Category Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

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.

Siberia, summer of 1976. Near the lowland town of Surgut on the River Ob in western Siberia, Russia’s space recovery forces had gathered to await the return of Russia’s latest moon probe. Already, the short, warm and fly-ridden Siberian summer was passing. Although it was only the 21st August, the birch trees were already turning colour and there was a cool breeze in the evening air. Gathered on the ground were amphibious army vehicles, designed to carry troops across marshy or rough terrain. In the air were half a dozen Mil helicopters, ready to spot a parachute opening in the sky. Getting to the moon probe quickly was important. They had missed Luna 20 four years earlier: it had come down, unseen, on an island in the middle of a snow-covered river, but thankfully they found it before the battery of its beeping beacon had given out. The diesel engines of the army ground crews were already running. The army crews stood around, waiting, waiting.

Bang! There was the sharp echo of a small sonic boom as the spherical spacecraft came through the sound barrier 20 km high. By this stage, it had barrelled through the high atmosphere at a speed of 7 km/sec, hitting the spot on the tiny 10-km by 20-km entry corridor necessary to ensure a safe return to Earth. The heatshield glowed red, then orange, then white hot as the cabin shed speed for heat. On board, in a sealed container, were precious rock and soil granules drilled up from the distant Sea of Crises on the moon’s northeastern face. The probe had left the moon three days earlier. Now, through the most perilous phase of the return, the cabin dropped, unaided, through the ever-denser layers of Earth’s atmosphere.

Fifteen kilometres high above the marshes, a meter sensed the growing density of Earth’s air. The lid of the cabin was explosively blown off. A small drogue parachute fluttered out. At 11 km, it had pulled out a much larger red-and-white canopy, ballooning out above the still-steaming sphere. Two beacons popped out of the top of the cabin. Abruptly halted in its downward spiral, the cabin twisted and was now caught in the wind and began to drift sideways and downward. The helicopter crews spotted the cabin in the air and picked up the beacon on their radios.

Over their radiophones they called up the amphibians who headed straight in the direction of the returning spacecraft. The helicopters saw the cabin reach the ground. The small parachute at once emptied and deflated to lie alongside. In minutes the amphibians had drawn up alongside. The army crews cut the parachute free. Gingerly – it was still warm from the hot fires of reentry – they lifted the blackened cabin into the back of their vehicle, driving back into Surgut. Within hours, it was on its way by air to the Moscow Vernadsky Institute. This was the third set of samples the Soviet Union had brought back from the moon. The first had come from the Sea of Fertility in 1970, with Luna 16. Two years later, Luna 20 had brought back a small sample from the Apollonius Highland. Luna 24 had gone a stage further and drilled deep into the lunar surface and this cabin had the deepest, biggest sample of moon soil of them all.

Nobody realized at the time that this was the last lunar mission of the Soviet Union. Fifty years later, lunar exploration is remembered for who won, the United States and who lost, the Soviet Union. In the popular mind, the view is that the Russians just did not have the technological capacity to send people to the moon. In reality, political rather than technical reasons prevented the Soviet Union from landing cosmonauts on the moon. It is often forgotten that the story of Soviet lunar exploration is, although it had its fair share of disappointments, also one of achieve­ment. The Soviet Union:

• Sent the first spacecraft past the moon (the First Cosmic Ship).

• Launched the first spacecraft to impact on the lunar surface (the Second Cosmic Ship).

• Sent the first spacecraft around the farside of the moon to take photographs (the Automatic Interplanetary Station).

• Made the first soft-landing on the moon (Luna 9).

• Put the first orbiter into lunar orbit (Luna 10).

• Pioneered sophisticated, precise high-speed reentries into the Earth’s atmosphere from the moon, becoming the first country to send a spaceship around the moon and recover it on Earth (Zond 5).

• Landed advanced roving laboratories that explored the moon for months on end (the Lunokhods).

• Retrieved two sets of rock samples from the surface of the moon by automatic spacecraft (Luna 16, 20) and drilled into the surface for a core sample (Luna 24).

• Returned a substantial volume of science from its lunar exploration programme.

Not only that, but the Soviet Union:

• Came close to sending a cosmonaut around the moon first.

• Built and successfully tested, in orbit, a lunar lander, the LK.

• Built a manned lunar orbiter, the LOK.

• Assembled and trained a team of cosmonauts to explore the moon’s surface, even selecting sites where they would land.

• Came close to perfecting a giant moon rocket, the N-1.

• Designed long-term lunar bases.

Although the United States Apollo programme is one of the great stories of human­kind, the story of Soviet and Russian lunar exploration is one worth telling too. First designs for lunar exploration date to the dark, final days of Stalin. The Soviet Union mapped out a plan for a lunar landing and, in pursuit of this, achieved most of the key ‘firsts’ of lunar exploration. Even when the manned programme faltered, a credible programme of unmanned lunar exploration was carried out, one which Luna 24 brought to an end. The story of Soviet lunar exploration is one of triumph and heartbreak, scientific achievement, engineering creativity, treachery and intrigue. Now, new lunar nations like China and India are following in the paths mapped out in the Soviet Union 60 years ago. And Russia itself is preparing to return to the moon, with the new Luna Glob mission in planning.

