“NOT A PRIORITY”

With predictable ambiguity, in the dying months of 1968, the Soviets gave little away to either confirm or deny that they had any interest in competing with the United States to reach the Moon. Fortunately for them, their head of state had not committed them to the same audacious goal as John Kennedy had done for America seven years before. However, it is well known that the Soviets had a vigorous manned lunar effort. . . and made equally vigorous attempts to hide it, although the intricacies will be discussed further in the next volume. On 14 October, indeed, Academician Leonid Sedov told the 19th Congress of the International Astro – nautical Federation in New York that “the question of sending astronauts to the Moon at this time is not an item on our agenda… it is not a priority’’. A few weeks later, discussing Beregovoi’s mission with the press, Mstislav Keldysh was forced to admit that Soyuz was not designed for a circumlunar flight and that journeys to the Moon were not being studied.

For months, though, speculation had grown over the development of a large lunar rocket, known as the ‘N-l’, or, had it successfully flown, as the ‘Raskat’ (‘Peal’). NASA Administrator Jim Webb, informed by CIA sources early in 1968 about the N-l, had proven so vocal about its existence that the booster was also colloquially known as ‘Webb’s Giant’. Its development had begun under Sergei Korolev in 1959 and it was originally intended to lift space stations into orbit or even deliver human crews to Mars with a nuclear-powered upper stage. Two years later, it received a small amount of funding and a government report established a schedule for its maiden launch sometime in 1965. The chance of the N-l moving from paper to production took a dramatic turn with Kennedy’s lunar speech in May 1961 and Korolev began laying plans for a Soviet mission to the Moon, featuring a new spacecraft called ‘Soyuz’.

Several launches, it was realised, would be needed to loft the crew-carrying Soyuz, the lunar lander and additional engines and fuel. Powering the giant rocket would be a new engine known as the RD-270, built by Valentin Glushko, employing unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and an oxidiser of nitrogen tetroxide; this hypergolic mixture reduced the need for a complex combustion system, but also yielded a reduced thrust when compared to a combination of, for example, kerosene and liquid oxygen. Korolev felt that a high-performance design demanded high – performance fuels and moved instead to work with Nikolai Kuznetsov’s OKB-276 bureau, which suggested a ‘ring’ of NK-15 engines on the rocket’s first stage. The interior of the ring would be open, with air piped into the hole through inlets near the top of the stage; this would then be mixed with the exhaust to augment the N-l’s total thrust.

Eventually, in recognition of the difficulties of orbital rendezvous, Korolev opted for a direct-ascent means of reaching the Moon. The result was that the N-l increased dramatically in size and was combined with a new lunar package called the ‘L-3’, which contained additional engines, an adapted Soyuz spacecraft (known as the ‘Lunniy Orbitny Korabl’ or ‘LOK’) and a lunar lander. Had the N-l actually flown successfully, it would have been one of the largest launch vehicles ever built: at 105 m tall, it was slightly shorter than the Saturn V, yet produced a million kilograms more thrust from its first stage engines. It had five stages in total, three to boost it into orbit and two to support lunar activities. The lower three stages formed a truncated cone, some l0 m wide at the base, arranged to best accommodate the kerosene and liquid oxygen tanks.

Astonishingly, the first stage – known as ‘Block A’ – was powered by no fewer than 30 NK-15 engines, arranged in two rings, with one ring handling pitch and yaw and the others on gimballing mounts for roll manoeuvres. With an estimated thrust of 4.5 million kg, Block A would have easily out-thrust the Saturn V’s first stage, although its use of kerosene offered poorer performance: it could place 86,000 kg into low-Earth orbit, compared to the Saturn V’s 118,000 kg. The N-l’s second stage would have comprised eight uprated NK-15V engines in a single ring and four smaller NK-21 engines in a square arrangement on its third stage.

The complexities of building plumbing to feed fuel and oxidiser into the clustered rocket engines proved an incredibly delicate and fragile task and contributed in part to the four catastrophic N-1 launch failures between 1969-72. The plumbing difficulties experienced during the construction of the Saturn V’s first stage, which comprised just five engines, must have been exacerbated tenfold for the N-1’s 30 engines. During the week that Apollo 8 circled the Moon, the first N-1 was being readied at Tyuratam for its first unmanned launch, scheduled for early in 1969.

As the N-1 proceeded through its torturous and ultimately unsuccessful development process, another rocket – the Proton – was meeting with greater success. It had been designed to loft a cosmonaut-carrying version of the Soyuz spacecraft, albeit without an orbital module, on a circumlunar trajectory. In readiness for this so-called ‘Soyuz 7K-L1’ variant, a number of unmanned missions were launched towards the Moon under the cover name of ‘Zond’. Despite several dismal Proton failures, Zond 5 was launched on 14 September 1968, passing within 1,950 km of the lunar surface and splashing down in the Indian Ocean seven days later. In addition to demonstrating the spacecraft which might someday support two cosmonauts, Zond 5 took the first living creatures – a pair of steppe tortoises, wine flies, mealworms, plants, seeds and bacteria – to the vicinity of the Moon.

