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Soviets in space (4)
a bit of fun with the Soviet space program. It's only a beginning !
August 16, 1971 Moscow Our lunar program is officially dead - but does this man realize it ?
Dmitryi Ustinov asked himself as he listened Vasily Mishin speech. Ustinov did not really hated Mishin - not as much as he scorned Chelomey.
Much like the rest of the soviet space establishment, he was very pissed-off by Mishin repeated failures - four dead astronauts, one space station and three N-1 blown up in five years.
But they were not talking about the past, not today.
No-one knew what the Americans were up to; and to the Soviets that was as much disturbing as Mishin blunders.
Since they had lost initiative in the Gemini days, the Soviets just reacted to American plans by forging similar projects.
That meant that every proposal of the now defunct Space Task Group - Moon, Mars or space station - had a soviet counterpart.
The Soviet Union had been beaten on the Moon. They had started three years late; they had only half of the funds required; and their own Saturn V, the N-1, had been a miserable failure so far. Because of bureaucratic inertia two years after the race was lost the Soviet lunar program - the L3 - was still running, although in a rather uncertain direction and much like a beheaded chicken.
Mishin continued his rambling.
"The Soviet space station effort would start off with Salyut, then move to Chelomey's military Almaz, and then finally migrate to MKBS-1 in the mid-1970s and MKBS-2 by the end of the decade - Zvezda first, then Zarya.
I already have plans to launch Zvezda first components on N1 boosters 10L and 11L, perhaps amid the initial lunar exploration phase of the L3 or L3M project."
Damn - he his still talking about the old, clunky L3. And he wants to integrate Chelomey Almaz in a line of space stations leading to the MKBS. Should I sack this guy ?
The future of the Soviet space program ended as essentially tailored to what would NASA do; there were contingency options for Mars, the Moon, and space stations.
By contrast, Ustinov briefly thought, there had been very little work done on a soviet space shuttle; but all things considered that was NASA worst option of alls, the one that made the least sense...