THE REVIVAL? LUNA GLOB

These and other plans were overtaken by political events and the financial crisis that engulfed the Soviet Union and then Russia in the early 1990s. In the post-Soviet space programme, the moon was rarely mentioned. The first instance was in summer 1997, when IKI proposed plans to send a small spacecraft into lunar orbit, using a Molniya rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia in 2000 (a Proton would be prohibitively expensive). Over time, this mission acquired the title Luna Glob, or ‘lunar globe’. The orbiter would deploy three 250 kg penetrators, modelled on those developed for the Mars 8 mission the previous year. They would dive into the lunar surface at some speed, burrowing seismic and heat flow instruments under the lunar surface, leaving transmitters just above the surface. With small nuclear isotopes, they would transmit for a year, operating as a three-point network to collect information on moonquakes and heat flow. A number of variations on these themes appeared, but none progressed beyond the aspirational stage at this time. The reality was that Russia lacked the financial resources to mount any scientific missions during the 15 years that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and concentrated all its efforts on keeping its manned, military and applications space programmes going. For the time being, the only hopes for more moon probes rested with private industry and Russia providing a booster rocket for a freelance Western venture. One such mission, Trailblazer of the TransOrbital Corporation, was postulated in the early 2000s, using an old Cold War rocket called the Dnepr.

July 2005 saw the Russian Federation announce that there would be a new federal space plan to run through 2015. One of the highlights of the plan was a return to Mars with a new mission to its moon Phobos in 2009, the mission being called Phobos Grunt. Analyzing the plan proved an impossibility, since the government issued only press releases and interviews about it, but never the original text. Almost a year later, it was made known that the plan included, in a revival of the Luna Glob mission, a return to the moon in 2012 [4]. Details of the mission were given by officials of the Russian Space Agency, the Vernadsky Institute and the Institute of Earth Physics. All appeared anxious that Russia, for all its past expertise in the exploration of the moon, should get back in the business of lunar exploration. They were also motivated not just by American plans to return to the moon by 2020 announced by President Bush, but by the prospect of moon probes being sent there by China, India and Japan much sooner.

The new Luna Glob envisaged the launch by a Molniya rocket of a mother ship into lunar orbit. Before arriving at the moon, the mother ship would release a fleet of ten high-speed penetrators to impact into the Sea of Fertility in a circular pattern, each only 2,500 m from the next one, forming a 10-point seismic station. The mother ship would continue into lunar orbit. First, it would deploy two pene – trator landers at the Apollo 11 and 12 landing sites, to rebuild the seismic network they began there in 1969. Then it would send a soft-lander down to the south polar region, called the polar station, carrying a seismometer and two spectrometers to detect water ice. The mother ship would act as a relay for the 13 data stations on the lunar surface.

Although the name Dennis Tito will never be as famous or recognizable as many of the great astronaut or cosmonaut heroes, what he did may prove ultimately to be of great importance. When his Soyuz rocket fired him up to the International Space Station in 2001, he became the world’s first paying space tourist. In one of the great post-Cold War ironies, commercial space tourism was developed by Russia, albeit by an American company, Space Adventures in cooperation with the builder of Soyuz, the Energiya Corporation. After launching a number of space tourists to the station, Space Adventures decided to offer an even more staggering – and pricey – idea: lunar tourism. Space Adventures’ proposal: to offer a six-day loop around the moon in a reconstructed Zond cabin for C80m, with a first flight set for 2009. When the original plans for space tourism were put forward, they were considered a publicity-seeking stunt, but with a queue of millionaires ready to spend the money and go through the year-long training, Space Adventures had established a viable business. Maybe, 40

years later than scheduled, Zond will make a round-the-moon manned flight after all [5].