Eight weeks later, on 10 November, Zond 6 provided perhaps the biggest impetus to get Apollo 8 into lunar orbit before the end of the year, when it too carried a biological payload and numerous instruments to the Moon. It hurtled just 2,420 km past the lunar surface, acquiring high-resolution photographs, but its descent module depressurised during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. This killed all of the biological specimens and would probably have resulted in the deaths of cosmonauts, too, had they been aboard. On the other hand, failure occurred because the spacecraft was held in an unusual attitude for a protracted time, owing to a problem that a pilot could have readily been able to overcome. Further, the seal suffered in the heat of the Sun and would not have been overly stressed if a crew had been aboard. To add insult to what had been a less-than-successful mission, only one negative was recovered from its camera container. . . and its parachutes deployed too early, causing it to crash land. Despite the depressurisation and parachute faults, either of which would have doomed a human crew, Tass’ announcement a few days later explicitly stated that Zond 6’s mission had been “to perfect the flight and construction of an automated variation of the manned spacecraft for flying to the Moon’’. It marked a stark contrast to Sedov’s claim only weeks earlier that the Soviets had no interest in manned lunar missions. . .

In perhaps one of the bitterest ironies, Frank Borman, who would command Apollo 8, the first manned circumlunar expedition, became the first American astronaut to be invited to the Soviet Union afterwards. When he arrived, he was welcomed with a huge party, held in his honour at Moscow’s Metropole Restaurant. Hundreds of guests flocked to shake his hand and have their photograph taken with him. One of them was Alexei Leonov. Borman congratulated Leonov on his Voskhod 2 spacewalk and the two chatted about the circumlunar mission and possible landing sites on the Moon. Most likely, Borman considered Leonov to be showing the interest typical of a space explorer. Little did he realise that Leonov had been training to complete the very same goal for which Borman was now being applauded.

Initially, in the months after Sergei Korolev’s death, Leonov and a civilian cosmonaut, possibly Oleg Makarov, had been tipped to fly the first circumlunar Soyuz mission sometime in the summer of 1967. “We then expected to be able to accomplish the first Moon landing,’’ wrote Leonov, “ahead of the Americans in September 1968.’’ The Soviet plan was for one cosmonaut to descend to the surface in the LK (‘Lunniy Korabl’) landing craft, whose spidery appearance was uncannily similar to Grumman’s lunar module, leaving his colleague in orbit aboard the main L-3 craft.

‘‘To train for the extreme difficulties of a lunar landing,’’ Leonov wrote, ‘‘we undertook exhaustive practice in modified Mi-4 helicopters. The flight plan of a lunar landing mission called for the landing module to separate from the main spacecraft at a very precise point in lunar orbit and then descend towards the surface of the Moon until it reached a height of 110 m from the surface, where it would hover until a safe landing area could be identified. The cosmonaut would then assume manual control of its descent. . . ’’ In addition to flying the circumlunar mission, it is likely that Leonov would have hoped for such a landing mission of his own. For that reason, he qualified as a helicopter pilot and spent much of 1966 and 1967 using it to prepare himself as much as possible for a Moon landing.

Not only would the journey to the lunar surface be fraught with risk, but so too would the return to Earth. In fact, the Soviet plan to slow down from transearth velocities would be to enter the atmosphere, ‘bounce’ off and re-enter a second time,

as would Apollo. “The key to this difficult manoeuvre,” continued Leonov, “was the angle of re-entry. If it was wrong, the spacecraft would be severely deformed, perhaps even destroyed… Several times during training sessions, I sustained pressures of 14 G, the maximum to which a human being can be subjected on Earth. This put tremendous strains on every cell in my body and caused several haemorrhages at those points where my body was most severely compressed.” With the completion of Zond 6, western analysts knew that the next favourable ‘window’ for a Soviet circumlunar shot opened on 6 December 1968, just two weeks before the window for Apollo 8. It never happened. The parachute failure and the depressurisation issue were sufficiently serious to have killed a cosmonaut crew and Vasili Mishin did not want to risk one until Zond was proven by at least two further test flights. Of course, the Americans knew nothing of this and missing the December window would pose yet more questions as to what the Soviets were up to. Years later, Alexei Leonov would tell Tom Stafford that he and Oleg Makarov were prepared to take the risk and ride a Zond for seven days to the Moon and back. ‘‘We could have beaten the Apollo 8 crew,’’ Leonov said sadly, ‘‘but Mishin was a blockhead.’’