Post 5: Red Moon
“I don't like moondust. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”
- Cosmonaut Anatoli Voronov
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The unexpectedly severe medical issues encountered by the crew of Zvezda 4 led to a flurry of activity at the TsKBEM design bureau. Although the extent of the problems had been kept hidden from the public, within the Soviet leadership hierarchy Mishin had been heavily criticised for allowing the mission to be cut short. He in turn made his anger felt by Zvezda chief designer Yuri Semenov, and the rest of his engineers. The next mission would launch nine months after Zvezda 4, and it would be a full two weeks on the surface!
To meet this demand, a number of short term mitigations were implemented, while longer term fixes would be brought in for later missions. For the next landing mission, Zvezda 6, Semenov’s engineers rigged up a lightweight internal partition. Constructed of fabric, this “airlock” would not be fully air-tight, but would instead use a pump to keep a negative air pressure relative to the rest of the module, similar to a clean room. This would provide a space in which the cosmonauts could don and doff their Krechet suits without spreading moon dust into the rest of the Cocooned Habitation Block, with air pressure blowing any lightweight particles back into the airlock area. Unfortunately this came at a cost, as the new airlock and its support equipment added 100kg to the ship. This was mass that had to be saved somewhere else, and the primary victim to be sacrificed was the mission’s scientific payload.
Though the internal airlock was expected to greatly reduce the infiltration of dust into the ship, it would not eliminate it, and further mitigations were provided in the form of increasing the power of the air filtration systems and, as a final resort, providing military-grade chemical and biological warfare masks for the crew to use. Operational timelines were also updated to allocate more time for wiping down the ship’s interior surfaces, and nightly eye-baths were mandated for the crew. The cosmonauts grumbled at these stop-gap inconveniences, but accepted the need to put up with them if there were not to be significant delays to the programme. The introduction of a full external airlock module, as had been in the original L3M designs, would have to wait for the debut of the upgraded N1-OK launcher and its hydrolox third stage. This was still several years in the future.
Working around the clock, Semenov’s team managed to get all of these new systems designed, built and integrated within six months. By the time N1-25L lifted off with the uncrewed Zvezda 5 GB1 stage in May 1982, Zvezda 6 was fully checked out and secure atop vehicle 26L on Pad 38. A month later, on 26th June 1982, Zvezda 6 launched a crew commanded by Zvezda 1 veteran Oleg Makarov. Together with cosmonauts Aleksandr Petrushenko and Viktor Savinykh, N1-26L lifted them on the first stage of their voyage to the Oceanus Procellarum.
TV pictures of this second crewed Soviet lunar mission were shared globally with hardly any delay, in order to maximise their propaganda value. An experimental space-to-space radio call on 28th June, between the outbound Zvezda 6 and the crew of Zarya 3, was similarly shared with the world on evening news bulletins, as were a plethora of ‘cosmovision’ transmissions from Makarov’s crew. However, despite this media blitz (by Soviet standards, at least), public reaction outside of the Eastern Bloc was relatively muted, with almost as much airtime devoted to the upcoming launch of the first Shuttle-C carrying the Skylab-B space station. The Soviets were learning the lesson already taught to later Apollo astronauts, that while the first mission was an Event, those that followed quickly became old news.
Despite the relative lack of interest from the general public, on a technical basis the Zvezda 6 mission proceeded more smoothly that the first L3M mission, with Makarov bringing the ship down to a landing in Planitia Descensus, on the western edge of the Oceanus Procellarum, on 1st July, 1982. Six hours after touchdown, Makarov and Petrushenko donned their Krechet moonsuits and exited the spacecraft to plant a second Soviet flag on the Moon.
The rest of the mission proceeded much more smoothly than the previous flight. Although not perfect, the new dust mitigation strategies proved largely effective, and the three cosmonauts experienced only slight irritation and mild cold-like symptoms throughout their stay on the surface. The most serious problems arose a few days after landing, as local noon approached, and the thermal control systems of both the L3M lander and the Krechet suits struggled to reject heat fast enough to counteract the glare of reflected sunlight from the surface. For this reason, Moonwalks were cancelled for the three days around noon itself, while the temperature inside the Cocooned Habitation Block rose to more than 30 degrees Celsius.
Despite these problems, the mission was a scientific success, with the cosmonauts conducting more than 150 person-hours of moonwalks, including covering more than 50km in their lunar rover. In an echo of Apollo 15’s visit to the Surveyor lander, the Soviets’ travels included an excursion to the Luna 9 spacecraft, which in 1966 had become the first probe to successfully land on the Moon. Markov and Savinykh took samples from the probe and left a commemorative plaque for future visitors.
