Category Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

Although the Soviet Union lost the race to the moon, a considerable body of knowl­edge of the moon was accumulated by the Soviet space probes that flew there over the years 1959-1976. The following is a broad outline of the type of scientific information collected:

• Maps of the farside and limbs of the moon were compiled on the basis of photographs taken by the Automatic Interplanetary Station, Zond 3 and the Zond 5-8 missions. Mapping of selected areas of the nearside was carried out by Luna 12, 19 and 22.

• The environment of near-moon space was characterized by the orbiting missions: Luna 10-12, 14, 19 and 22. Data were obtained on the levels of solar and cosmic radiation, cosmic and solar particles and gravitational fields. The moon’s surface was studied from orbit by instruments on Luna 10, 11, 12 and 18.

• The moon’s gravitational field was first mapped by Luna 10, then in detail by Luna 14 and refined by Luna 19 and 22.

• Attempts to identify and then measure the moon’s magnetic field were made by the First and Second Cosmic Ships.

• The chemical characteristics, composition and density of moonrock were deter­mined in situ by Lunokhod and Lunokhod 2 and through samples brought back to Earth by Lunas 16, 20 and 24. The lunar samples, although small, were shared internationally.

• The physical properties of the surface were determined by Luna 13 and the two Lunokhods (RIFMA).

• Precise distances between Earth and the moon were measured by laser reflectors on Lunokhods 1 and 2.

• Radiation levels and temperatures on the surface of the moon were measured by Luna 9, 16, 20, 23 and 24.

• The nature of the lunar micro-atmosphere was measured by Lunokhod.

• The effects of Earth-moon space on animals and other biological samples, es­pecially in respect of radiation, were measured by Zond 5 and 8. These remain the only (non-human) lunar biology missions.

As a result of the American and Soviet efforts, the moon became, unsurprisingly, the best known body in the solar system after our own Earth. With such an improved level of knowledge, the scientific case for returning to the moon became more and more difficult to make, granted our much less comprehensive knowledge of the inner planets Mercury, Venus and Mars and the outer planets. In fact, the moon still had many surprises in store, as the American Lunar Prospector was to prove as it began to search for ice. Scientific instruments by the new century were now able to return much more sophisticated data and at a much higher rate than had been possible in the 1960s, opening up further possibilities for scientific exploration. Miniaturization made it possible for smaller spacecraft to be launched on much less expensive rockets.

Sputnik changed everything. Most of the great historical events of our time make an immediate impact that fades over time. Sputnik was different. When the first Earth satellite was launched, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev calmly took the call from Baikonour Cosmodrome, thanked Korolev courteously and went to bed. Pravda did report the launching the next day, but well down the page, blandly headed ‘Tass communique’. In the West, the British Broadcasting Corporation announced the launching at the end of its late news bulletin, a certain vocal hesitancy indicating that neither the station nor the announcer knew exactly what to make of this strange event.

Whatever the political leadership, ordinary people knew. As Korolev and his colleagues took the long train journey back from Baikonour Cosmodrome, people came onto the platforms to stop the train and meet the engineers concerned. There was a palpable, rising air of excitement as they drew close to Moscow. By this stage, people throughout the Soviet Union were talking and chattering about this extraordinary event. The next day, Pravda made the satellite the only front-page story. Khrushchev was soon bragging about its achievements to foreign leaders.

But this was as nothing compared with the pandemonium in the United States, which ranged between the hysterical and apoplectic. There was admiration for the Soviet achievement, but it was couched in the regret that America had not been first. The Americans had been publicizing their plans to launch an Earth satellite for a number of years. Because America was the world’s leading technological country, nobody had ever suggested that the United States might not be first: the very idea was unthinkable. In fact, the Russians had also been broadcasting, very publicly and in some technical detail, their intentions of launching an Earth satellite. Although the first Sputnik was a surprise to the American people, it was not a surprise to the Soviet people, who had been expecting it and for whom space travel had achieved an acceptance within popular culture from the 1920s, renewed in the 1950s.

