Category Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

During 1966-8, the Soviet Union sent up seven orbiters to explore the lunar environ­ment and map the surface. Of these, two failed (Cosmos 111, 7th February 1968) and one partly failed (Luna 11). Only one photographic mission succeeded (Luna 12), but we do not have access to the archive which it assembled. Luna 10, despite being improvised, appears to have returned a substantial amount of scientific information. The Russians also ran a series of communications missions, the Ye-6LS, which shows their thoroughness in approaching the moon project and which have no direct American comparison.

There was discussion, in the Western popular press, as to the need for proceeding to manned flights to the moon when so much useful information had been already retrieved by automatic probes. Later, when the Russians were beaten in the moon race, they raised the question in retrospective justification for their use of automatic probes. In reality, this important discussion was given little airing within the two respective space programmes themselves, for the political decision had already been taken to go for a manned flight around the moon and to its surface. This decision had little to do with a calculation of the best way to obtain a scientific return, but, as President Kennedy himself put it, would be the approach ‘most impressive to man­kind’. It is back to this larger project that we now turn (Chapter 5).

But what if Alexei Leonov had been the first man on the moon? The selection of Alexei Leonov as first man on the moon – and also to fly the first L-1 around the moon – is no surprise, for he was perhaps the leading personality of the cosmonaut squad after Yuri Gagarin himself [27].

Alexei Leonov was selected among the original group of cosmonauts in I960. A short, well-built man full of energy and good humour, he had demonstrated his personal qualities from his teenage years. Alexei Leonov came from Listvyanka, Siberia where he was born in 1934, only months after Yuri Gagarin. He was eighth in a family of nine. Listvyanka was so cold that temperatures fell to — 50°C, but the stars by night were so perfectly clear. When he was only three and in the middle of winter, his father Arkhip was declared an enemy of the people; neighbours came in and stripped their home bare and the family was evicted into the nighttime winter forest [28]. The family fled to his married sister’s home. Arkhip was cleared and later rejoined them there.

Most astronauts and cosmonauts will tell you that all they ever wanted to do in life was fly a plane or a spaceship. Not Alexei Leonov, who determined to be an artist, a painter. He enrolled in the Academy of Arts in Riga in 1953. But he was unable to afford it and applied for Air Force college. He flew MiG-15s from Kremenchug Air Force Base in the Ukraine and later flew planes along the border between the two Germanies. In 1959, he was asked to go for selection for testing new types of planes and when undergoing medical tests for this unspecified assignment he met his sub­sequent best friend, Senior Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin.

Even before his first mission, he had two brushes with death: once when his car plunged through ice into a pond (he rescued his wife and the taxi driver from under the water) and then when his parachute straps tangled with his ejector seat (he bent the frame through brute force and freed the straps). It was a surprise to no one that he was assigned an early mission and he was Korolev’s choice for the first spacewalk. To keep himself fit, in the year up to the flight he cycled 1,000 km, ran 500 km and skied 300 km. The mission, Voskhod 2, itself was full of drama. It started with triumphant success: television viewers saw him push himself away from the craft and turn head

over foot as he gave an excited commentary of what must have been a stunning spectacle. He had great difficulty trying to get back into his spaceship. Only by reducing the spacesuit pressure to danger level and by using his physical strength was he able to get back into his airlock. Then the retrorockets failed to fire so he and his pilot Pavel Belyayev had to light them manually on the following orbit. Instead of landing in the steppe, they came down far off course, their communication aerials burnt away, in the Urals. State radio and television played Mozart’s Requiem, preparing the Soviet people for the worst. Their hatch jammed against a birch tree and they could barely open it. They emerged into deep snow, tapped out a morse message calling for rescuers and drew their emergency pistol to ward off prowling wolves and bears. The cosmonauts spent two nights among the fir trees while rescue crews tried to find a way of getting them out. They lit a fire to keep warm and eventually used skis to escape their ordeal. No wonder they got a hero’s welcome when they returned. Definitely the Russian right stuff.

Alexei Leonov had an artistic bent and made many paintings of orbital flight, spacewalks, sunrises and sunsets, and spaceships landing on distant worlds. He edited

the newsletter of the cosmonaut squad, called Neptune, satirizing people and events with his cartoons. He maintained an extraordinary level of physical fitness and kept up his outdoor pursuits, like water skiing and hunting. He learned English and was inevitably popular with the Western media. Unlike Gagarin and Titov, he seemed to cause the commanding officers of the cosmonaut squad little trouble. Sergei Korolev praised him for his liveliness of mind, his knowledge, sociability and character. With that background and experience, he was ideally suited for the assignment of first man on the moon and, indeed, first man around the moon before that. Certainly, had he got there, the moon landing would have been well illustrated as a result. Even from his spacewalk he had generated a substantial repertoire of paintings, books and films. Unlike Neil Armstrong, who retreated for many years into academia, the extroverted Alexei Leonov would have done much to tell of his experience thereafter.

Even though Alexei Leonov did not make it to the moon, the rest of his space career was full of incident. In June 1971, he was slated to command the second mission to the Salyut space station. His flight engineer, Valeri Kubasov, was pulled only two days before the flight because of a health problem and the entire crew was replaced, despite Leonov’s voluble protests. His comments became muted when the entire replacement crew was killed on returning to Earth: a depressurization valve opened in the vacuum instead of during the final stages of the return to Earth. He had cheated death again. In 1975, Leonov was the obvious choice for the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. Leonov was the star of the show, a gracious host to the Americans on board Soyuz, cracking jokes and presenting the Americans with cartoons and souvenirs. The

Americans described him as ‘a really funny guy who also knows how to get us to work’. Alexei Leonov made general, was appointed commander of the cosmonaut squad from 1976 to 1982 and was a senior figure in Star Town until 1991. He still lives there, moving on to become president of one of Russia’s biggest banks.

What of his companion for both missions, Oleg Makarov? Oleg Makarov was born in the village of Udomlya, in the Kalinin region near Moscow, on 6th January 1933 into an Army family. Oleg Makarov graduated as an engineer from the Moscow Baumann Higher Technical School in 1957 and worked in OKB-1 straight after. Makarov was centrally involved in the design of the control systems for Vostok, Voskhod and Soyuz, including Vostok’s control panel. He was selected in the 1966 group of civilian engineers appointed to the cosmonaut squad by chief designer Vasili Mishin. Several members of this group were fast-tracked into mission assignments, and it shows that Mishin and the selectors must have thought much of him to appoint him straight away to the first moon crew with Leonov.

