I have wondered in this timeline especially in the game that USSR is doing with going to relatively exotic locations on the moon why NASA didn't send one of the J missions to the far side. From what I read Schmitt had argued for landing on the Far side with 17 using existing TIROS satellites launched into Lunar Orbit. However it was rejected because of risk and cost. In this story it seems like NASA is so risk adverse that it is almost guaranteed the the USSR will get to any location first.
Red Star: A Soviet Lunar Landing
- Thread starter SpaceGeek
- Start date
I have wondered in this timeline especially in the game that USSR is doing with going to relatively exotic locations on the moon why NASA didn't send one of the J missions to the far side. From what I read Schmitt had argued for landing on the Far side with 17 using existing TIROS satellites launched into Lunar Orbit. However it was rejected because of risk and cost. In this story it seems like NASA is so risk adverse that it is almost guaranteed the the USSR will get to any location first.
For communications with the near side of the moon, it would seem that the most convenient communications satellite available would be the earth itself. The amount of equipment necessary to communicate reliably is actually rather modest.
The following links tell about a ham radio operator in Kentucky who was able to successfully monitor the VHF transmissions from the moon with relatively simple equipment. The receiving antenna was only about 8 feet.
http://www.ae5x.com/blog/2010/07/17/41-years-ago-apollo-11-and-w4eja/
http://legacy.jefferson.kctcs.edu/observatory/apollo11/
http://www.arrl.org/eavesdropping-on-apollo-11
The remarkable thing about this was that the transmissions were 10 watts VHF AM, and were only intended for local communication between the astronauts and the LEM. The actual communications link back to earth was a dedicated microwave signal from the LEM. This relayed the VHF communications, and what most of us heard on Earth were from that relay.
But as these articles make clear, even that 10 watt signal intended only for local communication could be received on Earth.
Hams also routinely bounce signals off the lunar surface, using it only as a passive reflector. Again, this can be done with a fairly modest station.
Of course, communicating with the far side of the moon from earth would be a considerably more difficult problem, and would require a satellite in a high polar orbit. But as long as the communications were with the near side, I don't think any satellite would provide much advantage.
The Soviets didn't begin landing in exotic locations untill L3-6 because they wanted to make sure the Soyuz/LK had a high enough reliability. By that time the Americans had only one J-Class mission left to perform, Apollo 19. They landed it in Tycho Crater, which is a very interesting location for pop culture reasons (2001: A Space Odyssey) and scientifically interesting. But the USSR continued with more and more interesting locations while the Americans couldn't fly any lunar mission.
NASA wasn't risk adverse. Although for the US public it certainly looks that way. They had to do Apollo 9 and 10 before they landed on the Moon and the Soviets won. The Soviets beat them to a space station, the Soviets beat them to a spacewalk, the Soviets had a 13 year streak of duration record (1961-1974). The public ITTL usually considers this because of a risk adverse NASA. They also think it's pretty unjustified because nobody has ever died on a manned Space mission (no Soyuz 1 or Soyuz 11 in this TL).
NASA was certainly less risk averse than it is today (just look at some of the risks they took with Apollo!). But in 1972 on our TL, they still thought the risk was too high to justify a mission to the Far Side.
Here, the pressure is higher to one-up the Soviets. But I think it is defensible for Space Geek to take the same decision against it. There are enough attractive targets on Near Side, and a Far Side landing wouldn't be enough of a triumph to justify the risk. They're already in the lead, as it is. A series of LESA missions is what's really needed - long duration missions that are clearly setting up for a permanent base, even if only man-tended.
And take into account the 3-day surface duration of the J-Missions, versus the little better than 1-day run of the LK, and the risks shoot up.
Which is what must have the USSR worried right now. All their firsts have been accomplished on what is ultimately an inferior design, while the US Saturn V is getting a notable (and quite easy) upgrade package for the LESA missions which will allow for a NASA leapfrog into the lead.
