Hello! I don't know how I missed this timeline over the past month but I've spent the past several days catching up, and of course I'm subscribing!
I find the POD pretty plausible and the decision to develop N-11 for the reasons given quite reasonable. It strikes me as quite in his character that Nikita Khrushchev would commit the USSR to the moon landing goal; and that having done so the Soviet space establishment (or rather, Korolev's faction of it) would set about quickly determining how they were going to do it. Once that effort had a couple years' solid progress committed to it, Brezhnev et al would find it harder to pull the plug, and would ride with it, unless some terrible setback discredited Korolev's faction.
People who know my opinions here will understand that I appreciate the N-11 winning out over Proton because I hate hypergolic fuels, at least in the function of the main launching propellants. (I understand why they are nevertheless used in all manned spacecraft to date, for orbital maneuvering. Like Korolev though I think there is a difference between less than ten tons of the stuff, even right next to the crew modules, versus many hundreds or even thousands!
So yay for the kerosene-oxygen N series!
That said, I was rather disturbed to see the cold-blooded Soviet assessment--that not only did the N-1 have a 50 percent failure rate in the early launches--so did the N-11.
But it certainly makes sense that such an ambitious project would have some serious teething issues and it is gratifying to see that they stuck with it, having adopted a more methodical approach and a slightly more modest goal for the N-1 than OTL, the latter being driven of course by something akin to panic.
Presumably, although clearly not approaching NASA standards of fastidiousness, the Soviet engineers have perforce adopted some rudiments of quality control that were unfortunately to remain alien to their OTL programs. Otherwise they'd have a 100 percent failure rate as per OTL! (In the big N rockets that is--obviously they managed a higher success rate with the R-7 series derivatives OTL, and more success than failure with the several rival forms of heavy lifters such as Proton and eventually Energia).
Being someone prone to Soviet-wanking (albeit I do like to insist this go hand in hand with a more humane regime evolving, and doubt the USSR could have lasted longer than it did OTL without progress on both economic and civil fronts) I would have some hope that the greater success due to greater discipline in the Soviet manned (and unmanned, noting the success of the Mars probes) space program might somehow propagate to improve the civil economy and thus prolong or even preserve the Soviet Union indefinitely. But that is admittedly a long shot; it doesn't seem likely since the space program is a regime priority and special case. They would have to learn to be less wasteful and more efficient despite being lavished with resources to be this successful but still the lessons learned might not be deemed applicable to general cases, and even if they are the bureaucratic corruption that led to the failure of the regime OTL would tend to resist such reforms; with Brezhnev in charge lazy cronyism is in the driver's seat.
The unfortunate neglect of women cosmonauts strikes me as an example of that; if the USSR were enjoying (if that is quite the right word) astringent winds of change, there would be more and stronger advocates for more women in the program, if only because Leninism is in principle behind equality for women (if not quite feminism as such).
Still of course they remain at this point infinitely more advanced than the Americans on that symbolic front; until there are female astronauts flying for NASA the Soviets can well afford to be complacent.
Even if the regime is pretty much doomed to stagnate visibly in the 1980s and fail early in the 90's if not before, there is still a lot of time for more impressive stuff, and for solid advancement of the state of the art.
At this point, only cosmonauts who are actually going to the Moon have been rocketed to space on the N rockets, is that correct? Indeed, unless one is going to ship a literal busload of people into orbit, even the N-11 is overkill; a Soyuz orbiter on an OTL-type R-7 Soyuz rocket is just fine for bringing them to orbit; I'm a little surprised the Lunar missions did not simply use the N-1 to put a translunar stage up for the cosmonauts, who could get into parking orbit on a third, Soyuz, rocket and move their spacecraft over to rendezvous with the big stage. After all the Lunar edition of the Soyuz is essentially the same as the familiar workhorse orbiter of OTL, is it not? But I do appreciate adding an extra Earth orbit rendezvous to one that already depended on a Lunar orbit rendezvous with the lander craft adds some risk of mission failure (though it lowers the risk of a crew loss). The translunar stage had a time limit, and so did the waiting Lunar lander, due to oxygen boiling off while either waits. So I understand the desire to get the manned launch done in one shot, since even if the N-1 did fail in some spectacular way, the crew would likely survive, pulled out by their launch escape system.