In the event, Oleg Makarov did get to fly into space a number of times. His first mission was to requalify the Soyuz after the disaster of June 1971. With Vasili Lazarev, he put the redesigned spaceship, Soyuz 12, through its paces in a two- day mission. The two were assigned to a space station mission in April 1975. This went badly wrong, the rocket booster tumbling out of control. They managed to separate their Soyuz 18 spaceship from the rogue rocket and after 400 sec of weight­lessness made the steepest ballistic descent in the history of rocketry, the G meter jamming when they briefly reached 18 G. Their spacecraft tumbled into a nighttime valley on the border with China and they waited some time for rescue. Soyuz came down in snow, in temperatures of —7°C, the parachute line snagging on trees at the edge of a cliff. The Western media alleged that the cosmonauts had died, so on his

return Makarov was sent out to play football with them to prove he was still alive. Oleg Makarov returned to space twice more. In 1978, he participated in the first ever double link-up with a space station, Salyut 6. Oleg Makarov flew again on an uneventful two-week repair mission to Salyut 6 in a new spaceship, the Soyuz T, in 1980. He died on 28th May 2003, aged 70. His obituary duly acknowledged the role he had played in the L-1 and L-3 programmes over 1965-9. Of a quieter disposition than Leonov, his technical competence must have been very evident and he would clearly have been a good selection.

What about the second crew, Valeri Bykovsky and Nikolai Rukhavishnikov? They too were slated for the second around-the-moon mission. Valeri Bykovsky was drawn from the 1960 selection with Yuri Gagarin and was given the fifth manned space mission, Vostok 5. He flew five days in orbit, three in formation with the Soviet Union’s first women cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova. A quiet and confident man, the same age as Gagarin (born in 1934), he was a jet pilot and later a parachute instructor. He would often volunteer to test out training equipment and was the first person to try out the isolation chamber for a long period. Bykovsky left the moon group for a brief period to head up the Soyuz 2 mission, scheduled for launch on 24th April 1967, but cancelled when the first Soyuz got into difficulties. It took some time for Bykovsky to get another mission, not doing so until 1976, when he flew a solo Soyuz Earth observation mission (Soyuz 22) and then led a visiting mission to the Salyut 6 space station (Soyuz 31, 1978). After his last mission, he became director of the Centre of Soviet Science & Culture in what was then East Berlin.

Nikolai Rukhavishnikov was one of the best regarded designers of OKB-1. An intense, dedicated, serious-looking man, he came from Tomsk in western Siberia, where he was born in 1932. His parents were both railway surveyors, so he spent much of his youth on the move, living a campsite life. His secondary education was in Mongolia, and from 1951 to 1957 studied in the Moscow Institute for Physics and Engineering, specializing in transistors. Within a month of graduation, he had joined OKB-1, concentrating on automatic control systems. For the translunar mission, he

planned experiments in solar physics. When the circumlunar and landing missions were delayed, he was assigned to the Salyut space station programme, being research engineer on the first mission there, Soyuz 10. Nikolai Rukhavishnikov was next selected for the Apollo-Soyuz test project, flying the dress rehearsal mission with Anatoli Filipchenko in 1974. Nikolai Rukhavishnikov was the first civilian to be given command of a Russian space mission, Soyuz 33. This went wrong, the engine failing as it approached the Salyut 6 station. Rukhavishnikov had to steer Soyuz through a hazardous ballistic descent. ‘I was scared as hell’, he admitted later. He later con­tributed to the design of the Mir space station and died in 1999.

And what about the others? The third lunar landing crew was Pavel Popovich and Vitally Sevastianov. The two of them had worked closely on the Zond 4 mission, their voices being relayed to the spacecraft in transponder tests. Pavel Popovich came from the class of 1960, an Air Force pilot based in the Arctic. He made history in 1962 when his Vostok 4 took him into orbit close to Vostok 3 on the first group flight. An extrovert like Leonov, extremely popular, he had a fine tenor voice and sang his way through his time off in orbit. His first wife Marina was also well known, being an ace test pilot. Later, he was given command of Soyuz 14, making the first successful Soviet occupation of an orbital station, the Salyut 3. Later he became a senior trainer in the cosmonaut training centre. Vitally Sevastianov was a graduate of the Moscow Avia­tion Institute and one of the teachers of the first group of cosmonauts, specializing in celestial physics. In between his own lunar training, he ran his own television pro­gramme, a science show called Man, the Earth and the Universe. He was one of the first of the moon group to get a mission once it became clear that there would be no early flight around the moon or landing. Vitally Sevastianov was assigned to Soyuz 9 in 1970 and later got a space station mission, 63 days on board Salyut 4 in the summer of

1975, setting a Soviet record. Later, he became a leading member of the Communist Party in the Russian parliament, the Duma.

The fate of the Soviet around-the-moon and landing team makes for a number of contrasts with the American teams. For most of the American Apollo astronauts who went to the moon, the experience was the climax of their spaceflight careers and many retired from the astronaut corps soon thereafter. For the Russians, the lunar assign­ment was a brief period during their cosmonaut career. Although crews were named, formed and re-formed, none got close to a launch and the training experience seems to have been quite unsatisfactory. For them, the lunar assignment was short and the best of their careers was still to come. Most were quickly rotated into the manned space station programme where they went on to achieve much personal and professional success. Alexei Leonov would have made a dramatically different first man on the moon from Neil Armstrong.

The Soviet plan for lunar exploration was now decisively redirected. Vasili Mishin now devised a moon plan even more ambitious than that of Apollo. He decided to match the three days of two Apollo astronauts on the moon with a Soviet plan to put three cosmonauts there for a month. The new Mishin plan, called the L-3M (‘M’ for modified) envisaged a manned lunar mission with two N-l rockets. The N-l would be upgraded with a more powerful hydrogen-powered upper stage. The exact date on which the L-3M plan was adopted is uncertain. The programme was first mooted in September 1969, clearly a first response to the American moon landing two months earlier, and the title ‘L-3M’ first appeared in print in documents in January 1970. The project was scrutinized by an expert commission under Mstislav Keldysh in spring 1971, and a resolution of the chief designers Technical proposals for the creation of the N1-L3M complex was signed off on 15th May 1972.

The first N-1 would place a large 24-tonne lunar lander descent stage, the GB-1, based on block D, in lunar orbit. Independently, a second N-1 would deliver a three – man lunar lander and return spacecraft, GB-2, to link up with the descent stage. Together they would descend to the lunar surface. Initially, three cosmonauts would work on the moon for a full lunar day (14 Earth days) but this would be later extended to be a month or longer. Eventually, four cosmonauts would live on the moon for a year at a time. The ascent stage would have a mass of 19.5 tonnes on launch from the moon and 8.4 tonnes during trans-Earth coast. Launch would be direct back to Earth, like Luna 16, without any manoeuvres in lunar orbit. The lander would incorporate Soyuz within what was called a cocooned habitation block, or OB, a sort of hangar. The crew could climb out of Soyuz into the hangar, put on their spacesuits there and use the hangar as a pressurization chamber before their descent to the lunar surface. The Americans might be first to the moon, but the Soviet Union would build the first moon base. Mishin envisaged the dual N-1 mission taking place in the late 1970s. Mishin’s new plan even won the approval of long-time N-1 opponent, Valentin Glushko. At one stage, the Soviet military considered turning the moon base into their first military headquarters off the planet [16].