These ideas were developed a stage further by another department of OKB-l, Depart­ment # 3 of Y. P. Kolyako and by Korolev himself later in 1962. Korolev was already working on a successor to the Vostok spacecraft. Korolev’s concept was for a larger spaceship than Vostok, with two cabins, able to manoeuvre in orbit and carry a crew of three. He linked his ideas to Tikhonravov’s earlier concept of orbital assembly and approved on 10th March 1962 blueprints entitled Complex for the assembly of space vehicles in artificial satellite orbit (the Soyuz), known in shorthand as the Soyuz complex. This described a multimanned spacecraft called the 7K which would link up in orbit with a stack of three propulsion modules called 9K and 11K which could send the manned spacecraft on a loop around the moon. This was endorsed by the government for further development on 16th April 1962. A second set of blueprints, called The 7K9K11K Soyuz complex, was approved on 24th December 1962. The complex was a linear descendant from the Vostok Zh design.

Work continued on refining the design of the Soyuz complex into the new year. On 10th May 1963, Korolev approved a definitive version, called Assembly of vehicles in Earth satellite orbit. The complex comprised a rocket block, which was launched ‘dry’ (not fuelled up) and which was the largest single unit. It contained automatic rendezvous and docking equipment and was labelled the Soyuz B; a space tanker, containing liquid fuel, called the Soyuz V; and a new manned spacecraft, called the Soyuz A. This was the system developed by Korolev, Tikhonravov and Feoktistov.

Soyuz A was a new-generation spaceship, 7.7 m long, 2.3 m diameter, with a mass of 5,800 kg. The design was radical, to say the least. At the bottom was an equipment section with fuel, radar and rocket motor. On top of this was a cone-shaped cabin for a three-man crew. Orthodox enough so far, but on top of that was a large, long cylinder­shaped orbital module. This provided extra cabin space (the cabin on its own would be small) and room for experiments and research. Work proceeded on the Soyuz complex into 1964 and a simulator to train cosmonauts in Earth orbit rendezvous was built in Noginsk.

Like the Vostok Zh, the Soyuz complex was aimed at flying cosmonauts around the moon without landing or orbiting. However, the Soyuz was large enough to carry two or even three men; had a cabin for observations and experiments; and the acorn

cabin that could tip its heatshield in such a way as to make a skip return to Earth possible.

The sequence of events for a moon flight was as follows. On day 1, the 5,700-kg rocket block, Soyuz B, would be launched into an orbit of 226 km, 65°. It would be tested out to see that its guidance and manoeuvring units were functioning. On day 2, the first of three 6,100 kg Soyuz V tankers would be launched. Because the fuel was volatile, it would have to be transferred quite quickly. The rocket block would be the ‘active’ spacecraft and would carry out the rendezvous and docking manoeuvres normally on the first orbit. Fuel would then be transferred in pipes. After three tanker linkups, a Soyuz A manned spaceship would be launched. It would be met by the rocket block, which, using its newly-transferred fuel, would blast moonwards. The on­going work was endorsed by government resolution on 3rd December 1963, which pressed for a first flight of the 7K in 1964 and the assembly of the Soyuz complex in orbit the following year. The first metal was cut at the very end of 1963 in the Progress machine building plant in Kyubyshev.

For the Soyuz complex, an improved version of the R-7 was defined. Glushko’s OKB-456 was asked to uprate the RD-108 motor of block A and the RD-107 motors of blocks B, V, G and D, and gains of at least 5% in performance were achieved. In OKB-154, Semyon Kosberg also uprated the third stage. An escape tower was developed by Department #11 in OKB-1. After a number of evolutions, the new rocket was given the industry code 11A511. The improved motors were tested during 1962 and entered service over 1963-4.

The Soyuz complex lunar project was a complicated profile, involving up to six launches and five orbital rendezvous. Subsequent studies show that such a mission, assuming the mastery by the USSR of Earth orbit rendezvous, was entirely feasible [3].

First flights were set for 1964 with the circumlunar mission for 1965-6. Had the Soviet Union persisted single-handedly with the design, then Russian cosmonauts could well have flown around the moon using this technique before the 50th anniversary of the revolution in October 1967.

