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Soviets in space (13)
May 16, 1974

"It isn’t ours to divine the future."

Boris Chertok was standing on a platform, facing a sea of inquiring looks from a large part of OKB-1 workforce.

"But from the future, which becomes the present, we can examine the past. Assessing the behavior of individual people and staffs, one realizes that we really did make history.

If during the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957 we still did not fully recognize the value of such events, then just five years later—from state leaders and chief designers to thousands of engineers, workers, and soldiers who worked in design bureaus, laboratories, shops, and firing ranges, who to this day remain unknown to his-tory— they understood that they were making history. They understood this just as clearly as a soldier during the Great Patriotic War recognized that he was defending his fatherland and giving up his life, not for foreign, unknown interests, but for his own nation, city, village, and family.

Today we know the history that we are making. We try to plan the future so as to correct the past. Everything in the plans, schedules, and deadlines is broken down year by year, month by month, and day by day. The workday is planned down to the minute. The preparation, launch, and flight of a rocket is calculated and forecast with an accuracy down to tenths of a second.

Having been in the recent past, which just yesterday was our future, and once again looking into this future, which has become the past, we, like chess players, feel vexed as a result of our bad decisions and sorted through dozens of options in order to find the one that would bring victory. My own notes, the stories of friends and acquaintances, and rare authoritative memoirs of that time have corroborated individual events and what at that time seemed like everyday life.

Now, looking at you, my comrades and myself from today’s perspective, I realize that over the last fifteen years we have been involved in tremendous achievements. Episodes that seemed workaday are now great events. However, strict standards forbid the historian describing the past from reflecting on the pages of his work.

So I begg the question: what would have been, if…. However, the majority of people allow themselves to reflect about what would have been if an hour, a day, a month, or a year ago he or she had acted in one way rather than the other. Before beginning the next game, a chess player who has lost a match must thoroughly analyze the preceding game, find his mistake, and finish playing that match with himself proceeding from the assumption that he has made a stronger move.

It is more difficult for a field commander, who knows full well how he must act to prevent his troops from taking a drubbing and to save thousands of lives, but despite his predictions he is ordered “from the top” to act otherwise. There are many examples of this in Marshal Zhukov’s Remembrances and Contemplations [Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya].

Today, we can still turn the tables in the Moon race. Four failed N-1 launches have provided a wealth of experience for the creation of a reliable launch vehicle. Preparation is under way for the launch of N-1 number eight with new reusable engines, which have undergone technological firing tests. Hundreds of modifications have been performed on the launch vehicle based on the results of the previous four launches and also devised “just in case….”

"With the N-1, we have tremendous opportunities for interplanetary flight and other less fantastic projects. That rocket has to live, and it will live. The future lunar base, the enormous MKBS space station, manned expeditions to Mars, the space radio telescopes with antennas hundreds of meters in diameter, and the communications satellites weighing many tons stationkeeping in geostationary orbit - all of this in thoroughly tangible designs is associated with the N-1.

I have proposed our leadership that in the future the N-1 project should be implemented in two phases.

First, on the basis of the second and third stages, produce a separate N-11 rocket with a launch mass of 750 tons, capable of inserting a satellite with a mass up to 25 tons into Earth orbit. Then, and only then, produce the actual super-heavy three-stage N-1 rocket with a launch mass of 2,200 tons.
"In 1962, and despite its obvious logic, this proposal to begin operations on the N-11 ultimately found no support from expert commissions, from the military, or in subsequent decrees. In history, one should not resort to the “what ifs,” but I am not a historian and I can allow myself to conjecture how everything would have unfolded if our 1962 proposal had been enacted.

"There is no doubt that we would have produced the N-11 considerably sooner than the first N-1 flight model. We could have conducted developmental testing on the second and third stages of the rocket on the firing rigs near Zagorsk. The launch systems that were constructed for the N-1 would have been simplified to be used for the N-11 during the first phase. We missed a real opportunity to produce an environmentally clean launch vehicle for a 25-metric-ton payload. To this day, world cosmonautics has a very acute need for such a clean launch vehicle.

In 1962 that idea interfered with Chelomei’s proposals for the UR-500 and Yangel’s proposals for the R-56. Today is different, and we will build that N-11 for a 30-ton payload. The military need this launch vehicle first and foremost for the crucial intelligence-gathering purposes of the Ministry of Defense in Sun-synchronous orbits. As for the N-1, the uprated launch vehicle could fly in a year and apayload needs to be prepared for it. We have received a unique opportunity: to correct - albeit late, but radically—the errors that Korolev, Mishin, and we, their deputies, have committed.

"With the N-1 we are standing at the treshold of a bold future in space.

"8 to 10 launches of the upgraded N-1 and we will have a base for six persons on the Moon. Comrades Barmin and Bushuyev are drafting plans for a lunar base known as Zvezda or Barmingrad.

"The Academy of Sciences is developing the design of a space radio interferometer. The spacecraft, equipped with a uniquely precise parabolic antenna with a diameter of 25 meters, has to be inserted into elliptical orbits with an apogee of up to 150,000 kilometers, and only the N-1 rocket is capable of doing this. Our radio interferometer will make it possible to study the finest structure of the universe right down to the “last boundaries of creation.” The universe is ready to reveal its secrets !

"The first spacecraft was inserted into geosynchronous orbit (GEO) in the 1960s. Since that time, a total of 300 spacecraft have been inserted there, and each year, on aver-age, 20 to 25 new ones are inserted. Geostationary orbit, as the most advantageous location for placing satellite communications systems, will exhaust its resources in the next 20 years. Strict international competition is unavoidable.

"One possible solution could be the creation in GEO of a heavy multipurpose platform. With coverage of nearly 1/3 of the surface of the planet, such a multipurpose platform will be able to replace dozens of modern communications satellites. The platform will require a high-capacity solar power plant. To support dozens of modern communica-tions satellites, the platform will require a capacity of 500 to 1,000 kilowatts. Large parabolic antennas or active phased arrays are capable of creating any given value of equivalent isotropically radiated power at Earth’s surface. The capability of placing hundreds of relays for various ranges on a heavy geostationary platform makes it possible for the owners of such platforms to sell all types of communications trunks for any region on Earth. Heavy multipurpose platforms will be commercially advantageous and will facilitate the global information rapprochement of peoples. Humankind needs the development and creation of such geostationary systems not in the distant future, but in the next 25 to 30 years. We developed a real design for the world’s first heavy universal platform for GEO. The mass of the proposed platform, according to the design, will be 20 tons and of course only the N-1 can launch that.

What will the future be is anyone guess. But whatever happens backed in production by its smaller siblings the N-1 will make that future bold and impressive."

Chertok concluded his speech under a thunder of applause and cheers from the crowd.
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