Category Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

How do Soviet space leaders regard their exploration of the moon now? In the early 1990s, the leaders of the space programme at the time emerged from the shadows to tell their story of the moon programme. Inevitably, granted the secrecy of the period, their first concern was to tell what happened. Many were directly involved as partisan protagonists, so their comments must be treated cautiously.

One of the first to tell the story was Chief Designer Vasili Mishin, first in magazine articles and then in interviews (his diaries were bought by the Ross Perot Foundation and have yet to be published). He was followed by numerous journalists, writing in dailies such as Izvestia and magazines like Znaniya. Some of the most detailed infor­mation was provided by the head of the cosmonaut squad, General Nikolai Kamanin, who kept a diary throughout the period and which has now been translated [6]. Latest and possibly last of the old guard to speak out was Boris Chertok, who in his eighties compiled a multi-volume memoir, published as Raketi i Lyudi (Rockets and people). Regrettably, little has been put in print by the cosmonauts involved in the lunar programme and some of them have already died. Oleg Makarov, for example, although he would have been on the first around-the-moon and first landing mission, was prepared to talk about the planned Zond mission, but would say very little about his own prominent role [7].

All expressed varying levels of regret, even grief, that the Soviet Union failed to win the moon race. Having achieved all the early breakthroughs in space exploration, they took the view that the Soviet Union should, with proper organization, have been able to reach the moon first. ‘How could we, after such a bright start, have slipped into second place?’ asked military journalist and cosmonaut candidate Col. Mikhail Rebrov [8]. Kamanin told his diary just how difficult it was for him to come to terms with what he regarded, unambiguously and without any mitigating factors, as a crushing defeat: ‘We drain the bitter cup of failure to the dregs,’ he acidly told his diary. He can’t have been the only one.

Most agreed with the reasons advanced by Mishin to explain why the Soviet Union lost: resources much inferior to the United States, the rivalry of the design bureaux, the continual revision and remaking of decisions, the false economy of avoid­ing comprehensive ground-testing, the death of Korolev at a crucial stage [9]. Most were sympathetic to Mishin, regarding his dismissal and the suspension of the N-1 programme as bad and even unjust decisions. In histories in which blame is liberally apportioned and widely scattered, several focused on Glushko for not being big enough to cooperate with the N-1 project from the start, arguing that he played an inconsistent, spoiling and even vindictive role in the programme [10]. Most felt that the N-1 would probably flown and been a successful rocket, eventually assembling large orbital stations. Chertok believed the Soviet Union did have the capacity to build a proper lunar base in the late 1970s and that such a venture made political, engineering and scientific sense, although it would have been costly [11]. Mishin [12]: We were able and should have implemented such an expedition after the USA. ‘Only a sense of political embarrassment, out of coming second, after the great rival, pre­vented this from happening,’ he said. Most of all he regrets the cancellation of the N-1, the wasted effort, the bitter resentment this caused in the industry and its replacement by an even more expensive programme which was ultimately cancelled in turn. Mishin’s final comment: ‘We were just a step away from success with the N-1. We could have built a base on the moon by now without stress or hurry.’

Having said this, these accounts are somewhat one-sided. Vladimir Chelomei did not leave memoirs, nor did Valentin Glushko. Although Glushko published technical papers, he never left behind a political statement defending his role in the space programme. When he died in 1989, his vast Energiya bureau was re-divided much as it was before he clustered its constituent companies together in 1974. The original OKB-1, now RKK Energiya, published a vast, colourful company history of the bureau and its projects, providing much of the detail on which an important portion of our knowledge of the Soviet moon programme is based. More critical comments and views come from General Kamanin. A diehard Stalinist, his severest criticisms focused on what he regarded as the poor quality of leadership given by the party and government, his own military and the space programme leadership, like Mishin and Keldysh. He was critical of the N-1 from the start, which he always regarded as an unsuitable and bad rocket: Chelomei’s UR-700 would have been better. Patriot though he was, he was overwhelmed in unconditional admiration of America’s stunning lunar successes. He resented the way in which they were under-reported and downplayed by the Soviet media and that he could not speak publicly and approvingly of them. He felt just how tough it must be on disappointed Soviet cosmonauts not to fly to the moon. Kamanin was especially critical on how good decision-making was undermined by the corrosive secrecy with which the Soviet lunar programme was run.

Retelling the Soviet side of the moon race, with its setbacks, ‘grandiose failures’ (Kamanin’s words), waste and poor decisions, seems to have given these writers little satisfaction, apart from the unmeasurably important one of making the facts of this hidden history known. They seemed to derive little comfort from the fact that from the chaotic final stages of the moon programme, a plan emerged for the building of space stations. This was a field in which their country became the undisputed world leader and remains so to this day. In his own way, Glushko was vindicated, for in 1987 his replacement for the N-1 did fly, Energiya giving the Soviet Union the most powerful rocket system in the world. Its subsequent cancellation, for economic reasons, can hardly be laid at his door. Unlike the N-1 and more like the Saturn V, the Energiya flew perfectly on its first two testflights and it was not for technical reasons that it never flew again.

Some of the writers refer to the general loss of interest in going to the moon among the Soviet political leadership, now that the Americans had achieved the feat and demonstrated it several times. Afanasayev [13] said that this was the considered view of the Soviet political leadership by 1972 and suggests that the decision to wind down the unmanned lunar programme was taken at around the same time as the decision regarding the manned programme. It is interesting that the political leadership of both the United States and the Soviet Union lost interest in flying to the moon in parallel at around the same time, even though one country had been there and the other had not. The next grand projet of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was a more practical, earthly one, the Baikal Amur Railway.

The hardware and rockets from the Soviet lunar programme mostly found their way to museums, like the LK lander. The main collection of unmanned Soviet lunar spacecraft may still be found in the Lavochkin Museum, and that is where Lunokhod 3 may be found. When the financial situation of the Russian space programme reached rock bottom, many of its most famous artefacts were sold, from spacesuits to space cabins, Vasili Mishin’s diary, even Sergei Korolev’s slide rule. Even real spacecraft were sold. On 11th December 1993, Sotheby’s sold Lunokhod for $68,500, but it was explained to the buyer that he would have to collect it from the Sea of Rains!

