WI: Soyuz to the Moon?

During the Moon race, there were plans proposed to use Gemini to land on the Moon in order to beat the Soviets there. Gemini was only intended as a test bed for and a bridge to Apollo and the Moon landings, but it was possible, per the plans, to use Gemini to get to the Moon. Those never went through and things went as planned with Apollo landing on the Moon.

NASA didn't need to do such a thing to beat the Soviets anyway. The Soviet Moon program was hampered by not taking the American seriously until 1964, by which time the Americans already had the lead. The Soviets never managed to catch up because of their delay, poor funding and lack of testing as a result of it and their race to catch up in spite of it, political infighting in the program and poor management, and the engineering failures of the N1 rocket which remained unresolved as its designer, Sergei Korolev, died in 1966 (even if he could have fixed them).

It seems like the Soviets, not the United States, should have been creating a plan of a rigging a space craft only intended for orbit and as a test bed to go all the way to the Moon and beat the enemy there. And that had a similar craft to Gemini in Soyuz, which was, like Gemini, a bridge between previous Russian spacecraft and the planned Moon rocket and spacecraft (which never came to successful fruition).

What if the Soviets had utilized or tried to utilize Soyuz, with obvious modifications, to get to Lunar orbit and possibly land there to beat the American Moon landing?

The list why the soviet lost the Moon-race is very long

Let take the Soyuz around the moon scenario:
Already 1962 Korolev design the Soyuz spacecraft, for Moon fly by It had to rendezvous in earth orbit with Stage and Tanker with fuel (use of 3 R-7 rocket )
Korolev work on this for 2 years ,until in 1964 it became clear that a R-7 rocket had not enough payload for stage and tanker.
Much to Korolev torment, that program was transfer to his rival of Vladimir Chelomei and put on UR-500 rocket to be launch a Soyuz in 1967.
but the Soyuz program got delayed first to death of Korolev in january 1966, than by taking incompetent Vasily Mishin as his successor
first manned Soyuz launch was in April 23, 1967. killing it's pilot Colonel Vladimir Komarov.
(the first manned Soyuz around the Moon was scheduled to fly in may 1967)
then in december 1968 Apollo 8 fly around the Moon and the politbureau gave order to stop the Soyuz around the moon program.
the remaining 5 launches were test of Soyuz hardware for Moon landing program...


So how had be gone better ?
If Korolev design the Soyuz spacecraft already with a big launch rocket, he work already on N-1 moon rocket in time
were it upper stage could work as smaller Launch rocket, his N2 N3 concept had replacing the UR-500 and R-7 rockets soon.
also had helpt the program if Korolev would not succeed by Vasily Mishin, but one more competent man.

The Soviets actually had two different lunar Soyuz.
Zond
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-L1
Launched by the Proton, Zond was a modified Soyuz launched into a lunar flyby (not orbit).

N1-L3
That was the Soviet equivalent of the Apollo CSM. It went into lunar orbit with the LK lunar lander shuttling between it and the lunar surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-LOK

Today the concept of a Soyuz lunar flyby has returned.
http://www.universetoday.com/85442/space-adventures-wants-to-fly-you-to-the-moon/

they had even there version of Lunar mini base
L3M
here two upgraded N1 to bring a Soyuz direct to the moon surface.
two cosmonauts had work for several week on moon


that's only picture taken of L3M mock-up.
it's big lander right behind the tiny LK lander.
inside the big sphere is the Soyuz return module and living space for two cosmonauts.
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/l3m.htm

Depends from what one's mean by "Soyuz to the Moon" - either the complete machine or a module of it; flyby, orbit or the surface.

But surely, the Soyuz descent module
can be used for Zond, the N1-L3 orbiter, or even the landers you mention (LK and L3M)

Archibald said:

Depends from what one's mean by "Soyuz to the Moon" - either the complete machine or a module of it; flyby, orbit or the surface.

But surely, the Soyuz descent module
can be used for Zond, the N1-L3 orbiter, or even the landers you mention (LK and L3M)

Click to expand...

