Maskirovka
January 1977
Moscow
Moscow, Queen of the Russian land
Built like a rock to stand, proud and devine
Moscow, your golden towers glow
Even through ice and snow, sparkling they shine
(Genghis Kahn – Moscow)
The Maskirovka is working nicely. Serguei Afanasyev smiled at the evident confusion of Western observers. Even their best experts - Charles Vick, Charles Sheldon - were aghast. To make a long story short, they knew very large rockets shot out of Baikonur, but they didn't had a single clue of what was going below the fairing. What Western observers could do was monitoring the payloads trajectories - and the Maskirovka had been set up just to confuse them on this matter.
According to the Western newspapers Afanasyev was reading delightfully, the Soviet had heavy spacecrafts on the Moon and on Mars, running in parallel with Salyut earth orbit platforms.
Missing from the reports was evidently the ongoing MKBS huge space station. And that was the other side of the Maskirovka: Salyut acted as a smoke mirror. Not only Salyut masked its Almaz military twin, it also somewhat hide the MKBS. Skylab heritage meant the future American space station would be send to a 51.6 degree inclination orbit, so Salyut and Almaz were send on a similar orbit, with some modules assembled one by one. The real space station, the MKBS, was to come only in the next decade and it would go into a polar orbit inclined by 98 degree over the equator (although that was not carved in stone yet - 51 degree was a strong possibility)
Western newspapers showed evident signs of anxiety; they described a Soviet space program provided with an unlimited number of N-1s, a program that included space stations in earth orbit
and manned lunar landings
and a vigorous automated Mars program starting with a big rover, then leapfrogging Viking with a sample return, the two evidently pathfinders to a manned trip to Mars before the end of the century. All this at a time when Ford and that Carter peanut farmer were cutting NASA and the military to the bones.
Welcome to space Potemkine village. Afanasyev thought bitterly.
Yes, they had more N-1s than they needed, but production had been curtailed to vehicle 14L – five giant boosters, no more. Work on them proceded at slow pace, giving the imperialists the illusion the production had never stopped, unlike their Saturn.
Potemkine rockets - how about that ?
And the fears about Moon
andMars extended programs were equally laughable. The two camps had somewhat killed each other, taking Mishin with them. Afanasyev had strong doubts about some infernal machination from Ustinov to get ride of Korolev successor. It had been a pathetic scene, happened in the fall of 1973.
"
Mishin wants a manned lunar Soyuz together with an automated landing - either an unmanned LK meeting Lunokhod 3, or the same Soyuz picking up samples from a Luna scooper. But the Americans are no longer going to the Moon. They are instead building a space station. And they are flying sophisticated robots to to seek life on Mars. We should use our N-1s for such missions."
In August 1974 the fifth N-1 flight test, the first N-1F, had been a success at least. Vehicle 8L had send an unmanned Soyuz with a LK lander in orbit around the Moon. The LK lander had gently touched down on the lunar surface near the Lunokhod 2 rover, which launch had been delayed by 18 months, swapping launches with the Luna 22 orbiter. All this carefully orchestrated to happen on August 9, 1974, the day when Nixon had left the White House in disgrace.
Lunokhod 2 had actually
filmedthe LK descent and touchdown on the lunar surface, a major propaganda coup for the Soviet leadership. Meanwhile the Soyuz returned with high resolution pictures of the lunar surface.
The very successful mission had been the lunar program last gasp; the L3M had been buried with Mishin and the end of Apollo. The LK was good for nothing. After ten years and billions of rubbles spent the Soviet Union had now a manned lunar
orbitcapability – for nothing. Worse, Afanasyev thought cynically, they even had enough N-1s left to launch a manned Mars shot.
How about that. But if America retreated to low Earth orbit, so would the Soviet Union.
Glushko had been one element in Ustinov conspiracy to get ride of Mishin. The Lavotchkin bureau had been another. But the final nail in the coffin had come from Mishin owns deputies - bastards like Feoktistov had plotted against their own boss. And Mishin had been finally sacked, the L3 buried forever, and USSR had embarked into sampling Mars, with a rover to scout the surface first.