It is with the moon drivers that we leave the story. Lunokhod was one of the great achievements of the lunar exploration programme, though, as we saw, far from the only one. The moon drivers did everything expected of them and more. Not only had they worked away from home for the year-long journey of Lunokhod and the half­year journey of Lunokhod 2, but they were not even allowed to tell their families or friends where they were or what they were doing. Not until perestroika were they allowed to come out of the shadows and tell their remarkable story. Since then, the Lunokhod drivers would gather once a year, on the great 17th November, to recall their experiences in driving on another world. They are older and greyer now and most have now retired. Vyacheslav Dovgan is now a general. Happily, they were at last formally conferred with the medals that they had deserved a quarter century earlier and now wear them with pride [14].

The First Cosmic Ship was denounced in some quarters of the Western world as a fraud and one writer, Lloyd Malan, even wrote a book about it called The big red lie.

The reason? Few people in the West picked up its signals, even though the Russians had, as usual, announced their transmission frequencies (183.6, 19.993 and 19.997 MHz). Not only that, but the original Tass communique announcing the mission had told observers when the moonship would be over Hawaii, when the sodium cloud would be released and even where to look for it (the constellation Virgo).

The explanations were mundane, rather than conspiratorial. The Russians had inconveniently launched the First Cosmic Ship late on a Friday night and most professional observers had long since gone home for the weekend. By the time the Earth had rotated in line of sight for American observatories, the First Cosmic Ship was already well on its way and ever more difficult to pick up. In the event, signals were received on the next day by Stanford University in California when it was about 171,000 km out. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, staff were recalled over the weekend in a frantic effort to locate the spacecraft, which they eventually did when it was 450,000 km out, eight hours after it passed the moon. American military signal stations probably also tracked the spacecraft in Hawaii, Singapore, Massachusetts and Cape Canaveral, but if they received signals, they never told.

In Britain, the director of the large radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, Bernard Lovell, was at home listening to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fantasy and fuge. Jodrell Bank had been established by a physics professor, Bernard Lovell, who had spent the war developing radar to detect enemy planes and ships. In peacetime, he now adapted ex-army radars to study cosmic rays and meteor trails. This work was so promising that in 1950 he got the go-ahead for a large radio telescope for radio mapping of deep space objects and this was, fortuitously, completed just in time for the launching of Sputnik seven years later. There was some debate in Jodrell Bank as to whether the huge dish telescope should be used to track spacecraft at all, but the station had considerable financial liabilities and the glow of world media publicity attached to the station’s role in tracking spacecraft soon enabled that debt to be cleared. In fact, it was not the Russians but the Americans who first brought Jodrell Bank into the moon programme, paying for the use of its facilities in 1958 for the early American moon probes. Jodrell Bank had tried but failed to pick up the First Cosmic Ship, but, Bernard Lovell added, the station still believed that the probe existed! He put down his failure to obtain signals as due to inexperience. He had imagined that it would transmit continuously and had not understood the Russian system of periodic transmission, the ‘communications session’ [6].

The early moon shots of the United States and the Soviet Union had much in common. The first and the most obvious was their high failure rate. With the successful launching of the First Cosmic Ship, Russia and America had each tried four times. One Russian probe had reached but missed the moon. One American probe had reached 113,000 km, the other 102,000 km before falling back. All the rest had exploded early on.

Here, the similarities ended. The Russian Ye-1 probe was large, weighing 156 kg, with a simple (albeit elusive) objective: to impact on the moon. Six instruments were carried. By contrast, the American Pioneer probes were tiny, between 6 kg and 39 kg. They carried similar instruments: for example, like the early Russian probes, Pioneer 1 carried a magnetometer. The early American missions were more ambitious, aiming for lunar orbit and to take pictures of the surface of the moon. The camera system on Pioneer was tiny, weighing only 400 g, comprising a mirror and an infrared thermal radiation imaging device.

The First Cosmic Ship was hailed as a great triumph in the Soviet Union. The third year of space exploration could not have opened more brightly. Stamps were issued showing the rocket and its ball-shaped cargo curving away into a distant cosmos.

Throughout 1962, the Ye-6 was put through a rigorous series of ground tests. These focused on the landing sequences, the operation of the airbags and ensuring their subsequent successful deployment.

The first Ye-6 was successfully launched into Earth parking orbit on 4th January 1963, four years and two days after the First Cosmic Ship. Block L was due to fire from its parking orbit over the Gulf of Guinea toward the end of the first orbit to send the new spaceship moonbound. The Dolinsk was steaming below to track the signals.

Once again, the block L let everyone down. The power system in the 1-100 control unit appears to have failed, for the electrical command to ignite block L was never sent. The moon probe orbited the Earth for a day before breaking into fragments and burning up. A second attempt was made a month later, on 3rd February. Control of the pitch angle began to fail at 105.5 sec. 1-100 control was lost just as block I was due to fire. There was no third-stage ignition and the two upper stages crashed into the Pacific near Midway Island. Both launches were detected by the Americans, who had no difficulty in assessing them as failed moon probes.

Sorting out the I-100 control unit took two months. The next probe was launched on 2nd April 1963 and became the first Russian moon probe to leave a parking orbit for the moon. It was named Luna 4 (no more ‘cosmic ships’ or ‘interplanetary stations’), although in reality it was the twelfth Russian moonshot. Its precise purpose was not revealed, except to say that it would travel to ‘the vicinity of the moon’. Although the Russians did not specifically ask Jodrell Bank to track Luna 4, they issued transmission frequencies (183.6 MHz) and gave navigational data, an indirect invitation to do so. Jodrell Bank picked up signals for six hours, two days after the probe left Earth. The Russian receiving stations followed the mission from their new base in the Crimea and the spacecraft was also picked up visually as a 14th magnitude star. The Soviet news agency, Tass, was upbeat:

Scientists have to clarify the physical conditions cosmonauts will meet, how they are to overcome landing difficulties and how they should prepare for a prolonged stay on the moon. The human epoch in the moon’s history is beginning. There will be laboratories, sanatoria and observatories on the moon.

This heady enthusiasm soon evaporated. The following day, it became clear that the astro-navigation system had failed and that it would be impossible to perform a mid­course manoeuvre. The next day, on 4th April, the USSR reluctantly announced that Luna 4 would fly ‘close to’ the moon at 9,301 km the following day (in reality, it may have come slightly closer, 8,451km). Jodrell Bank listened in carefully for 44min during the point of closest passage. Contact was lost two days later and Luna 4 ended up in a highly eccentric equatorial Earth orbit of 89,250 by 694,000 km, taking 29 days per revolution and may have been eventually perturbed out of it into solar orbit. The Russians claimed – quite unconvincingly – that a lunar flyby was all that had been intended. But they shut up about health resorts on the moon for the time being.