Actually, the Soyuz Descent Module was the common element of the Soyuz, L3-LOK, and Zond. It was the Service Module and Orbital Module that were changed to suit the mission. In short, they did plan to use Soyuz for their own Manned Lunar Missions. But the inability to get the N-1 to work reliably in time along with the US victory in the Lunar Race essentially scuppered those plans.

Here a good overview about Soviet manned Lunar program
http://viking.coe.uh.edu/~gkitmacher/_content/spacecraft/Capsules Historic folder/sovietlunar.pdf

Hee Hee! I get to be the first to say here that actually, Soyuz was meant to be a moonship (the EOR flyby mission) from the beginning. It is really the exact opposite of the OP challenge--a lunar craft has been repurposed to an orbital mission.

Rather like the Apollo Block III in Eyes Turned Skyward!

And this, Soyuz L3, is what you were asking for.

I do wonder why they didn't consider continuing with the EOR plan to assemble the moonship in orbit, but extend it to make it this, with landing capability. Thus it would be EOR-LOR, both.

Then again there's Chelomei's LK-700. This was direct ascent all the way--direct landing on the moon, direct launch and direct return to Earth.

Somewhere else in False Step's unfortunately poorly indexed pages is a description of the Zond mission, which returned to Korolev's early-60's flyby concept, at the very last possible minute to try to get something done to preempt the Americans.

I still don't know if this exhausts all the Soviet moonshot plans that actually got some funding. I don't know if your head is spinning but mine is...

What's very nice about False Steps from our AH point of view is the author considers not only why it was cancelled OTL, but what minimum configuration of changes it would take to make the plan go forward.

It would have been cool if they had attempted something, even just the zond.

Zond - if only the Proton had been more reliable.
Best opportunities
- early December 1968, ahead of Apollo 8 (very risky !)
- April 1970, for Lenin 100th birthday (Proton and Zond had matured a little bit, enough for the last Zond to work decently)

The last option has something big going for it - Lenin was born April 22, 1870, which would place the Zond mission just in time for... Apollo 13 !

Imagine the scenario: the soviet union launch an unmanned (or manned, but there was not much room aboard) Zond to Apollo 13 rescue.

It might makes for a good prequel to my "Save Columbia" TL

Archibald said:

Zond - if only the Proton had been more reliable.
Best opportunities
- early December 1968, ahead of Apollo 8 (very risky !)
- April 1970, for Lenin 100th birthday (Proton and Zond had matured a little bit, enough for the last Zond to work decently)

Click to expand...

Yeah. The UR-500 had severe reliability issues in its infancy, needing 61 launches to pass its State Trials and be declared operational.

The last option has something big going for it - Lenin was born April 22, 1870, which would place the Zond mission just in time for... Apollo 13 !

Imagine the scenario: the soviet union launch an unmanned (or manned, but there was not much room aboard) Zond to Apollo 13 rescue.

It might makes for a good prequel to my "Save Columbia" TL

Click to expand...

Not possible. The Zond was only capable of Circumlunar Flight, not having the Delta-V budget to even enter LLO. Besides, Apollo 13 was launched on 11/04/1070 and returned 7 days later.

Bahamut-255 said:

Yeah. The UR-500 had severe reliability issues in its infancy, needing 61 launches to pass its State Trials and be declared operational.




Not possible. The Zond was only capable of Circumlunar Flight, not having the Delta-V budget to even enter LLO. Besides, Apollo 13 was launched on 11/04/1070 and returned 7 days later.

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I was confused by your European dating convention, with months and dates swapped around from the way I expect to see them (Apollo 13 launched in November? Wait a minute...) and considered a cutesy reply like this, then I noticed the rest of the date.

Man, I knew William the Bastard was ambitious, but that's some impressive feat he squeezed out of his new-conquered English serfs there, what with colonizing Florida, building the VAB, the launch facilities, the rocket itself, and force-evolving NASA and the modern English language....

Yep, those Reds would have a hard time catching up with that capsule all right!

