A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster

If you butterfly Challenger by either have STS-27 or another early mission suffer a Columbia then the second part hasn't been proven so you are much more likely to see NASA learn a different lesson. That they cheaped out on development*...
My inner broken-record keeps asking "if the Orbiter had a been built from titanium instead of aluminum, would the greater heat resistance have led to either a different heat shield design or the ability to withstand the temperatures longer of a Columbia-type accident?
 
There are hundreds of roads not travelled with the STS but for me hydrogen is stands out. Yes it provides unmatched ISP but it has a host of costs most importantly for the STS the icing problem, the very low density forcing a very large external tank and the SSME being very expensive. If you can get NASA to look at other fuels you could end up with an architecture that delivers the objectives of the STS (rapid, cheap reuse) while also being safe.
 
My inner broken-record keeps asking "if the Orbiter had a been built from titanium instead of aluminum, would the greater heat resistance have led to either a different heat shield design or the ability to withstand the temperatures longer of a Columbia-type accident?
The only reason for accepting the much higher costs of titanium would be to use an alternate heat shield design. But, at the time that the heat shield decision was being made it was evident that ceramic tiles and carbon-carbon were far better than existing materials (lighter and more durable, funnily enough--maybe more fragile, but much more resistant to corrosion than superalloys). This has been vindicated by history, incidentally--after all, Starship is also using ceramic tiles for their heat shield, after briefly exploring alternatives. So it's very hard to see them making an alternative heat shield decision, and if they're going with the silica tiles there's no reason for them to also choose the more expensive and finicky material for the structure.
 
To be fair to metallic TPS systems while oxidation is a fundamental problem, it isn't an inherently unsolvable one with sufficient time and R&D expenditure. While ceramic tiles were fragile because they were lightweight, you were never going to make them tough enough to take a big ice strike. That said it would probably be better to accept ceramic tiles (because they were lighter and higher performance) but just make sure your architecture reduced the risk of strikes as much as possible. For example by not putting them below a liquid hydrogen filled tank with flaky insulation.
 
To be fair to metallic TPS systems while oxidation is a fundamental problem, it isn't an inherently unsolvable one with sufficient time and R&D expenditure.
Well, no, it's not obviously impossible to fix it, but at the time it had not been fixed and it was far from guaranteed that it would be fixed. Ceramic tiles fixed that problem and, from a certain point of view, don't seem to bring any problems except operational ones; you can't land in a rainstorm, for instance. But that's easy enough to "fix" by having multiple landing sites. It's only a more subtle grasp of the issue that would bring up the ice problem, and even then I suspect that they would have underestimated how bad it ended up being.
 
Agreed, unlike @TimothyC I think there's a lot of elements to criticise about the STS architecture as a whole but many of the more controversial individual items whether the delta wings, the sidemount, the SRB's, the hydrolox SSME's, the external tank or the ceramic TPS were reasonable in isolation and without the benefit of hindsight. But NASA had a lot of very smart people and they should have thought through the consequences of combining them. Especially combining a sidemount with an hydrolox external tank and ceramic TPS.
If you remove any one of those the system becomes safe. If your fragile TPS is above your hydrolox tank gravity will protect you. If you're sidemounted against an external tank filled with kerolox you should be ok as there won't be much ice. If your TPS is strong enough to take ice strikes from your hydrolox external tank that's not a problem.
 
The only reason for accepting the much higher costs of titanium would be to use an alternate heat shield design.
If we had built a couple dozen Orbiters, I could see price being a factor. Not so much if we only build a half-dozen. Especially as part of the overall cost of the project.
 
If we had built a couple dozen Orbiters, I could see price being a factor. Not so much if we only build a half-dozen. Especially as part of the overall cost of the project.
It's not just the raw materials cost. Titanium's a much more finicky metal to work with than aluminum (a lot of the most common alloys are rather crack prone), and few places have extensive experience in doing aircraft structures with it unlike aluminum, so it costs more to design and manufacture with as well as to source the stock.
 
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If we had built a couple dozen Orbiters, I could see price being a factor. Not so much if we only build a half-dozen. Especially as part of the overall cost of the project.
Titanium construction also would most likely impose significantly higher regular operating costs. @Workable Goblin and @e of pi both made choice usage of "finicky" to describe it and titanium's wonkiness would invariably have negative effects upon turnaround time and cost.
 