An important feature of the N1-L3M was the redesign of the N-1 launcher, given the tentative name of the N1-F (industry code 11A52F). The airframe was much improved and there was a hydrogen-powered upper stage. The top part of the rocket, needle-shaped for the early N-1, was now bulkier and broader. The fact that Russia successfully developed a hydrogen-powered upper stage during the 1960s was one of the last, well-kept secrets of the moon race. The West had not believed the Russians capable of such a development, and it did not come to light until India bought a hydrogen-powered upper stage from the Russians in the 1990s. In fact, we now know that Russia had worked on hydrogen propulsion from 1960 onward and that hydrogen-powered stages had been part of the 1964 revision of the Soyuz complex in OKB-1. This research had continued to progress and by the late 1960s was reaching maturity. Linking this research to the new, improved N-1 made a lot of sense.

The hydrogen motor was the KVD-1, built by the Isayev design bureau (KVD stands for Kislorodno Vodorodni Dvigatel, or oxygen hydrogen engine). The role of the KVD-1 was to brake the assembly into lunar orbit and make the descent to the lunar surface. The KVD-1 engine had a burn time of 800 sec and a combustion chamber pressure of 54.6 atmospheres. The KVD-1 had a turbopump-operated engine with a single fixed-thrust chamber, two gimballed thrust engines, an operating period of up

to 7.5 hours and a five times restart capability. It weighed 3.4 tonnes empty and 19 tonnes fuelled. Its thrust was 7,300 kg and the specific impulse was 461 sec, still the highest in the world at the end of the century. It was 2.146 m tall, 1.28 m diameter and weighed 292 kg. It was sometimes called block R and had the industry code of 11D56.

The Isayev bureau was one of the least well-known of all the Soviet design bureaux and featured little in the early glasnost revelations about the Soviet space programme, its design bureaux and rocket engines. The bureau started life as Plant #293 in Podlipki in 1943, directed by one of the early Soviet rocket engineers, Alexei Isayev. Born 11th October 1908 (os) in St Petersburg, he was a mining engineer and had been given his own design bureau in 1944. This was renamed OKB-2 in 1952, being given its current name, KM KhimMach, in 1974. Besides spacecraft, its work has concentrated on long-range naval, cruise and surface ballistic missiles and nuclear rockets, and by the early 1990s had built over a hundred rocket engines, mainly small ones for upper stages, mid-course corrections and attitude control.

The KVD-1 prototype was first fired in June 1967. The engine was later tested for 24,000 sec in six starts. Five block R stages were built and tested over the years 1974-6 and the engine was declared fully operational. In fact, the KVD-1 was not the only Soviet hydrogen-powered upper stage. Nikolai Kuznetsov also struggled with a hydrogen-powered upper stage engine called the NK-15V, with a thrust of 200 tonnes, which would replace block B. OKB-165 of Arkhip Lyulka also developed engines for the third stage and fifth stage, respectively, 11D54 and 11D57 or block S. A scale model was built of a revised N-1 with hydrogen upper stages [17]. Approval was given for these developments in June 1970.

A new engine and new fuel were developed for the N1-L3M lunar module. Here, under Vasili Mishin, Valentin Glushko’s OKB-486 design bureau made a belated appearance in the N-1 programme. Valentin Glushko designed the new RD-510 engine, with 12 tonnes thrust [18]. The fuel was hydrogen peroxide, also called High

Test Peroxide (HTP). Only one other country in the world used hydrogen peroxide for its space programme: Britain, for its Black Arrow rocket. Hydrogen peroxide actually went back to wartime Germany where it had been developed by Dr Hellmuth Walter for high-speed U-boats.

Like Glushko’s favourite fuel, nitric acid, hydrogen peroxide could be kept at room temperatures for long periods. Hydrogen peroxide had one advantage over nitrogen-based fuels: it did not require the mixing of a fuel with a oxidizer. It was a monopropellant, requiring one tank and a means of igniting the rocket (metallic filings were inserted). There was no need to mix in the product of two tanks in a very precise ratio to get the desired thrust. Nor was HTP toxic, but it could be equally dangerous in another way. HTP must be kept in absolutely pure tanks and fuel lines, otherwise it will decompose or, if mixed with particular impurities, would explode. HTP was later used to fuel the torpedoes on the Russian submarine Kursk, with disastrous results when they exploded in August 2000.

The cancellation of Luna 25 in 1977 marked the end of the Russian programme of lunar exploration. Nevertheless, the chief designer of the Soviet space programme was not ready to give up completely on a manned flight to the moon, for Valentin Glushko persisted with dreams for lunar exploration, presenting his last set of ideas in 1986, just three years before his death.

AFTER N-l: A NEW SOVIET MOON PROGRAMME?

Strangely enough, the suspension of the N-1 programme in 1974 did not mean the final end of the Soviet manned moon programme. The new chief designer, Valentin Glushko, announced that the whole space programme would be reappraised and a fresh start made in reconsidering strategic objectives. The only definite decision was that the N-1 would not fly for the time being, if at all. Glushko set up five task forces, one of which was headed by Ivan Prudnikov to develop the idea of a lunar base and another the idea of a new heavy-lift launcher. Glushko personally began to sketch a new series of heavy launchers called the RLAs, or Rocket Launch Apparatus, capable of putting 30, 100 and 200 tonnes into orbit respectively.

When the Politburo met in August 1974, it actually reaffirmed the general objective of Soviet manned missions to the moon. Ivan Prudnikov duly completed, by the end of that year, the plans for a lunar base. The base was called Zvezda, or ‘star’ and featured teams of cosmonauts working on the moon for a year at a time, supplied by the new, proposed heavy-lift rocket. Their proposals were formally tabled, along with the outcome of the four other task forces, in 1975. Design of a heavy-lift launcher appropriately called Vulkan, able to deliver 60 tonnes to lunar orbit, was sketched out. In an abrupt turnaround, Vulkan would be powered with hydrogen fuel, the one system Glushko refused to develop for Korolev. Glushko even designed new hydrogen-fuelled engines, the RD-130 and RD-135, the latter with a specific impulse

of no fewer than 450 sec. A lunar expeditionary craft or LEK was designed, not that different from the long-stay lander of Mishin’s N1-L3M plan.