The first Sputnik made a deep impact on ordinary Americans. The rocket body of the Sputnik entered orbit and could be seen tracking across the cooling night autumn skies of North America. The long aerials on the back of the spacecraft transmitted beep! beep! beep! signals that could be picked up by relatively simple receivers. Within months, polling found that almost all Americans had heard of the Sputnik and nearly everyone had comments to make about it.

More is known of the UR-700 [8] and in recent years the managers of the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Museum in Kaluga helpfully put a model on display. The UR-700 would
have a thrust of 5,760 tonnes, able to put in orbit 151 tonnes, a much better per­formance than the Saturn V. It would have been a huge rocket at take-off: 74 m tall, 17.6m in diameter and a liftoff weight of 4,823 tonnes [9].

The UR-700 combined a mixture of strap-on rockets and fuel tanks (like the Proton) clustered around the core stage, with the three strap-ons jettisoned at 155 sec and the three core engines burning out at 300 sec. It was a typically ingenious Chelomei design, one building on the proven engineering achievement of the Proton. As for power, the engine in development for the R-56, the RD-270, was transferred from the R-56 to the UR-700. Chelomei’s UR-700 had a single third stage, an RD-254 engine based on the Proton RD-253.

The UR-700 was a direct ascent rocket, which Chelomei believed was safer than a profile involving rendezvous in lunar orbit. Outlines of the UR-700 moonship are available. These were for a 50-tonne cylindrical moonship with conical top entering lunar orbit, 21 m long, 2.8 m in diameter, with a crew of two. The moonship would descend to the lunar surface backwards, touching down on a series of six flat skids. The top part, 9.3 tonnes, would blast off directly to Earth, the only recovered payload being an Apollo-style cabin that Chelomei later developed for his Almaz space stations. In his design, Chelomei emphasized the importance of using multiply redundant systems, the use of N2O4/UDMH fuels, exhaustive ground testing and the construction of all equipment in the bureau before shipping to the launch site. One reason for its slow pace of development was Chelomei’s concentration on intensive ground testing [10].

Like the R-56, the UR-700 was proposed as a moon project before the decision of August 1964. The N-1 was made the approved man-on-the-moon project in August 1964 and so, in October 1964, the UR-700 was cancelled and, as we saw, work on the R-56 was also terminated. Never one to give up, Vladimir Chelomei continued to advocate his UR-700 design, even getting approval for preliminary design from the Space Ministry in October 1965, much to Korolev’s fury. The following year, Chelomei got as far as presenting designs showing how the N-1 pads at Baikonour could be converted to handle his UR-700. Chelomei formally presented the UR-700 to a government commission in November 1966 as an alter­native, better moon plan than the N-1. The government politely agreed to further research on the UR-700 ‘at the preliminary level’ (basic research only) and this was reconfirmed in February 1967. Unfazed by this, Chelomei’s blueprints for the UR-700 were signed on 21st July 1967, approved by party and government resolution # 1070­363 on 17th November 1967, three years after the N-1 had been agreed as the final moon design!

Designs for the UR-700 moonship were finalized on 30th September 1968. First launch was set for May 1972 and after a successful second unmanned flight, the third would have a crew (similar to the American Saturn V) with lunar landings in the mid- 1970s. Although a certain amount of work was done on the project in 1968, it is unclear if much was done thereafter and it does not seem as if any metal was cut. The programme was not finally cancelled until 31st December 1970. In fairness to Chelomei, he never claimed, at least at this stage, that his UR-700 could beat the Americans to the moon. It is possible he saw the UR-700 as a successor project to the

N-l, or one that could later be adopted if the N-l faltered. The UR-700 plan certainly had many fans, quite apart from Chelomei himself, believing it to be a much superior design to the old and cumbersome N-l. However, its reintroduction into the moon programme in late 1967 was yet another example of the rivalry, disorder, waste and chaos enveloping the Soviet moon programme.