So, albeit cautiously, the two N-rockets are man-rated, and so is the Soyuz; the Russians can indeed send a busload of people to a waiting large space station, or assemble a huge interplanetary rocket with several N-1 launches.
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I would have to go back and skim the early posts to recall all my questions, but one sticks to the top of my mind:
The OTL Soyuz-LK lunar ensemble was not supposed to have a docking tunnel allowing the cosmonaut destined to land to enter the LK from the Soyuz in shirtsleeves; instead they would have to spacewalk from the Soyuz to the lunar lander. I gather in the OTL, 90-ton to orbit single launch N-1 version the lander would be nested just below the Soyuz in the launch stack, and since the last stage of the TLI stack was retained to brake the ensemble into lunar orbit, then stayed with the lander to serve as the crasher stage, presumably they simply were to stay in the stack until the landing cosmonaut boarded, so the spacewalk would be from the orbital module on top of the Soyuz, down its body past the reentry module and along the service module to the LK below. Once in, the Soyuz would cast free of the stack at last, and the landing cosmonaut would pilot the crasher-LK stack down.
Then, after ascent and rendezvous with the orbiting Soyuz, the "docking" would be a much cruder affair than the Apollo version--instead of a careful hatch-to-hatch dock, the LK had no second hatch at all, just the one used to first enter it, then later exit to moon walk. Instead of any pressurized tunnel, the moon landing cosmonaut would once again, for at least the third time (and the last!) depressurize the LK and spacewalk, the two crafting having physically merged via a probe in the center of the Soyuz orbital module spearing the mat of hexagonal gridwork on top of the LK; it would have been more like on of those safety dart boards, that have a surface covered in rubber or plastic nubs that can hold a blunt dart tossed at them with the right force. It was just to physically anchor them together so the two craft could not drift relative to each other, giving the spacewalker a firm footing.
All the pictures of the LK you show match the OTL design, including that aluminum "dartboard" on top that shows no sign of any sort of hatch, let alone more sophisticated docking port. And to add the pressurized tunnel, while obviously desirable, is also an unnecessary point of failure that might kill both cosmonauts (though it makes the job of the one using the LK both easier and less risky if all goes well) and would definitely be a mass increase for the LK, when the LK's design is very weight-critical indeed. I suppose the Soyuz orbital module might come out about the same if the dart probe were deleted in favor of something more like the Apollo hatch--more to the point, it doesn't have to rocket-land on the Moon and then ascend back into Lunar orbit! It has its own version of the same stage that serves as the crasher for the LK, that it used to brake into Lunar orbit, to boost it back out again toward Earth, plus whatever hypergolic propellant it carries in the service module as a back-up for that. But the LK can't afford the luxury of any unnecessary mass! The hatch/tunnel is dead weight going down to the Moon and even more critically, coming up.
Anyway while some of your Soyuz pictures do show what looks like a docking hatch, none of the pictures of LK show a corresponding one, even if the mass budget would allow for one. They all show the aluminum "dartboard" array instead.
Should we just assume that attempts to Photoshop in a suitable hatch (which perhaps would not mass all that much after all) proved unsatisfactory, and therefore we should simply use our imaginations for the hatch, and ignore the dartboard?
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Regarding questions about polar orbits of the Moon which have recurred, most recently because Comrade Solovyova's landing required one, it is my understanding that as far as launching
to the Moon is concerned it makes practically no difference--over the huge distance to Luna, a very tiny inclination--indeed, a simple choice of a slightly different point to begin transLunar injection from a highly inclined parking orbit, such as Soviet spacecraft launching so far to the north (and aiming even farther north to avoid flying over China!) would start from anyway, has the ship approaching right over the pole of one's choice. The nasty bit, as e of pi and others have tried to explain, is that once having looped around the Moon, such an orbit, unlike one in the plane of the Moon's orbit, cannot result in a free return to Earth--either one is successful in "braking" to Lunar orbit, or else doomed to be slingshotted into an orbit around Earth with a very high perigee--a wide ellipse, not the very narrow one necessary to return to atmospheric braking altitudes.