Although Glushko put his full force behind Zvezda, it attracted little support overall and none from the military at all. Crucially, the president of the Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh, would not back it. He was never a close friend of Glushko and was wary of the extravagance of the project. The cost, estimated at 100bn roubles, was too much even for a Soviet government not normally shy of extravagant projects. Keldysh let the process of consideration of the project exhaust itself so that it would run out of steam [1]. Glushko tried to save some face with a scaled-down project, but this won little support either. The basic problem was that Glushko had replaced a real rocket (the N-1) and a real programme (N1-L3M), both with diminishing political support, with a theoretical rocket (Vulkan) and a programme (Zvezda) that had none. The Soviet leadership began to regard the Soviet manned moon programme as having been a failure, a waste, a folie de grandeur that the country could not afford. Leonid Brezhnev had a mild stroke in 1975 and decisions were taken ever more by a shifting group of ministers and generals. This was not a leadership that would take a big decision and see it through.

In the event, the most significant project to emerge from the strategic reconsidera­tion of 1974-6 was the Energiya-Buran heavy launcher and shuttle system, which was driven by military imperatives to match the American space shuttle. No one can point to a particular day or decision on which the Soviet manned moon programme died, but it withered in mid-1975 and was effectively gone by March the following year, 1976. Despite this, Valentin Glushko even once briefly returned to the moon base idea in the 1980s, outlining how a small base might be built using the Energiya rocket, but he won no support in a country entering ever more difficult economic conditions. Despite their declining political fortunes, the moon base projects reached a certain level of detail and are outlined here.

In the course of the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union built the equipment it required for manned lunar exploration. This comprised the Proton rocket, to fly spacecraft around the moon, and the N-1 rocket, designed to land cosmonauts on the moon. The Soviet Union built the spacecraft necessary to circle and land on the moon: the Zond to pass round the moon and return to Earth, the LK lunar lander and the LOK lunar orbiter. And, finally, the Soviet Union trained a squad of cosmonauts to fly there and land there. Each is described in turn.

THE ROCKET FOR CIRCLING THE MOON: THE UR-500K PROTON

The UR-500 Proton rocket dates to October 1961, when Russia detonated, over the northern Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, its first 58-megatonne thermonuclear superbomb. This bomb was carried aloft and dropped by a Tu-95 bomber, but there was no way these ageing propellor planes were going to reach, never mind drop their cargoes on New York. For this purpose, a new, powerful rocket was required. Nikita Khrushchev turned to Vladimir Chelomei, the man who gave him his military rocket fleet who now promised to build him an ever bigger rocket called the Universal Rocket 500, so-called because it could be used for many other purposes (hence UR-500) [1]. Not long afterward, Khrushchev was bragging about the Soviet Union’s new ‘city – buster’ rocket.

In the event, the UR-500 was never taken into the armaments as a city-buster and was cancelled as a military project very early during the Brezhnev government. The UR-500 survived and was converted to civilian use. Vladimir Chelomei astutely persuaded the Kremlin that the UR-500, with suitable upper stages, could send a small manned spacecraft round the moon and that this was a much quicker, neater way of doing so than Sergei Korolev’s Soyuz complex, without any of the uncertain­ties of Earth orbit rendezvous. As a lunar rocket, it was called the UR-500K.

Chelomei’s moon rocket was a three-stage booster carrying nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylmethylhydrazine (UDMH), the fuel abhorred by Korolev. The engine of the first stage was built by Valentin Glushko’s OKB-456 and became the famous RD-253 engine. The second – and third-stage engines were built by the Kosberg Design Bureau. The Proton had the most advanced rocket engines in the world for 20 years. Valentin Glushko’s RD-253 engines recycled their exhaust gases to create a closed-circuit turbine system. Pressures of hundreds of atmospheres were obtained on delivery. Each engine weighed a modest 1,280 kg. The turbines went round at a fantastic 13,800 revolutions a minute or 18.74 MW. Temperatures reached 3,127°C in the engine chambers and their walls were plated

with zirconium. OKB-456 developed the first three stages, but the fourth came from rival Korolev’s design bureau. Here, block D was developed by Mikhail Melinkov in OKB-1 [2]. This relied on the traditional liquid oxygen and kerosene that was the hallmark of Korolev’s approach.

The RD-253 was perhaps the greatest breakthrough represented by the Proton. Equally significant was the clustering of fuel tanks of the side of the bottom stage.

Russian rockets are limited to a diameter of 4.1 m, the widest size that can be trans­ported by the rail system. This restriction would make any powerful rocket far too slim to be viable. What Chelomei did was develop the main core as the oxidizer only, within the 4.1m limit and later attach the fuel tanks to the side of the rocket. They were built separately, transported separately from Moscow to Baikonour and then attached in finishing hangars beside the pad in Baikonour. With the tanks attached, the diameter of the Proton on the pad is 7.4m.

Launching the Proton required the building of fresh pads to the northwest of the cosmodrome. Two sets of double pads were built, called Area 81 and Area 200. Each had a left pad and a right pad (81L, 81P, 200L, 200P). A Proton is brought down to the pad on a train trailer and then erected into the vertical position. Around the pad are 100 m tall lightning conductors and four 45 m tall floodlight stands. A shallow flame trench takes away the rushing roar of the engines firing at take-off from both sides.

Proton was and still is built in the Fili plant in Kaliningrad, now known as Korolev. This was an old automobile factory, taken over by the Bolsheviks to build German Junkers planes in the 1920s and then Tupolevs. It became effectively part of Vladimir Chelomei’s OKB-52 in 1960 but is now known as Khrunichev, an affiliate of Lockheed Martin.

The design history of the Proton is, compared with that of the N-1 which follows, not well known. It took Chelomei and his OKB-52 fewer than two years to design the UR-500 (1961-3) and fewer than two years to build it (1963-5), all the more remark­able granted its cancellation as a military weapon. The design was subject to rigorous ground testing and Chelomei refused to rush things. This paid off, for the UR-500’s first mission went like a dream, lofting the first of a series of four large cosmic ray satellites over 1965-8. They were called Proton and the first, Proton 1, was the largest scientific satellite ever launched up to that point, weighing in at no less than 12 tonnes (as a satellite, it was a failure, but that was not the launcher’s fault). Of the Proton’s first four launchings, only one failed, making it the most promising rocket of its day. The first launch was well publicized. The Western media quickly recognized a rival to the American Saturn IB moon rocket and came hastily but correctly to the immediate conclusion that an early task for the rocket was to send a Russian around the moon first. Possibly because of its military origins, the Russians kept back details of the Proton for well over 20 years and the first proper pictures of a Proton launch were not released until the 1980s.