And like you said, there are plenty of interesting sites on the Near Side to be explored at length.
And the last thing NASA needs right now is some dead astronauts on the Moon - or in lunar orbit.
Frankly, the Soviets have been damned lucky not to have some already. If I were doing the timeline, I'd be writing a Soviet tragedy into the narrative quite soon, if not already. They're playing with fire right now, given the risks they're running.
Frankly, the Soviets have been damned lucky not to have some already. If I were doing the timeline, I'd be writing a Soviet tragedy into the narrative quite soon, if not already. They're playing with fire right now, given the risks they're running.
The problem is that NASA still has the overall weaknesses in the Apollo system.
#1- No alternative if the LM engine doesn't ignite the astronauts are dead.
#2- The CSM engine doesn't ignite for TEI the astronauts are dead.
Going to the moon is dangerous. However visiting places like the far side doesn't really increase the chances of #1 or #2 happening with the current hardware.
They didn't think the far-side was worth the risk in ITL because the program was winding down. Nixon had given serious consideration to canceling 16 and 17. The main strike against the far-side landing was the additional cost and ITL NASA was very cost conscious with the shuttle funding ramping up and Apollo program ramping down. The problem is that NASA in this ATL keeps allowing the Soviets to grab the headlines with the first pole landing and the first far-side landing. The Public might not really understand the importance of Tycho but people understand being the first to the pole or the first to the far-side.
That's why they had to be absolutely certain that the single SPS engine and LEM engines would work, which led to the use of Pressure-Fed Hypergolic engines for the whole of the CSM/LEM, being the simplest design available with the greatest chance of success. Whereas the USSR uses back-up engines in the event that their vital (LOK and LK) pump-driven engines fail to decrease their chances of losing a crew to that.
The problem here is that the Soviet missions are still a secret until they succeed, so where they're going is really little more than a guessing game. They didn't know where the Soviet Cosmonauts were going until after they were already there. And it will only be in the recent months that NASA gets a strong insight into their current strategy.
The Soviets are only in a better position (from the point of view of more assured survival, certainly not from the point of view of mission capability) if my suggestion that the Soyuz has a suspenders-and-belt independent capability of boosting itself out of Lunar orbit on an acceptable return trajectory back to Earth is true; the authors have indicated it isn't. I don't see why not; if the N-1 can orbit a full 75 tons of payload, in the form of the Ghe stage (sized around 50 tons to achieve the entire TLI on its own) and the De stage and the Soyuz, there are almost 25 tons for the latter two; even a De that can brake a heavy Soyuz into Lunar orbit and then back out and back to Earth atmospheric braking leaves mass, I think, for the Soyuz to do it too.
The thing is such a plan is quite obviously wasteful of mass that could otherwise be used to expand mission capabilities; NASA did without double assurance the CSM could get back to Earth. However the authors have not indicated what use they make of the greater mass instead, whereas I'm pretty confident it is there if they start out with 75 tons. Perhaps the payload to orbit is less or perhaps I have gravely miscalculated; I have had to admit the numbers as I ran them were tight.
The greatest uncertainty I face is exactly how much delta-V is needed for the Lunar rendezvous; that depends on the trajectory. A wide range of trajectory energies, from a minimal and slow Hohmann orbit to one that achieves or exceeds Earth escape velocity
are available for very small differences in delta-V at TLI--the price of a higher-energy, faster orbit shows up mainly in the encounter with the Moon, with the fast orbits requiring more braking delta-V to be captured.One near-constant that all these orbits, economical or fast, share, is that since the velocity difference between them is quite small upon leaving low Earth orbit, the angular momentum the craft carries, in an Earth-centered system of coordinates, is essentially identical--and far less than the angular momentum of the Moon in its near-circular orbit. So even on a fast orbit, the extra speed shows up mainly in radial speed; from the Moon's point of view, all the orbits, whether fast or slow in the direction of zooming past the Moon outward into deep space, are all lagging the Moon's orbital speed of almost exactly 1000 meters/sec by over 800 m/sec. From the Moon's point of view the spacecraft is seen moving against the Moon's motion by that speed. Vice versa, if a spacecraft escaping the Moon's field wants to get down to Earth with a perigee close enough to be captured by the atmosphere, it has to be leaving Lunar space with that same speed again directed against the Moon's motion; whatever speed the overall trajectory is from Earth's point of view, the tangential component has to be that same pokey well under 200/m sec for the angular momentum to be low enough to permit a close approach.
