Seeking a compromise

Eventually, Sadovskiy’s Department 16, then numbering fewer than 80 people, got down to working out a compromise plan that would satisfy all players. After several weeks of work, they came up with a Space Shuttle type configuration with a side – strapped winged orbiter (OK-92), but with the engines mounted on the “external tank’’ rather than on the orbiter itself. This turned the external tank and the strap-on boosters into a universal launch vehicle capable of flying not only the orbiter, but other payloads as well. Moreover, the number of strap-ons could be varied to match the required payload. On the one hand, the plan made it possible to build an orbiter very similar to the American one (and thereby benefit from American R&D) and, on the other hand, it allowed Glushko to retain his beloved family of launch vehicles.

The report prepared by Sadovskiy’s team was called “Reusable Space System With The Orbital Ship OK-92’’ and contained a comparative analysis with the OS – 120 and MTKVP. Before being sent to Ustinov, it needed to be endorsed by Glushko. Even though the new design went a long way to accommodate his wishes, Glushko realized his signature would probably be the death warrant for his lunar program. Finally, Burdakov was able to talk him around, arguing among other things that Glushko would still go down in history as the man having built the most powerful rocket engine in the world. On 9 January 1976 Glushko signed the report, albeit with mixed feelings. He even called it the “Bloody Sunday” of Soviet cosmonautics, referring to an incident where unarmed, peaceful demonstrators marching to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II were gunned down by Imperial guards in St. Petersburg on 9 January 1905, exactly 71 years earlier [56].

Perhaps another reason Glushko came around was that the new plan enabled him to deal one final deadly blow to the N-1. Even though work on the N-1 had been suspended in 1974, the project had not yet been officially terminated. Boris Doro – feyev, the chief designer of the N-1, had even prepared an address to the 25th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (to be held in February 1976) calling for the N-1 program to be resurrected. With the most likely payload for the N-1 now being a shuttle-type vehicle, the very same arguments against mounting a winged orbiter on top of the RLA could now be used against the N-1 as well [57]. Later the Russians would justifiably describe the absence of main engines on the orbiter as one of their system’s main advantages, although they rarely or never pointed out that this design had not been a foregone conclusion from the beginning.