Small Steps, Giant Leaps - Part 8B: Живопись (Painting)
[N1 Booster 8L is erected at site 110/38 in preparation for Rodina 4, January 1972. Image credit: AEB Digital - used with permission]
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January 22nd, 1972
Rodina 4 T-02:55:00
The old bus clattered along the unpaved road. Visible in glimpses through the drifting snow, Site 110 loomed, illuminated ghostly pale by bright floodlights. At the center of it all, a single, bright white spire- their destination, and their ride.
Eventually, the rattle of the vehicle’s ill-fitting windows quieted, as it came to a stop at a predetermined point. The two cosmonauts were ushered out, shrouded in heavy coats over their flight suits. Valeri clutched the fur-lined hood closer, shrouding himself against the wind.
The ritual was performed quietly, almost solemnly, the sounds of the whistling wind and of the fat, heavy snowflakes impacting the gathered snow on the ground around them the only noise to break the silence. Alexei went first, of course, and Valeri respectfully looked away; on his turn, the pilot couldn’t help but feel as if someone were peering over his shoulder, even with Alexei facing away- the spectral form of their booster, perhaps, looked on as he completed one of the final rituals before setting off. It was the last in a complex chain, all linked back to the first to walk this path- Yuri Gagarin. They’d visited his grave in the Kremlin wall, planted a tree in a grove near Baikonur, even seen his office - still preserved, as it had been since his death in 1968. And now, as Gagarin had done before Vostok, they too had pissed on the back right tire of their transfer bus. Having no desire to remain standing around in a snowstorm, the crew of Rodina 4 quickly climbed back aboard the bus, which continued its rough trek onwards.
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T-02:10:00
There it stood- like a gleaming white marble cathedral, all Gothic angles and intricate trusswork, the mighty N1 booster towered into the clouds, seeming from this low vantage entirely unphased by the weather. Valeri took a passing glance at the many clustered engines, poking out from the first stage’s wide base and just visible over the lip of the pad’s recessed middle - those 30 engines were the key. Without their cooperation, the mission would be getting nowhere fast.
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The cosmonauts climbed up into the elevator with a collection of ground crew, savoring what would be their last steps on bare soil for some time. With a creak and a snap, the doors slammed shut and the motor pulled them upwards.
The rocket rolled past the windows, painted pure white. On closer inspection, the imposing machine appeared much less of a solid monolith. It seemed almost absurd that they would entrust their lives to this contraption, so obviously fragile and delicate, rivets and welds tracing across its skin, dents and wrinkles visible in the metalwork under the gloss of white. This was the truth of all manned spaceflight, really; grand visions of mighty and powerful rockets, held together in actuality by very careful engineering and quite a bit of luck. Valeri said nothing - they were in this now, for better or worse.
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T-01:55:00
Grinning technicians helped them through the hatch and into the LOK, shaking their hands as they went. Valeri went first, climbing down a ladder past supply bags and their two stowed spacesuits in the Orbital Module before dropping into the Descent Module and settling into his couch. After Alexei joined him, the technicians sealed up the hatches - first that between the Orbital Module and the Descent Module, leaving the crew isolated, and then - now out of sight, but still able to be heard - the Orbital Module’s main hatch. Supply bags were scattered around the cramped interior of the Descent Module, holding everything they would need for the one-week mission.
With a few clicks, the two men fastened their straps. Now all they had to do was wait.
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T-00:43:00
"Rodina, we are beginning propellant loading. The Launch Escape System is now armed."
"Understood, Control. Everything is looking good from here."
The N1 groaned and hissed as kerosene and oxygen snaked in from feed lines on the launch tower. It almost seemed to come alive, straining to be released from the chains of gravity, to pierce the snowy sky above and climb into the heavens.
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T-0:01:00
"Rodina, the situation is nominal at 1 minute. Everyone in the control bunker is very proud to be working with you, and we are wishing you good luck and success."
"Thank you, Control. We hope to not let you down!"
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The seconds ticked down. Over the comm, a launch controller’s voice counted in sequence.
At 6 seconds, the booster’s 30 engines flared to life far below.
“5.”
“4.”
