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Soviet lunar program Practically immediately after the Soviet Union sent the first cosmonaut into orbit, the Moon became the destination for human space flight. In May 1961, President Kennedy proclaimed the lunar landing on the surface of the Moon before 1970, as the main goal for NASA. However, the Soviet government was slow to respond to the US challenge. Previous chapter: Early piloted spacecraft
In 1962, four departments within Sergei Korolev's OKB-1 design bureau began studies of possible scenarios of lunar expeditions. Among multiple concepts, engineers investigated possible lunar flyby missions, which would require less rocket power than actual landing expeditions. Two such scenarios were under consideration. The first plan involved a pair of launch vehicles based on the R-7 rocket and carrying the 7K (Soyuz) spacecraft and the separate Earth-orbit escape stage propelled by liquid hydrogen. The second option also involved two launches of R-7-based rockets: one carrying a modified Vostok spacecraft along with an additional fuel tank and the second rocket was delivering a liquid oxygen tank along with an engine derived from Block L on the Molniya rocket. In parallel, Vladimir Chelomei's OKB-52 design bureau started its own work on the circumlunar mission, which had an advantage over Korolev's plans thanks to its reliance on a more powerful UR-500 rocket, which could accomplish the task in a single launch. (52) At the end of 1962, OKB-1 was reviewing various scenarios of lunar and martian expeditions, which could take advantage of the prospective N1 rocket with the expected payload of 75 tons to the low Earth's orbit. Four architectures were chosen out of 26 possible schemes to put cosmonauts on the lunar surface. The favored scenario required three N1 rockets launching the 19K lunar expeditionary system and a pair of 21K tankers for in-orbit fueling of the 19K ship. The crew would be delivered later on the vehicle derived from the 7K spacecraft. The expedition would use a direct descent to the lunar surface, skipping complex and dangerous rendezvous in the lunar orbit. By 1963, OKB-1 formulated the whole array of lunar exploration projects. The L1 circumlunar mission concept was at the root of the 7K (Soyuz) spacecraft development, which would be a part of the three-component mission, all of which would be launched by boosters derived from the R-7 ballistic missile. The same strategy also proposed the L2 unmanned lunar rover, the L3 complex for an expedition to the Moon and the L4 lunar orbital station and the L5 crew-carrying lunar rover. For the time being, the L3 lunar landing project became the focus for OKB-1 during most of 1964. It took more than three years after Kennedy's speech in 1961 for the cash-strapped Soviet government to commit needed resources for the manned expedition on the surface of the Moon. "Do not leave the Moon to the Americans," Nikita Khrushchev reportedly told leaders of the Soviet rocket industry, "...Anything you need in order to do it, will be provided." On Aug. 3, 1964, the Soviet government finally gave full go ahead to the lunar landing effort with Decree No. 655-268. What became a secondary task of a lunar flyby was delegated to Vladimir Chelomei's own spacecraft launched by the newly developed UR-500 rocket. At the same time, Korolev had to focus on a much more difficult but prestigious task of beating Americans to the Moon with his L3 lunar landing system. However, the development of a heavy-lifting launcher, needed for the lunar expedition, was plagued with political and technical problems. Powerful leaders of the Soviet rocket industry fought for the leadership and influence in the program, stretching the project's already limited resources, while the Soviet military, which financed rocket development, had always remained skeptical about the prospects of giant space launchers, be it Korolev's N1, Chelomei's UR-700 or Mikhail Yangel's R-56. At the end of 1964, Korolev also approved the idea to dock a pair of the 7K spacecraft in the Earth's orbit as a rehearsal of future operations during lunar expeditions. The Soyuz variant proposed for this purpose was designated 7K-OK, where the "7K" designation was inherited from the original manned vehicle in the lunar fly-by project, while "OK" stood for "okolozemny korabl" or "near-Earth-orbital spacecraft." The fall of Khrushchev in October 1964, further delayed the program, which continued suffering from the lack of funds and resources. Nevertheless, on Oct. 25, 1965, a government decree formally approved the development of the 7K-OK Earth-orbiting spacecraft, in parallel with the work on the 7K-L1 variant, which aimed to fly behind the Moon before the Apollo. In January 1966, the Soviet lunar program received another blow with the death of Sergei Korolev, but after many delays, the first unpiloted Soyuz 7K-OK spacecraft was finally launched in November 1966. At the time, the USSR was still well in the Moon Race and the planned lunar landing was still remote enough for TsKBEM to draft a super-ambitious three-phase strategy for lunar exploration. (INSIDER CONTENT) On Feb. 4, 1967, the Soviet government issued another decree, which proclaimed the flight around the Moon and the piloted landing on its surface to be a task of "state importance." The document set the goal of flying a circumlunar mission between June and October 1967. The flight testing of the 7K-L1 system began in March 1967, with the largely successful launch of the UR-500K/Block D rocket variant delivering