Contrary to Western impressions that the Soviet space programme was centralized, in fact it operated in a decentralized, competitive way. Thus, in the period after the government decision of 1964, three design bureaux were at work not only designing but building rival moon projects. Again, this marked a key difference from the American programme. In the United States, rival corporations submitted proposals and bids, but only one was chosen to develop the project and build the hardware (the company concerned was called the prime contractor).

In the Soviet Union, by contrast, rival design institutes not only designed but built hardware. Decisions about which would fly were taken much later. As a result, the Soviet moon programme, and indeed other key programmes, contained several rival, parallel projects. This was something neither appreciated nor imagined to be possible in the West at the time. The rivalry between designers was at a level that could not have been conceived on the outside. At one stage, no less a person than Nikita Khrushchev

The final route decided 65

tried to mediate between Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, inviting the two to his summer house for a peace summit (he was not successful).

Taking advantage of the public reaction, Korolev set new tasks for Mikhail Tikhon- ravov and his ‘planning department for the development of space apparatus’. Korolev had first raised the idea of lunar exploration with government as far back as a meeting on 30th April 1955, but nothing had come of it. Now the climate was quite different. Popular enthusiasm for spaceflight had reignited in a surge of public interest remi­niscent of the glorious 1920s and early 1930s. Three design groups were set up: one for a manned spacecraft, one for communications satellites and one for automatic lunar spacecraft. The lunar group was put under the charge of a brilliant young designer, then only 30 years old, Gleb Yuri Maksimov (1926-2000).

Based on discussions with him, on 28th January 1958, Tikhonravov and Korolev sent a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the government called On the launches of rockets to the moon (sometimes also translated as A programme for the investigation of the moon). This proposed that two

spacecraft be sent to the moon. One would hit the moon, while the other would take photographs of its hidden far side and transmit them to the Earth by television. The impacting probe would signify its arrival either by the cessation of its telemetry signal, or through the igniting of explosives, which could be seen from the Earth. The government agreed to the proposal within two months, on 20th March 1958. Contrary to Western impressions that Soviet spaceshots were ordered up by the political leadership, the opposite is true. Most of the early Soviet space missions resulted from proposals by the engineers, convincing government of the political and publicity advantages.

Tikhonravov and Korolev followed this with a grander plan for space exploration that summer. Called Most promising works in the development of outer space, this was an audacious plan outlining a vast programme of space exploration – variations of this title have also appeared (e. g., Preliminary considerations for the prospects of the mastery of outer space), probably a function of translation. None of this was evident in the West – indeed, details of Most promising works in the development of outer space were not published until decades later. Yet, the plan outlined, at this extraordinarily early stage, how the Soviet Union was to conquer the cosmos. This was what they proposed:

• Small research station of 15 to 20 kg to land on the moon.

• Satellite to photograph the lunar surface.

• Upgrade the R-7 launcher to four stages to send a probe to orbit the moon and return films to Earth.

• Send robotic spacecraft to Mars and Venus.

• Develop Earth orbit rendezvous.

• Manned spacecraft for flight around the moon.

• Eventually, manned flights to the moon, Venus and Mars.

• Goal of permanent colony on the moon.

• Development of the critical path technologies for rendezvous, life support systems and long-distance communications.

Now Maksimov’s group soon came up with its first set of detailed designs. Four types of spacecraft were proposed. They were called the Ye or E series, after the sixth letter in the Russian alphabet (the first five had already been assigned to other projects). These are shown in Table 2.1.

These plans were soon modified. The Ye-4 probe was the problem one. Nuclear experts warned that a nuclear explosion on the moon would, without an atmosphere there, be difficult to observe and that the visibility of even a conventional explosion was uncertain, so this probe was dropped. The engineers also worried about how to track a small spacecraft en route to the moon. They came up with the idea of fitting 1 kg of sodium or barium to be released during the journey. This would create a cloud of particles that could be spotted by the right sensors. Once the moon had been hit (Ye-1), they would move quickly on to farside photography missions (Ye-2, 3).