A particular highlight came on 6th July, when the Zvezda 6 crew observed the Earth eclipsing the sun during what, on Earth, was a total eclipse of the Moon. The cosmonauts had set up a suite of still and movie cameras to record the phenomenon in a number of wavelengths, and a telescopic photo of the sun re-emerging through the Earth’s atmosphere soon became famous, making the cover of Time magazine later in the year.
On 15th July, a day before local sunset, Zvezda 6 blasted off from the moon and headed back to Earth, having achieved its objective of spending two weeks on the lunar surface. Cosmonauts from the USSR had now spent more time on the Moon than the Americans, but the Soviets were aiming to do better still.
Since the early 1970s, Mishin had been working together with Barmin to design a lunar base that could be deployed by the N-1. When L3M became the official lunar architecture, Barmin’s engineers focussed on a similar dual-launch profile to land moon base modules on the surface. By the time the crew of Zvezda 6 had returned, a number of advanced lunar systems were undergoing tests at secretive facilities on the outskirts of Moscow or in the Kazakh desert.
The most basic of Barmin’s new modules was a Power and Habitat Module, also known as the EZA, for “Energetika i Zhiznennyy Apparat”, or GB3. This used the basic GB2 landing and propulsion systems, but in place of the Cocooned Habitation Blok and Return Vehicle was a collection of cylindrical modules, arranged in a cross formation, with a short tower on top supporting radiators and communications equipment. Originally designed to be solar powered, the expected improvement in performance of the N1-OK over the old N1F launcher meant that Barmin was able to switch to a smaller variant of the EyARD nuclear reactor used on Zarya. Mounted on a wheeled rover that would move the reactor a safe distance from the lander, this reactor would provide a steady stream of electrical energy, day or night.
To assist in constructing the base, as well as supporting long range scientific excursions, there was the GB4 pressurised rover. As well as a small cab, capable of supporting a crew of two for up to a week, the fuel-cell powered electric vehicle included a large trailer and crane assembly which could be used to lift moonbase modules off of their landing stages and move them to a permanent location.
The final piece of Barmin’s plan was the GB5 Industrial Module. Designed largely for uncrewed operations, this module would extract oxygen, aluminium, and other useful materials from the lunar regolith. Powered by a larger version of the GB3 nuclear reactor, the GB5 module could refuel the GB4 rover by cracking recovered ‘grey’ water back into hydrogen and oxygen for the rover’s fuel cells.
Taken together, these three base modules, supported by the existing GB1/2 system for crew transportation, would enable the establishment of an initial crew-tended lunar station able to support missions of three months or more. Ultimately, Barmin and Mishin planned to expand this to a permanently crewed outpost on the moon. However, to get maximum benefit, these new modules had been designed to take advantage of the additional lifting power afforded by the N1-OK rocket with its hydrolox third stage. Soviet lunar ambitions were therefore intricately linked to the fate of the Baikal shuttle and its modified N-1.
Before starting on the deployment of a lunar outpost, two final ‘Blok 1’ Zvezda missions were planned. Carried by twin launches in March and April 1983, the first of these, Zvezda 7/8, placed three cosmonauts at the edge of the Mare Crisium. In another propaganda victory, the Zvezda 8 crew included LEM pilot Alena Valieva, who on 18th April became the first woman to step onto the surface of the Moon. Together with Andrei Nekrassov and mission commander Dimitri Ryzanov, Valieva spent three weeks on the surface, including a week of lunar night.
To help power and heat the crew cabin during this period of darkness, the Zvezda 8 GB2 carried for the first time an RTG power source. This electrical generator helped conserve hydrogen and oxygen for the lander’s fuel cells during the record-breaking stay, as well as providing a direct source of heat during the hours of darkness. Dust continued to be a problem for the mission, but was again kept to manageable proportions through the mitigations developed on earlier missions.
The only significant setback for the mission was a breakdown of the rover on the tenth day on the surface, when Nekrassov drove the vehicle into a small crater and snapped the front axel. Nekrassov and Valieva were forced to walk just over a kilometre back to the lander, but suffered nothing more than mild dehydration and tiredness. Fortunately, coming as it did at the end of the lunar day, there was little loss to science, as no rover operations were planned during the night.
The conclusion of Zvezda 8 with a successful landing in Kazakhstan in May 1983 marked a high point for the reputation of Soviet space efforts. While the Americans were restricted to Earth orbit, Soviet moon missions continued to break new records with every launch, and plans were afoot to ensure Zvezda 9/10, the last of the Blok-1 missions, would provide further glory to the Soviet state. Meanwhile, in low Earth orbit, Zarya 3 gave the USSR a continuous crewed presence in space, while the US could only make brief, tentative sorties to their refurbished ‘60s-era space station. In only one area, that of reusable space planes, was the USA clearly in the lead. But for how long?