I suppose this is an acceptable risk for the Soyuz because in a successful mission, the final stage of its N-1 launch stack (I keep avoiding naming it by letter because I've lost count and forgetten the Cyrillic sequence--I forget if there is a Beh before or after the Veh (the one that looks like a Latin B) and if I'm talking about a fourth letter Geh (that looks like a gallows in the letter game of "Hangman") or what...I think it's the Geh stage? "Г"? I just used the Unicode special characters palette which does confirm "Ghe" is the 4th letter anyway).
*Edit--yes it is, but apparently the Ghe stage is for TLI, or part of it--a fifth, "Д" or De, stage is the LOI/crasher stage.
I am editing all references to match that.*
OK the De stage has lots of delta-V left, half of it intended to brake the ensemble into Lunar orbit and then the other half to boost the Soyuz back to Earth, at the right moment. (If they arrive in Lunar polar orbit, and wait too long, the Moon will move relative to Earth, or from their point of view Earth will move, and the orbit's plane, which will remain approximately constant barring mascons and other perturbations, will no longer include Earth. But if they return soon enough this inclination change will still be small--otherwise they have to wait two weeks until Earth moves back into a convenient location again). So if the De stage rocket fails, the Soyuz can still ditch it and maneuver to go back to Earth immediately (perhaps--I think that would work?) So it isn't death for them though it kills the rendezvous with LK and landing; the LK's De stage crasher will boil off its oxygen and so become unusable before another Soyuz can be sent.
If the Soyuz De stage is indeed meant to achieve both LOI and TEI, then again the Soyuz's own fuel in its service module is clearly meant to be mainly a safety backup. I'm very confident that it can achieve TEI....Um, wait, no. At least not the
1962 Soyuz A design; it could only achieve a delta-V of 420 m/sec, which would be sufficient to break out of a Lunar orbit that is nearly 3 times the Lunar radius (which is still closer to Luna's center than the surface of our planet is to its own center, but still many thousands of kilometers from the Lunar surface). Now IIRC the plan is for the Soyuz not to go into a circular but an elliptical orbit; if the major axis is 5 3/4 Lunar radii, with perilune skimming at say 1 1/4 and apilune way out at 4 1/2 Lunar radii, the energy of the orbit is right for that design to be able to escape Luna on its own--but the greater the major axis, the faster the Soyuz is skimming near the surface at perilune, which means the LK has a tough job catching up to it. I think we want to minimize the work the LK has to do, it is marginal enough already!
So I assume the Soyuz must seek as low an orbit as possible, where the LK is waiting for it. Also an elliptical orbit puts more constraints on the timing of a TEI.
So for a circular orbit about 100 km above the Moon, I estimate we need a delta-V more like 700 m/sec to escape it; let's make it 900 so we have a bit of maneuvering reserve for mid-course corrections and final approach to Earth. With engines that have an ISP of 282, we'd need over 1900 kg of fuel if the dry mass of the ship is 5000 kg, versus under 800 as designed!
However, the
1971 7K-LOK of OTL fits the bill much better--not only did it provide for over 3 tonnes of fuel, its engines also had higher ISP, 310 seconds--even allowing for its greater dry mass of 6700 kg, just 2300 kg of fuel, 850 less than the 1971 design allowed for, would suffice--to still have 200 m/sec margin to maneuver after escaping the moon that is; to just barely escape low lunar orbit with an initial mass of 9850 kg as this design provided, would 2040 kg, leaving 1112 that gives an additional maneuvering margin of 467 m/sec.
I gather the ATL Soyuz here is much more like this later design.
