Docking Excercise (and what could have been an international incident) – July 1975.
In 2006, Goddard Space Flight Center’s TV Engineer Don Johnson shared this recollection with Dick Nafzger. It is lightly edited here, with additional material added in boxes and heading added.
Don and Dick and others from GSFC travelled to Buitrago, about 60km north of Madrid, to support communications for the mission. |
At the end the Apollo era of the Manned Space Program, at a time before the advent of dedicated orbiting data relay satellites, NASA ingeniously moved into position over the Indian Ocean, an experimental satellite of a separate/different ongoing NASA program called the Applications Technology Satellite (ATS).
Using the ATS in a parked orbit to relay data from the Apollo Spacecraft to a ground tracking station, NASA was able to obtain uninterrupted data (television and telemetry) information over an extended period of each spacecraft revolution around the earth.
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About ATS-6
NASA’s Applications Technology Satellite-6 (sometimes referred to as ATS-F) was, at the time, the most powerful and versatile
communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
ATS-6 is best remembered for the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) which involved direct satellite broadcast to 3 metre parabolic antennas and community television receivers in 3000 villages across India.
The ASTP use of ATS-6 was immediately before the SITE broadcasts which began in early August 1975. |
The geographical location selected to receive ASTP data via the ATS was Buitrago, Spain.
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Why Buitrago?
In order to support communications between NASA’s stations in Spain (at Fresnedillas de la Oliva, Robledo de Chavela and Cebreros (Ávila)) and NASCOM at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Spanish National Telephone Company (Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España – CTNE) established a Satellite Earth Station at Buitrago del Lozoya, north of Madrid.
Between 1967 and 1970, two Earth Station antennas were built, one 26 metres and the other 30 metres dish diameter. For NASA, these had a role similar to those of the OTC Satellite Earth Station at Carnarvon, Western Australia.
The requirement for ASTP was to have a mobile ATS ground station to work ATS-6 and then send the telemetry and television to Houston via Intelsat. Siting the station adjacent to the Buitrago SES was an obvious choice.
Image from a 1969 OTC publication showing existing Satellite Earth Stations (filled images) and those planned (outlined images). |
Using the Spanish government’s tracking station located at Buitrago; NASA actually built a tracking station within Spain’s own facilities to accomplish this feat.
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Background to ATS-6 and Buitrago
From this GSFC document preserved by Orroral’s Philip Clark:
“Communications from the Apoilo-Soyuz spacecraft, including television, will be relayed through NASA’s Applications Technology Satellite-6 (ATS-6).
An advanced communications research satellite, the ATS-6 was launched into geosynchronous orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on May 30, 1974.
Use of the ATS-6 for the ASTP tracking and data relay will provide about three times the communications coverage of the ground stations, Thus it will permit larger amounts of biomedical and spacecraft data to be relayed to the earth in one transmission and increase the television coverage from the flight.
Operations of the ATS-6 are coordinated and controlled from the ATS Control Center at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. ATS ground stations are located at Rosman, N.C., Mojave, California, and a mobile station at Buitrago, Spain.
To support the ASTP mission, the ATS-6 will be positioned on the equator some 35,900 kilometers (22,260 statute miles) above the eastern edge of Lake Victoria in Kenya, East Africa. From this position, the spacecraft will be controlled through the Madrid mobile station and will command a view of about 50% of the Apollo-Soyuz’s 225-kilometer (140 statute miles) orbit.
During operations, the ATS-6 will point its antenna towards the edge of the earth as seen from its orbit, and generate a signal for the Apollo spacecraft to lock onto when it comes into view. Apollo, using a wide-band antenna, will home-in on the signal and, after establishing contact, will transmit telemetry, voice and live television to the satellite.
ATS-6 will relay the communications to the Buitrago, Spain ground station, who will then relay the data via the commercial satellite Intelsat to the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas.”
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From the above, it can be seen that ATS-6 was effectively a precursor to the TRDSS Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) satellites which were launched from 1983. These replaced and extended the functions of many of the ground-based tracking stations for Earth-orbital missions. |
Setting up at Buitrago
Three months prior to the scheduled mission, two engineers from Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), myself and Ted Knotts, went to Buitrago to develop, implement, test, coordinate with Johnson Space Flight Center (JSC), and eventually operate, NASA’s Buitrago tracking station for the ASTP project. [The Buitrago NASA station was also referred to as the Madrid Hybrid Terminal.]
At the time, I was a Systems Engineer with a job title of Mission Planning Coordinator and had been heavily involved in the development of the space programs television system. Ted Knotts was a very capable and talented Systems Engineer with emphasis to the space program’s television engineering aspects. The two of us, coveralls and all, and with terrific willing coordination of the Spanish engineers/officials, put together the tracking station that supported and provided 90% of the Telemetry/Television data used for the ASTP mission.
Two weeks prior to the scheduled mission, we were joined by nine more engineers who came on board at that time to support the checkout phase and operations. We divided the engineers into two teams, A & B, (two shift, 24-hour operation). Ted was lead engineer of the A Team and I was lead engineer of the B Team.
For the whole of the ASTP mission, Buitrago supported a total of 138 spacecraft revolutions via ATS-6 Satellite for Television and Telemetry coverage.