The three failures in four months forced a review of the programme, this time headed up by Mstislav Keldysh, who was now president of the Academy of Sciences. The investigators never determined the true cause of the failure of Luna 4. All that was known for certain was that the mid-course correction had never taken place because the astro-navigation system had failed, which meant that the spacecraft could not be orientated for the burn in the first place. The Keldysh investigation did find many problems with the system itself and these were corrected over the following year. There was abundant evidence of the programme being prepared in too much of a hurry and quality control suffering as a result.

It was another year before the next Ye-6 was made ready for launch. The background was not propitious, for two more 8K78 Molniya rockets with test probes for Venus had failed in the past six months. What should have been Luna 5 was launched on 21st March 1964, but a rod broke in the block I stage, a valve failed to open fully, it never reached full thrust, cut off at 489 sec and the stage crashed back to Earth. On the 20th April 1964, a month later, the next Ye-6 suffered the same fate, but this time the connecting circuitry between the BOZ and the I-100 failed, the mission ending after 340 sec. Despite further efforts to resolve the problems in the upper stage, the next moon rocket was lost as well on 12th March 1965. This time, block L failed to ignite due to a transformer failure. The mission was given the designator of Cosmos 60, but the ever-watchful Americans knew at once that it was a moon failure. Confirmation that this was the case came when, many years later, it became known that Cosmos 60 had carried a gamma ray detector of the type later flown on Luna 10 and 12. Even though the mission failed as a moon probe, useful scientific results on cosmic rays were obtained [1].

This time, more significant steps were taken to address the problems ofintegrating block 1, block L, the BOZ and the I-100. The whole system was re-worked and re­wired, with separate control systems installed on both block L and the Ye-6. Little good did it do, for the next Luna crashed to destruction on 10th April 1965. This time the pressurization system for the liquid oxygen tank of block I failed, causing the spacecraft to crash into the Pacific. The new guidance system was never tested. This was the fourth failure in a row since Luna 4. Indeed, since the Automatic Inter­planetary Station, Russia had attempted to launch nine probes to the moon, none had been successful and only one had been announced. The level of failures represented a rate of attrition no programme could sustain and questions were being asked in the Kremlin by now.

Although there was much celebration at the achievement of the First Cosmic Ship, Korolev still faced the task of hitting the moon and doing so before the Americans. In March, the Americans at last passed the moon, but the accuracy of Pioneer 4 was much less than the First Cosmic Ship, for Pioneer 4 missed the moon by 60,015 km. The first half of 1959 saw continued Soviet difficulties with the R-7 launcher and a new one was not ready until the summer. The moon probe itself was slightly modified, the payload being heavier at 390 kg and received the designator Ye-1a. The first attempt at launch had been planned for 16th June, but the upper stage had been incorrectly fuelled and had to be unloaded and then refilled. It did not matter in the end, for when the probe was launched two days later on 18th June 1959, the inertial guidance system failed at 152 sec and the rocket crashed out of control and was exploded on ground command.

The fix took three months and the next rocket counted down on 9th September. Ignition took place, but the engines did not build up sufficient thrust for the rocket to take off. This was what became known in American terminology as a pad abort. Korolev must have been extremely frustrated at this stage, for 13 months after the first attempt, he still had not hit the moon.

The 390.2 kg Second Cosmic Ship was eventually sent up on 12th September. The upper stage reached the intended escape velocity of 11.2km/sec and then the space­craft separated from the upper stage. Transmissions began at once, using three transmitters working on 183.6,19.993 and 39.986 megacycles. The signals told ground control that its course was, this time, dead centre and Radio Moscow quickly announced that the rocket would reach the moon at 00: 05 on the 14th September. The ship spun slowly around its axis, once every 14 min. The final stage also sent back radio signals on 20 MHz and 19 MHz as it headed away.

To mark the visual progress of the rocket, the Second Cosmic Ship released a sodium vapour cloud on the 13th, some 156,000 km out. It eventually expanded into a 650 km diameter cloud and this was spotted by observatories in Alma Ata, Byurakan, Abastuma, Tbilisi and Stalinabad. The Second Cosmic Ship carried an identical suite of scientific instruments to the first, although Shmaia Dolginov’s magnetometer had been modified to reduce the range of measurement to between —750 and +750

gammas, where a response was considered more likely. It took measurements every minute during the flight out and confirmed the observations of the First Cosmic Ship. As the probe neared the moon, the instruments were working perfectly and were searching for lunar magnetic and radiation fields (none were found when the last measurement came in 55 km out). The Second Cosmic Ship not only encountered the solar wind met by its predecessor, but measured it. Other instruments measured alpha particles (nuclei of carbon, nitrogen), X-rays, gamma rays, high – and low-energy electrons and high-energy particles.

Korolev and the designers gathered in the control room as the Second Cosmic Ship neared the moon. The Russians had been stung by the claims that the First

Cosmic Ship had been a fraud, or ‘a big red lie’ and this time took no chances. At Jodrell Bank, the Russians had again inconveniently launched a moon probe during a weekend. Bernard Lovell captained his local cricket team and refused all remonstra – tions to be interrupted to track the new spaceship. He was eventually persuaded to return to the observatory where a telex, hot in from Moscow, gave him not only the transmission and trajectory details but the intended time of impact. Cricket or not, this was a serious world event now. Jodrell Bank started tracking the Second Cosmic Ship the moment the moon rose over the horizon some five hours before impact was due. Round the world, radio stations went on a night-time vigil to wait for the historic moment of impact, in what must have been the first worldwide news coverage of an event taking place away from the Earth. Signals poured back loud and clear from the spacecraft against the eternal static of deep space. The Second Cosmic Ship plunged into the moon’s gravity well at an angle of 60° and a velocity of almost 3 km/sec. Then in a instant, 2 min and 24 sec after midnight, the signals were abruptly cut short and there was dead silence!

The Second Cosmic Ship had made it, reached the moon and impacted onto it at great speed. It was a bull’s eye, barely 1° west longitude and 30° north latitude. The Second Cosmic Ship crashed somewhere in a triangle shaped by the craters Archi­medes, Aristillus and Autolycus in the small mare (sea) called the Marsh of Decay (Palus Putredinis), scattering hammer-and-sickle ball-shaped momentos onto the lunar surface to mark the occasion. The upper stage of the rocket followed 30 min later, though it carried no transmitter so its impact point is unknown. And the person who told the waiting world was Bernard Lovell, who got the news out first, for he confirmed that the signals had ceased and that the trajectory had intercepted the moon. Still some Americans denied the Soviet achievement. Bernard Lovell calculated the Doppler shift on the signals, proving that they came from a moving object falling fast toward the centre of the moon. He played the tape recording, with the abrupt stop, over the phone to the New York media and that seemed to satisfy most of them. By way of a thank-you for the telex, many years later he handed a tape recording of the signals to Mstislav Keldysh.