With the layout of the modules if there had been cosmonauts onboard would they have been able to do anything?
Probably not. Maybe depressurise the return capsule and lean out of the top hatch to try to untangle the cable, but it’s not really designed for that. OTOH, on a full L3 mission, there would be an LK ascent module attached to the Orbital Module, so the combination might have enough mass to allow them to jerk it free with the RCS.

There are several Grade-B through ZZZ movies that show a standard Orbiter being used to travel to the Moon. Please God, no. Just don't send a winged spaceship that can't break out of LEO on a round trip to the friggin Moon. It just doesn't belong there.
View attachment 732465
One reasonable depiction of this sort of thing is in Larry Niven and Steven Barnes’ novel “The Descent of Anansi”, in which shuttle orbiters were pushed to and from lunar orbit with ion tugs. The transfer times were… rather short for an ion-drive, and the tugs were supposed to be solar powered rather than the more sensible nuclear reactors, but otherwise it seemed quite plausible. I’ve done some fan art of that shuttle (unfortunately not with the tug) here, here and here.

My main problem with most of these depictions is the fact they keep the payload bay doors closed, and so cook the orbiter.

Regarding the speculation on STS (you guys REALLY love STS!!), we’ll have a big update on that in a few weeks’ time.

In the meantime, and going back to a comment from a few weeks ago:
When you’re so geeky you alter Clark’s book for your own needs. Peak space geekiness,amirite?

Hold my beer…
 
Interlude: The Phantom Moonwalker
Popular space YouTuber Steve Maitlis explores the “Phantom Moonwalker” legend.


Hullo! This is Steve Maitlis, and today I’d like to talk about the Phantom Moonwalker legend. Now, this is the idea that in the mid-1970s the Soviet Union actually put a cosmonaut on the Moon, but that he was killed during the return to Earth and the whole thing was covered up by the Communist Party.

So the first thing to say about this story is that it does have some basis in fact. Although it was denied at the time, we now know that the USSR was developing their giant Groza rocket from the mid-sixties onwards. This was an attempt to beat the American Apollo programme and put the first man on the Moon. This attempt failed, with the Groza suffering a number of catastrophic failures in the late-sixties and early seventies. It finally made its first successful launch in 1972, sending the Zond 9 probe past the Moon. Zond 9 was much larger than the earlier Zond probes that had been launched on the Proton rocket, and in the West it was referred to as the “Heavy Zond”. Again, no details were released by the Soviets, but there were those in the West who speculated this could be a test of a new, piloted space vehicle for lunar missions.

This of course was coming three years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had won the Moon race for the United States. At the time, the Soviets claimed that they had never been racing Apollo, and were instead working on a more gradual, but larger-scale programme of increasingly sophisticated space stations, before progressing to more capable lunar missions with up to three cosmonauts at a time.

However, revelations after the fall of the USSR showed that they had in fact developed a smaller, faster mission for putting a Russian on the Moon, called “L3”. This was similar to Apollo, in that it used a single launch to send both a lunar orbital ship and a lander together to the Moon. Like Apollo, the lander would descend to the surface, then re-join the mothership in lunar orbit to bring the crew back home. But the scale of the mission was smaller. To meet the mass limitations of the Groza, the crew would be just two, compared with three for Apollo. Just one of the cosmonauts would fly the lander to the surface, while the other remained in orbit. The lander itself was as small as possible, carrying only a minute of propellant for the descent, and requiring the pilot to remain in his spacesuit for the whole mission. This meant that he would be able to stay on the surface for just a couple of hours before having to return to the orbiter.

So, the second Groza launch came on January 21st, 1974, and the payload was once again a Heavy Zond, designated Zond 10. Now unlike Zond 9, this new probe didn’t fly past the Moon, but actually went into lunar orbit. It then deployed a separate landing vehicle, called Luna 23, which made a successful soft landing in the Mare Vaporum - the Sea of Vapours. This was very close to the landing site of the Luna 22 probe, which had put a Lunokhod rover on the Moon a few months earlier, and it is believed that the Lunokhod acted as a beacon to guide Luna 23 down to a safe landing. After less than a day on the surface, Luna 23 launched an ascent stage back into lunar orbit, and this module then performed a rendezvous with the Zond 10 mothership. It’s unclear whether the two spacecraft succeeded in docking, but shortly afterwards Zond 10 blasted out of lunar orbit to head back to Earth. Unfortunately, communications with Zond 10 were lost en-route, and the probe never made it back to Earth.

