LUNA 4 AND THE 1963, 1964 ROUNDS OF LAUNCHINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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