No one was more pleased than Nikita Khrushchev. He was able straightaway to present President Dwight Eisenhower with a model of the commemorative pennants which his country had just deposited on the moon. Khrushchev loved these gestures. Not only had the USSR reached the moon, but he could bring the good news in the latest Soviet aircraft. First, there was the Tupolev 104, the first successful modern jetliner. Then the Soviet Union developed the Tupolev 114. This was a massive, fast, long-range propellor-driven airliner able to fly 220 people with two decks high above the clouds. Khrushchev amazed the Americans when he flew to New York in this huge silver plane without ever stopping once for refuelling.

The scientific results of the mission of the Second Cosmic Ship were published the following spring. To do so, scientists went through 14km of teletype! Neither a magnetic field nor a radiation belt was found around the moon. The outer belt of electrons in the Earth’s charged particles reached out as far as 50,000 km. The four ion traps on the outside measured the flows of the currents of ion particles all the way out to the moon. Their concentration varied, sometimes as less than 100 particles/cm3.

But 8,000 km out from the moon, current intensities increased, suggesting the exist­ence of a shell of a lunar ionosphere.

These setbacks led to a major shakeup in the moon programme. Korolev’s OKB-1 was now heavily overcommitted and the manned space programme was using up his full energies. Korolev approached the Lavochkin Design Bureau. This was, at first sight, a strange thing to do, for Lavochkin was an aircraft design bureau that had languished since the death of its founder, Semyon Lavochkin. This design bureau dated to 1937, being founded as Plant #301 by aviation designer Semyon Lavochkin. During the 1940s the plant made fighter aircraft and during the 1950s, cruise missiles. Plant # 301 was named the Lavochkin Design Bureau on the death of its founder in 1960. The deputy director then was Georgi Babakin but he had since gone to work for Korolev’s rival, Vladimir Chelomei.

Georgi Babakin is to become a central person in our story. Fifty-year-old Georgi Babakin was an unusual man, self-taught, with a healthy suspicion of formal educa­tion. Born in Moscow on 31st August 1914 (os), he developed an early passion for radio electronics, becoming senior radio technician with the Moscow Telephone Company in 1931. He was drafted into the Red Army’s Proletarian Infantry Division in 1936 where he was radio operator for six months before being dismissed for ill

health. He returned to school, where he completed his exams, joining the old Lavoch­kin Design Bureau during its plane-making days, rising to deputy chief designer. He eventually took a university degree in 1957 [2].

March 1965 saw a shakeup in the unmanned lunar programme in which the Ye-6 missions, as well as the interplanetary programme, left OKB-1. OKB-301 was effec­tively reconstructed, with its former deputy director Georgi Babakin returning as chief designer. Specifically, Korolev asked Georgi Babakin to ask him to take over the Ye-6 programme once the current OKB-1 production run was complete, but he knew that this would mean the entire set of programmes going to Lavochkin from then on. In April 1965, Sergei Korolev made his first and only visit to the Lavochkin Design Bureau. He met all the senior design staff, formally handed over the OKB-1 blueprints to them, made clear the heavy duty now incumbent upon them and warned them that he would take the projects back if they did not perform. Lavochkin’s experience of producing military aircraft stood to its advantage, for the company put much emphasis into ground testing and cleaning bugs out of the system beforehand.

Few people seem to have moved across from OKB-1 to Lavochkin. One who did was Oleg Ivanovsky. Another radio enthusiast, he was a cossack cavalryman during the war but was so badly wounded that at war’s end he was registered permanently disabled, facing a grim future without work or, more importantly, worker ration cards. An old friend managed to get him work in OKB-1 where his radio skills were quickly appreciated. Korolev gave him a key role in the radio instrumentation for Sputnik, the 1959 moon probes and then the Vostok, personally accompanying Yuri Gagarin to his cabin. When the new Lavochkin company was set up, Korolev found him a post as deputy chief designer, second only to Babakin [3].

At the same time, the Isayev bureau also improved the KTDU-5 engine system. A new version, called the KTDU-5A, was introduced. Using amine as fuel and nitric acid as oxidizer, it had a specific impulse of 278 sec, a thrust of 4,640 kg and a chamber pressure of 64 atmospheres. It was designed to burn twice – the first time for the mid-

course correction (up to 130m/sec) and then a second time for the landing (2,630 m/ sec) and had a total burn time of 43 sec [4]. The decision was also taken to upgrade the launcher and replace the unreliable 8K78 and block L by an improved version. The lower stages, the 8K78, were replaced by the 8K78M by the end of the year and the old block L by the new block MVL by 1968.

The early frustrations of 1958 could be put to one side now: the knifelike precision of the Second Cosmic Ship showed what could be done. The accuracy of the Second Cosmic Ship was not lost on the Americans, who had never attained such early accuracy. Not that they were given much time to recover. Three weeks later, and on the second anniversary of Sputnik, a third cosmic ship lifted off the pad.

This was the first Ye-2 type of moon probe (though, to be completely accurate, it had now been designated Ye-2a). There was quite a jump between the Ye-1 type of probe and the ambition of a Ye-2 or Ye-3. Both required great accuracy, but the farside photography mission especially so. For lunar imaging, Keldysh’s Mathe­matical Institute was called in. Such a mission must take place when the farside was lit up by the sun and bring the probe on a trajectory back to the Earth high over the Soviet Union so that it could transmit back the pictures. Such optimum conditions would take place infrequently: in October 1959 (photography after approaching the moon) and April I960 (photography while approaching the moon). The spacecraft would require an orientation system to make sure the cameras pointed the right way and that the transmissions were subsequently relayed back to the Earth. The orientation system was developed by Boris Raushenbakh and a team of seven young engineers who built the parts from shop-bought electronic components, the Soviet Radio Shack of its day. Boris Raushenbakh (1915-2001) was, as his name suggests, German by background and for this reason was interned during the war. In his spare time, he developed an expertise in the history of Russian art. He was allowed to return to the Keldysh Research Centre after the war, where he developed a knowledge of spacecraft orientation. Gas jets provided the all-important orientation system. Sensors were used to maintain orientation toward the Earth, sun and moon. The station was the first spacecraft to develop a three-axis stabilization system. For

the flyby, the sensors would be used to locate the sun, Earth and moon and once this was done, the spacecraft’s thrusters would fire until it was brought into the desired position for photography or communications or whatever was required. His system has been used ever since.