Now even at the time, this mission raised a lot of questions in the West. The Soviets claimed that it had been a test of a new automatic sample return spacecraft, similar to the earlier Luna 16 and 20 spacecraft, just much larger. But a lot of Western analysts felt that the scale and complexity of the mission was just too high for this to be plausible. Also, if it was a sample return mission, why did the lander spend such a short period on the surface? Surely if it was collecting large volumes of rock and regolith, it would have needed more time.

However, the mission did match the profile of a minimum-capability piloted lunar mission, and Western space observers quickly came to the conclusion - later proved correct - that this had been an uncrewed dry run for an attempt to put a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon. But a few people went further, speculating that Zond 10 had in fact carried cosmonauts, but that the mission had failed, and the whole episode had been covered up.

This may seem outlandish, but the secrecy surrounding the Soviet space programme meant that many people found it plausible. Even back then, the Soviets were suspected of renaming unsuccessful missions using the generic name “Cosmos” to hide their failures. Moreover, this wasn’t the first time suspicions had been raised about a piloted mission. Going all the way back to Yuri Gagarin, there are claims that Vladimir Ilyushin, a Soviet test pilot, had actually beaten Gagarin to orbit by a few days, but had been seriously injured when his capsule crashed in China, and so had his mission erased from the history books. In the early 1960s there were also a number of recordings made by a pair of Italian brothers, Achille and Giovanni Battista, which claimed to include radio messages from Soviet cosmonauts dying in space. Now these claims have all since been debunked, but at the time it seemed quite plausible that the USSR may have been covering up fatalities in their space programme.

Thinking it through, though, the claims that Zond 10 was a piloted mission gone wrong don’t really stack up. For one thing, the mission was launched nearly five years after the Soviets had lost the Moon race, and more than one year after the last Apollo mission, Apollo 17. Why would they take the risk of putting a crew on their experimental spacecraft to do a mission that had already been done better by the United States? Why not take more time to get it right?

Secondly, if the failure occurred after the lander had lifted off from the Moon, during the attempted rendezvous with the orbiter, why was the landing of a cosmonaut on the surface not announced as soon as it happened? We might not expect the sort of live TV coverage that Apollo 11 got, but surely the Soviets would have announced their triumph at the earliest opportunity?

In fact, photos of the site taken by the Lunikhod 3 rover, which were publicly released in the early 2000s, show no signs of footprints, a flag, or the sort of scientific equipment we would have expected a moonwalker to have left on the surface. Other spacecraft have since taken high resolution overhead photos of the area, which clearly show the abandoned descent stage, but again there is no sign of flags and footprints.

Now it could be that the failure was such that the cosmonaut was unable to exit the lander, but even so, we would expect that just the success in landing would be something worth celebrating - especially considering how challenging landing this thing is, at least in Nurbel!

Thirdly, any piloted mission generates a lot of space-to-ground comms traffic, and in particular voice communications. Even back then, there was a large community of amature radio enthusiasts who regularly listened in on both Soviet and US space missions. Although there was one case of a radio operator in Norway claiming to have heard the voice of a cosmonaut during the mission, there was no independent verification of this. For there to be no other recorded voice traffic over a mission lasting for several days seems extremely unlikely. Some people have argued that, for this mission, they may have been observing strict radio silence, but this begs the question of why it’s never been employed on other Soviet space missions - even the military missions to the Almaz space stations.

Finally, we have the counter-example of what happened when a Soviet cosmonaut was killed in the course of a mission. On 24th April, 1967, Vladimir Komarov was killed when the parachutes of his Soyuz 1 capsule failed to deploy.

Far from his death being covered up, Komarov was given a state funeral and buried with full honours in the Kremlin wall. We would expect similar honours for the heroes of a Soviet Moon landing attempt.

So in summary, while it appears that Zond 10 was indeed a test of hardware for a Soviet piloted lunar landing mission, there is no evidence to suggest there was a crew on board. The Phantom Moonwalker myth remains just a myth.

I’m Steve Maitlis: Happy Landings!
 