Thus the resolution of August 1964 was much less decisive than one might expect. Not only did it not resolve the rivalry between different projects, but it did not ensure the rapid progress of those that were decided. Progress on the moon plan between August 1964 and late 1966 was quite slow. Not until October 1966 were steps taken to accelerate the favoured programme, the N-1, with the formation of the State Commis­sion for the N-1, also known as the Lunar Exploration Council.

In September 1966, a 34-strong expert commission was called in to review the moon programme, decide between the N-1 and UR-700 and settle the continued rivalries once and for all. Mstislav Keldysh was appointed chairman and it reported at the end of November. Despite impressive lobbying efforts by Chelomei and Glushko to replace the N-1 with the UR-700, the original plan won the day. The commission’s report, confirming the N-1 for the moon landing and the UR-500K for the circumlunar mission was ratified by the government in a joint resolution on 4th February 1967 (About the course of work in the creation of the UR-500K-L-1), which specified test flights later that year and a landing on the moon in 1968. The joint resolution reinforced the August 1964 resolution and upgraded the landing on the moon to ‘an objective of national significance’. This meant it was a priority of priorities, enabling design bureaux to command resources at will. The real problem was that the Americans had decided on their method of going to the moon five years earlier and Apollo had been an objective of national importance for six years. In effect, the February 1967 resolution hardened up on the decision of August 1964. The Russian moon plan was now officially set in stone (though, in practice, the UR-700 was not finally killed off for another three years). The Keldysh Commission of 1966 and the resolution of 1967 would have been unnecessary had not the rival designers continually tried to re-make the original decision. It was a dramatic contrast to the single-mindedness of the Apollo programme and the discipline of American industry.

There were considerable differences between how the Russians and Americans organized their respective moon programmes. In the United States, there had indeed between intense rivalries as to which company or corporation would get the contract for building the hardware of the American moon programme. Once decisions were made, though, they were not contested or re-made and rival pro­grammes did not proceed in parallel. In the United States, the decision as to how to go to the moon was the focus of intense discussions over 1961-2. No equivalent discussion took place in the Soviet Union. Until 1964, Earth orbit rendezvous, using the Soyuz complex to achieve a circumlunar mission, was the only method under consideration. When the N-1 was adopted as the landing programme in August 1964, lunar orbit rendezvous was abruptly accepted as the method best suited to its

dimensions, despite the investment of three years of design work in the Soyuz complex then reaching fruition.

Chelomei’s UR-700 was a direct challenge to this approach and Chelomei raised questions about the risks involved in lunar orbit rendezvous. However, the debate in the Soviet Union was less about how to go to the moon, but, instead: which bureau, which rocket, which engines and which fuels?

RUSSIA’S THREE WAYS TO GO

R-56 UR-700

Korolev

OKB-l

LOR

l04m

2,850 tonnes 33 tonnes NK-31

Yangel OKB-586 LOR 68 m

1,421 tonnes 30 tonnes RD-270

Chelomei OKB-52 Direct ascent 74m

3,400 tonnes 50 tonnes RD-270

Key government and party decisions in the moon race

3 Aug 1964 On work involving the study of the moon and outer space.

16 Nov 1966 Keldysh Commission.

4 Feb 1967 About the course of work in the creation of the UR-500K-L-1.

Thus, by now, the Soviet Union had made a plan for sending cosmonauts around the moon and a separate plan for landing on it. A plan had been worked out for both missions. Hard work lay ahead in constructing the rockets, the spacecraft, the hard­ware, the software, the support systems and in training a squad of cosmonauts to fly the missions. In the meantime, unmanned spacecraft were expected to pave the way to the moon.

Spacecraft design was only one part of the jigsaw required to put the moon project together. The other crucial part was an upper stage able to send the probe toward the moon. The rocket that had launched Sputnik, Sputnik 2 and 3 – the R-7 – was capable of sending only 1,400 kg into low-Earth orbit, no further. A new upper stage would be required. Back in April 1957, Mikhail Tikhonravov had suggested that it would be possible to send small payloads to the moon, through the addition of a small upper stage to the R-7.

