What they were supposed to do if the balloon went up while they were in space? Anything they could do e.g. reconnaissance that would help? Emergency alternate landing sites? Could the lunar missions return to Earth on their own without help from Houston Control? In the special case of the Skylab missions, was using the supplies meant for later crews to delay returning to Earth an option?
A somewhat relevant case is that of Sergei Volkov and Sergei Krikalyov (also transliterated as Krikalev), who were aboard the Mir space station when the USSR broke up. I gather there was a lot of adaptation and making do, while they sorted out when the crew would be able to land in now-independent Kazakhstan, while mission control was in Russia. I don’t really know the details, though.
US Apollo missions might have had a bigger problem in that they landed in the ocean. Without the services of a large contingent of skilled Navy personnel (or those like them), it might be a problem getting from a floating capsule to dry land.
Most of the shuttle crews now include both women and men, so they could breed and re-populate the earth. And as adults, I think they would know how to do that without having to break ‘out emergency orders’ from NASA.
“Insert tab A in slot B”.
That could be difficult in zero-G.
They really should run some training drills, or something. “Operation Adam and Eve,” commencing test run.
I’m sure Hugo Drax had this figured out. He even factored in the googly-eyed broads.
Yes. If you ever read through the mission transcripts, you’ll see Houston read up abort data for the computers regularly so the crew has the information needed to return even if communications are cut off.
–Cliffy
Aleksander Aleksandrovich Volkov. Sergei is his son.
(By no means do I claim any sort of superiority over our very own staff rocket scientist. I just went to find out more about Volkov and discovered the discrepancy.)
It’s no picnic landing in the middle of Siberia with nobody to pick you up either.
In Lucifer’s Hammer, the Apollo/Soyuz astro- and cosmonauts took the Soyuz lander down to the western United States. I don’t recall how they settled on that location, though.
They determined that due to both Hammerfall and the nuclear conflict between the USSR and China that the USSR had ceased to exist. So they picked the US, as getting to the southern hemisphere was gonna be difficult given their orbit.
Shouldn’t have been any harder than the northern hemisphere. Of course, there might still be good reasons to pick the US over, say, Australia (if some of the crew were from there, for instance).
Ah, yeah. Actually, I thought the name was wrong, but I was in a bit of a rush, and didn’t imagine there were two cosmonauts named Volkov. I was impressed that Volkov would still be in active service after all these years, but if Thirsk can do it, why not? Anyway, it’s pretty cool that there is a society in which ‘cosmonaut’ is some peoples’ family business to inherit. 
(You know, I bet living up to your parents’ expectations is hard when your dad is a cosmonaut. “Hey, Yuri, what does Pops think about your new job in the camera store?” “He says he didn’t fly into space for the motherland so his son could be a slave of capitalist exploitation.”)
Okay, back to the thread:
Emergency landing:
I guess you could deorbit your spacecraft anytime you like if you know how long to burn the rocket engine for. But I don’t think the Apollo or prior capsules had anything on board that would let them calculate when and where to start the deorbit burn to reach a desired landing site; such numbers would have been sent up from the ground, or perhaps pre-programmed. Even today, I don’t imagine the space shuttle or Soyuz craft have this kind of capability; they just de-orbit on schedule.
Now, any of those spacecraft would be limited in their choice of landing sites by the inclination of the orbit (among other things). And while Soyuz can land basically anywhere solid (they usually settle into the vast plains of Kazakhstan, plus or minus some tens (or even hundreds!) of kilometers), the Space Shuttle needs a suitable runway, and landing it without the pre-programmed assistance and timings for the engine burns, roll reversals, and such would be pretty challenging. There is a procedure for launch failures with STS called Transatlantic Abort, in which they land in Europe or Africa, and they obviously don’t have time to do any calculations in this scenario, but AFAIK the landing site is chosen before launch to suit the ascent profile, so there’s no choosing and planning going on.
Pre-STS US capsules, of course, have to land in the ocean, and carried nothing like the kind of equipment you’d need for a long survival at sea, or to reach land from any serious distance.
So my best guess is, Soyuz is best equipped to come down in the 500-km vicinity of a chosen site. Its descent sequence is mostly automated and not very complex, nor does it need a very special landing site. Once on land, you hope it hasn’t started a forest fire or managed to get caught in the tops of some jungle trees, and go out into the world in your spacesuits to seek the Australians or the Yanomamo or whoever.
On reconnaissance:
Most scenarios for nuclear war between the USSR and USA involve a lot of nothing, then an hour or two of missiles intercontinentally cruising, then a period of big explosions that throw so much soot into the sky that it blocks out the sun and causes a nuclear winter. Pre-missiles, it doesn’t matter because the war hasn’t started. During the missile flight, the astronauts can’t see them or likely detect them in any way. After the explosions, it doesn’t matter to anybody. They’ll probably have a pretty good view of the mushroom clouds near their orbital track (there’ve been some impressive photos of cumulonimbus clouds from space, for example), but after that, probably:
- the communications infrastructure to receive their reconnaissance reports is likely destroyed
- everyone who might care to read their reports is quite possibly dead
- the nuclear winter effect will probably block their view of anything interesting
Certainly, if the US was looking for reconnaissance that would tell them where to point their nuclear missiles, astronauts looking out the window after the war has begun are too late to help. Those missiles, of course, were targeted already.