Soyuz A Role Weight Length Diameter

Manned spacecraft, <three cosmonauts 6.45 tonnes 7.7m 2.5 m

Soyuz В Role Weight Length Diameter

Rocket block 5.7 tonnes 7.8m 2.5 m

Soyuz V Role Tanker Weight 6.1 tonnes Length 4.2m Diameter 2.5 m

The Soyuz complex, using Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) was a natural proposition for a nation bred on the theories of Tsiolkovsky. The two other possible methods of going to the moon were direct ascent and a much more obscure method called lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR). Direct ascent was the most popular one in the science fiction literature of the time. The Stories of Tintin cartoon is this type of method. А huge rocket – it really would have to be utterly enormous – would put up a moonship which would fly direct to the moon, slow down coming in to land, touch down and deposit two or three astronauts directly on the surface. After a period of exploration, the cosmonauts would climb back into their mother ship and fire direct back to Earth. Third, a variation on this was lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR). А booster would place both mother ship and lunar cabin directly into moon orbit, cutting out the Earth orbit rendezvous stage. The lunar cabin would descend to the surface while the mother ship continued to orbit. After surface exploration, the lander would take off, fly into lunar orbit and rendezvous with the orbiting mother ship. The lander crew would transfer to the mother ship before all the astronauts blasted out of lunar orbit for home. This method depended on a big and reliable booster, though nothing as big as direct ascent. Carrying out a rendezvous in distant lunar orbit was clearly a risky

aspect of the plan. Alexander Shargei (AKA Yuri Kondratyuk) had outlined such a method, but again it depended on a rocket much bigger than anything immediately in prospect.

Origins of the manned Soviet moon programme, 1959-64

1959 Start of studies by Mikhail Tikhonravov in Department #9, OKB-1.

1962 Vostok Zh study.

1962 First design of the Soyuz complex (10th March).

Endorsed by government (16th April).

Second set of blueprints (24th December).

1963 Definitive design of the Soyuz complex (10th May).

Approval by government (3rd December).

The design for the Soyuz complex required rendezvousing spacecraft to come within 20 km of one another on their first orbit so as to prepare for subsequent docking. This was something which the Vostok programme, limited though it was, could put to the test. On 11th August 1962, the third Vostok was put into orbit, manned by Andrian Nikolayev. Vostok 4 was put into orbit with Pavel Popovich exactly one day later, so precisely that it approached to within 5 km of Vostok 3 on its first orbit. This close approach was much better than anticipated. Both ships orbited the Earth together for three days, though unable to manoeuvre and drifting ever farther apart. In June 1963, Vostok 6, with Valentina Terreskhova on board, came to within 3 km of Vostok 5. Even though there was never any prospect of the ships coming together, the two group flights were a demonstration of how close spaceships could come on their first orbit. The cosmonauts communicated with one another during their missions and ground control learned how to follow two missions simultaneously.

Although these missions had been put together at relatively short notice and in an unplanned way to respond to the flights of the American Mercury programme, this was not at all how the missions had been interpreted in the West. The Vostok missions were seen as a carefully orchestrated series of events leading up to a flight to the moon. When Pavel Popovich joined Andrian Nikolayev in orbit, the Associated Press speculated that an attempt might be made to bring the spacecraft together before setting out on a loop to the moon. It was almost as if the agency had seen the designs of the Soyuz complex.

During the 1963 conference of the International Astronautical Federation in Paris, Yuri Gagarin told the assembled delegates:

A flight to the moon requires a space vehicle of tens of tonnes and it is no secret that such large rockets are not yet available. One technique is the assembly of parts of spaceships in near-Earth orbit. Once in orbit the components could be collected together, joined up and supplied with propellant. The flight could then begin.

This was not how the Americans were planning to go to the moon – NASA had opted for Shargei’s LOR method – and many people were skeptical as to how truthful Yuri Gagarin was actually being. The Russians must be racing the Americans to a moon

landing, they said. In fact, Gagarin was outlining, perfectly accurately, the Soviet moon plan as it stood in autumn 1963.

Korolev was summoned to Moscow to explain why the promised success had not been forthcoming, but the meeting never took place. He was dead. He was admitted to hospital on 13th January 1966, for the removal of a colon tumour. No less a person than the Minister for Health, Dr Boris Petrovsky, carried out the operation – on Korolev’s own request. Mid-way through, Petrovsky discovered a more serious tumour, ‘the size of a fist’. He continued the operation. A large blood vessel burst; haemorrhaging began; and Sergei Korolev’s heart – weakened as it had been from the toil of the labour camps – collapsed. Attempts to ventilate him were made more difficult by his jaw having been broken by a camp guard during the Gulag years. Frantic efforts were made to revive him, but on 14th January he was pronounced dead.

Once dead, his identity and importance could safely be revealed and indeed it was, following burial in the wall of the Kremlin on 16th January 1966. A flood of Korolev literature followed. No efforts were spared telling of his boundless energy, iron will, limitless imagination and engineering genius. This could have been mistaken for nostalgia but it was not. With Korolev’s death, the Soviet space programme was never the same again. The driving force went out of it and with him that unique ability to command, inspire, bargain, lead, design and attend to detail. After 1966, the programme had many excellent designers, planners, politicians, administrators and prophets, but never in one person all together. Not that this was immediately obvious. The programme continued on much as before. But the sense of direction slackened. Indeed, the absence of Korolev may have made the critical difference to the climax of the moon race in 1968-9.