Chronology of the early Soviet lunar programme

4 Oct 1957 Sputnik.

28 Jan 1958 Proposal to government by Korolev and Keldysh.

10 Feb 1958 Agreement with OKB-154 (Kosberg) for upper stage.

20 Mar 1958 Approval by government of proposal for moon probe.

5 Jul 1958 Most promising works in the development of outer space.

Korolev considered two options for an upper stage. First, he turned to the main designer of rocket engines in the Soviet Union, Valentin Glushko. Glushko had designed the main engines for the R-7, the kerosene-propelled RD-107 and RD-108 (RD, or rocket engine, in Russian Raketa Digvatel). Since then, though, he had discovered UDMH, or to be more correct, it had been discovered by the State Institute for Applied Chemistry. UDMH stood for unsymmetrical dimethyl methyl hydrazine and it had many advantages. When mixed with nitric acid or one of its derivatives, this produced powerful thrust for a rocket engine. Unlike liquid oxygen – which must be cooled to very low temperatures – and kerosene, UDMH and nitric acid could be kept in rockets and their adjacent fuelling tanks at room temperature for some time and for this reason were called ‘storable’ fuels.

They were hypergolic and fired on contact with one other, saving on ignition systems. The great disadvantage was that they were toxic: men working on them had to wear full proper protective gear. The consequences of an unplanned explosion did not bear thinking about and Korolev labelled the fuel ‘the devil’s own venom’. Glushko proposed the R-7 fly his new upper stage, the RD-109.

Korolev had his doubts as to whether Glushko could get his new engine ready for him in any reasonable time. He learned that an aircraft design bureau, the OKB-154 of Semyon Kosberg in Voronezh, had done some development work on a restartable rocket engine using the tried-and-tested liquid oxygen and kerosene. Semyon Kosberg was not a spacecraft designer: his background was in the Moscow Aviation Institute, he built fighters for the Red Air Force and his interest was in aviation. Korolev, wary of Glushko’s engine and skeptical of his ability to deliver on time, persuaded Kosberg to build him a small upper stage and they signed an agreement on 10th February 1958, even before government agreement for the moon programme. The new engine, later called the RD-105 (also referred to as the RD-0105 and the RO-5), was duly delivered only six months later, in August 1958. It was the first rocket designed only to work in a vacuum. This new variant of the R-7 was given the technical designation of the 8K72E (a more powerful version of the upper stage later became the basis of the first manned spaceship, Vostok, and was known as the 8K72K).

R-7 rocket, with upper stage block

Length

Diameter (blocks ABVGD) Weight

of which frame propellant Thrust at liftoff

8K72E upper stage (block E)

Length

Diameter

Weight

Frame

Propellants

RD-105 engine

Weight

Thrust

Fuel

Pressure

Specific impulse

Burn times

Burn time block A Burn times blocks BVGD Burn time block E

Source: Varfolomeyev (1995-2001)

A suborbital flight of the new moon rocket took place on 10th July 1958. The aim was to test the control system for the ignition and separation of the upper stage, but the mission never got that far, for the rocket blew up a few seconds after liftoff.

With man-on-the-moon plans in full swing, the next stage for the Soviet Union was to send unmanned probes to pave the way. These were essential for a manned landing on the moon. The successful landing of a probe intact on the lunar surface was necessary to test whether a piloted vehicle could later land on the moon at all. The nature of the surface would have a strong bearing on the design, strength and structure of the lunar landing legs. The level of dust would determine the landing method and such issues as the approach and the windows. The successful placing of probes in lunar orbit was necessary to assess potential landing sites that would be safe for touchdown and of scientific interest. Stable communications would also be essential for complex opera­tions taking place 350,000 km away. Unmanned missions would address each of these key issues, one by one.

ORIGINS

As noted in Chapter 2, the Soviet pre-landing programme can be dated to the 5th July 1958 when Mikhail Tikhonravov and Sergei Korolev wrote their historic proposal to the Soviet government and party, Most promising works in the development of outer space. Among other things, they proposed:

• The landing of small 10 kg to 20 kg research stations on the moon.