The reason the Soviets can do some things, like polar landings, the Americans can't, is first of all that their lander is far more tiny, and second of all that although each N-1 launch is considerably more marginal in mass to orbit, 70 tons versus over 100, and worse the throw weight to TLI is even more drastically reduced due to using kerosene rather than hydrogen for the TLI stage(s), still there are two launches and two De stages arriving along with the two manned vehicles; the LK's enables the lander itself to be so small and yet capable of landing and then returning to orbit, while the Soyuz's allows it to have all this massive safety margin, making two different engines available as the manned craft approaches the Moon.
If I am mistaken that the Soyuz's De stage is meant to be used both for LOI and TEI, and it is used up doing the former, so the cosmonauts are utterly dependent on the Soyuz's own fuel and engine to get home--still, I've just demonstrated that the 7K-LOK version would have been quite capable of that with margin to spare (margin, to be sure, that might be eaten up fast by the need for an inclination change after a couple days in Lunar polar orbit!)(*Edit--After 2 days, the plane would be out of alignment by 25.7 degrees, which if I have done the vector math right, raises the total delta V needed by over 62 percent!
On the other hand, maybe it is possible to put some "english" on the original trajectory that one approaches polar orbit with, so that it doesn't arrive aligned with Earth and then starts drifting out, but arrives advanced by an angle that corresponds to mission time, so it is just coming into alignment at the planned time of arrival. If some such trick is not possible, then of course the LK, which arrived first, will be out of alignment with the Soyuz arriving some time later, unless the latter shows up some multiple of 14 days later--I gather this is not good either since the LK's De stage will be bleeding oxygen.*)
AND, come to think of it, if it turns out upon arrival in Low Lunar Orbit, that the Soyuz main engine has crapped out for some unfortunate reason (or say an Apollo 13 type event dumps all their fuel into space
)--they
still have a possible option--if they can maneuver on attitude thrusters to dock with the LK, the LK is mated to its own De stage crasher! If perchance the LK itself can be disconnected and discarded, and the Soyuz nested in its place (very doubtful of course unless this contingency were designed in) then perhaps the LK-De has enough fuel to return the Soyuz to Earth? Perhaps not, if I am wrong about the Soyuz-De being capable of both LOI and TEI; if braking the Soyuz into orbit exhausts one De, presumably although the LK is much lighter than the Soyuz, still most of its De's fuel must be gone too.
But the fact it was to be used as a crasher encourages me--escape velocity is just a bit over 40 percent greater than orbital; it is the latter that the LK-De has to kill, say it only takes off 80 percent of the orbital velocity (which is around 1700 m/sec, so say the De can just remove 1350 of that for the 5-ton LK)--still it ought to be able to impart something like 1000 m/sec to the 7 ton empty Soyuz (if the accident that cripples it doesn't drain the fuel, if the engine is useless they might as well dump it anyway). That's plenty to escape with lots of margin to spare! Obviously that's not true if as a crasher stage the De does a more modest job leaving more to the LK engines themselves. (*Edit--Encyclopedia Astronautica says the plan was for the De to cut orbital velocity down to just 100 m/sec 4 km above the surface!*) But if that's true, then an even more risky desperation scheme would involve trying to jury-rig the LK itself to shove the whole De plus Soyuz as hard as it can first, then ditch it to ignite the De for what it is worth--no matter how you slice it, the fact that the LK plus De is meant to be able to land on the Moon and return to orbit, a total delta-V of over 3400 m/sec, suggests there ought to be some way to shove the Soyuz back to Earth even without any of its own engines.
Using the two De stages then makes the game radically different than Apollo, which utterly depended on the SM main engine to brake the CSM-LM assembly into Lunar orbit and then push the CSM back home again. To be sure, as Apollo 13 showed, the LM engine and fuel was also available to them as backup--and if disaster struck the Soyuz main engine after the LK had departed for a Lunar landing, depriving the Soyuz of both the De stage and the LK's delta-V, it too would be marooned unless its own De stage still had some fuel left. (But considering how the LK's is meant to serve as a crasher, that suggests to me it would indeed).
