Return to the moon

The cancellation of Luna 25 in 1977 marked the end of the Russian programme of lunar exploration. Nevertheless, the chief designer of the Soviet space programme was not ready to give up completely on a manned flight to the moon, for Valentin Glushko persisted with dreams for lunar exploration, presenting his last set of ideas in 1986, just three years before his death.

AFTER N-l: A NEW SOVIET MOON PROGRAMME?

Strangely enough, the suspension of the N-1 programme in 1974 did not mean the final end of the Soviet manned moon programme. The new chief designer, Valentin Glushko, announced that the whole space programme would be reappraised and a fresh start made in reconsidering strategic objectives. The only definite decision was that the N-1 would not fly for the time being, if at all. Glushko set up five task forces, one of which was headed by Ivan Prudnikov to develop the idea of a lunar base and another the idea of a new heavy-lift launcher. Glushko personally began to sketch a new series of heavy launchers called the RLAs, or Rocket Launch Apparatus, capable of putting 30, 100 and 200 tonnes into orbit respectively.

When the Politburo met in August 1974, it actually reaffirmed the general objective of Soviet manned missions to the moon. Ivan Prudnikov duly completed, by the end of that year, the plans for a lunar base. The base was called Zvezda, or ‘star’ and featured teams of cosmonauts working on the moon for a year at a time, supplied by the new, proposed heavy-lift rocket. Their proposals were formally tabled, along with the outcome of the four other task forces, in 1975. Design of a heavy-lift launcher appropriately called Vulkan, able to deliver 60 tonnes to lunar orbit, was sketched out. In an abrupt turnaround, Vulkan would be powered with hydrogen fuel, the one system Glushko refused to develop for Korolev. Glushko even designed new hydrogen-fuelled engines, the RD-130 and RD-135, the latter with a specific impulse

of no fewer than 450 sec. A lunar expeditionary craft or LEK was designed, not that different from the long-stay lander of Mishin’s N1-L3M plan.

Although Glushko put his full force behind Zvezda, it attracted little support overall and none from the military at all. Crucially, the president of the Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh, would not back it. He was never a close friend of Glushko and was wary of the extravagance of the project. The cost, estimated at 100bn roubles, was too much even for a Soviet government not normally shy of extravagant projects. Keldysh let the process of consideration of the project exhaust itself so that it would run out of steam [1]. Glushko tried to save some face with a scaled-down project, but this won little support either. The basic problem was that Glushko had replaced a real rocket (the N-1) and a real programme (N1-L3M), both with diminishing political support, with a theoretical rocket (Vulkan) and a programme (Zvezda) that had none. The Soviet leadership began to regard the Soviet manned moon programme as having been a failure, a waste, a folie de grandeur that the country could not afford. Leonid Brezhnev had a mild stroke in 1975 and decisions were taken ever more by a shifting group of ministers and generals. This was not a leadership that would take a big decision and see it through.

In the event, the most significant project to emerge from the strategic reconsidera­tion of 1974-6 was the Energiya-Buran heavy launcher and shuttle system, which was driven by military imperatives to match the American space shuttle. No one can point to a particular day or decision on which the Soviet manned moon programme died, but it withered in mid-1975 and was effectively gone by March the following year, 1976. Despite this, Valentin Glushko even once briefly returned to the moon base idea in the 1980s, outlining how a small base might be built using the Energiya rocket, but he won no support in a country entering ever more difficult economic conditions. Despite their declining political fortunes, the moon base projects reached a certain level of detail and are outlined here.