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Soviets in space (14) lunar landing
The Soviet lunar program August 9, 1974
The Soviet rover had been delivered to the Moon three weeks earlier; it had explored Earth satellite at the pace of 1 miles per hour.Now Lunokhod 2 moved into position.
The rover cameras tilted upwards. Far above Lunokhod a star was climbing out of the eastern lunar sky, unblinking, hauling its way toward the zenith. It was a Soyuz (LOK) orbiting the Moon. It had delivered the squat LK lunar lander that was now descending toward the lunar surface, in the direction of the waiting Lunokhod.
The LK was nothing like the American Lunar Module – it fact it was rather pathetic. It was barely able to support a single guy for only six hours, and that was it.
The landing sequence was entirely different.
The Lunokhod cameras now tracked a fast descending point of light that grew bigger and bigger; the LK was coming fast. As it closed from the lunar surface the LK jettisoned the block D rocket stage that had assumed most of the descent. The spent stage flew overhead of Lunokhod and went crashing only a mile away. The LK own propulsion system then took over, kicking dust as the Lunokhod cameras filmed the scene. The diminutive lunar lander landed smoothly and the engine thrust died as moon dust fell back to the surface.
In an alternate reality Alexey Leonov would have stepped out of the LK and planted the USSR flag on the surface. Leonov may have strapped himself to the Lunokhod and driven toward another LK delivered ahead of his landing and to be used as a lifeboat.
None of this happened, however. The LK now standing on the surface was unmanned, and so was the Soyuz LOK orbiting the Moon. Both had been delivered by the N1-8L, in fact the fifth N-1 and the first to suceed.
Three hours later the LK fired its block E engine and the upper module climbed into lunar orbit, where it docked with the waiting LOK. The Soyuz jettisoned the spent lander, and then rocketed out of the Moon gravity well, shedding two more modules before the reentry capsule sunk into the Earth atmosphere. The Soyuz landed in Kazakhstan and the ground team recovered some hundreds of photographies of the lunar surface.
After ten years of harrowing efforts the entire L3 lunar stack was now flight qualified – for nothing, since the system was way too limited and perfectly unseful since Apollo had swept the lunar race in 1969. OKB-1 chief designer Mishin had fought teeth and nail for the automated mission to happen, but there would be no other lunar landing.
The mission had nonetheless been an unmitigated technical triumph, and for a brief moment the soviet leadership seriously considered reavealing its lunar program to the West.
The reason was that, the day the Soyuz landed in Kazakhstan a bolt of thunder was heard worldwide – President Nixon resigned from the U.S Presidency because of the Watergate scandal. With America in turmoil, the stunning revelation of a continuing soviet lunar program might be a major propaganda coup.
The Soviet leadership finally decided that they had nothing to lose, and, as a result, TASS issued a brief news release that stunned the world.
"Today, August 11, 1974 the Soviet Union tested an advanced manned lunar system with much better performance than Apollo. A modified, deep-space Soyuz delivered a LK lander into lunar orbit; the LK then landed near a Lunokhod rover which filmed the whole landing. The L3 lunar complex is now operational, and will led to a lunar base in 1980."
The TASS press release was accompanied with the Lunokhod video showing the LK descent, Block D jettison and crash, and the landing, together with the Block E departure three hours later. The movie was made available to Western medias on August 13, 1974. And truth was, the propaganda coup worked beyond the Soviet leadership wildest dreams; the video perfectly, negatively and shockingly echoed another stunning picture – that of Nixon climbing aboard Marine One, the helicopter to carry him away from the White House.
August 15 1974
The lunar program was now dead, although it had ended with a huge bang. The decrees were on the way; the Soviet space program was reorganizing, although at bureaucratic pace. Glushko had continued hammering Ustinov, day after day, week after week. Glushko even played Mishin own argument: he had had, too, an alliance with Chelomei in the recent past. Considering the hate Ustinov had for Chelomei, at first it looked like a suicide from Glushko. But, as usual, the machiavellian rocket engine designer had a plan.
Glushko had designed massive engines for the never-were Chelomei lunar rocket: the huge, brute-looking UR-700, the great sister of the Proton. That the UR-700 was a competitor to the N-1 explained a lot of things. Glushko never had a single hope the UR-700 would be build someday, even with the equally massive N-1s exploding at every launch atempt. What mattered was the engine itself; Glushko hoped that someday, someone would notice his big RD-270 on the bench, and ask him to design an upgraded N-1 around it. The RD-270 had become Glushko vengence against the N-1, Korolev and Mishin. The alliance with Chelomei was a mere detail in that process.