What a wonderful way to lend this timeline some verisimilitude! As for the content, this 'phantom moonwalker' theory lines up well with the general paranoia about Lost Cosmonauts; with all the Soviet secrecy at the time, one can see why some folks would fall for that kind of thing. Still, we now know that the L3 architecture will be skipped altogether in favor of the two-launch strategy, and that the might of the Groza rocket won't stop the USSR from collapsing. Perhaps they're sending all their butterflies out to the Moon as well.
 
That was excellent! I know we've had stuff like in-universe video transcripts and such, but to actually have the video is a really cool touch. It does make me want to play Nurbel Space Race, if only to see how it stacks up!

Also, looks like we have soft confirmation that we never see any other soviet spaceflight fatalities during the space race. Hopefully the US can match that, though I wouldn't put my money on it...
 
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However, revelations after the fall of the USSR showed
Ah, It seems that the Hardliners did not gain enough power in the 80s to keep the cash strapped USSR running into the 21st Century and not get any chance to utilize modern computers (stolen from the west) in the planed economy of the Union, instead we seem to have the OTL result of the reformers failing horrifically to reform the Union and instead sabotaging the Union and themselves in the process.

Although we do not know when exactly it did fall yet since this a Alt-History video which was uploaded in 2022, we do now know that a collapse of Communism did happen in this timeline.

The New Union Treaty seemed to or probably failed in this timeline. We don't know if the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was able to be more of a uniting force for the former Soviet Republics in this timeline.

So all we know now is that the Groza (N1) and the Soviet Space missions have an expiration date or execution date that is looming overhead...
 
Well we all know that the USSR is destined to collapse ITTL as well now...

....but I can't say it surprises me. Not nearly as much as it might've a couple years back.

The way I see it, the N1 (and OTL's Energia/Buran) were symptoms of a crippling failing within the Soviet Union's Structure. The obsessive, paranoia-fuelled Need, to maintain Parity with the United States in critical key areas. Particularly with regards to its Military.

So I wonder just what they did manage to achieve ITTL before the whole thing went under?
 
Popular space YouTuber Steve Maitlis explores the “Phantom Moonwalker” legend.


Hullo! This is Steve Maitlis, and today I’d like to talk about the Phantom Moonwalker legend. Now, this is the idea that in the mid-1970s the Soviet Union actually put a cosmonaut on the Moon, but that he was killed during the return to Earth and the whole thing was covered up by the Communist Party.

So the first thing to say about this story is that it does have some basis in fact. Although it was denied at the time, we now know that the USSR was developing their giant Groza rocket from the mid-sixties onwards. This was an attempt to beat the American Apollo programme and put the first man on the Moon. This attempt failed, with the Groza suffering a number of catastrophic failures in the late-sixties and early seventies. It finally made its first successful launch in 1972, sending the Zond 9 probe past the Moon. Zond 9 was much larger than the earlier Zond probes that had been launched on the Proton rocket, and in the West it was referred to as the “Heavy Zond”. Again, no details were released by the Soviets, but there were those in the West who speculated this could be a test of a new, piloted space vehicle for lunar missions.

This of course was coming three years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had won the Moon race for the United States. At the time, the Soviets claimed that they had never been racing Apollo, and were instead working on a more gradual, but larger-scale programme of increasingly sophisticated space stations, before progressing to more capable lunar missions with up to three cosmonauts at a time.

However, revelations after the fall of the USSR showed that they had in fact developed a smaller, faster mission for putting a Russian on the Moon, called “L3”. This was similar to Apollo, in that it used a single launch to send both a lunar orbital ship and a lander together to the Moon. Like Apollo, the lander would descend to the surface, then re-join the mothership in lunar orbit to bring the crew back home. But the scale of the mission was smaller. To meet the mass limitations of the Groza, the crew would be just two, compared with three for Apollo. Just one of the cosmonauts would fly the lander to the surface, while the other remained in orbit. The lander itself was as small as possible, carrying only a minute of propellant for the descent, and requiring the pilot to remain in his spacesuit for the whole mission. This meant that he would be able to stay on the surface for just a couple of hours before having to return to the orbiter.