The succession was not clear and the defence minister Dmitri Ustinov proposed Georgi Tyulin who for several months appeared to be the likely new chief designer. In May, the choice eventually fell on Korolev’s deputy, Vasili Mishin, who had worked alongside him since 1945. Vasili Mishin – born 5th January 1917 (os) – came from Orekhovzvevo near Moscow and became a mathematician at the Moscow Aviation Institute. Mishin had been the youngest member of Tikhonravov’s group to visit Poland in 1944 and had probably done the most to extract what could be learned from the fragments recovered. He was a very bright young engineer and was also a successful phot. Mishin contributed to the design of Sputnik before being named deputy to Korolev in 1959. He invented, for example, the railcar system for erecting the R-7 on its pad, one which facilitated launches in rapid succession at the same pad and would have enabled the assembly of the Soyuz complex. Vasili Mishin was a kindly man, well regarded by those who interviewed him and, before his death in 2001, did much to tell us of the moon race and open the historical record. Khrushchev made this judgement of him and, while it is harsh, few would dispute it:

Vasili Mishin was excellent at calculating trajectories, but did not have the slightest idea how to cope with the many thousands of people, the management of whom had been loaded onto his shoulders, nor to make the huge irreversible government machine work for him [8].

Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov described him as a good engineer, but hesitant, un­inspiring, poor at making decisions, over-reluctant to take risks and bad at managing the cosmonaut corps [9]. He had a drink problem, though Alexei Leonov observed from first hand that his engineering judgement was remarkably unaffected while still under the influence. OKB-1 was reorganized and renamed TsKBEM (Central Design Bureau of Experimental Machine Building) while Chelomei’s bureau was renamed TsKBM (Central Design Bureau of Machine Building) (to avoid obvious and needless confusion, the old designators will continue to be used in this narrative).

The chief designer system had worked well for the Soviet Union in the time of Korolev. But the system was extremely dependant on one person and, lacking Korolev’s strengths and skills, the system exposed serious weaknesses when dependent on Mishin. The rival American programme was never as dependent on personality as was the Soviet system. Although Wernher von Braun was the closest the Americans came to a ‘great designer’, the Americans were much more circumspect in separating the space programme’s administrative leadership – the administrator of NASA, note the title – from its engineering leadership (the NASA centres and the contracting companies).

The Ye-6 series, its OKB-1 production run now expended, gave way to the Ye-6M series. This was the first series actually built by Lavochkin. The improvements of the Ye-6M might have happened anyway, but were also prompted by the failures of the Ye-6. These were:

• Inflation of the airbags after ignition of the final rocket engine firing.

• New, lighter and more efficient camera system.

• More instruments: two folded booms to be fitted to later spacecraft.

The new cabin was slightly heavier, up from 82 kg to 100 kg. The camera system, designed by Arnold Selivanov and built by NII-885, weighed 1.5 kg, used only 2.5 watts of power, could see a horizon 1,500 m distant and was in the form of a rotating turret out of the top of the lander. It was designed to have a higher resolution than the cameras on Luna 4-8 and a full 360° panorama would have 6,000 lines.

The Soviet moon programme began in an unlikely place – in a children’s magazine, on 2nd October 1951. Mikhail Tikhonravov was a veteran rocket engineer from the 1920s and was now convinced that a flight to the moon might soon become a practical possibility. In the paranoia of Stalin’s Russia, talking about unapproved projects like moon flights was a potentially dangerous enterprise, so he chose a relatively safe outlet, one unlikely to raise the blood pressure of the censors: the pages of Pionerskaya Pravda, the newspaper devoted to communist youth. There, on 2nd October 1951, he outlined how two men could fly out to the moon and back in a 1,000 tonne rocketship. The article concluded:

We do not have long to wait. We can assume that the bold dream of Tsiolkovsky will be realized within the next 10 to 15 years. All of you will become witness to this and some of you may even be participants in unprecedented journeys.

His article was noticed immediately by Western intelligence, which apparently scanned children’s magazines as well the main national political press. In what may have been the first occasion that Soviet space plans were noticed in the West, the New York Times noted ‘Dr Tikhonravov’s article’, commenting that Soviet advances in rockets were developing rapidly and might equal, if not exceed, Western achievements. Indeed, at official level within the Soviet Union, his article was noticed too, for when the next edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia came to be written, Mikhail Tikhonravov was invited to write a section called Interplanetary communica­tions (1954) [1].

The next step took place in April 1954, a year after the death of Stalin. Although there was no direct connexion between scientific research institute NII-4 (NII stands for Scientific Research Institute, or in Russian Nauchno Issledovatelsky Institut), where Mikhail Tikhonravov was posted and the OKB-1 experimental design bureau (in Russian, Opytno Konstrucktorskoye Buro), where the chief designer of spaceflight

Sergei Korolev worked, there was clearly a degree of informal collaboration between them. In 1946, Stalin had appointed a council of spaceflight designers and it was headed by a ‘chief designer’ (in Russian Glavnykonstruktor). The chief designer was Sergei Korolev, the legend who led the Soviet space programme from its inception. The chief designer was not just a crucial engineering post, but the political leader of the space programme, making it the most coveted position in the industry. His support was now critical.