N-1 vehicle 9L had been expended into an automated Mars shot, Afanasyev pet project he had defended at all cost, again for an extremely mixed result. It was a two phases atempt at beating
Viking, and another spinoff from the lunar program.
Lavotchkin automated robots had essentially saved Soviet honour against Apollo; some
Lunashad brought back samples of lunar soil, others had dumped sophisticated Lunokhod rovers on the surface. In 1970 Afanasyev himself suggested Lavotchkin director Babakin to expend such mission to Mars - rover first, then soil sampling.
Mars, however, was many order of magnitude harder than the Moon. So the size and complexity of the robots grew exponentially, to the point it took a full N-1 to send them to their destination. At a time when every single modest probe the Soviet Union send to Mars failed miserably, trying a full scale sample return bordered on craziness, and Babakin simply refused to try the mission. His premature death in October 1971, however, removed that obstacle.
Arguing that Viking had to be leapfrogged, Afanasyev threw all his power behind the twin Mars missions and the rover was ultimately a go in 1972, with the launch coming five years later. The armada of probes to be send to Mars in 1973 was cut to a pair of landers, and that was not a bad thing since a close examination of the planned orbiters showed defective electronic chips unable to withstand interplanteray space harsh environment. And indeed both Mars 6 and Mars 7 landers failed.
The so-called 4NM was one hell of a monster spacecraft.
It was a huge 20 ton probe which divided into a 3.6 tons orbiter derived from the earlier Mars probe series, and a 16-ton lander - a mass higher than the Apollo lunar module ! Late December 1976 the 4NM entered the Martian atmosphere with an asymmetrical aerodynamic shield 6.5 meters in diameter during launch and deployed once in the space up to 11 m thanks to an ingenious design consisting of 30 petals. After atmospheric entry angle, the shield fell and the ship landed using just four liquid-fueled rockets. Parachutes had been discarded early on per lack of knowledge about Martian atmopshere density.
And then the Marsokhod would wheel down the martian surface thanks to an inclined ramp. It was a huge machine massing 2610 kg including 200 kg of scientific instruments, mostly located in a cylindrical container on a side. It was powered by an RTG with a thermal power of 5 kW.
Due to the enormous distance, Marsokhod could not piloted by remote control from Earth in near real time as Lunokhods had been, so only a communications session would take place as of one hour, for which it would use a high gain antenna of 1.5 meters in diameter. The average speed of Marsokhod was to be 0.5 to 1 km/h and it was expected that worked one year on the Martian surface, covering about 100 km and obtaining 110 photographic panoramas.
Project 5NM intended at Mars sample return was to follow in 1977, but difficulties had it postponed to the 1979 opportunity.
Late 1976 and after a string of failures touching many subsystems of the giant ship carrying it, the lander - somewhat miraculously - touched down on the surface just in time for the
Marsokhodto die as it was wheeling down the ramp. It was not even knew if its wheels ever made contact with the martian dirt. The whole automated Mars program program then collapsed, sending the 5NM sample return into development hell. Most of the 5NM large robot had been build, but it wouldn't be launched and went into storage in a corner of the MIK-112 in Baikonur.
Once again a Soviet Mars probe had been doomed by defective microships. In order to save money they were plated in aluminium, not gold. In turn that make the chips extremely vulnerable to deep space coldness and radiations; the components usually died within six months, the exact time a probe needed to reach Mars. The end result was a bunch of probes dying just as they reached the Red Planet. The Soviet Union had lost many probes that way.
Worse, there had been a very high price to pay. The troubled 4NM / 5NM program had caused a significant delay in Luna 24, the last Soviet mission to bring soil samples from the Moon, as well as contributed to a decision to cancel the launch of the Lunokhod-3 lunar rover and disrupted pre-flight tests of Venera-11 and Venera-12 landers.