So it isn't enough to depart the Moon with just escape velocity; a returning craft has to have enough additional velocity to have enough energy so that when it is very far from the Moon, where its kinetic energy relative to the Moon is much greater than its gravitational potential within the Moon's field, it has this relative velocity--plus enough more to be moving inward at a speed that gets it to Earth reasonably soon.
Well, I did attempt to factor all that in, and to average a bare minimum speed that could achieve a Hohmann orbit (which would take almost 6 days, I believe, to get to perigee from its Lunar apogee) with the highest speed I inferred the Apollo CSM could manage. Doing that I think the Soyuz can carry enough propellant to escape the Moon's orbit without any help from its De stage. But it is tight.
If I just roll with author canon, and accept that the Soyuz delta-V is far short of what is needed to escape orbit, then the Soyuz too is utterly dependent on the De stage's engine firing--twice, once during orbital insertion (and failure there might be survivable for tropical Lunar orbits with a free return planned, or easily available with small maneuvers from the Soyuz--or fatal in the case of a botched polar orbit) and again to go home.
I still think I'm clever to have pointed out the other possible safety factor, the LK's own De stage. Since the LK has less mass than the Soyuz presumably its De stage, which presumably started out at least as massive the Soyuz's, has more propellant in it than the Soyuz's does--if the Soyuz's De is adequate to get them home the LK's is even more capable. But this is analogous, roughly, to the fact that the Apollo missions two had not one but two big engines available to them before the commitment to a Lunar landing--not just the Apollo SM main engine, but also the LM's landing engine. As demonstrated so dramatically by Apollo 13!
Actually the LK De stage is quite superior to the LM landing engine, or even, I would bet, both the LM's engines used in succession.
But of course first of all, the authors have said nothing about whether it is practical for the LK to undock from its De and be discarded, then the Soyuz to mate with it. And more importantly, it seems highly unlikely the Soyuz's De can succeed in bringing the Soyuz to low Lunar orbit and rendezvous with the LK, and yet be suspected of being unreliable for TEI. If it works OK coming in, chances are it will work fine going out; contingencies where someone has good reason to foresee otherwise are pretty unlikely.
Once the LK commits to a Moon landing, goodbye LK-De as a backup--its fuel will be consumed completely preparing the LK for its landing and the stage itself will crash into the Moon.
At that point--per the authors, either the Soyuz-De stage's kerlox engine engine fires and pushes them home, or they are just as dead as any Apollo astronaut whose SM failed to ignite for TEI.
Since my math might be off I would suggest a compromise to the authors--that for the tropical missions, the Soyuz can indeed rely on moving close to a free-return orbit in case the De fails immediately, and so either these early missions carry less mass than I calculate they could or they use more of that mass for other (but unspecified!
) purposes. But on the polar approaches, when free-return is not an option, they fill up on propellant, paring down the empty mass of the ship as necessary, to provide enough fuel to survive a De failure. As I've estimated before if the dry Soyuz masses 7 tons, 3 or at most 4 more should be plenty to escape Luna on a return trajectory with some margin to spare and I repeat, I don't know what the missions that avoid carrying that much hypergolic fuel for the Soyuz are carrying instead. Nor do I believe I'm so far off in my estimates of the necessary mass for the Ghe stage that that margin isn't available. There isn't much good the mission architecture allows the extra tonnage to do as anything but a fuel reserve; you can't land more on the LK for instance, nor are they carrying a third cosmonaut who requires an extra-heavy reentry and orbital module, nor can they carry anything that enables two cosmonauts to go down to the Moon. So why not reserve fuel?Consider this--NASA was confident in the Apollo SM main engine because it was a hypergolic engine, like the Soyuz's. Mix the fuels and they are guaranteed to ignite--the only things to go wrong are if the fuel delivery system fails to operate or if something cracks open. (The oxygen tank explosion on Apollo 13 did crack things open! The astronauts, when they finally got a look as they approached reentry, reported seeing damage to the nozzle, and God knows what other damage they couldn't see inside!