May 1954 was the deadline for proposals for projects for countries interested in participating in the forthcoming International Geophysical Year. Encouraged, indeed prompted by Sergei Korolev, the Russian proposal was written by Mikhail Tikhon – ravov, in consultation with leading Soviet mathematician Mstislav Keldysh and Russia’s top rocket engine designer, Valentin Glushko. Called Report on an artificial satellite of the Earth, it was, according to historian Siddiqi, one of the great researchers of the period, a tour de force of foresight for the 1950s and remarkable even in the present day [2]. Even though the Soviet Union had yet to commit itself to a small Earth satellite, the writers tried to engage their country in a project for manned spaceflight from the very start. The third section of the report dealt with the problems of reaching the moon and outlined how the rocket that they were then building could send a probe to the moon and bring it back to Earth through means of atmospheric braking. Report on an artificial satellite of the Earth did not emerge from the archives until the 1990s, but it was the first mention, in an official document of plans for a Soviet flight to the moon. Although the report appeared at first sight to sink in a sea of red bureaucratic ink, in fact it became the basis of the Soviet space programme. Siddiqi says that the combination of Korolev’s managerial genius and Tikhonravov’s technical acumen became the basis of humankind’s departure from the Earth.

With the Soviet Union at last thawing out from the time of terror, it was now possible to discuss lunar missions more openly. The 25th September 1955 marked the 125th anniversary of the NE Baumann Moscow Higher Technical School. Here, chief designer Sergei Korolev gave a lengthy paper called On the question of the application of rockets for research into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Here, he outlined the possibility of landing robotic probes on the surface of the moon. As the chief designer, Korolev had developed a series of rockets, derived from the German V-2, firing some with animals into the upper atmosphere. Now under Soviet Premier Nikita Khrush­chev he was tasked with developing the Soviet Union’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), capable of hitting the United States. The postwar Soviet rocket effort was driven by two complementary imperatives. The political leadership wanted missiles, while the engineers wanted rockets to explore space. Engineers had to justify their rocket building in terms of their military capability and potential. Only later did the political leadership appreciate that missiles designed for military purposes could also be powerful servants of non-military political objectives. While the interconti­nental ballistic missile would indeed, Korolev knew, meet Khrushchev’s military needs, Korolev always designed the rocket with a second purpose in mind: to open the door to space travel.

The Soyuz complex remained the Soviet moon plan until August 1964 and, as can be seen, was limited to a manned circumlunar mission. A man-on-the-moon programme was not even on the drawing board. A central assumption in NASA, in the American political community and in the Western media was that the Soviet Union had a long­time plan to send a man to the moon. All Soviet missions were explained in the context of this presumed, methodical master plan. To the West, it was unthinkable that the Soviet Union was not trying to plant the red flag on the moon first.

In reality, until August 1964, the Soviet Union had no such plan at all. The significance of the Kennedy challenge of 25th May 1961 had not been fully appre­ciated by the Kremlin. Kennedy’s speech may have been considered aspirational or rhetorical, rather than the purposeful mobilization of an entire national effort that it became. For the Soviet Union, well used to public hyperbole, it was just another

speech. According to his son, Sergei, Nikita Khrushchev ‘did not attach much importance to the challenge of John F. Kennedy’. But as time went on and the American space industry burgeoned, he was now faced with the choice of accepting the challenge and spending billions, or allowing his richer competitor to get ahead. ‘My father was not prepared to answer the question and neither was Korolev’, his son said later. Khrushchev had a sense of financial proportion lacking in his successor, wanted to concentrate the Soviet Union’s limited resources on housing and agricul­ture and was savvy enough to know that for the Americans the Apollo programme was almost small change. Sergei Khrushchev said: ‘It had never been my father’s plan to spend substantial sums in order to support our priority in space’.

It is also worth recording that, although the American moon project appeared, in retrospect, to be purposeful and deliberative, this was not always how it seemed at the time. President Kennedy had accepted the project somewhat reluctantly, had cast around for alternatives, but had been hustled into the venture by his vice-president and space enthusiast Lyndon Johnson. Following his speech to Congress in May 1961, only five congressmen had spoken and the project had been nodded through. There was little sign of public enthusiasm. Congress had approved many projects before and they had not materialized: the moon programme could well have gone their way too. Kennedy himself seems to have been uncertain and when he met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna later that June, Kennedy proposed a joint lunar venture. According to Sergei Khrushchev, this proposal ‘found my father unprepared’. Nikita Khrushchev did not formally respond. His own military were unhappy about sharing their rocket secrets (so was Korolev) and Khrushchev was concerned that the Americans would find out how weak their missile forces really were. Khrushchev baulked at Korolev’s estimates for the cost. The Russians were probably wary of exposing just how unprepared they were for such a venture.

The situation changed two years later. Kennedy repeated his proposal, this time to Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in August and then to the United Nations in September. Many query his motives. Some say that Kennedy made the offer with the certainty that the Soviet Union would refuse, but make him look statesmanlike to the world. Privately, some people on the American side were apprehensive about sharing with the Russians, as they were in turn.