Valeri felt a hand clap on his shoulder. Over the growing rumble of the engines, Alexei looked over to him with a twinkle in his eye. The two exchanged a look, before affixing their eyes back on their respective consoles.
“3.”
“2.”
“1.”
With a thunderous, many-throated roar, the N1 lifted off from the pad and began its upward climb. Feeling the kick of slow, building acceleration in his back, Valeri found himself smiling, and then laughing.
As the rocket pushed upwards away from Site 110, Valeri Nikolaevich Kubasov shouted with elation- one last connection to the start of it all, to tie it all together.
“Poyekhali!”
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[The Rodina 4 stack separates from its Blok V third stage and settles into a parking orbit around Earth after a nominal ascent. Image credit: AEB Digital - used with permission]
January 26th, 1972
Rodina 4 MET 4 days, 6 hours
The hatch was open. Outside, the battered grey surface of the Moon slid past below an infinite expanse of black.
The time had come.
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The trip to the Moon had been, despite the extraordinary nature of the mission as a whole, relatively uneventful. Launch had been within normal parameters, with only a single engine failure out of 30, very late into the first stage burn. After trans-lunar injection, it was simply a multi-day coast out to the Moon, keeping the spacecraft in order all the while. An issue with the waste disposal controls, a faulty reading from a fuel cell at one point in day 2 - the same sorts of little things Rodina 1 and 3 had experienced. Alexei and Valeri had been sure to pack something to read in the downtime.
Arrival in lunar orbit had been similarly nominal, repeating Rodina 3 to the letter. They’d spent a sleep period in orbit, and now, having awoken for the day and gone about final preparations, it was time for Commander Leonov to perform his EVA transfer before the two spacecraft were to separate. The two cosmonauts had entered the Orbital Module, and helped one another to don their respective spacesuits. They looked a strangely mis-matched pair; Valeri, in his Orlan spacesuit meant for orbit, all khaki tans and off-whites with blue stripes; and Alexei, in his Krechet lunar suit, done up in white with red accents- white for its thermal reflectivity, and red, of course, for the USSR, her flag emblazoned proudly on both the suit’s arm and the middle of the integrated backpack/entry hatch.
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For the second time in his life, Alexei Leonov found himself staring out the hatch of a spacecraft at the infinite, deadly void of space.
He couldn’t help but think back to the first time - the first of
any time, on Voskhod 2. He’d bumbled out into the unknown, leaving the cramped spacecraft’s flimsy inflatable airlock and floating aimlessly for some 12 minutes above the Earth. It’d been beautiful; life-changing, really- but it’d also come close to being life-ending. A poorly-designed EVA suit, overpressurized to the point of ballooning outward; a risky maneuver, bleeding off air to dangerous levels just to be able to re-enter the airlock. Not to mention the hatch issues, the bungled re-entry, the night spent hiding out in the capsule in the freezing taiga during wolf mating season with pistol close at hand-
“Commander? Alexei?”
Leonov snapped out of his reverie at once. It was 1972, not 1965; spacewalks were now a well-practiced part of space missions, with more than half a decade of refinement and numerous improvements in spacesuit design. He wasn’t even the first person to perform this very maneuver - Yevgeny Khrunov had done it on the test flight last year.
Carefully, Alexei moved to exit the hatch. The Krechet lunar suit was quite comfortable compared to his last EVA experience, and significantly more maneuverable in the limbs- and a hard torso section, he hoped, would stop any sort of ballooning. Head-first, the Commander climbed out of the Soyuz and proceeded slowly, methodically down the side of the craft, moving and re-attaching his safety tether as he went. Mounted on a point near the bottom of the Descent Module, a long, telescoping boom stretched down towards his ultimate goal - the LK, hidden away beneath a protective black fairing below the Soyuz.
Reaching the end of the boom and affixing himself to a well-placed handhold, Leonov wasted no time in his next task. Pulling aside a panel in the fairing and flinging it off into the void, Alexei got the first proper look at his lunar craft- the area immediately surrounding the hatch, at least. White-painted structural elements, silvery-white thermal blanketing- an elegant design, one he looked forward to seeing in full on the lunar surface.