Despite its promising start and despite Chelomei’s thoroughness, the Proton was to have an exasperating development history. The early promise was not maintained, and of its first 29 launches, no less than 14 failed, arguably costing the Soviet Union the round-the-moon race, as well as numerous lunar and Mars probes. At the time, nobody would have credited it that the Proton would go on to become one of the most reliable rockets in the world. Proton was launched for the 300th time in June 2003. Although there were occasional final-stage failures with block D, lower-stage failures became most unusual (there were two in the 1990s, when quality control in the manufacturing plant slipped during the period of greatest economic difficulty). A new version of the Proton was even introduced, the Proton M, in 2001.

Russia’s UR-500K Proton

Length 44.34 m

Diameter 4.1 m

When Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins returned from the moon, television viewers were amazed to see the returning heroes wrapped up in biological suits with masks and unceremoniously ushered into what looked like a camper caravan. The purpose was a serious one: to ensure that they were not contaminated with lunar soil that might in turn affect other Earthlings. The caravan was transferred to Houston where the astronauts spent the rest of their three-week quarantine.

The USSR developed a similar series of precautions and its own isolation unit. Lunar soil samples were to be received in the Vernadsky Institute of Geological and Analytical Chemistry, but a small lunar isolation unit was built in Star Town. In the Vernadsky institute, a two-floor room was set aside with two cylindrical glovebox units, each with four large viewing ports.

The opportunity to use the Soviet isolation unit came in 1970, following the mission of Soyuz 9. This was a two-man spaceflight designed to push back the then Soviet endurance record of five days and pave the way for the first Soviet space station, Salyut, due in 1970. The cosmonauts chosen, veteran Andrian Nikolayev and new­comer Vitally Sevastianov, spent 17 days in the small Soyuz cabin in June 1970.

Soon after landing, the cosmonauts were transferred to the isolation unit in Star Town by way of Vnukuvo Airport and not let out till 2 July, two weeks later: the same period of isolation as a moon journey would require. Flight debriefing was carried out behind glass partitions: telephones and microphones were used. The isolation complex had probably cost a lot to build and this was the only use it was to get. Soviet Weekly tried to explain:

The isolation isn’t because offears that Nikolayev and Sevastianov may have brought back strange diseases from outer space! Indeed the precautions are for the opposite reason. Doctors consider it possible that protracted space flight may lower normal immunities and they are therefore making sure that the spacemen are protected from earthbound infection until they have acclimatized.

Although Soviet spaceflights subsequently grew longer and longer, the facility was never used again. In reality, there was an element of farce about the whole episode. The Soviet Weekly explanation was the exact opposite of the truth, for the ultimate purpose of the unit was precisely to prevent infection from space-borne diseases. The real aim of the unit was never publicly revealed and we do not know what became of it subsequently. The theory behind the need for Soyuz 9 isolation had already been

completely undermined anyway at the point of landing. Nikolayev and Sevastianov were in weak condition when they touched down and had to be assisted from their cabin. Pictures released many years later showed them being helped and comforted, and if there had been any plans to rush them into biological protection suits, they must have been quickly abandoned. Had they indeed carried the cosmic plague with them, the entire recovery team would have been quickly infected.

Thus, by 1972 the N-1 was in redesign. The old N1-L3 plan had now been superseded by a more ambitious plan, using a redesigned launcher, equipped with the hydrogen – powered engines that had brought the Americans so much success. Once the N-1 was perfected, Mishin could look forward to eclipsing the Apollo landings with the beginnings of a Soviet base on the moon. The Americans might get there first, but Soviet cosmonauts would be the first to really live there and explore. Three more N-1s were under construction and one was now almost ready.

With the N1-L3M plan now over a year under way, it was time for the fourth full test of the N-1. Although there had been some pressure to cancel the programme after the third failure, there was a strong conviction that the rocket must now be near to success. Following the third failure, further modifications of the rocket took place: [7]

• Better thermal protection for tanks, cables and pipes.

• New control system.

• Improved performance monitoring, with 13,000 sensors sending back data.

This N-1 was the first Soviet launch to use a digital guidance and control system, one overseeeing the engines, gyroscopes and accelerometers. The S-530 computer was developed by the Pilyugin design bureau and was used not only for the N-1 but the LOK and LK. The rocket’s telemetry system relayed back high-density data, some analysts estimating at a rate of 9.6Gbyte/sec on up to 320,000 channels on 14 frequencies, so fast that eavesdropping American electronic intelligence satellites could not keep up. Commands could be sent up to the ascending N-1 at the same pace.

Much improved engines were also in preparation, to be installed on the fifth flight model. The fourth N-1 launch took place on 23rd November 1972, directed by Boris Chertok, Mishin’s deputy (the chief designer was in hospital at the time). This N-1 carried a dummy LK but, for the first time, a real LOK, which was intended to be put in lunar orbit and return to Earth. To reach the moon, the N-1 would have used a southbound course for translunar injection. A flight plan was approved by Vasili Mishin in July and subsequently published, highlights of which were:

• Burn-out of Earth orbit after one day on 24th November.

• Two course corrections en route to the moon.

• Lunar orbit insertion after 98 hours, orbiting at 175 km on 28th November.

• Change in lunar path on the 5th and 27th orbit.

• Descent to 40 km over the moon.

• Landing site photography on orbits 14, 17, 34 and 36.

• Jettison the dummy LK on orbit 37.

• Drop the LOK orbital module on orbit 39.

• LOK to blast back to Earth on orbit 42, on 1st December.

• Course corrections 24 hours after trans-Earth injection and 6 hours before reentry.

• Splashdown in the Indian Ocean on 4th December (Clark, 2002).

At 72 sec after take-off, the fourth N-1 was flying longer, higher and faster than any of its predecessors. Hopes rose that the first staging of an N-1 might now take place just short of the 2 min mark. At 90 sec another hurdle was passed when the six core engines were shut down on schedule (this was a procedure to reduce G forces and vibrations). Then all of a sudden it all went wrong again. Engine # 4 caught fire, for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained, right at the end of its burn. There was then the bright flame of an explosion at the tail. The rest of the rocket then quickly blew apart, mere seconds from second-stage ignition. The escape rocket engine fired the payload, the LOK, free. Again, a human crew would have survived.

Flights of the N-1

Date Outcome Payload [8] [9]

Lavochkin. A date was even set for the launch: 17th September 1975, with a landing on Mars on 22nd September 1976, liftoff from Mars on 27th July 1977 and a return to Earth on 14th May 1978 [19].

Mishin was close to bringing the fifth N-1 down to the pad in May 1974. It was scheduled to fly in August 1974, with the fully improved Kuznetsov engines. An all-up unmanned mission in lunar orbit was scheduled. Even as he did so, the plotters moved.