Two camera systems were developed, the successful one being built by Television Scientific Research Institute NII-380 in Leningrad under Petr Bratslavets (1925— 1999), assisted by I. A. Rosselevich. To take pictures, the Russians opted not for relatively new television systems like the Americans but for older, mechanical designs likely to give much higher quality. The imaging system was called Yenisey 2 and this comprised a duel-lens camera, scanner and processing unit. The dual lens could take up to 40 pictures at 200 mm, f5.6 (designed for the full moon) or 500 mm, f9.5, designed for close-ups. The cameras could not be moved or swivelled: instead, the spacecraft itself would be rotated to point in the appropriate direction. Transmissions of signals could be made at two speeds: slow, at 1.25 lines a second (for distant transmissions) and faster, at 50 lines a second (closer to Earth).

The photographs would be developed onboard and then scanned by a television camera. This system was designed by Scientific Research Institute for Radio Instru­ment Building, NII-885, where the person responsible was the deputy chief designer Yevgeni Boguslavsky (1917—1969) who used, instead of the traditional valves, some of the new transistors. The station was the first to make use of transistors. Now long outdated, transistors were new in the 1950s, the first being made by the NPO Svetlana in Leningrad in 1955. The first transistors had been flown in Sputnik 3 the previous year, but this was the first time that they were the basis of the electrical system. Boguslavsky had developed optical and radio tracking systems for missiles in the 1940s and had been involved in the radio tracking of the First and Second Cosmic Ships. As the probes swung back to Earth, the television camera would scan the photographs and transmit them by radio. Transmission would be by omnidirectional antenna, sending signals out over a broad range, which improved the chances of them being picked up but diminished the quality of the signal received. Transmissions were to be sent on two frequencies: 39.986 MHz and 183.6 MHz, using a system of impulse transmitters able to achieve high rates of telemetry. The Ye-2 was probably the most complex spacecraft in the very early days of space exploration. The Ye-3 was an even more sophisticated system, but was cancelled when it was decided to con­centrate on the Ye-2 versions, the Ye-2a and Ye-2f.

Years later, it emerged that the Soviet specialists had not been able to manu­facture radiation-hardened film that would survive the journey through the radiation belts and the translunar environment. Instead, they used American film retrieved from Gentrix balloons – spy balloons floated across the Soviet Union from American bases in western Europe to spy on military facilities but whose film was known to be radiation-protected.

The weight of the new lunar craft was 278 kg. The Ye-2 looked quite different from the Ye-1, being a cylindrical canister with solar cells of the type already used on Sputnik 3. The Ye-2 was 1.3 m tall, 1.2m in diameter at the widest but 95 cm for most of its body. The cannister was sealed and pressurized at 0.23 atmospheres. Shutters opened and closed to regulate the temperature, being set to open if it rose above 25° C. Four antennae poked out through the top of the spacecraft, two more from the bottom. The cameras were set in the top and the other scientific instruments were mounted on other parts of the outside. In addition to the cameras, the main payload, the spacecraft carried a cosmic ray detector and micrometeoroid detector.

The new moon probe arrived at Baikonour in August 1959, even before the mission of the Second Cosmic Ship. There was still some testing to be completed there and this was signed off on 25th September. Launching took place on 4th October, two years after Sputnik. The new launching caused mystery at first. Far from taking a rapid course out to the moon, it swung lazily outward in what was actually an irregular high-Earth orbit, 48,280 km by 468,300 km, inclination 55°. The trajectory had been carefully calculated with the help of a computer at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the Steklov Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This time it was curiously labelled the ‘Automatic Interplanetary Station’ (AIS). The Russians announced its transmission frequencies 39.986 MHz (science) and 183.6 MHz (tra­jectory). They informed Jodrell Bank, which picked up the station some ten hours after launch. The Jodrell Bank staff had to do this without their director. Bernard Lovell was on a visit to the United States. His NASA hosts were giving him a mock journey to the moon in newly opened Disneyland in California when news of the Automatic Interplanetary Station broke, an unhappy irony for them.

Its purpose was not immediately obvious and news managers had decided that the objective of photographing the moon should not yet be mentioned, presumably in case

of failure. They had good reason to be cautious, for confidence in the probe down on the ground was low, for signal transmissions from the probe were unreliable and those that were received indicated that it was overheating in the harsh conditions of Earth – moon space. The station reached a temperature of 40°C, far above that intended (25°C). The signals had become ever weaker and even with a dish ten times bigger than Kochka, Jodrell Bank had lost track, the British getting the impression that things had gone badly wrong.

Korolev at once flew with Mstislav Keldysh, Boris Chertok and other OKB-1 engineers from Moscow to see what could be done to salvage the situation. They rushed to Vnukovo Airport, the main domestic terminal in Moscow, where the government made available the fastest plane in the Aeroflot fleet, the Tu-104 jetliner. Such was the rush that the last passengers boarded as it taxied out to take off. Once they landed in the Crimea, a helicopter was supposed to bring them the rest of the way, but thick snow was falling, visibility was nearly zero and the helicopter had to fly on to Yalta. Here, local communist chiefs organized Pobeda cars to whisk them to Kochka where they eventually arrived, tired and probably worried sick. Korolev took charge, they worked through the night and by realigning the aerials ground control was able to send fresh commands up to the probe. Commands were sent up to change the spin rate and to shut some systems down and this had the desired effect of bringing temperatures down a bit, to 30°C. At about 65,000 km, rotation was stopped altogether.

The station swung around the south lunar pole at a distance of 6,200 km at 17:16 Moscow time on the 6th October before climbing high over the moon’s far northern side. Now the sun angle was from behind and shining on the lunar farside. Early the following morning, the 7th October, rising 65,200 km above the moon’s surface, sensors detected the sunlit farside of the moon and the Ye-2’s unique design came into its own. The orientation system, linked to gas jets, went into action. One sensor locked onto the Sun, the other onto the moon. The gas jets fired from time to time to maintain this orientation. At 06: 30 Moscow time, the camera system whirred into operation. For a full 40 min the two lenses took 29 pictures of the farside, with speeds varying between 1/200 and 1/800 sec. The last image was taken at an altitude of 66,700 km. The photographs were then developed, spooled, dried and scanned at

1.0 lines by the cathode ray television system. The system is not unlike a scanner that might be used on a modern domestic computer – except that this was 1959 and half a million kilometres away!

