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Soviets in space (2)
Here come the Soviet space program...
April 2, 1969
Baikonur, Kazakhstan It rained hydrazine and nitrogen tetraoxide; a deadly, corrosive and toxic rain. The 2M unmanned Mars landers and orbiters had been blown to bits, or even dust. Two hundredths of a second after launch, one of the Proton's first stage engines carrying them had caught fire and exploded.
The robust rocket just shrugged and continued to fly. When twenty-five seconds later destruction and gravity prevailed, the doomed Proton pitched over and began to fly horizontally like some crazy missile.
The eerie vision of a monster rocket flying in the wrong direction did last a mere fifteen seconds, after what the unfortunate Proton impacted the planet about two miles from the launch pad. The huge explosion shook the ground for miles and was followed by a menacing mushroom cloud.
And then disaster struck The wind blew the cloud in the wrong direction; toxic propellant was blown back across the launch complex ! A panic-stricken military launch comission ran for cover: the rain was acid, corrosive and extremely toxic. But there was nowhere to run, although by pure luck noone died.
Once the dust (and toxic propellants) settled, the scale of the disaster apeared. The pad was undamaged, yet the nasty chemical compounds made it unusable, and there was no way of cleaning the mess. Unless, of course, mother nature rain washed the propellant away. But the rain did not came in time, and Mars was lost for 26 months; it would return only in 1971.
With Proton grounded and its pad paralyzed, there would be no Soviet robots to the Moon and Mars for months. Proton was the second most powerful booster in the inventory behind the huge N-1 build to land men on the Moon. Unfortunately, the N-1 was no better than the Proton, reliability-wise. The first had blown in February in a truly huge explosion starting what would decidedly be a very bad year in Baikonur history. Although the Proton failure was nearly as bad, the worse was to come.
July 3, 1969 Baikonur, Kazakhstan
Only seconds into its flight, the second N-1 lunar rocket lost all of its thirty engines and fell back on its launch pad like some furious asteroid.
Three thousand tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen detonated into an immense blast which rocked the steppe as if a nuclear bomb had exploded. A white-hot fireball illuminated the barren landscape like a man-made sun. The launch gantry was simply vaporized, the blast melting it down to its foundations.
Such was the scale of the fire that it draw attention of American intelligence satellites usually tasked with monitoring nuclear explosions elsewhere in Kazakhstan.
Powerful shockwaves extended in every direction; walls of air as thick as concrete that instantly killed hundreds of birds and animals, busted windows and engineers eardrums and flattened everything standing for kilometers.
Vasily Mishin mouth gapped as a shock wave nearly tipped a twenty ton bus parked nearby. They were eight kilometer away !
It was a cataclysm of truly biblical scale, although no-one died. The lesson had been learned in blood. A decade earlier, after a technical glitch stage 2 of a ballistic missile had fired too early - with stage 1 still under it, and the whole rocket still on the launch pad ! The resulting colossal explosion had literally incinerated 150 people, famously vaporizing Marshall Nedeline that had had the unfortunate idea to sat near the launch pad on a wooden chair.
That day of 1969, from a safe distance of eight kilometers N-1 chief engineer Vasily Mishin watched the disaster unfold desultorily. Gone was the very last chance to beat the Americans to the Moon. Apollo 8 round the Moon flight last december had already wiped out the circumlunar Zond; now last hopes of a landing were burning fiercely. Race to the Moon was lost.
What would the future be ?
If the damn N-1 could made working someday - that was a big if, considering today's fireworks - then there would be three directions.
It could be Mars: just like that old movie Mishin had seen many times in his youth - Aelita.
Or it might be a Moon base - making Mishin's mentor Serguey Korolev dreams real.
Or they could build some giant space station down in earth orbit, an assembly of massive modules thrown by N-1s.
Mishin did not knew. The soviet space program laid in shambles. He really missed Serguei Korolev.
Since 1945 the soviet space program had been marred with epic rivalries. Two decades before Korolev had battled Yangel, then the two had been sidetracked by Khrushchev favourite rocket designer, Chelomey, obviously in disgrace since the fall of his mentor.
Manipulating everybody were motorist Valentin Glushko and rocket minister Dmitryi Ustinov.
Mishin had succeeded Korolev after his death, with Yangel quietly retiring from the shark pool. As for the survivors - Mishin and Chelomei, Ustinov and Glushko: both sides just hated each other, fighting teeth and nails, sometimes forging alliances that never lasted very long.
The Soviet lunar program had been a mess. There were two manned lunar ships, Zond and the LOK. There was a manned lunar lander, the LK; an unmanned robot to bring samples back, Luna; and an unmanned rover, Lunokhod.
Zond and the LOK were both sons of Soyuz, but they had nothing in common past that. Zond was a truncated Soyuz light enough to turn a loop around the Moon after a launch by a Proton – their most powerful rocket beside the N-1.
When this rocket would be ready it would launch another, bigger Soyuz, the LOK, and the LK lunar lander. But that was years into the future, as demonstrated by today explosion.
Zond was really a very limited program; unlike Apollo 8 they could not even enter lunar orbit. The Proton was just not powerful enough. Still, had a Zond flown manned around the Moon, say, in the fall of 1968, with or without orbit the Soviets could have claimed to be the first... near Earth satellite.
Of course what ultimately mattered was to touch down on the surface, and there the Americans could not be beaten.
At least the Soviet Union would have scored a symbolic victory !
But Zond had decided otherwise. After a string of failures they had had a very successfull flight in September 1968; truth be told the Soviet Union had been the first in history to shoot living beings around the Moon... But the livings were merely tortoises and worms, a far cry from Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and David Anders. Still, the American trio could have been beaten to the Moon somewhere in October or November or even early in December; they had the launch windows for that, and very motivated astronauts like spacewalker Leonov.
Fortunately they had had not tried it. The next two Zonds returned to their usual failures, which would have killed anyone onboard; and now Zond was good for nothing. Still, Lenin birthday was to be celebrated next April... perhaps they could shot a couple of cosmonaut around the Moon for the occasion. But sure enough, each Apollo landing made the Zond flybys more pathetic...