the 7K-L1 No. 2P unmanned spacecraft prototype. During 1967, Soviet strategists also further detailed (INSIDER CONTENT) an aggressive post-lunar landing space program, which would led to humanity's first missions to the vicinity of Mars and Venus! At the height of the Moon Race in 1968, TsKBEM found itself developing at least five Soyuz-derived crew vehicles, including the 7K-OK ships for missions in the Earth orbit, L1 ships for circumlunar flights, the L1A variant for the N1 rocket, the LOK orbiter for the L3 lunar expeditionary complex and the L1E vehicle for testing the critical Block D upper stage. The LK lunar lander and a multitude of other elements of the lunar program were also in the development pipeline. In the meantime, various technical problems, delayed the first launch of the N1 rocket until February 1969 and it ended in failure. It was a heavy blow to the Soviet space program, already hopelessly behind the US in the Moon Race. While engineers at Sergei Korolev's TsKBEM design bureau were picking up pieces, their Kremlin bosses watched the US to add to its triumphant flight of Apollo-8 around the Moon in the previous December yet another successful test of the Saturn-5 rocket during the Apollo-9 mission in March 1969. Two months later, the piloted lunar module of the Apollo-10 mission hovered just a few miles from the lunar surface, setting the stage for the actual landing in the Summer 1969. Not surprisingly, new calls for changing the course came to the Kremlin. Like in Khrushchev's reign at the turn of the 1960s, Vladimir Chelomei, the head of the rival TsKBM design bureau, reemerged on the scene with an "alternative" launcher to the troubled N1. Obviously, this time, there was no point in talking about beating Americans to the Moon, but instead, the Soviet response would be a piloted mission to Mars! To this end, Chelomei proposed to upgrade his mighty but non-existing UR-700 rocket into an even bigger UR-700A or UR-900. (685) But at the time, neither technical failures nor political pressure at home and abroad could deter Soviet engineers from pressing on with the N1 project. In 1969, they had no illusions about winning the Moon Race, but the N1-L3 project still remained the centerpiece of the Soviet space program. On July 3, 1969, the second attempt to launch the N1 rocket ended in a much bigger catastrophe than the first, seriously damaging the only available launch pad, while also revealing serious technical flaws in the design of the booster. Two years of corrective measures brought little results, as the third launch also failed in 1971. The last attempt to fly N1 was made on Nov. 23, 1972, when the rocket failed 107 seconds into the flight, around seven seconds before the separation of the first stage. In the meantime, the TsKBEM design bureau initiated design work (INSIDER CONTENT) on an upgraded expeditionary complex, known as N1-L3M, which was intended to "outshine" the Apollo expeditions with larger crews and longer stays on the surface of the Moon. In the second half of 1969, the L3M design team ruled out the use of the radically redesigned N1M rocket and, after considering a three-launch scenario in early 1970 (INSIDER CONTENT), then focused on the two-launch scenario based on moderate upgrades of the N1 rocket. (INSIDER CONTENT) In 1971, TsKBEM narrowed down its studies of the L3M lunar expeditionary complex to just two architectures. Both relied on a pair of N1 rockets, with one configuration considering a fully integrated crew vehicle for landing on the Moon, leaving the second rocket a job of space tug delivery. Alternatively, the second scenario called for the first N1 rocket launching a heavy version of the lunar lander, LKT. (INSIDER CONTENT) Ultimately, developers favored the integrated spacecraft, because it avoided a lunar-orbit docking whose failure would result in the loss of the crew. The preliminary design of the L3M complex that was finalized in 1972 involved the development of new upper stages for the N1 – Block S/Sr (INSIDER CONTENT), Block D2 (INSIDER CONTENT) — and the whole new lunar lander, LKM, (INSIDER CONTENT) for the crew of two or three. However, both L3 and L3M projects were cancelled in 1974, after the program's leader Vasily Mishin was ousted as the head of the TsKBEM industrial conglomerate responsible for the project. Despite many appeals, an almost ready N1 rocket (Vehicle No. 8L) (INSIDER CONTENT), which was scheduled for launch before the end of 1974, was scrapped along with hardware for several other N1 rockets. Mishin's successor, Valentin Glushko, had its own ambitious plans for lunar exploration, but under political pressure, he had to re-direct most of the effort of the industry toward the development of the Soviet copy of the US Space Shuttle. The post-Soviet Russian industry renewed planning for lunar expeditions in the mid-2000s, as the economic conditions in the country had slowly improved. The Kremlin then came close to endorsing the Moon (INSIDER CONTENT) as the objective of the Russian space program, but in 2014, essentially undercut its own ambitions in space with the neo-imperialist expansion back on Earth, first with the annexation of Crimea and then finishing off last hopes for the space program (INSIDER CONTENT) after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Piloted lunar exploration projects in the 20th century:
Soviet deep-space spacecraft (proposed and developed):
Soviet missions preparing expedition to the Moon:
Next chapter: First space stations (Salyut era) |
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