In fact the 5NM had dragged on for so long it had put the Venus program in trouble. Roald Sagdyeev at the IKI was screaming like hell, because once again short-sighted political decisions (keep the N-1 flying) had prevailed over rational science planning.
Still, the Americans had been panicked enough to believe a “Mars rover race” had started. Afanasyev smiled at the vision of a pair of unmanned robots racing full bore across the martian landscape, sending rocks and dust flying everywhere. Yes, there had been a kind of mini-race, with the American hastily outfitting their third, backup Viking lander with tank-like tracks so that it could move. Even with the soviet failure, their project remained on track – a truly appropriate word – for a launch in the year 1979, heading for Mangala Vallis. The soviet were doing nothing to alleviate the American fears, clamouring their next step would be the sample mission.
A bitter irony of the Mars rover race was that, in order to tackle Marsokhod, the Viking-rover crash program had killed Pioneer-Venus. Venus, a planet where the Soviet
Veneraruled !
We start a rover, they kill their Venus mission to fund another Viking against it; then we talk aloud about Mars sample return just to affraid them further... and in the end we beat them again to Venus, a planet they left to beat us at Mars.
We are making the American crazy.
It was just delightful.
Icing on the cake, to add a little more confusion the Pioneer Venus / Viking rover boondoggle had ultimately clashed with a third major, expensive project: the Space Telescope. The House of representative had starved the telescope first, in 1974; and the next year, as astronomers fought to bring the project back, it had been Pioneer Venus that had suffered the same fate. Needless to say, the planetary scientists and astronomers had been at each other throats. That had been the exact moment when Afanasyev had leaked the Mars 4M Marsokhod into the Pravda, thus to the world.
The
Maskirovkawas over, but it had fulfilled it role nicely. All remaining N-1s were carefully mothballed with the pads in stealth mode - pending the launch of the MKBS in the middle of the next decade, of course.
Whoever in the White House at this moment will have one a hell of a surprise.
After years of immobilism, the soviet space program was rolling again, full steam.
Although there would be no new N-1s build, all three upper stages of it - themselves the smaller N-11 booster - would replace the Proton as soon as possible. Around the N-11 would be build a whole new, standardized family of modular rockets burning begnin propellants to replace
Protonand
Soyuzand
Tsyklon. Engines would be a mix of Kuznetsov and Glushko, of small and large.
It suddenly occured to Afanasyev that they could in fact cut the last two N-1s, the 13L and 14L marks, into smaller N-11s. All they had to do was to junk the huge first stage, after removing all of the thirty engines on it. Engines that would go to the smaller rocket, by the way., since they were ground-started.
That way they could still confused the Americans over their superbooster while preparing to replace the Proton. It was one hell of an idea; it would make development of the N-11 smoother and faster altogether.
And if we ever churn N-11s like Soyuz or Protons, the Americans will have some heart attack. They will believe we are mass producing N-1 giant rockets – how funny.
Unfortunately Afanasyev boss Grechko had died a year before, leaving Ustinov sizing control of the military rocket aparatus, crushing both Afanasyev and Chelomei he hated so much. Yet before dying, Grechko had staged an ultimate coup against Ustinov he hated so much: he had managed to convince Glushko that he needed not to cancell Chelomei TKS, because that ship represented a true match to the American Big Gemini, unlike Soyuz that was too small.
Despite his friendship with Ustinov Glushko had happily complied, because the Soyuz belonged to the ennemy design bureau he had failed to control in 1974: the bureau of Korolev, Mishin and Chertok.
The TKS (an ungainly accronym he soon dropped in favor of
Zarya) soon become Glushko weapon to control the manned spaceflight program and crush Soyuz. Even the space station program was schizophrenic: Glushko, again, had managed to save the Salyut and Almaz despite the MKBS, turning them into free fliers, backup core modules, and other applications.
Ferocious internal rivalries and confusing Americans: it was just an ordinary year in the Soviet space program.
Sergey Afanasyev, also known as The Big Hammer - you don't want to mess with that guy, don't you ?