So, the second Groza launch came on January 21st, 1974, and the payload was once again a Heavy Zond, designated Zond 10. Now unlike Zond 9, this new probe didn’t fly past the Moon, but actually went into lunar orbit. It then deployed a separate landing vehicle, called Luna 23, which made a successful soft landing in the Mare Vaporum - the Sea of Vapours. This was very close to the landing site of the Luna 22 probe, which had put a Lunokhod rover on the Moon a few months earlier, and it is believed that the Lunokhod acted as a beacon to guide Luna 23 down to a safe landing. After less than a day on the surface, Luna 23 launched an ascent stage back into lunar orbit, and this module then performed a rendezvous with the Zond 10 mothership. It’s unclear whether the two spacecraft succeeded in docking, but shortly afterwards Zond 10 blasted out of lunar orbit to head back to Earth. Unfortunately, communications with Zond 10 were lost en-route, and the probe never made it back to Earth.

Now even at the time, this mission raised a lot of questions in the West. The Soviets claimed that it had been a test of a new automatic sample return spacecraft, similar to the earlier Luna 16 and 20 spacecraft, just much larger. But a lot of Western analysts felt that the scale and complexity of the mission was just too high for this to be plausible. Also, if it was a sample return mission, why did the lander spend such a short period on the surface? Surely if it was collecting large volumes of rock and regolith, it would have needed more time.

However, the mission did match the profile of a minimum-capability piloted lunar mission, and Western space observers quickly came to the conclusion - later proved correct - that this had been an uncrewed dry run for an attempt to put a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon. But a few people went further, speculating that Zond 10 had in fact carried cosmonauts, but that the mission had failed, and the whole episode had been covered up.

This may seem outlandish, but the secrecy surrounding the Soviet space programme meant that many people found it plausible. Even back then, the Soviets were suspected of renaming unsuccessful missions using the generic name “Cosmos” to hide their failures. Moreover, this wasn’t the first time suspicions had been raised about a piloted mission. Going all the way back to Yuri Gagarin, there are claims that Vladimir Ilyushin, a Soviet test pilot, had actually beaten Gagarin to orbit by a few days, but had been seriously injured when his capsule crashed in China, and so had his mission erased from the history books. In the early 1960s there were also a number of recordings made by a pair of Italian brothers, Achille and Giovanni Battista, which claimed to include radio messages from Soviet cosmonauts dying in space. Now these claims have all since been debunked, but at the time it seemed quite plausible that the USSR may have been covering up fatalities in their space programme.

Thinking it through, though, the claims that Zond 10 was a piloted mission gone wrong don’t really stack up. For one thing, the mission was launched nearly five years after the Soviets had lost the Moon race, and more than one year after the last Apollo mission, Apollo 17. Why would they take the risk of putting a crew on their experimental spacecraft to do a mission that had already been done better by the United States? Why not take more time to get it right?

Secondly, if the failure occurred after the lander had lifted off from the Moon, during the attempted rendezvous with the orbiter, why was the landing of a cosmonaut on the surface not announced as soon as it happened? We might not expect the sort of live TV coverage that Apollo 11 got, but surely the Soviets would have announced their triumph at the earliest opportunity?

In fact, photos of the site taken by the Lunikhod 3 rover, which were publicly released in the early 2000s, show no signs of footprints, a flag, or the sort of scientific equipment we would have expected a moonwalker to have left on the surface. Other spacecraft have since taken high resolution overhead photos of the area, which clearly show the abandoned descent stage, but again there is no sign of flags and footprints.

Now it could be that the failure was such that the cosmonaut was unable to exit the lander, but even so, we would expect that just the success in landing would be something worth celebrating - especially considering how challenging landing this thing is, at least in Nurbel!

Thirdly, any piloted mission generates a lot of space-to-ground comms traffic, and in particular voice communications. Even back then, there was a large community of amature radio enthusiasts who regularly listened in on both Soviet and US space missions. Although there was one case of a radio operator in Norway claiming to have heard the voice of a cosmonaut during the mission, there was no independent verification of this. For there to be no other recorded voice traffic over a mission lasting for several days seems extremely unlikely. Some people have argued that, for this mission, they may have been observing strict radio silence, but this begs the question of why it’s never been employed on other Soviet space missions - even the military missions to the Almaz space stations.

Finally, we have the counter-example of what happened when a Soviet cosmonaut was killed in the course of a mission. On 24th April, 1967, Vladimir Komarov was killed when the parachutes of his Soyuz 1 capsule failed to deploy.