) The De stage engine on the other hand burns Ker-LOX, and needs turbomechanical pumps to operate; these are another failure point as is the ignition system.On the other hand if my math is not far wrong, the Soviet planners could indeed provide for two separate systems to enable return from Lunar orbit--wastefully in that this capability might have somehow been used instead to allow more capable missions--longer stays for one cosmonaut, or for both to descend together in a bigger lander while a third one stays to man the Soyuz.
The reason they had this left-over awkward capability is that originally they were hoping to cram everything needed into one launch of a bigger N-1. Failure to achieve that, requiring a second N-1 to complete the mission, left some capacity over the minimum required.
If future missions are "right-sized," then the cosmonauts will face the risk of death due to a single point of failure just as Apollo astronauts did ITTL and OTL.
I didn't address the LK and lunar landing part of the mission as compared to Apollo's LM. There too the risks are similar. If the LK's De engine fails to start--well that's a mission abort, just as if the LM's descent engine fails to fire--the former being a bit more likely than the latter since the LM also used hypergolic fuels in a relatively simple engine. It seems less likely the De would start out working well and then quit, but if it did it would be like a similar breakdown in the LM--in many though not quite all contingencies, the Apollo Lunar crew of two could escape in the Ascent Module (assuming its hypergolic engine, hitherto untested, fired of course) which had delta-V to get up to orbit from the Lunar surface after all. Well, the LK is essentially a slightly glorified AM--very little of its total delta-V hence fuel was meant to be used descending, just about all of it was for the ascent afterward. The extra fuel is offset a bit by the mass of the landing legs, but in an emergency these would of course be discarded soon!
Finally, if the De works as advertised but the LK engine fails on landing approach--well as e of pi pointed out in another thread a year ago, the LK actually had a backup engine!
Both are hypergolic. If the failure is on landing approach I think it would likely be fatal, backup or no--even if the cosmonaut can avoid a fatal crash, they'd use up too much fuel meant for ascent I'd fear.If the failure is that somehow neither engine ignites for takeoff, then like Apollo astronauts with a dysfunctional Ascent stage engine, the cosmonaut is simply doomed. But that's why they have 2 engines after all, unlike the daring Apollo astronauts with their one--one that unlike the LK's engine set has not been tested at all until this point. But again NASA had confidence in the LM Ascent engine due to it being a simple hypergolic design--LK had two Soviet-designed hypergolic engines.
By and large, the risk element comes out pretty much a wash I think, especially if the practice is to test the LK's engines in brief maneuvers, such as pulling away from dock with the Soyuz, before engaging the De for its crasher run. So far, the Russians are only risking one cosmonaut in this final stage of the mission, the Americans two astronauts. The Russian lander is tiny, and the mission capability a mere sketch of what Americans, even in their shortest early missions, could accomplish. But only a small minority of scientists and space visionaries with their eyes on distant horizons of the future care about Lunar science and actual exploration; in terms of accomplishing political milestones the LK is an admirable feat of focused miniaturization!
Wait, the LOK and LK engines are all hypergolic, are they not? None of them use Ker-LOX. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't use pumps of course; it is just as possible to use pumps in hypergolics as it is to have a pressure-fed Ker-LOX system after all.