After climbing aboard his lander and securing the hatch, Commander Leonov spent the next hour powering up the little spacecraft, repressurizing the cabin, and verifying all its systems were functioning ahead of separation. Over the far side, the comm crackled to life as his LOK Pilot’s voice came to him from hardly a few meters away back aboard the Soyuz.
“
Yantar to
Rubin, how do you read?”
“I am reading you nominally,
Yantar.”
As with Rodina 3, Rodina 4 had chosen two separate callsigns for their individual spacecraft, for use during lunar operations. Alexei elected to call his lander
Rubin (“Ruby”) - the callsign Vladimir Komarov had used for his spacecraft on the ill-fated Soyuz 1 - as a tribute to a fallen comrade. Georgy Dobrovolsky, the mission’s backup LOK Pilot, suggested
Yantar (“Amber”) for the LOK, after another precious gem.
And so here Alexei Leonov now sat aboard
Rubin, preparing to leave
Yantar behind for the time being.
[Rodina 4 LK Rubin separates from LOK Yantar in lunar orbit before landing. Image credit: AEB Digital]
Rodina 4 MET 4 days, 9 hours
Landing on the Moon was, all at once, terrifying and mundane. For much of the descent, the cosmonaut was there simply to verify that the computer was working correctly and make minor adjustments. The Blok D upper stage performed most of the initial burn to slow the LK down to a landing trajectory before separation; from there,
Rubin’s main engine slowed the vehicle to a hover at around 110 meters above the surface.
It was only now, hovering above the Moon in this split-second before he either had to land or abort, that Alexei Leonov realized just how dangerous this all truly was.
He was facing down a rough, unknown landscape. A sharp-edged crater maybe 50 meters in diameter ahead and to his left, in the direction of the lander’s current target site; across the surface, scattered boulders and rubble seeming to spray outwards from it in all directions.
Rubin didn’t have the fuel to fly over and look for safer ground, like the American Apollos could; the best option Alexei could see was to pull back away from the crater, and land more or less directly below where he currently hovered, on the outer edges of the ejecta blanket. It was that, or abort.
Taking in all this information in a short moment, Leonov reacted with practiced quickness from months of training- he grabbed the control stick, pitching the little lander back to align with the ground below. His field of view out his round porthole window pitched with it, like a ship on a stormy sea; first up, and then back down, revealing the spot below that he was now descending towards at a slow, but increasingly more urgent, pace. The surface there was relatively clear, save for a few small rocks that he could easily avoid. There was a flat area in the middle of it all, right where he’d hoped- this was it.
“Control, I am in terminal descent. I have a landing site.”
Rubin’s engine throttled up to slow the terminal descent, turning the gentle flow of dust across the surface into a streaming blizzard of ashen grey, radiating out from under the lander and obscuring the surface just as he’d had gotten his first good look.
Alexei didn’t feel contact with the lunar surface, but he sure as hell felt what came next - The whole vehicle jolted as, automatically, the main engine cut and four small solid rocket motors mounted on the base of the lander fired to ensure that
Rubin was planted firmly on the ground and wouldn’t tip over.
The cosmonaut exhaled- he hadn’t realized, but he’d been unconsciously holding his breath in anticipation of touchdown.
“Control,
Rubin. I have landed successfully.”
Then, everything was silent and still. The vibrations of the engine through the body of the lander were gone; Alexei was acutely aware of how heavy his spacesuit felt, even in the low gravity, after 4 days in space. There was no time to rest, however; landing was only the start of operations.
Rodina 4 MET 4 days, 11 hours
The cosmonaut carefully climbed down his LK's ladder.
It had been a long, hard road to the Moon. The training, the development, the testing, all of it pushing the space program to its absolute limits. They had overcome the back-to-back disasters of the Chief Designer's death and the deadly failure of Soyuz 1, the initial failure and setbacks with the N1 booster- everything. And now, he was here.
Leonov took another tentative step back, down the slanted ladder towards the surface below. For ground control’s benefit more than his own, He had tried to maintain some amount of running commentary through his time alone on the mission- though, he found himself getting lost in focus, seconds and minutes passing between status reports without a word said.
"Control, everything is proceeding nominally. I am able to maintain my balance on the ladder without issue. The surface has many small rocks scattered, but I will have no trouble stepping over them.”