Far from his death being covered up, Komarov was given a state funeral and buried with full honours in the Kremlin wall. We would expect similar honours for the heroes of a Soviet Moon landing attempt.

So in summary, while it appears that Zond 10 was indeed a test of hardware for a Soviet piloted lunar landing mission, there is no evidence to suggest there was a crew on board. The Phantom Moonwalker myth remains just a myth.

I’m Steve Maitlis: Happy Landings!
Amazing job on the video; love the Nerbals and Not Manley, very nice touches.
 
What a wonderful way to lend this timeline some verisimilitude! As for the content, this 'phantom moonwalker' theory lines up well with the general paranoia about Lost Cosmonauts; with all the Soviet secrecy at the time, one can see why some folks would fall for that kind of thing. Still, we now know that the L3 architecture will be skipped altogether in favor of the two-launch strategy, and that the might of the Groza rocket won't stop the USSR from collapsing. Perhaps they're sending all their butterflies out to the Moon as well.
Thanks! As soon as I wrote the N1-8L mission, I knew that modern conspiracy theorists would have immediately jumped on it, so the topic seemed ripe for exploring in an Interlude.

That was excellent! I know we've had stuff like in-universe video transcripts and such, but to actually have the video is a really cool touch. It does make me want to play Nurbel Space Race, if only to see how it stacks up!

Also, looks like we have soft confirmation that we never see any other soviet spaceflight fatalities during the space race. Hopefully the US can match that, though I wouldn't put my money on it...
Glad you enjoyed it! I originally planned to insert gameplay footage from Kerbal using an N1 mod (like this one), but not being a Kerbal player myself I wasn’t confident I could get the shots I wanted. Instead, I faked it up in Blender using the Eevee render engine. For those interested, I have now uploaded the full sequence from launch to landing on the moon here.

Ah, It seems that the Hardliners did not gain enough power in the 80s to keep the cash strapped USSR running into the 21st Century and not get any chance to utilize modern computers (stolen from the west) in the planed economy of the Union, instead we seem to have the OTL result of the reformers failing horrifically to reform the Union and instead sabotaging the Union and themselves in the process.

Although we do not know when exactly it did fall yet since this a Alt-History video which was uploaded in 2022, we do now know that a collapse of Communism did happen in this timeline.

The New Union Treaty seemed to or probably failed in this timeline. We don't know if the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was able to be more of a uniting force for the former Soviet Republics in this timeline.

So all we know now is that the Groza (N1) and the Soviet Space missions have an expiration date or execution date that is looming overhead...
Well, we know the USSR has an expiration date…

Well we all know that the USSR is destined to collapse ITTL as well now...

....but I can't say it surprises me. Not nearly as much as it might've a couple years back.

The way I see it, the N1 (and OTL's Energia/Buran) were symptoms of a crippling failing within the Soviet Union's Structure. The obsessive, paranoia-fuelled Need, to maintain Parity with the United States in critical key areas. Particularly with regards to its Military.

So I wonder just what they did manage to achieve ITTL before the whole thing went under?

Naaah, clearly the most logical result is the USSR collapsing peacefully after the USA reformed into a new torchbearer for communism.

Obviously what happened is that the USSR dissolved after achieving true communism :winkytongue:
Yeah, I’m not saving the USSR this time. I did that for The Snow Flies, for those interested in that sort of thing. ITTL, L3M and the Shuttle programme are filling the space of Energia-Buran IOTL, so those inclined towards the theory that lavish spending on space contributed to the collapse of the state will still have something to point to. The exact shape of the collapse, and its impact on space activities, is a topic for the future…

Amazing job on the video; love the Nerbals and Not Manley, very nice touches.
Thanks! Note of trivia: “Not Manley” was played by my good (and very Scottish) friend Andy Johnstone, whose day job is flying the Mars Express space probe.
 
Post 7: N-1 Developments
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Post 7: N-1 Developments​


“We do not want to retrace the Americans’ path. We must have forward-looking plans.”