But how would ground control get the pictures? The station was transmitting during the picture taking, but the signal was intermittent and, to save energy, the transmitter was then turned off. Later that day, 7th October, the first attempt to send the images was made. One picture was received, taken some distance from the moon and showing it to be round, but not much more. Jodrell Bank picked up these signals, but – in order to take out radio noise so as to get a better signal – the station mistakenly cut out the video part of the signal.

The station was getting ever farther away on its elongated orbit. Near apogee, at

467.0 km, a second attempt was commanded to slow-transmit the pictures, but again the quality was very poor, so ground control just had to wait until its figure-of – eight trajectory brought the station back towards the Earth, which meant a long wait of almost two weeks. The Automatic Interplanetary Station’s orbit took it far out behind the moon and it did not curve around back toward Earth until five days later, on 11th October, passing the moon’s distance but this time Earthbound on the 15th. By the 17th, the station was halfway between Earth and the moon and it rounded Earth on the 19th. Now it was in an ideal position for the northerly Soviet ground­tracking stations.

Ground control made several attempts to get the probe to send the pictures, this time on fast speed. The first time, the next day, the signals were too weak. For the next four attempts, there was too much static and radio noise. In ground control, it became apparent that 29 pictures had indeed been taken, but whether they would ever receive them in useable condition was less clear. To lower the level of radio noise, the Soviet authorities ordered radio silence in the Black Sea and naval ships put out to sea off the Crimea to enforce the ban. The already tense humour in the control room became nervous and despondent. On the fifth attempt, though, the signal strength and quality improved abruptly. In the end, 17 of the 29 pictures were useable, covering 70% of the farside (the eastern side, as seen from Earth). On the 19th, rumours swept Moscow that pictures had been received of the farside of the moon.

Not until ten days later did the USSR release the historic first photograph of the moon’s farside. A first set had been prepared by Yuri Lipsky in the Sternberg Astronomical Institute. The main picture was hazy and fuzzy, but it gave a bird’s

eye view of the moon’s hidden side. It was the first time the view from space had ever been presented to people on Earth, the first time that a space probe had ever obtained data that could never have been obtained any other way. The farside was found to be mainly cratered highlands and was quite different from the near side. In the tradition of exploration, to the finder fell the privilege of naming the new-found lands. There

was one huge crater, which the Russians duly called Tsiolkovsky and two seas, which they duly named the Moscow Sea (Mare Moskvi) and the Sea of Dreams. By astonishing coincidence, the pictures came through just when the monthly, popular live BBC astronomy television programme, The sky at night was on air (in those days, all programmes were done in real time with no pre-recording). The presenter, Patrick Moore, was able to show the pictures live to the world the instant they became available. Half a century later, he would still recall how the night the moon pictures came in was one of the highlights of his broadcasting career.

Contact with the Automatic Interplanetary Station was lost later that month, on the 22nd October. It passed the moon again on 24th January I960, but signals could no longer be received. Its irregular orbit brought it crashing into the Earth’s atmo­sphere at the end of April I960, where it duly burned. For the Americans, the Automatic Interplanetary Station buried another myth: that the Russians could only

build crude spacecraft on big dumb boosters. The station was a versatile display of engineering and technical sophistication. Now the whole world could see the pictures of the farside, be they in the newspapers or on educational posters. The Soviet Union published the first, primitive lunar farside atlas. Articles were published about the characteristics of the farside in general and of its specific features. A geological reconstruction was later made of the Moscow Sea [7].

Indeed, the Americans were so impressed with the Automatic Interplanetary Station that they contrived a plot of which James Bond and his director, M, would have been proud. In December 1959, only two months after the mission, the Russians sent a model of the station to an exhibition in Mexico. In reality, it was more than just a scale model, but the backup, working version. The Central Intelligence Agency sought and obtained the permission of the president of Mexico to kidnap the space­craft. On its way to the exhibition, the truck carrying the spacecraft was diverted overnight to a timber warehouse where specialists were on hand to photograph, disassemble and reassemble the spacecraft. They had only a few hours to carry out their mission before anyone noticed that the truck was late. Although the main purpose was to estimate what size warhead the Soviet rocket could deliver, the exercise gave the Americans literally a hands-on examination of the capacity of Russian electronics, cameras and manufacturing capacity. The kidnapping of the Automatic Interplanetary Station was kept secret until the Cold War was long over.

Instruments of the Automatic Interplanetary Station

Camera photography system, 200 mm and 500 mm. Cosmic ray detector.

Micrometeoroid detector.

The original design for the Ye-2 series was based on two suitable launch windows: October 1959 and April I960. The second window was now approaching. This time, the Russians would film the moon’s farside while approaching the farside, covering the 30% not accessible to the AIS. Scientific Research Institute N11-380 devised an improved camera system and two probes were built, called the Ye-2f series. Now the earlier unreliabilities reasserted themselves. The first launching on 15th April began well, but Kosberg’s RD-105 engine cut off early and the probe fell back from an altitude of 200,000 km. The second launching, the next day on 16th April, was even worse (some accounts give the date as 19th April). A moment after liftoff, the four strap-on blocks peeled apart, shooting out over the heads of the controllers, shattering the assembly hall and leaving the rails to the pad in a gnarled, tangled mess. None of this reached the rest of the world – or at least not for 30 years. So far as the rest of the world was concerned, the Russians had done one lunar farside mission and succeeded so completely that they did not need to repeat it.

FIRST MOONSHOTS

To what must have been enormous relief in OKB-301, the next moon probe sailed smoothly away from Earth orbit on 9th May 1965. This date marked Victory in Europe Day, 20 years from the end of the war and hopefully this would augur well for the new probe, Luna 5. Maybe the guidance systems had at last been corrected. Nine communications sessions took place en route to the moon. During the first five, the probe radioed back its exact position as accurately as possible so that the thrust for the mid-course correction could be calculated. The fifth session issued the commands. Things began to go wrong now. The 1-100 was unable to control the probe properly and it began spinning. Ground control brought it back under control and tried again. The command instructions were issued wrongly, so the burn did not take place. By now it was too late to carry out the burn. Thankfully, Luna 5’s original path was sufficiently accurate to hit the moon, although far from the area intended, so an embarrassing repeat of the Luna 4 could be avoided. Ground control positioned the spacecraft for retrofire, aware that the spacecraft would come down about 700 km off course and that it would not be the intended direct, vertical descent but an oblique one instead. The 1-100 again failed to stabilize the probe, so retrofire did not take place. Soviet scientists in the control room listened helplessly to Luna 5’s signals as it crashed unaided on the moon at great speed, way off course. Its precise impact point has never been determined and the original Soviet announcement suggested the Sea of Clouds, a location of 30°S, 8°W being later suggested. Some subsequent analysis gave an impact point to the northwest and nearer the equator (8° 10’N, 23°26’W), but well away from the Sea of Clouds [5].