• A satellite to photograph the lunar surface.

• A lunar flyby, with the subsequent recovery of the payload to Earth.

Noting the American attempts to orbit the moon with Pioneer, Korolev made a proposal to government in February 1959 for a small probe to orbit the moon, the Ye-5. However, this required a heavier launcher than was available; and, in any case, the proposal was subordinated to the need to achieve success with the

Ye-1 to -4 series, which was proving difficult enough. The Ye-5 never got far. Korolev revised his proposals in late 1959, by which time a much more advanced upper stage was now in prospect, one able to send 1.5 tonnes to the moon, a considerable advance, but a figure identified by Tikhonravov as far back as 1954 in Report on an artificial satellite of the Earth. By now, the proposal was for:

• A new lunar rocket and upper stage, the 8K78, later to be called the Molniya.

• A lander, called the Ye-6.

• An orbiter, the Ye-7.

These were approved by government during the winter of 1959-60. OKB-1 Depart­ment #9, under Mikhail Tikhonravov, was assigned the work and he supervised teams led by Gleb Maksimov and Boris Chertok. Design and development work got under way in 1960, but it does not seem to have been a priority, the manned space programme taking precedence. The 8K78 was primarily designed around the payloads required for the first missions to Mars and Venus, rather than the moon, but they equally served for the second generation of Soviet lunar probes.

The moon programme required a tracking network. To follow Sputnik, a government resolution had been issued on 3rd September 1956 and authorized the establishment of up to 25 stations [1]. By the time of Sputnik, about 13 had been constructed, the principal ones being in Kolpashevo, Tbilisi, Ulan Ude, Ussurisk and Petropavlovsk, supplemented by visual observatories in the Crimea, Caucasus and Leningrad.

For the moon programme, systems were required to follow spacecraft over half a million kilometres away. For this, a new ground station was constructed and it was declared operational on 23rd September 1958, just in time for the first Soviet lunar probe. Yevgeni Boguslavsky, deputy chief designer of the Scientific Research Institute of Radio Instrument Building, NII-885, was responsible for setting up the ground station. It was located in Simeiz, at Kochka Mountain in the Crimea close to the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory of the Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His choice of the Crimea was a fateful one, for all the main subsequent Soviet observing stations came to be based around there, including the more substantial subsequent interplanetary communications network. Boguslavsky obtained the services of military unit #32103 for the construction work and it was sited on a hill facing southward onto the Black Sea. Sixteen helice aerials were installed, turning on a cement tower. A backup station was also built in Kamchatka on the Pacific coast.

Although the station was declared operational, the people working there might have taken a different view, for the ground equipment was located in trailers, ground control was in a wooden barrack hut, many of the staff lived in tents and food was supplied by mobile kitchen. All of this cannot have been very comfortable in a Crimean winter.

The Soviet Union also relied on a 24 m parabolic dish radio telescope in Moscow and the receiver network used for the first three Sputniks. Pictures of the first missions – which indicated a location ‘near Moscow’ – showed technicians operating banks of wall computers and receiving equipment, using headphones, tuners and old-fashioned spool tape recorders, printing out copious quantities of telex. Presumably, they didn’t wish to draw the attention of the Americans to their new facilities on the Black Sea and this remained the case until 1961, by which time it was guessed, correctly, that the Americans had found out anyway.

The new rocket, the 8K78, was a key development. The 8K78 became a cornerstone of the Soviet space programme as a whole, not just the moon programme and versions were still flying over 40 years later, over 220 being flown. The following were the key elements:

• Improvements to the RD-108 block A and RD-107 block BVGD stages of the R-7, with more thrust, higher rates of pressurization and larger tanks, developed by Glushko’s OKB-453.

• A new upper stage, the block I, developed with Kosberg’s OKB-154.

• A new fourth stage, the block L, designed within OKB-1.