As of 1974, a handful of RD-270s were running fine on the bench, producing immense amount of thrust; had the N-1F been powered by them, the first stage would have had only five or six engines instead of a staggering thirty, a mind-boggling number that caused so much troubles.
Obviously launch vehicles assembled of a limited number of serially manufactured stages and boosters were cheaper than missile-derived rockets. Attempts to develop a rocket family from the lightest class to the heaviest according to such a modular principle were repeatedly made in the USSR. This applied to Chelomei UR-100/200/500/700/900 and Korolev N-1/N-11/N-111 programs, the later expanded by Mishin and Chertok.
Standardization of the rocket fleet: that was the thing. For two decades such a modular family of rockets had been Korolev, Yangel, Chelomei and Glushko holly grail. So far politics had prevented that, together with the hellish, unending fights among soviet rocket designers. The result was a rather disparate fleet of small, medium and heavy civilian boosters. Tsyklon was Yangel, Soyuz, Korolev, and Proton, Chelomei. And of course the N-1 was Mishin's baby, and every rocket had a different diameter and engines and tooling. It cost the Soviet Union an arm and a leg, plus the Tsyklon and Proton propellants were extremely dangerous and dirty.
Glushko certainly agreed that a modular family of boosters would be a fine thing, but, if it was to derive from the ongoing N-1, to him it would be a lost cause. Now, if he could replace the bloody Kuznestov engines with its cherished RD-270...
Then Ustinov warned him about a different, although related, program he would have to deal with if he took control of Chelomei empire.
"The National Reconnaissance Office has no less than four different space reconnaissance systems. The KH-9 scans broad swaths spanning ten thousands of kilometers at medium resolution. The KH-11 will do a mostly similar job with a huge advantage; it will beam the photos electronically and instantly. Even more worrying, however, are their dual use systems - half civilian, half military. Keldysh is pretty much convinced that NASA Agena space tug and Big Gemini are only a cover for military operations. The space tug is nothing more than a civilian KH-8 Gambit 3; as for that Big Gemini, it is nothing less than a return to the KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory.
Both can take pictures with an extreme resolution of four inches. They can see details of our tanks, aircrafts, ships, ground infrastructures as small as ten centimeters ! Not only their Navy and Air Force is probing our airspace. They are also harassing us in space; there had been case of Agena manoeuvering in the vicinity of our satellites - a reminder of the sixty and their Satellite Interceptor program. They had an Agena outfitted with a camera and a radar to destroy our space assets.
Someday one of their military Big Gemini missions may have an orbit that flew over Moscow on a regular basis. Wouldn't this be a clear message ? Selective political assassination. Say the Politburo is standing outside on May Day and a single nuclear warhead or laser could take them all out…. These things are overhead, they're invisible, but with zero warning they could zap us."
Glushko shivered. Ustinov is getting very paranoid these days.
"Andropov and Keldysh are convinced the Americans are preparing a surprise nuclear attack against us. I personally believe their Agena tug is a cover for a new anti-satellite program. That why I think we should retain the IS system"
"And how does this concern myself ?" Glushko asked rather naively.
"Well Chelomei covers our anti-satellite program - Istrebitel Sputnikov, the destroyer of satellites."
"I thought that program had been killed by the 1972 ABM treaty, or at least put on hold."
"Nope. Recently Breznhev ordered testing to continue. Do you remember what I told you about the space shuttle ? That the American planned to launch it into polar orbit from an Air Base, and Keldysh was led to believe it was to be a nuclear bomber."
"Ah yes, I vaguely remember that."
"Well, had this been the case, the current Istrebitel Sputnikov system could have delt with it, since both only work in low Earth orbit."
"But the shuttle is dead."
"Indeed. Yet it has been somewhat replaced by the Agena, with the difference the Agena can fly much higher, up to the Moon if needed."
"Or into Molnyia orbit" Glushko added.
"Spot on. Thus the American can blind us by saturating space with space tugs. How could we distinguish civilian and military Agenas ?"
"So the I.S system has now to match the Agena capabilities..."
"Up to geostationary orbit and beyond."
"We will need a new engine capable of multiplefirings in space; a propulsion systems for prolonged operations in space, such as the Mars or Lunar probes." Glushko said.
"We want more." Ustinov said. "We want an unprecedented capability for such a large engine to make as much as 75 firings in space. Ideally the system could be launched on alert, much like a nuclear missile, and in fact a nuclear missile would be the carrier."
"A missile like the UR-100, for example."
"Exactly. Another product from Chelomei, thus your shop. Understood ? You will takeover the Breez upper stage and turn it into a space tug similar, or superior, to the American Agena system."