- Minister of General Machine Building, Sergei Afanasiev, 6 December 1969

++++++++++++++++++++​

The success of the N1-8L mission was a cause for elation amongst the TsKBEM engineers who had worked on the lunar mission for so many years, and for much of that time had known only failure. Despite the loss of Soyuz 7K-LOK No.2 en-route back to Earth, the impressive achievement of placing the LK on the lunar surface - under fully automatic control, no less! - seemed to open the way to putting a cosmonaut on the surface years earlier than the L3M programme could achieve. True to his earlier form, in March 1974 Mishin proposed to the VPK that, if the upcoming N1-9L mission was completed successfully, then the next mission should attempt to put a man on the Moon using the L3 approach.

Despite the superficial attractiveness of this option, there were several influential voices speaking against it, including from within Mishin’s own bureau. Several of his senior deputies, including Feoktistov, Semenov, and others, were concerned at diverting resources away from the L3M project in favour of the far more limited dead-end of an L3 landing. This opinion was shared by Mstislav Keldysh, head of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who had long opposed L3 as being scientifically useless. Keldysh, who was now approaching the end of his long and illustrious career, had backed L3M, and was loath to see it delayed any further.

Further concerns were raised by Nikolai Kaminin[1], the head of the Cosmonaut Training Centre for the Air Force, who remained unconvinced that the L3 system could be made safe enough to risk the lives of cosmonauts. In his view, the large number of critical events and the razor-thin safety margins inherent to the system made it an accident waiting to happen. The failure of the LOK habitation module separation on mission 8L appeared to validate this view.

In the end, the VPK agreed, and decided to continue with the flight plan as laid out for L3M. Mishin still held out hope that a successful follow-up to 8L would enable him to persuade the leadership to be more daring, but these hopes were dealt a blow when N1-9L launched in August 1974. Carrying another LOK/LK pair on a similar mission profile to 8L, all appeared well until the time came for the Blok-G upper stage to send the L3 stack on its way to the Moon. The stage failed to ignite, leaving the Blok-D, LOK No.3 and LK No.2 in an Earth parking orbit. The mission was not a total loss, as it proved possible to separate the Blok-G from the rest of the stack and perform the various planned manoeuvres with the LK and LOK in Earth orbit under the designation “Kosmos-676/7”, but it lent further strength to Kaminin’s argument that the L3 system was not ready to fly cosmonauts.

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By this time, four years after the VPK had approved the L3M project, good progress was being made on developing the Blok-Sr upper stage, GB-1 lunar “crasher” stage, and crewed GB-2 Lunar Expedition Ship (LEK) that would be used for the mission.

Blok-Sr was to be the largest hydrolox stage developed by the USSR to that point, making use of an upgrade of the RD-56 engine developed by Alexei Isaev’s OKB-2 Design Bureau (re-named KM KhimMach in 1974). This upgrade had originally been intended for use on the smaller Blok-R for an earlier upgrade of the N1, and had carried over to the Blok-Sr when that stage merged the roles of the old Blok-S and Blok-R. A particular challenge was the requirement to be able to re-start the engines up to five times over the course of a mission, in order to perform the Earth departure, mid-course correction, and lunar capture manoeuvres that would put the GB-1 and GB-2 into orbit of the Moon, but by 1974 Isaev’s team were confident that they had solved these issues. Initial test firings showed good results, and Isaev was expecting to be able to deliver an integrated Blok-Sr stage with two RD-56 engines for a test flight by mid-1975.

In order to support such a mission, it was necessary to upgrade the facilities at the Groza launch pads to support liquid hydrogen production, storage and fueling operations. To this end, Vladimir Barmin’s Design Bureau of General Machine-Building (KBOM) had in 1973 begun construction of a new hydrogen propellant and storage facility half a kilometre northeast of the twin launch pads at Baikonur Site 110. These would pipe the super-cold propellants for the Blok-Sr via a new fueling arm on the Rotating Service Structure towers at each launch pad.

With Pad 37 (the West or Right launch pad) supporting ongoing Groza launches, the tower modifications were first started at Pad 38 (Site 110 East or Left). Following its devastation in the explosion of N1-5L in July 1969, the launch pad had been painstakingly rebuilt, and would now be further modified to support L3M. In addition to the provisions for liquid hydrogen, this also involved modifications to the umbilical connects and the crew access arm that would be used with the L3M GB-2 spacecraft. This meant that, for the next few years, Pad 37 would remain the sole launch pad for Groza missions. After completion of the upgrade at Pad 38, the pads would swap roles as Pad 37 was upgraded in its turn, resulting in a dual-launch capability being restored by the end of 1976.