Whatever these convoluted manoeuvrings, Khrushchev was more positive this time. The Soviet Union now had its own fleet of R-16 missiles and was closer to strategic military parity. With the Cuban misadventure left behind, he felt he could now work with Kennedy. The prospect of avoiding an expensive moon race and actually sharing costs began to look attractive. In a compromise with the military, a joint moon programme would be done on the basis of each partner doing its share independently, minimizing the risk of Russia learning of American technical capa­cities. In the autumn of 1963, Nikita Khrushchev volunteered that the Soviet Union was not in a moon race and had no plans to send men to the moon. On 26th October, he declared:

The Soviet Union is not at present planning flights of cosmonauts to the moon. Soviet scientists are studying it as a scientific problem.

The Americans want to land a man on the moon by 1970. We wish them luck and we will watch to see how they fly there and how they will return. I wish them success. Competition would not bring any good but might to the contrary cause harm because it might lead to the death of people.

He opened the door to the enterprise being undertaken together. Now that Russia had launched a woman into space, he jokingly referred to how an American man could fly to the moon with a Soviet woman, but then countered by saying the gender balance should be reversed and a Russian man should bring an American woman there. This was the second round of what could have turned into a courtship for a joint pro­gramme. There was a positive response from the White House which said it was studying the premier’s statement. Although Khrushchev had now responded to the Vienna offer two years late, he had now responded positively. We know of no technical documents that could have outlined how such a joint venture might have taken place. The proposal came to an abrupt end only three weeks later when John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, where he arrived directly after visiting the growing space facilities of Houston, Texas. The new leader, Lyndon Johnson, had built his political reputation on responding to the Soviet threat in space and made it clear that he was not interested in a joint programme.

Thus by early 1964, the Soviet Union:

• Had its own plan to fly to the moon, the Soyuz complex, now in construction.

• Based its approach on Earth orbit rendezvous.

• Planned only a flight around the moon, without orbiting or landing.

• Had paid little or no attention to Kennedy’s speech of 25th May 1961.

• Was reluctant, principally for reasons of cost, to compete with the United States.

• Had begun, slowly, to respond to overtures for a joint lunar venture with the Americans.

• But now found the Kennedy idea rejected by the new American president.

Lavochkin’s Luna 9, 1,583 kg, got away on 31st January 1966. The next day, a course correction manoeuvre was carried out, with 233,000 km still to go. Two days later, 8,300 km out, Luna 9 assumed a vertical position in the line of direction of the moon. The retrorockets blazed into life 75 km above the lunar surface for 48 sec. They cut out when the craft was a mere 250 m above the surface, its downward velocity halted. The lander, cocooned in its two airbags, was flung free to bounce over the lunar surface. The little 99.8 kg capsule settled. On the top part, four petal-like wings unfolded. Four minutes later, four 75 cm aerials poked their way out of the dome, slowly extending. Transmitters working on 183 MHz were set both on the antenna and into the petals.

Luna 9 was down in the Ocean of Storms between the craters of Reiner and Maria, at 64.37°, 7.08°N. On Earth, ground controllers gathered that winter night, in a moment of expectation. The main module’s signals had died as it crashed. Ground controllers had to wait a very long 4 min 10 sec to know if the capsule had survived, if its instruments were still functioning and whether they would get usable information. Or would they be robbed of victory yet again?

They were not. It was an agonizing wait. Exactly on schedule, from the walls of the control room, where loudspeakers had been installed, flooded in the beeps, pips and humming squeal of the signals of Luna 9, direct from the surface of the moon! It was a sweet moment. For the first time a spacecraft was transmitting directly to Earth from another world! It was a historic moment and Radio Moscow lost no time in assessing its significance:

A soft-landing was one of the most difficult scientific and technical problems in space research. It’s a major step towards a manned landing on the moon and other planets.

Its importance was not lost on the West. ‘New space lead for Russia’ and ‘Russians move ahead again’ were typical headlines. Once again, America’s equivalent project called Surveyor had managed to get itself a year or two behind schedule. American engineers were quick to point out that their craft was much more sophisticated than Luna 9. Surveyor planned a real parachutist-type landing, with no rough-landing capsules and would do a more detailed job. ‘But, so what?,’ people asked. It was still in the shed.

For the next few days the eyes of the world focused on the moon. At 4:50 a. m. on 4th February the television camera was switched on, a mere 60 cm above the surface. Using its mirror, it began to scan the lunar surface, a process which took 100 min through the full 360°. The camera was in fact the main instrument on board: the other

was a radiation recorder. A series of communication sessions was held between Earth and the moon over the next three days, which was as long as the batteries permitted. Some sessions lasted over an hour. The principal one was held on 4th February from 6:30 p. m. to 7:55 p. m. Moscow time and it sparked off a diplomatic incident. This relay was the big one – the one with the pictures. Presumably, they would be sent in code and the best would eventually be published by the Soviet media in the fullness of time.