For Telemetry, we received and recorded all Command Service Module (CSM) data downlinked via the ATS-6 Satellite during 123 revolutions of the CSM. In addition, extensive use was made of the Buitrago downlink voice throughout the mission.
For Television, we received a total of 36 television downlink transmission sequences providing an approximate total of 13 hours of video. This included 23 scheduled real-time transmissions and 10 scheduled spacecraft on-board VTR dumps. All real-time TV downlinks were remoted real-time to JSC via Atlantic Intelsat- 4 and 10 VTR Dumps were remoted to JSC post real-time.
International Incident Avoided
After the undocking of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft and the US Apollo spacecraft towards the completion of the mission, the two spacecraft engaged in an exercise of docking and undocking. These maneuvers were video recorded on-board and later downlinked to Buitrago via a spacecraft VTR dump.
In monitoring the data of this event at Buitrago, the voice of the CSM astronaut to mission control was heard to make a remark, which if made public at that time, could most likely make for an international incident. Mission Control asked, words to the effect, “how’s it going?” referring to the docking exercise, to which the astronaut replied, words to the effect, “O.K., if somebody would teach that #$@%!! Russian how to fly that thing”.
The video shows the Soyuz spacecraft jostling about making it difficult for the Apollo spacecraft to home in for docking.
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NASA illustration preserved by Philip Clark.
Scan by Colin Mackellar. |
At Buitrago, we had an operations video voice link to JSC. We notified JSC TV (the JSC TV engineer on duty at that time, I believe, was Ed Tarkington) that the dump TV data contained information of possible serious nature. We then talked on a closed loop and described the voice dialog on the tape. Ed then passed the word to the Mission Director and shortly after, the instructions were to “erase all those damn tapes”. The types of video recorders being used at that time (2) were helical scan, meaning that as the tape traversed, the video heads rotated across (perpendicular) to the tape. Because of confusing events, only one of the two tapes was destroyed.
In later years, I believe those recorders (made obsolete later in the space program) were given to the Smithsonian Institution.
This scenario has been put together 31 years after this historic space mission, thus I have had to dig deep into my memory banks.
Ted Knotts died in 1985-86 during a time he was at JSC attending meetings. I have no information on other associates of mine during my space program career. Most all assuredly are retired or have passed away.
As to the Buitrago operations for ASTP project, suffice it to say, the Buitrago operations were 100% successful, memorable and provided the best television quality ever obtained in the Apollo program.
Don Johnson
March 23, 2006.
with thanks to Dick Nafzger for his copy of Don’s recollections.
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In his 2011 book “NASA Stations near Madrid: forty-five years of history (1963-2008)”*, Dr. José Manuel Urech Ribera, Director of Ceberos and then Robledo tracking complexes, relays another account of the foiled “international incident”.
He includes this humorous anecdote from Luis R. de Gopegui, who at that time was the Director of the Fresnedillas station:
When at 12.40 of the 18th of July of that year they told me that the Communications Director of Houston urgently wished to talk to me, I was very surprised and afraid that something serious was happening. He asked me to destroy immediately the videotape “ASTP/35/4” that we had recorded the day before, when the two spacecraft Apollo and Soyuz were close to docking for the first time above the Spanish heavens. He also suggested doing it with maximum discretion. I was quite confused and asked him why, but I was not able to react when coldly, and even impolitely, he replied: “It’s a Houston requirement”.
Before ordering the destruction of the videotape it seemed to me suitable to comment on it with our Director, Manuel Bautista. It was difficult for me to find him, as the 18 of July was then a holiday in Spain, and when I succeeded, he was so surprised that asked me to stand by until reporting to Guilermo Pérez del Puerto, the then General Director of INTA, who in turn was disconcerted, and asked us not to do anything until he had spoken with the Minister of Air (to whom INTA depended). The Minister, General Mariano Cuadra, prove difficult to localize as he was in the palace of “La Granja de San Ildefonso”, where General Francisco Franco was holding a grand reception for the Diplomatic Corps on this date.
Finally Don Guilermo managed to speak with the Minister, who was also disconcerted and told him to do nothing until he had spoken to the Head of State. Finally he did so, and Franco with his traditional parsimony answered him:
“Mariano, why you telling me all this? If they have told you to destroy the videotape, go ahead, do it and go on to other things”.
In recounting watching the videotape, Luis R. de Gopegui recalled,
Periodically they announced the firing of the micro-rockets in order to increase the Apollo’s velocity slightly or routinely announced the distance between the spacecraft that they had read on the approach radar, and the pilot of the docking module, Donald Slayton, watch through the port hole and said:
“Keep going, keep going”.
However, something had passed us unnoticed when the spacecrafts were already very close to each other, the Soyuz gave small sudden pitches. Slayton, who was a 51 year old astronaut … was becoming nervous with the pitching, which was making docking difficult, and when he could stand it no longer he exclaimed:
“Sons of a bitch! But aren’t you capable of maintaining your ‘bird’ still?”
Then we understood that if that phrase came to the notice of press media it could cause an international conflict.
pages 69-70.
* ISBN 978-84-930056-8-9. Published by INTA. Thanks to Mike Dinn for the loan of his copy. PDF version available here. |