Luna 5 exploded and sent up a cloud of dust measuring 80 km wide and 225 km long. It was the second Soviet probe to impact on the moon, the first since the Second Cosmic Ship seven years earlier. The announcement of the unhappy outcome was not made until twelve hours later: whether this was in the forlorn hope that the probe might have survived, or to give time to put news management into operation, is not known.

The idea that Luna 5 had created a big impact cloud was ridiculed at the time and subsequently. The cloud was seen by observers at Rodewitsch Observatory in the German Democratic Republic until ten minutes after impact when it faded and the details given in Izvestia on 16th May. The claims were treated nowhere more seriously than in the United States, where Bellcomm Inc. was commissioned by NASA to investigate. Bellcomm’s report was done by J. S. Dohnanyi, who concluded that August that if Luna 5 impacted into a basalt surface and if the fuel of the landing rocket exploded on impact, then such a cloud was indeed possible [6].

Luna 6 on the 8th June set off for the moon with the same promise as Luna 5. There was a sense of apprehension as the mid-course manoeuvre approached. Although the rocket switched on correctly, it would not turn off! The engine continued to blast away remorselessly, sending Luna 6 away in the opposite direction. It missed the moon by no fewer than 160,935 km, what must have been a record. Trying to salvage something from another disappointment, ground control commanded a separation of the lander and inflation of the airbags, a manoeuvre that apparently worked.

The author would like to thank and acknowledge all those who assisted with this book. In particular, he would like to thank: Dave Shayler, whose creative ideas helped to shape this book; Rex Hall, for his comments and advice on the Soviet cosmonaut squad and making available his collection for study; Phil Clark of Molniya Space Consultancy, for his technical advice; Paolo Ulivi, Bart Hendrickx and Don P. Mitchell who provided valuable information; Andy Salmon, for access to his collec­tion; Suszann Parry, for making available information sources and photographs in the British Interplanetary Society; Prof. Evert Meurs, director and Carol Woods, librar­ian of Dunsink Observatory; and of course Clive Horwood for his support for this project.

Many of the photographs published here come from the author’s collection. I would like to thank the many people who generously provided or gave permission for the use of photographs, especially the following:

• Piet Smolders, for permission to use his painting of the first Russian on the moon.

• Andy Salmon, for his series of images of the LK and Luna 10.

• Rex Hall, for his photographs of Luna 10, 13, 16 and Lunokhod 3.

• NASA, for its collection on Soviet space science. Other open American sources were used, such as the declassified CIA collection.

Brian Harvey Dublin, Ireland, 2007

After the flight of the First and Second Cosmic Ship and then the Automatic Interplanetary Station, the full attentions of OKB-1 switched to manned spaceflight. Design of the first manned spaceship gathered pace over 1959, culminating in the launch of the first prototype, Korabl Sputnik, on 15th May I960. The rest of the year was spent on refining the design, testing and preparing the first team of cosmonauts for flight. Only after five Korabl Sputnik missions, with dummies and dogs, were the Russians prepared to commit a cosmonaut to such a mission, called for the purpose the Vostok spacecraft. Vostok was a spherical spacecraft, riding on an equipment module, weighing four tonnes, able to fly a cosmonaut in space for up to ten days.

VOSTOK ZH: A CONCEPTUAL STUDY

This did not mean that moon plans were in abeyance, but they took a second place to the priority Korabl Sputnik and Vostok projects. Fresh Soviet moon pans were developed following the 5th July 1958 plan Most promising works in the development of outer space. Already, the designers were exploring how best to make a manned mission to the moon. In 1959, Sergei Korolev had asked Mikhail Tikhonravov and his Department # 9 to work on the problems of rendezvous, using the now available R-7 launcher and to develop a broad range of missions before a heavy lift launcher, called the N-1, or Nositel (‘carrier’) 1 could be built. The department’s initial design was to link a Vostok spacecraft, then being prepared for the first manned flight into space, with two or three fuelled rocket stages. The manoeuvrable, manned Vostok would carry out a number of dockings and assemble a complex in orbit. Once assembled, the rocket train would blast moonward. This has sometimes been called the Vostok Zh plan [1]. Such a flight would go around the moon, without orbiting or landing, flying straight back to Earth after swinging around the farside. Vostok Zh was a conceptual study and does not seem to have got much further. It was one of a number of

possibilities explored during this period, the other principal one being a space station called Sever.

The limits of Vostok as a round-the-moon spaceship were realized at a fairly early stage. First, it was designed for only one person, while a moon mission required a crew of two, one as a pilot, the other as a navigator and observer. Second, a spherical­shaped cabin could only make a steep ballistic return into the Earth’s atmosphere. The return speed from the moon was 11 km/sec, compared with 7 km/sec from Earth orbit and this would present difficult challenges to protect the cabin from the intense heat involved. Not only that, but an equatorial moon-Earth trajectory would bring the returning lunar cabin back to Earth near the equator. This was not a problem for the Americans, for they preferred sea splashdowns, but it was for the Russians, for no part of the Soviet Union was anywhere near the equator.

Looking for solutions to these problems, Tikhonravov collaborated with a rising engineer in OKB-1, Konstantin Feoktistov. He was a remarkable man. Born in Voronezh in 1926, he was a child prodigy and by the time the war broke out had mastered advanced maths, physics and Tsiolkovsky’s formulae. When the Germans invaded, he acted as a scout for the partisans, but he was captured and put before a firing squad. The Germans left him for dead, but the bullets had only grazed his brain. He recovered, made his way back to the Russian lines, entered the Baumann Technical College in 1943, was awarded his degree and entered Mikhail Tikhonravov’s design department in the 1950s.