I still think it's worth considering, for AH, WI the Soviet Politburo got serious about beating Kennedy's deadline and told Korolev to go back to the drawing board re his early EOR flyby ship and stretch it to some kind of lander; this would quickly lead him to think "LOR" as well.

Just how many launches would it take to assemble a viable moonship with R-7 rockets as the only launchers? Those could launch 6.5 tonne payloads, and would have provided all the building blocks of his earliest Soyuz (the origin of Soyuz, remember) flyby mission. I'd think once he was thinking, "LOR, one cosmonaut in the smallest lander we can manage, to land, put up a flag, and go again in a few hours" then the minimum lander would be quite small indeed, in line with what he came up with some years later, and so not itself a tremendous addition to the original flyby design. What would be a big addition would be fuel modules for the extra stages of acceleration--braking to Lunar orbit, then boosting the Soyuz itself back home. That's just more fuel modules, though each one requires another one or two for boosting their added mass to TLI.

Even though I love any excuse to get away from using hypergolic acid fuels, ker-lox doesn't offer a tremendous advantage in ISP and does present the extra headache of trying to prevent, or slow, or counter the boiloff of the oxygen. Hydrogen-oxygen is of course much superior, if only just for TLI as per OTL Apollo--it's more rapid boiloff pretty much limits it to that one stage, but that's the big one of course. But the Soviets dismissed developing it as too risky (not in the sense of blowup, but that they doubted it could be feasible).

But hey--what about methane-lox? I believe the ISP is something like 20 percent better than ker-lox or hypergolics, whereas it would store considerably denser than hydrogen, at a considerably higher temperature, and developing a meth-lox engine might look much more reasonable a challenge.

So here's the scenario:

Khrushchev takes Kennedy's challenge to heart, and goes to Korolev to ask if a Soviet Cosmonaut--just one will do, just briefly--could possibly set foot on the moon before 1970? (Technically Kennedy's "...before the decade is out" takes up to December 31, 1970, but most people think it means before 1969 ends, besides Khrushchev wants a margin to beat the USA by.)

And--because of some earlier divergence, a POD in the 1950s in the Soviet rocket program--Korolev knows that a series of methane-oxygen engines are passing testing, and there are already plans for a version to replace the ker-lox engines in an R-7--this presumably would merit naming it a new rocket, presumably R-8. It is pretty much the same as an R-7 so the payload is only a little larger.

Could the boiloff time of methane-oxygen tankage accumulating in LEO, docked to each other, be long enough to allow assembly of an extended version of the 1962 flyby plan, one that boosts a lunar orbit injection stage, a lunar escape stage, and a lunar lander as well as the Soyuz itself all to TLI? In that case, I'd think the Lunar stages could be meth-lox too. The TLI would have a poorer mass ratio than the OTL Apollo launched to the moon on the hydrogen J-2 engine, but if the latter two stages, and the lander too why not, were all fueled with meth-lox then each of those stages of the mission would be more efficient than OTL Apollo which used hypergolic fuel for all the corresponding mission stages.

So he comes back to Khrushchev with a plan to do it all with technology that pretty much already on the shelf, warns that it will require many many launches but not a new rocket that is much bigger than the ones they already have--and with that assurance in mind, the Premier signs off on it. Then Korolev is go to develop Soyuz (immediately to replace Voshkod, but also the Lunar version with its better heat shield, and the clear, straightforward (if somewhat laborious) plan gets firmly set in the bureaucratic machinery. They test the new meth-lox launcher, it works, the orbital Soyuz, massing a bit more than OTL, either is go or has accidents that the planners know how to fix, and the focus of the manned orbital program is learning to manage rendezvous...Khrushchev might not announce the Soviet plan to reach the moon by 1968 until he knows all these ducks are in a row, and by then he might be ousted--but his successors will see little reason to stop it. Not only is Soviet prestige on the line, but the modular approach means that the USSR is acquiring expertise in mass manufacture of units that have other uses than being part of a Moon ship.

So the question again is, assuming boil-off can be kept low, and all the rockets the new meth-lox "R-8" orbits are themselves meth-lox, what total number of modules in, I guess, the 7-10 tonne range would be needed.