It's news to me that your LOK, and by inferences Soyuzes in general from the 1960s to the present day (OTL) use pumps. I suppose that's because generally speaking, you get higher combustion chamber temperatures and hence higher ISP from a pump engine than a pressure-fed one, which explains the high ISP's I've seen cited for the Soviet hypergolic engines compared to the American ones.
I also am unaware of the Soyuz main engine having any backups; perhaps it is different in the case of this timeline's LOK, which is going to be a long long way away from any rescue should its single engine fail!
Not that I'm aware of any OTL Soviet/Russian contingency plans to rescue a Soyuz in low orbit should its single engine fail. Then again it is possible that an engine failure in orbit can be remedied by deorbiting with the maneuvering thrusters.I've never heard of a Soyuz engine failure in orbit either.
All of this could simply be my woeful ignorance of course.
Personally when I fantasize manned spacecraft in my head, I like to go for something like six engines; as with the N-1's KORD you can have one fail, shut down the opposite one for balance, and still have 2/3 nominal thrust. But this seems all the more nervous-Nelly of me when I consider that as I say, I've never heard of an engine on a manned ship in orbit ever actually failing.
Did any Shuttle OMS engines ever fail in orbit?
And as I indicated in the prior post (though it might have been obscured by the glow of general admiration for TTL's LOK-LK program working out so well thus far) they've bloody well shot their bolt now. And should quit with this scale of operation while they are still ahead. They made it to the Moon first, they landed a woman first, they visited the near-polar region first and now Farside. Each time, the amount of actual scientific exploration their lone brief cosmonaut could manage (even without Party hacks tying the hands of their intrepid woman cosmonaut with their sexist projected apron strings*) was miniscule compared to the American teams staying for days and riding around on Moon Rovers, and the amount of lunar material they could take home for study on Earth was dwarfed by what the Americans could do in that respect. It has all been about grabbing political points. To stay in the game, they need some serious stay time and more numbers on the ground; for that, they need to considerably amplify their throw weight to Lunar orbit.
I really admire the elegance of your two-launch, Lunar orbit rendezvous LK-LOK missions. What comes next has to be something else entirely.
It is conceivable that Soyuz still has life in it as the vehicle that carries the cosmonauts; it was always meant for three, and only modest increases in the landing module can accommodate three for launch and landing, whereas expanding the orbital module for greater habitability is a relatively cheap option, which is the whole beauty of the ship's concept.
The drawback of perching the lightweight and adaptable orbital module on top of the entry capsule is that in case of launch emergency, the escape rocket must pull not only the latter but the former as well away from the failing rocket below, so a bigger orbital module must be paid for with a more powerful escape rocket as well.
Reasoning around this to arrive at a more elegant system still takes us almost straight and inexorably to Chelomei's TKS concept. It seems common sense to me, if thine orbital module offend thee, cast it back (in the stack that is
) So, put the reentry capsule with all the crew you plan to launch right on top with a smaller escape rocket, then open a hatch once in orbit to a mission module sandwiched between it and the engines in back. Neat, right? Voila Big Gemini! But wait! The orbital module, among other things, served Soyuz OTL not only as extra habitable space, badly needed given the ultra-cramped entry module (and since these Soviets have learned, cosmonauts absolutely must be in spacesuits during the critical maneuvers, it will be all the more cramped for that) but as a good place to put the docking ports or airlocks (or just serve as an airlock itself, though that strikes me as wasteful of air). A mission module stuck between the service module and the entry module is pretty awkward for that purpose. Not to worry, says Comrade Designer Chelomei, we'll just integrate the "service module" and the "mission module" into one block with crew space amidst the propulsion systems and stuff, and put the airlock/docking port on what was the "back" during launch--but now we are in space, up and down don't apply, the former bottom is now the front. And this is TKS.Well, Chelomei has been shoved off into a corner here by Korolev and then Mishin's successes. But the basic layout seems almost inevitable to me.
