‘LIKE STALINGRAD, BUT WITHOUT THE STUKA DIVE BOMBERS’

The next few months were difficult ones for the Soviet space programme. In March, the Russians could only watch as the Americans put the lunar module through its paces on Apollo 9. May 1969 saw the triumph of Apollo 10: Tom Stafford, Eugene Cernan and John Young had flown out to the moon, and Cernan and Stafford had brought the LM down to less than 14,400 m over the lunar surface in a dress rehearsal for the moon landing itself. Apollo 11 had been set for 16th July and the Americans had tested about all they reasonably could before actually touching down.

Summer 1969 was full of rumours of a last ditch Soviet effort to somehow upstage the American moon landing. By now, the first of the Lavochkin design bureau sample return missions of the Ye-8-5 series was ready. The first such moonscooper prepared for launch failed on 14th June 1969. The craft failed to even reach Earth orbit: an electrical failure prevented block D from firing. The Proton booster had now notched up eight failures in fourteen launches, nearly all of them mooncraft.

Time was running out for the Soviet challenge – whatever that was. In the West, observers realized there would be some challenge, though no one seemed sure exactly what. As July opened, the eyes of the world began to turn to Cape Canaveral and focused on the personalities of the three courageous Americans selected for the historic journey of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin.

At this very time, Mishin’s crews wheeled out the second N-1. An engineering model was also at the second N-1 pad at the time. Spectacular pictures show the two giants standing side by side just as the moon race entered its final days. Impressive though they must have been to the Russians gathered there, photographs of the two N-1s snapped by prying American spy satellites must have created near apoplexy in Washington where they panicked some American analysts to speculate on a desperate, last Russian effort to beat Apollo with a man on the moon.

As in February, the second N-1 carried another L-1S and a dummy LK. The intention was to repeat the February profile with a lunar orbit and return. Was consideration even given for a manned mission to lunar orbit to accompany the sample return mission from the surface? Assuming the same profile as February, the L-1S would have entered lunar orbit on 7th July, left for Earth on the 9th and been recovered on the 12th. Virtually all the officials concerned with the space programme converged on Baikonour for the launch. This was a heroic effort to stay in the moon race ahead of Apollo 11. One engineer later recounted that the frantic scenes reminded him of World War II in Stalingrad: ‘All that was missing was the German Stuka dive bombers.’

The second N-1 lifted off very late on the night of 3rd July, at 11: 18 p. m. Moscow time. Before it even left the ground, a steel diaphragm from a pulse sensor broke, entered the pump of an engine which went on fire, putting adjacent engines out of action, burning through the KORD telemetry systems and setting the scene for an explosion. KORD began to close down the affected engines: 7, 8, 19 and 20. Then an oxygen line failed, disabling engine #9. The cabling system once again disrupted, KORD shut the entire system down about 10 sec into the mission (though, for some reason, one engine continued to operate for as long as 23 sec). The N-1 began to sink back on the pad. As it did so, the top of the rocket, now 200 m above the pad, came alight at 14 sec, the escape system whooshing the L-1S cabin free just before the collapsing N-1 crashed into the base of its stand, utterly destroying the launchpad and causing devastation throughout the surrounding area. For the thousands of people watching, there was an air of surreality about it. They saw the rocket topple and fall, the fireball, the mushroom cloud but they didn’t hear a thing. Then they felt the ground shake, the wind gush over them, the thunderous deafening roar and the metal rain down on top of them. Although only a few had sheltered in bunkers, none of the others had been near enough to be injured. The explosion had the force of a small nuclear explosion, toppling cars over. The physical destruction was enormous, with windows and doors blown out for miles around and little left of the pad but smoulder­ing, gnarled girders. Part of the flame trench had even collapsed. Amazingly, the adjacent pad, with a mock N-1 rocket still installed, had survived. Even more miraculously, so had most of the crashed N-1’s own tower.

The explosion was so powerful that it triggered seismographs all over the world. Days later, an American satellite flew overhead, snapping the scorch marks and devastation. When the image was received by an analyst in Washington DC he took a sharp intake of breath, stood up and yelled at the top of his voice to all his colleagues to come over and see what he had seen.

Although a preliminary investigation had guessed the cause of the disaster within a few days, the search for further clues went on for some time and the definitive report was not released for a year. The gap between this launch and the next one would inevitably be longer, as facilities must be rebuilt. Again, the failure to go for full ground-testing had proved expensive.

To Soviet space planners it was clear that the game was nearly up. Foiled by the Apollo 8 success, frustrated by one Proton and N-1 failure after another, the past two years had been marked by one misfortune after another. Nothing seemed to go right. It was a dramatic contrast to the early days when they could do no wrong and the Americans could do no right. It was the other way round now and Apollo steamed on

from one brilliant achievement to another, dazzling the world like an acrobat who has practised a million times: except that as everyone know, NASA had not.