Othrys Program

*The information presented in this article is **true for my alternate history**, but either completely false, or only partly true for real life.*

The **Othrys Program** was an American manned space exploration program intended to land astronauts on the moons of Saturn - Titan, Rhea, and Iapetus.

First launch took place on 11th of July 1976.

Transfer to Saturn on 3rd of September 1977.

The entire program took 8 years and ended in 1984, with the crew safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

The Manned Titan Lander was used to land the crew on the surfaces of Titan, Rhea, and Iapetus.

## Development:

The initial proposal called for landing on Titan and Enceladus, with a separate launch of Iapetus Explorer Probe.

It was also proposed that an MLV Saturn V-1 could launch additional probes that would fly by each of the Saturn's moons and collect additional data. This idea was later moved to its own dedicated team, but got scrapped due to budget constraints.

This role was delegated to the 3 "Voyager" probes which were to launch around the same time. Two of them flew past Saturn, imaging both Rhea, and Iapetus in great detail. Titan however, remained obscured by its impenetrable atmosphere.

The final proposal was refined to a manned expedition to Titan, Rhea, and Iapetus, in that order.

## Incidents:

The mission came frighteningly close to being a total loss several times.

The first close call was identified after several weeks in transit. The propellant boiloff measurements reported flow rate that was much higher than anticipated. It, however, wasn't high enough to abort the mission, but the ground controllers had to recalculate the arrival and Saturn parking orbit, to account for the lower-than-expected amount of propellant.

The first really critical problem hit when the ascent engine of the Titan Lander failed to ignite, almost stranding the crew of 3 on the surface. The fault was identified as an electical failure in the wiring of the engine controller. It was fixed the next day during an EVA, and the engine ignited successfully for the next window. The troubles didn't end quite there though. Once ignited, the engine started to overperform which posed a real danger of burning through the nozzle. This was mitigated by manually throttling the engine down slightly below its design specification.

Another incident happened during the flight back from Rhea, when one of the RL-10A-3-3-1P engines on the transfer stage shut down prematurely. It then didn't ignite for the burn to Iapetus, which triggered automatic shutdown of the opposing engine.

A consequence of the lower-than-expected propellant quantity was also the dangerous maneuver at the end of the Iapetus escape burn, where the crew had to undock the lander from the transfer stage, turn it 180 degrees and light the lander's engines to complete the burn. The retrorockets designed to pull the transfer stage away didn't fire, and the astronauts lost time on flying back away from the transfer stage, worried it might explode if they lit the engines right next to it. The burn failed to bring them on a rendezvous trajectory, and they had to perform an unplanned course correction.

There was also the loss of Othrys 10, although not a mission-critical loss, it's still notable.

## Criticism:

The program was criticized for the enormous sums of money that were put into it, as well as for the fears about the wellbeing of the crew, and environmental impact caused by launching such a huge amount of payload into orbit.

The Titan Lander flew into Titan almost blind. They didn't know where they were gonna land. The lander had a limited ability to perform obstacle avoidance under its own power, but had they come down over a lake, they would have had to abort to orbit.

Othrys was also incredibly rushed, in order to meet the 1977 Jupiter-Saturn transfer window, which unfortunately impacted safety.

One of the engineers working on the project later said it was a miracle that the mission wasn't a complete loss.

## List of launches:

There were 26 launches in total, 7 of them assembling the ship, 18 refuelling flights, and 1 test flight.

## Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqbLJejkV74

This is the first KSP video I've ever made. Back when I made it, I didn't think this would grow into an entire alternate history timeline.

## See Also:

Othrys Program Ship - The ship used in this program.