I recently came across a fascinating website containing a large number of articles concerning proposed manned space projects that never succeeded in making it beyond the drawing board. In looking over the website I happened to notice that all of the material it contained was available as an E-Book so of course I quickly bought myself a copy, and borrowed my brother’s Nook so I could read it! To anyone who is as interested in the history of manned space exploration as I am you’ll find ‘False Steps’ to be both a trip down memory lane and a revelation of unknown projects.
The projects described in ‘False Steps’ date from as early as the 1940s to as recently as the 2010s. And the projects discussed don’t just come from the US or even the US and USSR, they come from every country that has ever thought about putting a man in space. Author Paul Drye must have expended a great deal of effort hunting down and reading some of the information about the Chinese 1970s space program or Hermes the spaceplane France tried to talk the European Union into building, not to mention the rival British Multi-Role Capsule.
Some of the most interesting topics include the two, that’s right two failed Russian manned Lunar Programs, which I discussed a bit in my post of 14June2019. It’s a fact that the Soviets hoped to send men to loop around the Moon as early as 1967(!) using a completely different main rocket than their landing mission would use a few years later. While there were many reasons why the Soviets failed with both attempts certainly one of them has to be the competition for resources between two completely different programs.
But at the same time NASA, the American space agency also received several proposals from McDonald Aircraft Corporation, who build the highly successful Gemini spacecraft, to use the Gemini as a basis for a Lunar orbiter. Those proposals never became more than back of the envelope ideas however because NASA committed itself to Apollo and avoided any of the distractions that plagued the Russians.
As I mentioned above ‘False Steps’ also contains a wealth of information about projects that came close enough to manned launches that there was some public discussion of them, i.e. I heard about them. The US air Force’s Manned Orbiting Labouratory (MOL) and the USSR’s Buran space shuttle are two examples. But ‘False Steps’ also contains information about projects that I had never heard of such as NASA’s plan to use Apollo technology to perform a manned flyby of the planet Venus in 1973. Another way out project was the Lunar Escape System or LESS that in the case of a disastrous Moon landing by the LM, would allow the stranded astronauts to use parts of the LM to built, on the Moon, an escape rocket!
Now in a sense ‘False Steps’ is all about might have beens. Reading it you think about how things could have been different. What if von Braun had been allowed to launch a satellite in 1956, a year before Sputnik? He was ready. What if Sergei Korolev hadn’t died in 1966? What if Nixon hadn’t done everything he could to kill the space program as president?
As I said at the beginning ‘False Steps’ is both a webpage, address below, and an E-book. So what you can do is visit the site, read a few of the articles and decide if you’d like to get the E-book, which you can do right from the site! If you find yourself as I did reading a half a dozen articles before you even realize it, get the book! You’ll be glad you did. The address is https://falsesteps.wordpress.com/. Have Fun!