I'd try to figure it out myself but not tonight!

Despite the complexity, we know from hindsight the business of docking things together was something the Russians got good at fast; we don't know a methlox engine is possible but it seems doable considering the progress Americans made with hydrogen engines. So I think it's a plan the Russians can pull off, if they stick to it and do the necessary homework.

Assuming no boiloff (a bit bold, methane is easier to store than LH2 but still not simple), some calculations:

Req'd estimated total lunar payload:

Lunar Soyuz: 9800 kg
LK lander: 5560 kg
Total TLI payload: 15,360 kg

Tank Mass: 10,000 kg
Est. percent mass that is tank: 12.5% (based on centaur, probably optimistic for the time).
Tank dry mass: 1,250 kg
Fuel mass: 8,750 kg

TLI delta-v: 3200 m/s
ISp: 370s
Mass ratio: 2.41

1-module burnout mass: 3623 kg
1-module payload: 2373 kg (burnout mass minus mass of tank)

Number of modules required: 6.47 (round up to 7)
Number of launches: 9 (7 for modules, 1 for Soyuz, 1 for LK)

And it's probably worth mentioning that the Soviets didn't get rendezvous and docking right IOTL until 1967ish--and that just for two vehicles. This requires 8 different attempts, all fairly mission-critical. I'm up pretty late, but it doesn't seem feasible. Maybe it'll seem different in the light of day, but I'm skeptical.

As an aside I like that the Soviet Lunar Lander would have deployed a remote control rover, it's thrifty use of available resources. Is there any info on this rover, would it have been a lunakhod or something different.

e of pi said:

Assuming no boiloff (a bit bold, methane is easier to store than LH2 but still not simple), some calculations:

Req'd estimated total lunar payload:

Lunar Soyuz: 9800 kg
LK lander: 5560 kg
Total TLI payload: 15,360 kg

Tank Mass: 10,000 kg
Est. percent mass that is tank: 12.5% (based on centaur, probably optimistic for the time).
Tank dry mass: 1,250 kg
Fuel mass: 8,750 kg

TLI delta-v: 3200 m/s
ISp: 370s
Mass ratio: 2.41

1-module burnout mass: 3623 kg
1-module payload: 2373 kg (burnout mass minus mass of tank)

Number of modules required: 6.47 (round up to 7)
Number of launches: 9 (7 for modules, 1 for Soyuz, 1 for LK)

And it's probably worth mentioning that the Soviets didn't get rendezvous and docking right IOTL until 1967ish--and that just for two vehicles. This requires 8 different attempts, all fairly mission-critical. I'm up pretty late, but it doesn't seem feasible. Maybe it'll seem different in the light of day, but I'm skeptical.

Click to expand...

on boiloff, Lox/CH4 would keep in tanks approximative, for 165 day in orbit.
sadly the Stage empty weigh is much higher, the soviets and russian not build so fragile thinks like Centaur tank.
they bolded strong solid tanks from steel and Aluminum.
there early Analog rendezvous computer were pure junk, during Salut program, they made the system perfect.

*sigh* Don't design rockets while sleep-deprived. Burnout isn't fuel/mass ratio, F/(R-1). That makes it not quite as bad, you only need 3.11 tanks, not 7 with a 12.5% dry mass tank, though it sounds like more like 15% might be required given Soviet tech, which would make it more like 3.4 tanks.

Does anyone else get an Ohrwurm of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett singing this?

on Shevek23 question on methlox engine
it was the Soviet who tested it first, but in 1990s
there were modified engine who run normally with Lox Kerosine or Lox Hydrogen
the ISp on the just fuel exchange is bad isp 350 sec, while for adapted turbo-pumps and burner goes to isp 382 sec

a standart R-7 of 1960s would carry 6340 kg in a 200 km high 65° Orbit.
Methlox engine version could bring 7067 kg in that orbit.

we can boost the methlox R-8 by bigger core stage diameter and 6 booster, similar to the YaKhR-2 design
but please, without the nuclear engine on core stage...