Tikhonravov and Feoktistov worked to develop a spacecraft that could safely return to land following a high-speed reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere from the moon. This led them away from the spherical shape of Vostok toward a headlight-

shaped acorn-like cabin. Tikhonravov calculated that coming through reentry at llkm/sec the cabin could tilt its heatshield downward, use it to generate lift and skip across the atmosphere like a pebble skimming across water, bounce back into space and return to Earth, but now with a much diminished velocity [2]. This would not only reduce gravity forces for the crew, but make the capsule fly from the equator, skimming the atmosphere to a more northerly landing site in the Soviet Union. Although the return to Earth required considerable accuracy and although the reentry profile was a long 7,000-km corridor, it held out the promise of a safe landing on Soviet territory with a landing accuracy of ±50 km.

After all these Luna disappointments, it was ironic that during the summer the Soviet Union now achieved an unexpected success courtesy of an unlaunched Mars probe. This was Zond 3. The title ‘Zond’ had been contrived by Korolev to test out the technologies involved in deep space missions. Zond 1 had been sent to Venus in March 1964, while Zond 2 headed for Mars in November 1964, coming quite close to hitting the planet the following summer. These Zonds each had two modules: a pressurized orbital section, 1.1 m in diameter, with 4m wide solar panels, telemetry systems, 2 m transmission dish, a KDU-414 engine for mid-course manoeuvre and a planetary module. This could be a lander (e. g., Zond 1), but in the case of Zond 3 this was a photographic system, accompanied by other scientific instruments. The probe was compact and smaller than the Lunas at 950 kg. The camera system was a new one introduced for the 1964-5 series of Mars and Venus probes. The designer was Arnold Selivanov and his system was comparatively miniscule, weighing only 6.5 kg. The film used was 25.4mm, able to hold 40 images and could be scanned at either 550 or 1,100

lines. Transmission could be relayed at 67 lines a second, taking only a few minutes per picture, or at high resolution, taking 34 min a picture. Additional infrared and ultraviolet filters were installed.

Zond 3 was supposed to have been launched as a photographic mission to Mars in November 1964 as well, but it had missed its launching window. Now this interplanetary probe was reused to take pictures of the moon’s farside and get pictures far superior to those taken by the Automatic Interplanetary Station in 1959 and of the 30% part of the lunar farside covered neither then nor by the April I960 failures. Taking off on 18th July 1965, nothing further was heard ofit until 15th August whena new space success was revealed. Zond 3 had shot past the moon at a distance of 9,219 km some 33 hours after launch en route to a deep space trajectory.

Photography began at 04: 24 on 20th July at 11,600 km, shortly before the closest passage over the Mare Orientale on the western part of the visible side. Well-known

features of the western side of the moon were used to calibrate the subsequent features and the idea was to cover those parts of the moon not seen by the Automatic Interplanetary Station, which had swung round over the eastern limb of the moon. As Zond 3 soared over the far northwestern hemisphere of the moon, its fl06-mm camera blinked away for 68 min at l/l00th and l/300th of a second. By 05: 32, when imaging was concluded, 25 wide-view pictures were taken, some covering territory as large as 5 million km2 and, in addition, three ultraviolet scans were made. The details shown were excellent and were on l, l00 lines (the American Ranger cameras of the same time were half that).

Soviet scientists waited till Zond 3 was l.25 million km away before commanding the signals to be transmitted by remote control. They were rebroadcast several times, the last photo-relay being on 23rd October at a distance of 30 million km. There was grandeur in the photographs as Zond swung around the moon’s leading edge – whole new mountain ranges, continents and hundreds of craters swept into view. Transmis­sions were received from a distance of l53.4 million km, the last being on 3rd March l966. Course corrections were made using a new system of combined solar and stellar orientation.

Zond 3 had been built by OKB-l entirely in-house, not using the I-l00 control system. It was the last deep space probe designed within OKB-l, before the moon programme was handed over to Lavochkin.

With Zond 3, the primitive moon maps of the lunar farside issued after the journey of the Automatic Interplanetary Station could now be updated. Whereas the nearside was dominated by seas (maria), mountain ranges and large craters, the farside was a vast continent with hardly any maria, but pockmarked with small craters. The Russians again exercised discoverers’ prerogative to name the new feat­ures in their own language. Thus, there were new gulfs, the Bolshoi Romb and the Maly Romb (big and small) and new ribbon maria Peny, Voln and Zmei [7].

Zond 3: scientific instruments

Two cameras.

Infrared and ultraviolet spectrometer. Magnetometer.

Cosmic ray detector.

Solar particle detector.

Meteoroid detector.

Zond 3 may have encouraged the designers to believe that in their next soft-landing mission, Luna 7, they would at last meet with success. Launch was set for 4th September 1965, but faults were found in the R-7 control system and the entire rocket had to be taken back into the hangar for repairs, missing the launch window. Luna 7 left Earth the following month, on the eighth anniversary of Sputnik’s launch, on 4th October. On the second day, the mid-course correction burn went perfectly, unlike what had been the case with Luna 5 or 6. On the third day, two hours before landing and 8,500 km out, the Luna 7 orientated itself for landing. Unlike Luna 5, it was on course for its intended landing area near the crater Kepler in the Ocean of Storms. As it did so, the sensors lost their lock on the Earth and, without a confirmed sensor lock, the engine could not fire. This was the second time, after Luna 4, that the astro-navigation system had failed. Ground controllers watched helplessly as Luna 7 crashed at great speed, much as Luna 5 had done only months earlier. Investigation found that the sensor had been set at the wrong angle, in such a way that it would find it difficult to locate and hold Earthlock in the first place.

Korolev was summoned to Moscow to explain the continued high failure rate. His old patron, Nikita Khrushchev, had now been deposed and Korolev now had to deal with the new leadership around Leonid Brezhnev. Korolev admitted that there had been great difficulties and promised success the next time. Luna 8 was duly launched on 3rd December. This was the last of the Ye-6 production run of OKB- 1. Luna 8 used a new parking orbit. Its predecessors, Luna 4-7, has used a parking orbit of 65° to the equator. Now, a lower equatorial angle of 51.6° was used, making it possible to increase the mass of the spacecraft from around 1,500 kg to around 1,600 kg.

Luna 8 smoothly passed the hurdle of the mid-course correction. This time it got into a correct position for the deceleration burn and a descent to crater Kepler. Now, at this late stage, things began to go wrong. When the command was sent to inflate the airbags, a sharp bracket pierced one of them and the escaping air set the probe spinning. This blocked the system from orientating itself and the engine from firing. The probe briefly came back into position and the engine fired for 9 sec, before going out of alignment again and cutting out. A 9 sec firing instead of 46 sec clearly did little to prevent what must have been another explosive impact. The decision was taken for the future to inflate the airbags only at the very end of the deceleration burn. This was the tenth failure to achieve a soft-landing.