• New guidance and control systems, the I-100 and BOZ.

In a new approach, the first three stages would put the block L and payload in Earth orbit. Block L would circle the Earth once in what was called a parking orbit before firing out of Earth orbit for the moon. With the Ye-1 to -4 series, a direct ascent was used, the rocket firing directly to the moon. The problem with direct ascent was that even the smallest error in the launch trajectory, even from early on, would be magnified later. By contrast, parking orbit would give greater flexibility in when and how rockets could be sent to the moon. The course could be recalculated and readjusted once in Earth orbit before the command was given. Parking orbit also enabled a much heavier payload to be carried.

The principal disadvantage – no one realized how big it would turn out to be – was that the engine firing out of parking orbit required the ignition of engines that had been circling the Earth in a state of weightlessness for over an hour. This was where

New lunar rocket 71

block L came in. Block L was designed to work only in a vacuum, coast in parking orbit and then fire moonward. A device called the BOZ (Blok Obespecheyna Zapushka) or Ignition Insurance System would guide the firing system toward the moon. Block L was 7.145 m long, the first Soviet rocket with a closed-stage thermo­dynamic cycle, with gimbal engines for pitch and yaw and two vernier engines for roll. The new third stage, block I, was based on an intercontinental ballistic missile design called the R-9. A new orientation system for blocks I and L, called the I-100, was devised by Scientific Research Institute NII-885 of Nikolai Pilyugin.

The new 8K78 rocket, including block L, was built in some haste. Block L was ordered in January I960 and the blueprints approved in May. The first two stages, with block I but without block L, were fired in suborbital missions from January onward. Block L was first tested aboard Tupolev 104 aircraft, designed to simulate weightlessness, in summer 1960. The first all-up launchings took place in October 1960, when two probes were fired to Mars, both failing at launch. Two Venus launches were made in February 1961, one being stranded in Earth orbit but the second one getting away successfully. But the worst period in the development phase was still to come. Three Venus probes in a row failed in August/September 1962, all at launch. Of three Mars probes in October/November 1962, only one left parking orbit. Blocks A and B failed once, block I three times and block L four times. The Americans later published the list of all these failures (this took the form of a letter to the secretary general of the United Nations from ambassador Adlai Stevenson on 6th June 1963), but some people assumed they were making them up, for no country could afford so many failures and still keep on trying.

By this time, the United States had launched their first satellite (Explorer 1, January 1958) and had made rapid progress in preparing a lunar programme. Korolev followed closely the early preparations by the United States to launch their first moon probe, called Pioneer. Learning that Pioneer was set for take-off on 17th August 1958, Korolev managed to get his first lunar bound R-7, with its brand-new Kosberg upper stage, out to the pad the same day, fitted with a Ye-1 probe to hit the lunar surface. The closeness of these events set a pattern that was to thread in and out of the moon programmes of the two space superpowers for the next eleven years.

There had been a lot of delays in getting the rocket ready and Korolev only managed to get this far by working around the clock. The lunar trajectory mapped out by Korolev and Tikhonravov was shorter than Pioneer. Korolev waited to see if Pioneer was successfully launched. If it was, then Korolev would launch and could still beat the Americans to the moon. Fortunately for Korolev, though not for the Americans, Pioneer exploded at 77 sec and a relieved Korolev was able to bring his rocket back to the shed for more careful testing.

A month later, all was eventually ready. The first Soviet moon probe lifted off from Baikonour on 23rd September 1958. Korolev may have worried most about whether the upper stage would work or not, but the main rocket never got that far, for vibration in the BVGD boosters caused it to explode after 93 sec. Despite launching three Sputniks into orbit, the R-7 was still taking some time to tame. Challenged about

repeated failures and asked for a guarantee they would not happen again, Korolev lost his temper and yelled: Do you think only American rockets explode?