For the spacecraft themselves, the 24 tonne GB-1 ‘crasher stage’ was maturing rapidly. This was to be expected, as it was basically a stretched version of the Blok-D that had been in use since the first Proton/Zond mission in 1967, and which had given sterling performance on the N1-8L/Zond-10 mission. GB-1 would use the same 11D71 engine burning kerolox propellants as Blok-D, and TsKBEM expected to have the first flight model ready for launch by the end of 1974.

By far the most complex component still to be developed was the GB-2 Lunar Expedition Ship (LEK). Projected to have a mass of more than 23 tonnes on the lunar surface, the GB-2 dwarfed the six tonne LK lander used for L3. This was partly due to the tripling of the crew compliment, but also related to the fact that LEK would also replace the function of the LOK, being a single vehicle for the journey to lunar orbit, landing and habitation on the Moon’s surface, and return to Earth.

Working backwards from the end of the mission, the Return Capsule (VA) was a modification to the familiar, headlamp-shaped Soyuz module that had been used on all of the 7K variants, including the LOK. For most of the mission, the Return Capsule would be housed within a pressurised ‘hanger’ formed by the Cocooned Habitation Block (OB), with the VA suspended from a hatch at the top of the OB, which in turn connected to the Escape Tower during launch. The three cosmonauts would remain in this capsule for launch and re-entry phases of the mission, but the rest of the time would be able to exit the VA through a side hatch and move around the OB, removing the need for spacewalks or complicated (and heavy) docking mechanisms and hatches.

The Cocooned Habitation Block would be the cosmonauts’ cockpit, main workspace, and home during the 2-3 weeks of the L3M mission. The module was spherical in shape, with two bowl-shaped depressions for windows, affording the Commander and LEK Pilot a downwards view from which to control the descent and landing. On the other side of the module was an exterior hatch for access to the lunar surface. Weight and volume limitations meant that it was not possible to include an airlock in the OB, and so for moonwalks one of the cosmonauts would seal themself inside the Return Capsule, while the other two donned moonsuits and depressurised the main cabin of the OB. Space was tight in the Habitation Block, with the Return Capsule taking up much of the interior volume, but it was roomier than the capsules already used for the long duration Soyuz 9/10 mission, and so Semenov’s team were confident it would be sufficient.

The Habitation Block was mounted atop a Propulsion Unit (DU) carrying a large main engine using a hydrogen peroxide/hydrocarbon propellant mix. This engine would be responsible for all vehicle manoeuvres from final descent through to lunar ascent and trans-Earth injection, and so reliability was vital. In an unusual case of cooperation between bureaux, the RD-510 engine for the DU was being developed by Glushko’s NPO Energomash. The DU would also house the fuel cells that would power the spaceship for missions of up to a month. Based on those developed for the L3 LOK, they would provide both power and drinking water for the crew during their mission.

The combined VA/BO/DU complex was attached to a disposable Landing Stage, consisting of a framework mounting the landing legs, batteries, scientific equipment, and radiators. This would be left behind on the surface at the end of the mission, removing the need to lift almost four tonnes of equipment back to lunar orbit. Before descending to the surface, the Landing Stage would also carry a Kontakt docking system and associated rendezvous antennas and cameras. Derived from the system developed for the L3 LOK and LK, and tested in Earth orbit on the Soyuz 9/10 mission, this would be used to link the LEK to the GB-1 crasher stage in lunar orbit. Following the completion of GB-1 descent burn, the Docking Module would detach from the Landing Stage and impact on the lunar surface with the GB-1 booster.

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The development of the LEK was led by Yuri Semenov’s team at TsKBEM, and was proceeding well, taking advantage of many of the systems developed for the L3 programme. Nevertheless, the complexity of the new spacecraft meant that the first uncrewed test flights were not expected to take place before 1977, putting the earliest date for a crewed mission into 1978. Before that date, there were two other major programmes planning to make use of Groza’s heavy lift capability: a series of uncrewed heavy Mars probes, and the long-delayed MKBS space station.

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[1] IOTL, Kaminin was retired after the Soyuz 11 disaster, having previously avoided forced retirement in 1969. ITTL, he is still in-post at the age of 67, and still fighting political battles with Mishin.
 
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