Mishin had come increasingly under fire not only for the failures of the N-1 programme but also for the difficulties experienced in other parts of the programme. The early 1970s were bad years for the Soviet space programme, for not only were there the problems with the moon programme, but three cosmonauts were lost on Soyuz 11, three space stations were lost over 1972-3 and a fleet of four probes sent to Mars in 1973 suffered a series of computer failures. In some senses, it is a surprise that he lasted as long as he did. Mishin was aware of the criticism, but not that his enemies were preparing to move against him, which they did when he was in hospital. In May 1974, they persuaded Leonid Brezhnev to remove Vasili Mishin from his post as chief designer. He was dismissed on 15th May and replaced at once by Chief Engine Designer Valentin Glushko, who was shortly elevated to membership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the apex of political power.

Within days, Glushko suspended the N-1 programme. The sudden suspension of the programme cause widespread shock throughout the Soviet space programme, most so in Kyubyshev where it was built. Alexei Leonov recalls what a devastating blow this was. He blamed Mishin for his failure to present his case properly to the political leadership [20]. Leonov believed that, had Korolev lived, the Soviet Union would certainly have sent a cosmonaut around the moon first. He was less sure that they could have landed on the moon first, but Korolev could have learned from the mistakes with the N-1. They would have got there in the end.

Even after Mishin had been removed, his engineers lobbied hard to be permitted even suborbital flights down the Tyuratam missile range, but to no avail [21]. Others argued, equally unsuccessfully, that even if the moon programme were to be aban­doned, the N-1 would still be needed to launch large space stations. Some took out the old N-1-for-Mars design, now called the N-1M, trying to reinvent the rocket for its original mission, intended as far back as 1956. This inevitably prompted a rival design from Chelomei, the UR-700M and then the UR-900, raising the tedious prospect of the battles to the moon being refought again, but this time all the way to Mars [22].

Over the next two years, the Soviet space programme was gradually reoriented, but in a much more fundamental way. The future of the space programme was fought out at a meeting of the Military Industrial Commission on 13th August 1974 [23]. The main imperative seems to have been Glushko’s desire for a clean sweep, replacing the N-1 with his own family of launch vehicles (ultimately this evolved into Energiya); a reaffirmation of the value of orbital stations, where the USSR had achieved some modest success; and the need for a space shuttle to match the Americans. The military were not interested in going to the moon, but they were interested to match the shuttle. Now that he had finally triumphed over his dead rival, Korolev and his still alive successor Mishin, Glushko very much wanted to remake the Soviet space programme in his own image [24]. Glushko was undoubtedly a brilliant engineer, but critics found

him petty, gossipy, vainglorious and someone who liked to settle old scores. The political leadership was anxious to reign back costs and even Brezhnev, a supposed lover of projets de grandeur, understood the enormous cost to the Soviet economy of moon programmes. Although large-scale lunar and Martian projects continued on the drawing board for another two years, enthusiasm for them diminished to the point that they could be finally buried. Again, the Soviet decision-making process moved slowly and, apart from suspending the N-l, nothing was decided immediately. A consensus emerged, driven by Glushko, who had now combined his old bureau, OKB – 456, with Korolev’s old OKB-l, not to mention the Kyubyshev plant as well, to form the greatest mega-bureau of all time, Energiya. Following his death in 1989, they were again separated, the former becoming RKK Energiya and the later Energomash.

The three great chief designers of the Soviet space programme

1946-66 Sergei Korolev

1966-74 Vasili Mishin

1974-89 Valentin Glushko

In March 1976, the N-l was finally cancelled and the order was given to destroy all the N-l hardware. Project 5M to Mars was cancelled, though the absence of the N-1 was not the only reason (it was eventually recognized as being over-ambitious). The only items to survive were: the NK-33 rocket engines, which were stored away in a shed in the Kuznetsov plant in Kyubyshev; four lunar landers, now to be found in various museums; and half an N-1 fuel tank, which was converted to a bandstand shelter in a park in Leninsk. The N-1 pads were converted to serve for Glushko’s new rocket, the Energiya launcher, and it was from one of them that his Buran space shuttle made its first and only mission in November 1988. As for the former chief designer, Mishin was sent to lecture at the Moscow Aviation Institute, and, when glasnost broke, emerged to break the story of the N-l.

Heartbreaking though these decisions were for the designers, the cosmonauts who had hoped to fly to to the moon also felt an acute sense of disappointment. What happened to the cosmonaut squad? Once Apollo 8 had flown around the moon, the prospects of an L-l manned mission around the moon receded, although briefly rekindled when consideration was given to a mission to mark Lenin’s centenary in 1970. With the failure of the second N-l rocket in July 1969 and the American landing on the moon later that month, the prospects of a Soviet manned flight to the moon depended on the taming of the N-l rocket, which was nowhere in sight. The squad’s members had so little to do that they were permitted to make overseas trips, though some were recalled when they told too much of Soviet intentions. Autumn l969 saw the troika flight of three Soyuz spacecraft, mainly taking cosmonauts from the main Soyuz training groups but also some less prominent members of the lunar group (e. g., Vladislav Volkov). Plans were put forward for 1970-1 for at least one set of Kontakt missions to test out the lunar orbit docking system, with members drawn from the moon teams and farther afield. These missions were eventually cancelled in late 1970. When the head of the cosmonaut squad, General Kamanin, came to assemble his crews for the first manned space station missions in spring 1971, he chose cosmonauts from the round-the-moon and lunar-landing teams, like Nikolai Rukhavishnikov (research engineer, Soyuz 10) and Alexei Leonov (original commander, Soyuz 11). No specific training was ever done for the N1-L3M missions and no simulators were ever built. The moon team was formally disbanded in May 1974, matching the suspension of the N-1 programme, although there cannot have been many left at this stage, most having been reassigned to the manned space station programme. Last to go was navigator scientist Valentin Yershov, who alleged he was put out either for not joining the party or else to make way for nominees of new Chief Designer Valentin Glushko.

Winding down the moon race: cutbacks and redirection

1 Jan 1969 Party and government resolution to continue the moon programme, develop

an unmanned alternative programme and develop space stations.

Sept. 1969 First plans drawn for the N1-L3M.

Spring 1971 N1-L3M presented to expert commission.

August 1971 Cancellation of N1-L3 programme, replaced by the N1-L3M programme. 15 May 1972 Technical proposals for the creation of the N1-L3M complex approved.

May 1974 Mishin deposed; Glushko becomes chief designer; N-1 suspended. Cos­

monaut members disbanded March 1976 N-1 finally cancelled.

Moon bases had been part of Soviet thinking for some time. For Glushko, a moon base had a number of attractions. With Apollo over and the shuttle in development, there was no prospect now of the Americans establishing a moon base. By contrast, the world might be impressed by a permanent Soviet settlement on the moon. What would it have looked like?