“Understood. Status is nominal.”
[Rodina 4 Commander Alexei Leonov exits LK Rubin to begin his solo moonwalk. Image credit: AEB Digital]
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The last portion of the ladder was bent at a very low angle relative to the surface. Choosing to bypass it entirely, Leonov shifted to the side, stepping the last short distance to the surface and planting one boot, then another, in the dust. He let go of the ladder and turned, then took a few careful steps away from the lander and turned back to face it. Without the ladder to lean on for support, Alexei could feel just how offset his center of gravity was as he moved - the bulk of his spacesuit’s weight was behind him, mounted in the backpack; with each step, he had to counteract a natural lean backwards to avoid tipping. It wasn’t dangerous, but he might lose his balance momentarily if he weren’t thinking about it.
Alexei looked up and down at the lander-
his lander, for now.
Rubin was a unique-looking thing, all metal struts and protruding antennas; her skin of wrinkled thermal covering with a silver-white sheen, like the delicate iridescent wings of a moth. The television camera mounted above the hatch stared down blankly at him, its polished lens reflecting the surface as it transmitted his image back across the gulf of space to the untold many watching across the world.
He realized he hadn't spoken anything from the surface yet. If the American Virgil Grissom was any example, these first words would no doubt be overblown in their importance; recorded for all time, written in newspapers, flown on banners in the Red Square, engraved on statues lionizing the great Soviet hero-
‘Breathe, Alexei.’ The man had to mentally remind himself, exhaling an unconsciously-held breath. Now wasn’t the time to start contemplating the distortions of propaganda- All the time in the world for that later. What mattered now was the mission, being here. He focused on what felt real; the ever-present growling sound of his suit’s cooling equipment, the weight of the bulky integrated backpack pulling him even in the low gravity, the soft reassuring rush of life-giving air against his face. Turning and looking out from his man-shaped bubble of safety, the landscape before him was so very unlike anything he’d ever seen. The color palette, his artist’s eye could observe even through the tint of his outer visor, was entirely foreign to that of home - Earth was blue skies and green hills and brown mud and misty grey cloud; the Moon was grey, yes, but not the cold, wet grey of a rainy morning, nor the warm, dry grey of sun-weathered concrete. It was a kind of stark grey-on-black that was hard to describe, all at once lacking in color and containing a million subtleties of hue, a tableau of alien ashen tones forming a landscape both enigmatic and all-telling.
The words came to Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov almost without intention, a thought welling up to the surface.
"This strange world is more beautiful than any painting can capture."
[LK Rubin and LOK Yantar reunite in lunar orbit after the first crewed Soviet lunar landing. Image credit: AEB Digital - used with permission]
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The January 26th, 1972 lunar landing of Rodina 4 made front-page headlines across the world. An estimated worldwide audience upwards of 70 million watched and listened to the live television and radio broadcast of the moonwalk, and millions more - particularly in the United States - would see the footage on news broadcasts in the following days. For the Soviet Union, it was a reassurance of their own technological might; a display that they were by no means “behind” in the race to explore outer space.
Commander Alexei Leonov spent just over 6 hours on the lunar surface, with 2 hours walking on the Moon, and another 4 resting aboard the lander before liftoff. While on the surface, he planted the Soviet flag, placed a small plaque commemorating the two cosmonauts (Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin) and four American astronauts (Theodore Freeman, Charles Bassett II and Elliot See Jr., and Clifton Williams Jr.) who’d died in service of space exploration,[6] collected samples, and placed a series of small scientific instruments including a laser retroreflector and a seismometer powered by a small unfolding solar panel assembly.[7] On returning to orbit,
Rubin rendezvoused and docked with
Yantar and Leonov performed a second transfer EVA carrying the lunar samples.
Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov returned to Earth on January 29th as new Soviet icons, showered with parades and honors; personally congratulated by Brezhnev himself, and both awarded Hero of the Soviet Union for a second time.[8] But even as the Union celebrated the triumph of Rodina 4, rivalries between designers and political pressure from above loomed like dark clouds over the Soviet space program, as questions of its future in a post-Moon landing world arose...
