Why the Soviets lost the race of the moon | Space

About two weeks before the launch of the Apollo 11 mission on the Moon, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman was in Moscow for a courtesy visit on behalf of NASA. The visit was planned for months but the timing could not have been worse. The American astronauts were preparing to land on the moon while the Soviets seemed to have yielded the race.

On the evening of July 4, 1969, Borman was in the ornate compound of the US Embassy in Moscow, surrounded by several experienced cosmonauts who seemed reluctant, even downright morose. The next day, Borman went to the Star City cosmonaut training center, where he met Cosmonaut coordinator Nikolai Kamanin. Kamanin, one of the few leaders of Soviet space programs to have public notoriety, was also a national hero who had made himself known in the 1930s for leading a daring rescue in the Arctic. Now his mood seemed unusually moderate. When a reporter asked if the Soviet Union would launch a mission to the moon to preempt Apollo 11, Kamanin and the cosmonauts did not want to confirm or deny it.

Yet Kamanin knew something that neither Borman nor the reporters knew: the race for the moon was already lost. On July 3, the secret lunar rocket known as the N-1 had exploded into a fireball at the remote launch site of Baikonur in Kazakhstan, destroying one of the two launch pads. In his diary that night, Kamanin wrote a lament: "We desperately need a hit, especially now that American astronaut Frank Borman is our guest. But all these hopes were dispelled by the powerful explosion of the rocket five seconds after the launch … the failure made us go back a year or a year and a half … "

Back in the United States, the CIA had prepared a report in President Richard Nixon's "Daily Brief" of July 5: "A major Soviet launch in the unmanned space to the moon, July 3, s & # 39 is sold out after an explosion. . "Solid evidence will come later. In August, a US spy satellite CORONA returned detailed images of the region. Jack Rooney, a photo interpreter from the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, DC, was so upset when he saw the images that his brilliance ("Jesus Christ!") Interrupted. colleagues around him. The entire area around the pad seemed destroyed or damaged.

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In the Soviet Union, nothing has been said about failure in public. In fact, the secret to the iron hand that had enveloped the first Soviet space program proved useful, as these early successes were now eclipsed by a series of disasters. As Yaroslav Golovanov, a sharp-edged journalist for the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda "The secret was necessary so that no one passed us. But later, when they passed us, we had to keep the secret so that nobody knew that we were overwhelmed. "

Why did the Soviets lose the race of the moon? Their lead over Americans at the beginning of the space age seemed almost unassailable. In 1957, with Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, they recorded a series of unprecedented firsts: the first human in space, the first spacewalk, the first soft landing on the Moon and the first rover lunar. These achievements required smart people and good designs, as well as the ability to organize high-tech teams for unique tasks. If the Soviet Union could do all this, why not land a cosmonaut on the moon?

As with any major historical event, the reasons are complex and there is no simple and easy explanation. Yet, a few general factors emerge. First, the Soviets entered the match late, more than three years after the declaration of John F. Kennedy for the moon in May 1961. In 1960, the Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev, who presided over the largest missile company and space, had passed the approval of a series of heavy-lift rockets called "N" (for nosityel "Carrier" in Russian), with the capacity (by 1967) to lift about 80 tons of payload to Earth orbit. The reason for being such rockets was vague: varied military objectives, a large space station in Earth orbit and perhaps human missions on Mars.

In September 1962, the plan to place 75 tons in Earth orbit was frozen, with a rocket called the N-1. Hundreds of subcontracts have been made and the work has really started. But unlike NASA's Saturn V, there has been no firm mission for the rocket for at least a year. In July 1963, Korolev established for the first time a pilot lunar landing and asked his engineers to develop a detailed plan.

But it was NASA's Saturn I rocket in May 1964, equipped with an Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM), that most alarmed the Soviet leaders. Before that, the American calendar to reach the moon could be considered temporary. But who could ignore a real Apollo spacecraft in orbit? Two months later, Korolev organized a meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin and persuaded him to engage in a project that could beat Apollo on the surface of the moon. Khrushchev approved the plan on August 3, 1964. By that time, Korolev and his engineers were just beginning to consolidate the architecture of the Moon project, which included an inflated N-1 capable of delivering 95 tons on the planet. Earth orbit, a rendezvous strategy in lunar orbit (similar to that of NASA) and a lunar lander of a person. At that time, Apollo was already well engaged and the lead role of the United States would be great.

Late departure was not the only, or even the most important, problem. The Soviet defense industry was beset by a chaotic management system completely at odds with what one might imagine for a socialist economy. While NASA was a centralized and descendant system run by the federal government, the Soviet space program was more like a socialist version of a competitive market. But the rules were followed only half the time and the program was held hostage by bureaucratic traffic jams and the whims of powerful individuals.

Managers like Korolev operated their own small fiefdoms. He had worked closely with the design company Valentin Glushko, who manufactured high-performance liquid propellant rocket engines. Korolev and Glushko knew each other as young men in the early 1930s and although their friendship was agitated (especially during the Stalinist purges, forced to denounce themselves), they managed to remain cordial until the end of the years. . 1950s The battle over the N-1, however, completely destroyed all decorum, to the point that they refused to end up in the same room.