A considerable amount of homework had already been done on moon bases. Design for a Soviet lunar base dated to the Galaktika project, approved by the government in November 1967. This mandated the study of the issues associated with lunar and planetary settlements [2]. The work was done not by one of the normal space design bodies but instead by the bureau associated with the construction of the cosmodromes, Vladimir Barmin’s KBOM. Work began in March 1968. Within the broader Galaktika programme, whose broad remit was the solar system as a whole, KBOM designed a full lunar base called Kolumb, or Columbus, constructed a full – scale habitation model and built a number of scale models, making its report as

Principles of the construction of long-term functioning lunar settlements in late 1969. KBOM designed a moon base for between four and twelve cosmonauts, working on the lunar surface for up to a year at a time. Up to nine modules might be delivered, telescoping out in length after their arrival. The study calculated that establishment of a moon base required the delivery, to the lunar surface, of about 52 tonnes of modules and equipment. Its key elements were:

• Pressurized habitation modules, buried under the regolith for protection from radiation, including a control centre.

• Construction equipment.

• Power supply centre, which could be solar, chemical or nuclear.

• Greenhouse to enrich oxygen, provide food and offer recreation.

• Logistics facilities for oxygen, water, waste disposal.

• Astronomy laboratory.

• Lunar rover, able to carry three cosmonauts across the lunar surface for up to three days to a distance of 250 km.

• Equipment for lunar exploration, such as drills and laboratory devices to examine rocks.

The western edge of the Ocean of Storms, already selected as the prime Soviet manned landing site, was nominated as the best possible location. Barmin was thanked for his work, for which he was paid 50m roubles, but cautioned that it was unlikely to be accomplished until the next century. The existence of this project was not eventually revealed until November 1987, when details were given on the Serbo-Croat and standard Chinese service of Radio Moscow’s overseas service.

In contrast to Proton, the N-1’s design history has been chronicled in some detail. The N-1 programme began on 14th September 1956, when the first sketches appeared in the archive of OKB-1. Korolev gave it the relatively bland name of N-1, ‘N’ standing for Nositel or carrier, with the industry code of 11A51. The concept was brought to the Council of Chief Designers on 15th July 1957, but it did notwin endorsement. The N-1 at this stage was a large rocket able to put 50 tonnes into orbit.

This was in dramatic contrast with the United States, where the Saturn V was constructed around a single mission: a manned moon landing. The N rocket, by contrast, was a universal rocket with broad applications. Korolev kept these purposes deliberately vague and, in order to keep military support for the project, hinting at how the N-1 could launch military reconnaissance satellites. The sending of large payloads to 24 hr orbit was also envisaged.

The N-1 languished for several years. Unlike the R-7, then in development, it did not have any precise military application and as a result the military would not back it. The situation changed on 23rd June 1960 when the N-1 was approved by Resolution #715-296 of the government and party called On the creation of powerful carrier rockets, satellites, space ships and the mastery of cosmic space 1960-7. Encouraged by the success of early Soviet space exploration, aware of reports of the developments by the United States of the Saturn launch vehicle, the Soviet government issued a party and government decree which authorized the development of large rocket systems, such as the N-1, able to lift 50 tonnes. The decree also authorized the development of liquid hydrogen, ion, plasma and atomic rockets. The 1960 resolution included approval for an N-2 rocket (industry code 11A52), able to lift 75 tonnes, but it was dependent on the development of these liquid hydrogen, ion, plasma and nuclear engines, suggesting it was a more distant prospect. The 1960 resolution also proposed circumlunar and circumplanetary missions. The implicit objective of the N-1 was to make possible a manned mission to fly to and return from Mars.

Such a mission was mapped out by a group of engineers led by Gleb Yuri Maksimov in Department # 9, overseen by Mikhail Tikhonravov. This would not be a landing, but a year-long circumplanetary mission. Maksimov’s 1959-61 studies postulated a heavy interplanetary ship, or TMK, like a daisy stem (nuclear power plant at one end, crew quarters at the opposite), which would fly past Mars and return within a year. In 1967-8, three volunteers – G. Manovtsev, Y. Ulybyshev and A. Bozhko – spent a year in a TMK-type cabin testing a closed-loop life support system. A related project, also developed in Department #9 but this time by designer Konstantin Feoktistov, envisaged a landing on Mars using two TMKs. The N-1 design, although it proved problematical for a man-on-the-moon project, was actually perfect for the assembly of a Mars expedition in Earth orbit.

Siddiqi points out that the N-1 Mars project and the development of related technologies took up a considerable amount of time, resources and energy at OKB-1 over 1959-63 [3]. Were it not for the Apollo programme, the Russians might well have by-passed the moon and sent cosmonauts to Mars by the end of the decade. Ambitious though the Apollo project was, Korolev had all along planned to go much farther.

The slogan of the GIRD group, written by Friedrich Tsander, never referred to the moon at all. Instead, its motto was ‘Onward to Mars!’

The fact that the original payload was 50 tonnes, far too little for a manned moon mission, demonstrates how little a part a moon landing played in Korolev’s plans at this time. Indeed, unaware of its origins, several people later questioned the suitability of the N-1 for the moon mission. Sergei Khrushchev said it was neither fish nor fowl, too large for a space station module, too small for a lunar expedition [4]. The head of the cosmonaut squad, General Kamanin, took the view in the mid-1960s that the design, going back to 1957, was already dated. The rival and ambitious Vladimir Chelomei felt he could do better with a more modern design.

Despite approval in 1960, the N-1 made very slow progress, and early the following year Korolev was already complaining that he was not getting the resources he needed. At one stage, in 1962, the government halted progress, limiting the N-1 project only to plans. An early problem, one that was to engulf the project, was the choice of engine. Korolev needed a much more powerful engine for such a large rocket. Korolev proposed kerosene-based engines for the lower stages and hydrogen – powered engines for the upper ones. He turned, as might be expected, to Valentin Glushko of OKB-456, asking him to design and build such engines. Valentin Glushko proposed a series of engines for the different stages of the N-1: the RD-114, RD-115, RD-200, RD-221, RD-222, RD-223. None of these was acceptable to Korolev, for all were nitric-based, anathema to him [5].

The ever-resourceful Korolev then turned to Kyubyshev plane-maker Nikolai Kuznetsov, asking him to make the engines using the traditional fuels of kerosene and liquid oxygen. Although Kuznetsov had no experience of rocket engines, he and his OKB-276 design bureau were prepared to give it a try. However, he knew he had no ability to develop high-powered engines, so a large number of modest-power kerosene-fuelled engines would have to do. In fact, despite his inexperience, the en­gines came out exceptionally powerful and lightweight, achieving the best thrust-to – weight ratios of the period. The engines were called NK, NK standing for Nikolai Kuznetsov. The first stage used NK-33s, the second NK-43s. There was little differ­ence between them except that NK-43 was designed for higher altitudes and had a larger nozzle [6]. Roll was controlled by a series of roll engines. For example, on the first stage, there were four roll engines of 7 tonne thrust each, assisted by four aerodynamic stabilizers.