The ever-present radio dish at Jodrell Bank, Manchester had been listening in to the Luna 9 signals all during the flight. The public relations officer at Jodrell Bank had worked in newspapers and he at once recognized the sound of the next round of signals: it was just like a newspaper’s fax machine! On an inspiration and a hunch a car was speedily despatched to Manchester to pick up the Daily Express fax machine. The car collected it, dashed back and the fax machine was at once linked up to the radio receiver and the signals from the moon. Reporters were breathless as the fax at once began converting the signals into standard newsroom photographs.

The print was passed round to observatory director Sir Bernard Lovell and the animated reporters. They could only gasp. The tall, authoritative Sir Bernard drew a deep breath and could only utter ‘amazing!’ There it was, at last – the face of the moon. The camera’s eye stretched to a sloping horizon and there loomed rocks, pebbles, stones and boulders, scattered randomly across a porous rocky surface. In the far distance was a crater dipping down. Long shadows accentuated the contrasts of the other-worldly glimpses of the moon’s stark surface.

In minutes, the world had seen the photographs. They were put out at the top of the television news and carried by every national newspapers’ front page the next day. The Russians were furious at the West scooping ‘their’ pictures. Sir Bernard was accused of sensationalism and irresponsibility. In fact, he had his scales slightly wrong (he had no means of guessing the right scale) and the real pictures were slightly flatter.

Luna 9’s transmissions were to continue for several days. Two further photo­graphic transmissions followed, a second one on the 4th and the third on the 5th February. More photographs were picked up – eight in all – showing the lunar horizon stretching 1.4 km away in the distance and Luna 9 obviously settled into a boulder field. It was eerie, but reassuring. If Luna 9 could soft-land, then so too could a manned spacecraft: it would not suffocate in a field of dust as some had feared. As the cooling water in the spacecraft gradually evaporated, it settled its position, giving a new angle to the photos.

Its battery exhausted, Luna 9 finally went off the air forever on 6th February after transmitting 8 hr 5 min of data over seven communication sessions, of which three were photo-relays. The Ocean of Storms returned to its customary silence and

desolation. Luna 9 had done all that was asked of it: it had survived, transmitted and photographed and its timer had ensured regular broadcasts from the moon to the Earth. Another barrier to a lunar landing was down and the Americans had been beaten once again.

The second and final Ye-6, called the Ye-6M, was Luna 13. Luna 13 went aloft on 21st December 1966, fired its retrorockets at a distance of 69 km and bumped down onto the surface of the moon in the Ocean of Storms between the craters Craft and Selenus some 440 km distant from the Luna 9 site at 18.87°N, 62.05°W. For six days, till 28th December, it sent back a series of panoramic sweeps of surrounding craters, stones and rocks. Sun angles were low and the shadows of Luna 13’s antennae stood out against the ghostly lunarscape. Five full panoramas were returned.

Luna 13 was more advanced than its soft-landing precursor Luna 9. This was also reflected in its increased weight, 112 kg. Luna 13 carried two extensible arms which folded down like ladders onto the lunar surface. Each was 1.5 m long. At the end of one was a mechanical soil meter with a thumper which tested the density of the soil to a depth of 4.5 cm with an impulse of 7 kg and force of 23.3 kg/m2. This was developed by Alexander Kemurdzhian at VNII Transmash, the company later responsible for the development of lunar rovers. The conclusion was that moonrock was similar to medium-density Earth soil (800 kg/m3, to be precise), solid, not dusty. The moon dust was between 20 cm and 30 cm deep. At the end of the other arm was a radiation density

meter which found that levels of radiation on the moon were modest and would be tolerable for humans.

Luna 13 also carried a thermometer and a cosmic particle detector. The last found that the moon absorbed about 75% of cosmic ray particles reaching the surface, reflecting the balance, 25%, back into space. The temperature of the lunar surface was measured (117°C). There was little radiation in the lunar soil itself. Table4.1 shows the key events in the Luna 13 exploration programme.

The following year, the State University of Leningrad convened a conference of physicists to examine the nature of the moon and the planets. It was held in Leningrad in February 1956. Most of those attending were scientists, astronomers and what would now be called planetologists. Also there was Mikhail Tikhonravov, not repre­senting Pionerskaya Pravda, but this time the Artillery Institute, where NII-4 was located. The conference in Leningrad State University, which reviewed the state of knowledge of our moon at the time, was well publicized and news of its deliberations were again picked up in the West [3].

Following the deliberations in Leningrad State University, Korolev paid a visit to Tikhonravov’s Artillery Institute. There, he asked its designers, engineers and experts to explain their work to him. As was his wont, Korolev said little, preferring to listen and taking a particular interest in their work on trajectories. Being a man more of action than of words, the institute soon found out that it had made its mark. Wielding his authority as chief designer, Korolev transferred the institute to his own, the first experimental design bureau, OKB-1. There, the NII-4 personnel could be under his direct control and enlisted fully in his cause. They now became department #9 of OKB-1, founded 8th March 1957 [4]. We do not know what Mikhail Tikhonravov thought of this. He was a quiet man who preferred to work in the background and who rarely sought the limelight. His unassuming nature concealed great imagination, a steely sense of purpose and, as the situation in the early 1950s required some considerable courage.