*Edit--I Did The Bloody Research belatedly as I sometimes do. Here's Mark Wade on the
N1 Block De (he translates De to "D")--I don't know if this version of the De is the same as designed in the mid-60s or is tweaked for the ill-fated 1970s 90 ton version. It masses 3.5 tons empty, with 14.7 tons propellant and a very impressive engine ISP of 349, so it would burn a bit over 5240 kg of that braking a notional 10 ton Soyuz to lunar orbit. Quite obviously that leaves more than plenty to boost it back out of orbit again--unless some of Block De's fuel was burnt up in TLI or mid-course corrections of course. This in turn suggests that the Soyuz can be a lot less than 10 tons, hardly needing the three tons of fuel I supposed it would have, except of course as a safety contingency should the De fail after achieving lunar orbit. By the same token, the LK's De should park the lander in low lunar orbit with even bigger margins of fuel--needed to brake the thing to a landing of course! When I try to figure that I come up with absurdly high margins of fuel left over, though, meaning either I'm underestimating the LK's mass or that several ton's margin were engineered in to allow for a ton or more of oxygen boiling off, or that several tons get used up during TLI or midcourse corrections.*
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I am very impressed with this plausible path for a Soviet lunar first--I obviously like the robust options that a two-launch of the more modest N-1 opens up. And it is clear that the Soviets are already planning upgrades that would change the game radically--if they can indeed replace the upper stages with hydrogen burners, then the N-1 moves much closer to the Saturn V leagues, for instance. They could then consider replacing the two-launch Lunar missions with single launch, but since they have already evolved the capability of launching two N-1s within days of each other, I'd suggest that instead they continue to use two launches, of much heavier payloads.
By the way--another question I've just remembered--how exactly did the Soviets, OTL and here, cope with the shelter structure they'd need to assemble such a big rocket as any version of the N-1? The Americans of course made the VAB, a monstrously huge and expensive building. Limited space in the VAB is the major constraint on growing the Saturn V rocket much larger, and also the constraint on how many Saturn V's the USA can launch per year, even with a huge budget. With the N-1 comparable in size to the Saturn V, clearly the Russians have had to build something like the VAB, and it has to be capable of popping out two big rockets just about the same time, and then they have to move the things over to launching pads far enough from their construction site that if they blow up (as many of them have already!
) they don't ruin the whole complex. Clearly the two pads also have to be really far away from each other, since you'll have a rocket on one as the other launches.
I've been a nag at Eyes Turned Skyward, recommending radical changes to ease assembly, transport and quick launch of the Saturn Multibodies developed there, to be told that I misunderstand how much it would cost to make the stages robust enough to survive the handling I suggest, and that there is no great advantage to be gained by going for horizontal assembly and transport and erection at the launch site.
It is because I figured that being able to do that with R-7 derived rockets was a plus for the Soviets, that therefore the way forward for Khrushchev and Korolev in 1962 would have been to make modest increments in the R-7 type to achieve something more capable but only modestly so--say 20 tonnes to orbit--and then do everything with EOR (and LOR too of course), launching dozens of relatively small standardized rockets a year to assemble whatever they desired. But then when I tried to work out what a "modest" increment to Saturn 1B capabilities would do to the R-7--holding it down to just tripling it would be a great achievement!
I realized this was not such an easy thing to achieve, whereas the capabilities might still be too modest to allow timely assembly of a moon train.
Thus, I admire your stroke of genius in modestly downsizing (or strictly speaking, refusing to upsize!) the N-1, rather than trying to grow the R-7 so very far beyond its reach.
But I still regret that you can't possibly handle your N's the way Soyuz rockets could be, assembling them in modest (if long) hangars horizontally, hauling them in long truck beds that way, then swinging them up for fueling and launch. Nope, just looking at those bulbous, ponderous lower stages it is perfectly clear those puppies have to be assembled and moved just like Saturn rockets.
*Edit--no, going by a picture at Mark Wade's Enc Astro, apparently even these giant and elaborate rockets were meant to be assembled horizontally then hoisted up at the launch site!!
*
So perhaps someday, you can show off some pictures of the launch complex and show us a VAB and crawler, Soviet-style?
*Or their horizontal equivalents...*