The quarrel was more than personal. Glushko, in 1960 and 1961, had begun to use all its resources to develop rocket engines using storable thrusters, which were better suited to ICBMs that had to remain on standby permanently. This had a pragmatic sense, given that the Soviet Union was preparing for a massive reinforcement of its ICBM force in the 1960s. Korolev, however, argued that cryogenic fuel (supercold), such as hydrogen liquid, would generate a much greater lifting capacity for a lunar rocket. In the summer of 1962, a commission evaluated Glushko's designs for the N-1 and those of Nikolai Kuznetsov, a newcomer in the rocket engine industry who was willing to use cryogenics as Korolev wanted. The commission ruled in favor of Kuznetsov.

In a market economy, one expects the loser of a design competition to evolve. In the Soviet space program, this has not been the case. Glushko had influential friends of the Communist Party and allies of the space program. He associated with another usurper, Vladimir Chelomei, who oversaw a giant conglomerate of companies that designed intercontinental ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. In 1967, while Korolev's N-1 program was in full swing, Glushko and Chelomei managed to obtain Politburo approval to mount a parallel project, known as the UR-700, to compete with Korolev's lunar rocket. . It was as if a NASA subcontractor refused to accept that he lost to another company and kept his own version. Although the UR-700 was canceled soon after, such cases – and there were many in the Soviet space and missile programs – dissipated resources that were sorely lacking.

Organizational chaos has also affected the lunar plan itself. From the earliest days, Korolev and others have considered the flight of a cosmonaut orbiting the moon as a mission separate from a lunar landing, even if, logically, they could have been integrated into a single program. The separation continued until the end of the 1960s, even though it became less and less sensible. In the end, Korolev and Chelomei agreed to cooperate as part of a program called L-1, whose sole purpose was to send a crew of two cosmonauts around the moon and bring them back on Earth. This project, known publicly as Zond, did not bear fruit after its new launch rocket, the new Chelomei Proton, failed three times in Earth's orbit in 1967 and 1968. Zond-4 reached space, but deviated from its trajectory in the night. Atlantic on his return, and had to be destroyed by remote control.

Even at the latest in mid-1968, there was a real chance that the Soviets could have anticipated NASA's historic Apollo 8 mission orbiting the moon, which was only added to the program in August of the same year. same year. But even though the next two flights, Zond-5 in September and Zond-6 in November, circled the Moon successfully, they suffered major failures when returning to Earth. As a result, the proposed mission to launch cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Oleg Makarov in early December, just in time to defeat Apollo 8, was canceled. When Apollo 8 was flying around the moon after Christmas 1968, Kamanin wrote in his diary: "For us, the party is darkened by the awareness of the lost opportunities and the sadness that today the men who fly to the moon is not named Valery Bykovsky, Pavel Popovich. or Alexei Leonov but rather Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. "

Historically, the Soviet lunar program has a third problem: the lack of money. Massive investments are needed to develop new ICBMs and new nuclear weapons so that the Soviet Army can achieve strategic parity with the United States diverting funds from the space program. The organizations that designed the strategic weapons, as well as the support electronics and terrestrial infrastructure, were exactly the same as those manufacturing the hardware for the space program. While Korolev's design office, OKB-1, was building the N-1 rocket, it was also producing the first-generation solid-propellant ICBM. The resources were incredibly tight and when the Strategic Rocket Forces, which essentially managed the Soviet space program, decided to allocate funds, they naturally favored strategic and military programs at the expense of what it saw as spectacular useless spaces.

The N-1, in particular, was considered by many senior officers as a total mess, and they did not hide their disdain. The Soviet Minister of Defense, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, launched in 1965 at an assembly. even more direct: "I am against lunar missions."

The lack of money and time directly contributed to one of the most decisive decisions of the N-1 program, namely to give up the ground tests of the first stage before the flight. This meant that every launch of the N-1 – there were four attempts, all failed attempts, from February 1969 to November 1972 – had been made without ever having tested the first stage on a test bench, this that even some considered as an absolute madness, the novelty of its design. Kuznetsov, the engine designer, decided to adopt a very advanced and very risky process (at the time) known as staged combustion. This meant that the thrust was expected to be relatively small – about 150 tonnes at sea level – compared to the Saturn V F-1 engines, which weighed about 690 tonnes. To generate the necessary thrust, Korolev and Kuznetsov decided to place 30 engines at the base of the first floor of the N-1. But this decision has created more problems: how to synchronize the thrust and vectors of so many engines running at the same time? And if one or two fail? These potential anomalies required serious attention and could have been resolved by building a new, costly ground testing facility. But such a site would have cost money and time to build. The resentment generated by this affair became so intense that Korolev and one of his longtime assistants, Leonid Voskresensky, embarked on a screaming match. Korolev threatened to hit him with a stick. Although Korolev later apologized, Voskresensky resigned in 1964 instead of participating in what he rightly saw as a doomed project.

In fact, the four launches of the N-1 failed even before the first stage reached burnout. The second attempt, on July 3, 1969 – with NASA's Apollo 11 already seated on the launch pad – was intended to send a Zond spacecraft into lunar orbit. There were no cosmonauts on board, but that meant that the Soviets were close. Moments after takeoff, just after midnight in Baikonur, she fell and exploded. According to Valery Menshikov, a young rocket officer on duty, the explosion was so intense that "pieces of the rocket were thrown 10 kilometers away and large windows were broken 40 km away. A 400-kilogram spherical tank landed on the roof of the wing of installation and testing, seven kilometers from the launch pad. The race of the moon ended at a spectacular moment.