This was typical of Korolev. Long before his intercontinental ballistic missile had flown, some time before the first Sputnik had even been approved, he was already thinking ahead to a flight to the moon. Working on several projects at once daunted many lesser men, but it was his forte. Korolev’s drive, imagination, timing and ability to knock heads (and institutes) together do much to explain the early successes of the Soviet space programme [5]. The relationship between Tikhonravov and Korolev has attracted little attention, but it was a key element in the early Soviet lunar programme. One person who has commented is Sergei Khrushchev, son of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Sergei Khrushchev says that Korolev was not an originator of technical ideas, but someone able to gather the best engineers and technicians around him. He was able, though, to spot talent, to organize, to manage, to drive ideas and concepts through the political system. Although many of the ideas of his design bureau were attributed externally to him, he made sure that, within the bureau, individual designers were recognized, promoted, praised and rewarded. Khrushchev: ‘Mikhail Tikhonravov was a man ofbrilliant intellect and imaginative scope [but] totally devoid of organizational talents’ [6]. The combination of Korolev the organizer and Tikhon – ravov the designer worked well and between them they built the moon programme.

In early 1964, Russia’s plans were still to fly around the moon using the Soyuz complex. With the construction of Soyuz already under way, the R-7 rocket already available and the first group flights showing remarkable promise, there was a real prospect that this could be achieved over 1966-7 or so.

There was still considerable uncertainty about the future medium – and long-term direction of the Soviet space effort. The death of John Kennedy had now eliminated the prospect of a joint mission. In 1963, Jodrell Bank Observatory director Bernard Lovell had visited the Soviet Union as a guest of Mstislav Keldysh and learned, to his surprise, that the Soviet Union had no plans to race the Americans to the moon (exactly as Khrushchev had told the United Nations). Instead, they would build an Earth-orbiting space platform. Indeed, designs of Soviet cosmonauts spacewalking around such platforms soon found their way to the West. Bernard Lovell’s remarks were disputed by some Soviet scientists, but his visit created some considerable doubt about the nature of Soviet intentions.

Although the Soyuz complex had made considerable progress during 1962-3, this slowed down during 1964. However, it is important to stress that the Soyuz complex was no mere study. Not only did the design progress to an advanced stage, but initial flight models were in construction. The slowdown was not because of an action on the part of government, but due to gross overwork in OKB-1. Concerned with the complexities of the Earth orbit rendezvous manoeuvres required, Korolev now began to revise the concept. The weight of the complex to be assembled in Earth orbit would be about the same, 18 tonnes. Under the new plan:

• Only three spacecraft would be involved.

• The rocket block would use the much more powerful hydrogen fuel.

• The Soyuz spacecraft would, for the lunar journey, be shortened and lightened to five tonnes: the orbital module would not be carried. This would now be called the Soyuz 7K-L-1 (L for Luna, Luniy or moon).

Learning about this, a rival design bureau, OKB-52 of Vladimir Chelomei, came up with a rival proposal. Using the new Proton rocket which he was building, he said that he could send such a spacecraft directly to the moon. Only one rocket would be required and there was no need for orbital rendezvous or the transfer of fuels in Earth orbit. He persuaded the government that the plans for Earth orbital rendezvous were too cumbersome. Korolev was so busy with other projects and Chelomei managed to get government approval before he realized what was going on and could stop him.

The arrival of a competitor to Korolev was an important development. Until 1964, Korolev had, as chief designer, ruled supreme over the Soviet space programme. Vladimir Chelomei was a slightly younger man than Korolev – he was born in 1914 – and when Korolev had developed the German V-2 after the war, Chelomei had built derivatives of the V-1 flying bomb. Prom 1944 to 1954, Chelomei had developed pulse jet engines, cruise missiles and sea-borne rockets. His style was quite different from Korolev, being smartly dressed, with a polished manner and he was a great com­municator. All who met him paid tribute to his ambition and powers of persuasion. Chelomei was a professor of the Baumann Technical School, a member of the Academy of Sciences from 1958 and full academician from 1962. He was able to offer the Kremlin a viable military space programme: new military rockets (SS-9, Tsyklon, Proton), anti-satellite weapons (Polyot), radar observation satellites and was even working on a manned platform for space surveillance (Almaz). Nikita Khrush­chev’s son Sergei worked for him.

Chelomei was not the only challenger to Korolev’s hitherto undisputed promi­nence. Korolev’s former collaborator, Valentin Glushko, ran a large engine design bureau, OKB-456, and as we saw in 1958 the two had already quarrelled over the upper stage for the R-7 used to fire the first cosmic ship. In Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, another large design bureau had grown up under Mikhail Yangel. He built military missiles for the Soviet rocket troops by the hundreds in his sprawling factory there.

Some of the missiles were adapted as satellite launchers and by 1962 his design bureau was building small military satellites.