First-stage separation would take place at 118 sec, at 41.7-km altitude, by which time the rocket would be travelling at 2,317 m/sec. The second stage would burn for over a further two minutes, reaching 110.6 km, with speed now at 4,970 m/sec. The third stage would then burn until 583 sec, by which time the stack had reached orbital altitude of 300 km and a velocity of 7,790 m/sec. Translunar orbit injection would be done by block G. This would use a single NK-31 engine, burning for 480 sec, to fire the stack moonward. Block D would then be used three times: [3]

The N-1 was originally designed to have hydrogen-powered upper stages. Research on hydrogen engines dated to 1959 in Arkhip Lyulka’s OKB-165 and I960 in Alexei Isayev’s OKB-2. The main engine design bureau was that of Valentin Glushko, but he had no time for hydrogen-fuelled stages. In May 1961, Korolev contracted Lyulka to build a 25 tonne thrust engine and Isayev a small one of 7 tonne thrust. Within two years, they were able to come back to him with the specifications of their motors, called respectively the 11D54 and 11D56. However, their progress was slow. A critical factor was the lack of testing facilities. Although both tried to get the use of the main testing facility at Zagorsk, priority was given to the testing of military rockets. In the event, they were not able to conduct the necessary tests until 1966-7. By 1964, Korolev had abandoned hope of getting hydrogen-powered engines available on time for the N-1 and went for more conventional solutions.

By summer 1962, the N-1 approached a critical design review. The N-1 design was studied by a commission presided over by Mstislav Keldysh for two weeks in July 1962. The Keldysh Commission gave the go-ahead for the N-1, with Korolev’s choice of liquid oxygen and kerosene engines. Siddiqi [7] points to the significance of this decision, for it forever fractured the Soviet space programme into rival camps: Korolev’s OKB-1 on one side; and on the other, Glushko’s OKB-456 and Chelomei’s OKB-52. The payload was set at 75 tonnes, merging the N-1 and N-2 design concepts (another interpretation is that the N-2 was in effect renamed and superseded the N-1). Either way, 75 tonnes was now the base line.

Two months later, on 24th September 1962, a government decree called for a first test flight in 1965. The N-1 was once again given the green light. Despite these changes, the N-1 and its engines continued to make very slow progress. Promised funding never arrived and despite seven years of design and redesign, no hardware had yet been cut. When the Soviet Union began to respond to the challenge of Apollo, Korolev saw the moon landing as an opportunity to give the N-1 the prominence he believed it deserved. On 27th July 1963, Korolev wrote a memo confirming that the N-1 would now be directed toward a manned landing on the moon. Now that the nature of American lunar ambitions had became more apparent, the N-1 was directed away from Mars and toward the moon. His first ideas for a lunar mission for the N-1 were to use two N-1s for his manned lunar expedition, employing the technique of Earth orbit rendezvous. The precise point at which Korolev moved from the Earth orbit rendez­vous profile to the lunar orbit rendezvous profile is unclear. Granted the difficulties they had experienced with getting funding for the N-1, the prospect of having to build only one, rather than two, for each moon mission must have been appealing. The favourable trajectory and payload economics of the American lunar orbit rendezvous method persuaded him that a single N-1 could do the job, but it would have to be upgraded again, this time from a payload of 75 tonnes to one of 92 to 95 tonnes, almost double its original intended payload.

When the decision to go to the moon was taken on 3rd August 1964, the N-1 was designated as the rocket for the lunar landing programme. The 95 tonne requirement had two immediate implications. First, the number of engines must be increased from 24 to 30, giving it a much wider base than had originally been intended. The 24 were in a ring and the additional six were added in the middle. Second, the fuel and oxidizer tanks would necessarily be very large. Korolev decided that spherical fuel tanks were to be used, eschewing the strapping of large fuel tanks to the side of the rocket. The diameters in each stage would be of different dimensions, making the system more complex and meaning that the rocket would be carrying a certain amount of empty space. The largest tank was no less than 12.8 m across! Korolev’s fuel tanks were so huge that they could not be transported by rail and had to be built on site at the cosmodrome. The first stage had 1,683 tonnes of propellant, of which no fewer than 20 tonnes were consumed before take-off!

Trying to get a 95-tonne payload out of a 75-tonne payload rocket design was quite a challenge. Other economies were sought and changes made:

• Setting a parking orbit of 220 km, lower than the 300 km originally planned.

• Additional cooling of fuels prior to launch.

• Thrust improvements of 2% in each engine.

• Use of plastic in place of steel in key components.

• Parking orbit inclination from 65° to 51.6° (later 50.7°).

• Reducing the crew of the lunar expedition from three to two.

Many different – and sometimes rival – branches and bureaux of the Soviet space industry were involved in the N-1 and the programme to put a Soviet cosmonaut on the moon. The N-1 was a huge industrial scientific undertaking, employing thousands

of people in Kyubyshev, Moscow, Dnepropetrovsk, Baikonour and many other locations. These were some of the main ones:

The overall designer was Sergei Kryukov, a graduate of the Moscow Higher Technical School, one of the experts sent to Germany in 1945 and a collaborator with Korolev on the R-7.

The moon race between the Soviet Union and the United States climaxed in summer 1969 when the first men landed on the moon – but there was an earlier, dramatic climax six months earlier at Christmas 1968. That time the battle was to see which country would be the first to send people around the moon and return. Although, in retrospect, there was less and less chance that the Russians would beat the Americans to a moon landing, the chances of the Russians sending cosmonauts around the moon first were very real.

By late August 1968, the Russians were still trying to achieve a successful mission of the L-1 Zond around the moon. The continued troubles with the Proton rocket must have been deeply disappointing. It was then going through its most difficult phase of development and none could have imagined that it would become, much later on, one of the world’s most reliable rockets. Although L-1 Zond missions had started as far back as March 1967 with Cosmos 146, none since then had been entirely successful. In August 1968, the Russians began to realize that time was no longer on their side. The first manned Apollo, redesigned after the Apollo fire, was due to make its first flight in October. Word came out of Washington that NASA was considering sending the second Apollo around the moon before the end of the year. It would be only the second Apollo flight and the first crew on the huge Saturn V rocket. The Russians had considered four unmanned lunar flights as essential before a manned flight: now the Americans were planning a manned flight on only the second Apollo mission, without any unmanned flights around the moon first.

As luck would have it, the same launch window that might take Apollo 8 to the moon opened for America on 21st December but much earlier in the USSR – from 7th to 9th December. This was entirely due to the celestial mechanics of the optimum launching and landing opportunities.