The August drama came around a second time the following month. At Cape Canaveral, the Americans counted down for a new Pioneer, with the launch set for 11th October. In complete contrast to the developments at Cape Canaveral, which were carried out amidst excited media publicity, not a word of what was going on in Baikonour reached the outside world. Again, Korolev planned to launch the Ye-1 spaceship on a faster, quicker trajectory after Pioneer. News of the Pioneer launching was relayed immediately to Baikonour, Korolev passing it on in turn over the loudspeaker.

Not long afterwards, the news came through that the Pioneer’s third stage had failed. Korolev and his engineers now had the opportunity to eclipse the Americans. On 12th October, his second launching took place. It did only marginally better than the previous month’s launch, but the vibration problem recurred, blowing the rocket apart after 104 sec. Although Pioneer 1 was launched thirteen hours before the Soviet moon probe was due to go, the Russian ship had a shorter flight time and would have overtaken Pioneer at the very end. Korolev’s probe would have reached the moon a mere six hours ahead of Pioneer. According to Swedish space scientist and tracker Sven Grahn who calculated the trajectories many years later, ‘the moon race never got much hotter!’.

These two failures left Korolev and his team downcast. Although the R-7 had given trouble before, two failures in a row should not be expected, even at this stage of its development. Boris Petrov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences was appointed to head up a committee of inquiry while the debris from the two failures was collected and carefully sifted for clues. What they found surprised them. It turned out that the Kosberg’s new upper stage, even though it had never fired, was indirectly to blame. The new stage, small though it might be, had created vibrations in the lower stage of the rocket at a frequency that had caused them to break up. This was the first, but far from the last, time that modification to the upper stages of rockets led to unexpected consequences.

Devices were fitted to dampen out the vibration. Although they indeed fixed this problem, the programme was then hit by another one. It took two months, working around the clock, to get a third rocket and spacecraft ready. The third rocket took off for the moon on 4th December. As it flew through the hazardous 90-100 sec stage, hopes began to rise. They did not last, for at 245 sec, the thrust fell to 70% on the core stage (block A) and then cut out altogether. The rocket broke up and the remnants crashed downrange. The crash was due to the failure of a hydrogen peroxide pump gearbox, in turn due to the breaking of a hermetic seal which exposed the pump to a vacuum. It must have been little consolation to Korolev that the next American attempt, on 6th January, was also a failure, though it reached a much higher altitude, 102,000 km.

The Soviet failures were unknown except to those directly involved and the political leadership. America had experienced its own share of problems, but there the mood was upbeat. The probes had a morale-boosting effect on American public opinion. There was huge press coverage. The Cape Canaveral range (all it had been to date was an air force and coastguard station) became part of the American conscious­ness. Boosters, rockets, countdowns, the moon, missions, these words all entered the vocabulary. America was fighting back, and if the missions failed, there were credits for trying.

On the Russian side, there was little public indication that a moon programme was even under way. In one of the few, on 21st July 1957, Y. S. Khlebstsevich wrote a speculative piece outlining how, sometime in the next five to ten tears, the Soviet Union would send a mobile caterpillar laboratory or tankette to rove the lunar surface and help choose the best place for a manned landing [2]. Information about the Soviet space programme, which had been relatively open about its intentions in the mid-1950s, now became ever more tightly regulated. Chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov laid down the rubric that there could not be failures in the Soviet space programme. Only successful launchings and successful mission outcomes would be announced, he decreed, despite the protests at the time and later of Mstislav Keldysh. A cloud of secrecy and anonymity descended. The names of Glushko and Korolev now disappeared from the record, although they were allowed to write for the press under pseudonyms. Sergei Korolev became ‘Professor Sergeev’. Valentin Petrovich Glushko’s nom deplume was only slightly less transparent: ‘Professor G. V. Petrovich’, for it used both his initials (in reverse) and his patronymic.

So whenever spaceflights went wrong, their missions were redefined to prove that they had, indeed, achieved all the tasks set for them. This was to lead Soviet news management, in the course of lunar exploration, into a series of contradictions, blunders, disinformation, misinformation and confusion. But it was best, as in the case of the first three moonshots, that nothing be known about them at all.