Now, in the event of a limited war, they could probably take pictures and such, but really, spy satellites or even Earth-observation satellites would be more useful than an astronaut with a Hasselblad. (Apparently the USAF did have a plan for a crewed, orbiting reconnaissnce station, but it never went anywhere.)
I don’t know anything about how Skylab was provisioned, but if the Dr. Strangelove scenario was playing out on the ground, nobody was about to stop the astronauts from breaking into the free-dried ice cream sandwiches of the people who were never going to be launched to eat them. In fact, the crew of Skylab 4 went on strike because they felt mission control was working them too hard. 
So yes, I’m sure they would have broken into the pudding rations if the end of the world came around.
wolfstu’s wild guess as to how this might go down if civilization collapsed tomorrow, while the ISS is in orbit:
Nothing happens, at first. The ISS goes out of communication with the ground for part of each orbit, anyway. They’ve got food and water on-board for months, but not forever, and they’ve always got enough Soyuz vehicles to carry a full crew down to Earth (3 now, 6 starting next spring), and qualified Soyuz pilots to fly them down. I guess you spend a while moping, fighting, screaming in frustration at the end of the world as the beautiful blue marble lights itself on fire before your eyes, and consoling each other, and then choose to deorbit by Soyuz, probably waiting a while for the initial radiation hazard to die down and some of the fallout to rain out of the atmosphere.
You’ve got some time to think about which continent you want to aim for (you can pick anything between about 51°N and 51°S (as far as I know, unless there are limits as to which parts of the orbit Soyuz can de-orbit on), and the ground track is periodic, so you have to choose which day is best to deorbit if you happen to prefer a particular exact longitude and latitude. Kazakhstan is probably a pretty good choice, with Canada as a backup; you could basically just wait until the conditions are the same as for Kazakhstan, but half an orbit out of phase. (Halfway around the world from Kazakhstan are the great plains of central North America, roughly.) Australia, with it’s nice big flat desert, is another option.
Now, the chances of landing both Soyuz capsules (for an ISS crew of 6; Soyuz carries 3) in the same place aren’t all that good, but I guess you might as well aim for the same spot, just in case. And if all goes well, I guess that’s that. Time to go rebuild civilization, or die in the wilderness, or flirt with your dashing cosmonaut colleague to distract yourself from the bleakness of the situation.
What about ISS? If left alone by the crew, it’ll eventually re-enter the atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner and mostly burn up. It’s big enough that large pieces could survive to the surface, plunging into the ocean, setting fire to the last food crop untouched by the nuclear scourge, or crushing all the males in the one surviving village in Africa. I guess ATV might carry enough fuel to deorbit the station, if it could be pre-programmed to do so after the crew departs, in which case they could choose the crash site within some hundreds of kilometres. I’m not sure this would be a high priority, though.
wolfstu’s guess as to what doesn’t happen:
This.
PS.
I found two really interesting links about Soyuz emergency landings while I was checking facts on this:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=815
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/histind/Ugol/Ugol.html
Australia is probably the best bet. In most plausible nuclear war scenarios, the northern hemisphere is going to get hit a lot harder than the southern, so there’ll be considerably less fallout Down Under.
I’ve never read that either American astronauts or Soviet cosmonauts were given emergency orders in the event of nuclear war. If they were, it would pretty much be an exercise in futility. Everyone understood they could not live indefinitely in space, and that returning to Earth would almost certainly lead to eventual death by radiation poisoning.
On the fiction front, in Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: The Untold Story, the crew of a U.S. space shuttle is tasked with sabotaging Soviet spysats through spacewalks. One astronaut is blinded when it turns out a satellite is boobytrapped with a laser, IIRC.
In the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the U.S. and the Soviet Union come close to WW3 over a brushfire conflict in Honduras. As tensions rise, the three U.S. astronauts are ordered to leave the Soviet spacecraft Leonov and take shelter aboard the long-abandoned Discovery. Zany hijinks ensue.
Those aboard the ISS in The Day After Tomorrow could only watch helplessly from orbit as (utterly inaccurate) climatological disaster overtook the Earth.
But isn’t there a greater likelihood of landing in inhospitable country? How much of Australia is desert?
Alot, but there’s also a greater chance that someone would be around to do search & rescue than in Russia, Kazakhstan, or North America.
In the comic book series Y - The Last Man, two cosmonauts and an astronaut (I think in the ISS) are orbiting when a mysterious plague wipes out almost all male life on the planet, so they have to take the Soyuz escape capsule down on their own because almost everyone in both U.S. and Russian control centers are dead.
–Cliffy
Ok, imagine that all support staff from the ground, including all their transmitters and automatic radio beacons and gadgetry, are gone.
They’re COMPLETELY on their own up there.
Could they get in the Soyez, close the door, and end up on Earth?
Could they do the calculations to plan on where they’d land?
All of this completely independently from any outside help.
Is it designed to be able to work that way?