Category Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instruments of the Automatic Interplanetary Station

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

Micrometeoroid detector.

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

FIRST MOONSHOTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Harvey Dublin, Ireland, 2007

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

VOSTOK ZH: A CONCEPTUAL STUDY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zond 3: scientific instruments

Two cameras.

Infrared and ultraviolet spectrometer. Magnetometer.

Cosmic ray detector.

Solar particle detector.

Meteoroid detector.

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

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

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

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.