Another approach is as per the Eyes Turned Skyward Apollo Block III+ and IV, where the mission module is stashed behind the SM and the main craft with landing module on top turns around to do a docking maneuver after achieving orbit, reacquiring the simpler layout of the Soyuz after issues of launch escape are left behind. No need for a hatch in the primary thermal protection surface, and your mission module is completely separate from the propulsion and other basic support systems. This has great elegance too, but it does require the docking maneuver in every mission. To be sure Soviet cosmonauts ITTL are getting as accustomed to that as Apollo astronauts were.
And yet another approach, for spaceplane nuts like myself, is to go beyond the basic capsule idea to have something like Spiral/HL-20/Kliper, a lifting body meant to enter and land horizontally, be the launch/Landing capsule. The escape rocket now has a bigger job to do again, but upon achieving orbit if all goes well, the mission module is again behind the spaceplane, only now the hatch is not through the primary TPS which is off to one side. Again it is sandwiched between the spaceplane and the service module unless again like TKS these two are integrated--and I pray God they've gotten past using hypergolic fuels and either use liquid oxygen or hydrogen peroxide for the oxidant and kerosene for fuel--not that these are exactly safe things to spend a portion of your life in close proximity to, but they are far less toxic than hypergolic fuels.
Since the focus is still on projects involving the Moon and conceivably beyond, I daresay the Soviets will continue with the basic capsule idea since they will be reentering at unGodly escape velocity and beyond airspeeds. In which case I hope they consider also reinventing Chelomei's transposition of the final braking rocket for landing away from the capsule itself, onto the upper structure attached to the parachute shrouds, so the rocket flies up to blast down from a height, thus clearing the capsule structure itself.
So, I'm looking forward to y'all either ripping off poor neglected Chelomei, or perhaps our fellow AHers and creative geniuses e of pi and Workable Goblin.
Or perhaps something else entirely. After all, for three cosmonauts the Soyuz works pretty well-if instead of making a great big orbital module you just have it dock with something bigger in space, the basic design can go right on serving; that's typical Soviet style--why go for this year's model with the new tailfins when the old model still runs?
The thing about the Soyuz still serving well is that therefore it doesn't need a higher performing launcher, even to reach the Moon, than the established all-Ker-LOX N-1. If you go replacing stages with hydrogen ones, and raising the payload to orbit and especially to TLI, you have to add something on just to use the capacity. Whereas for significant Lunar capability,we need a lot more than the LK, cute as it is.
The missions might go on being two-launch, except the unmanned one is a real monster, delivering far more than a 5 ton LK to wait for them at low lunar orbit or possibly a Lagrange point--perhaps 50 tons or more! Or prelanding a third of that or more on the surface to wait for them there?
Can there be a reusable Moonbug, and a more capable N-1 sends not only a Soyuz-LOK (Troika model, for 3 cosmonauts) but the fuel the Moonbug needs with it?
It isn't clear to me that they need a heavier launcher than the N-1, if they can have hydrogen-fueled TLI and Lunar orbital stages; then even starting with 70 tonnes one might arrive in low orbit with almost as much mass as Apollo could deliver there. With a hydrogen lander they could deliver more mass to the surface--they can hardly use hydrogen to ascend again though.
I wouldn't be to hard to guess that the far side would be a prime target for landing. Lets see what would be a prime prestige landing site on the Moon, hmmmm - one of the poles, Tycho and the far-side of the Moon. From a scientific point the far-side would be very interesting to collect material from. That is why Schmitt pushed for it for Apollo 17. If Schmitt also pushed for a far-side landing for Apollo 18 (I wouldn't see why not ITL) and the Soviets got there first, once again the Nixon White House is going to have harsh language for NASA. I can start to see certain Top Level Administrations in NASA getting canned.
I can see a lively blame game going on in the press about why NASA is "failing to bring home the bacon", with some accusing NASA of being overly risk adverse and others accusing the Nixon White House/Congressman Proxmire of messing with NASA's funding so they can't plan the missions they need.
'Cuz let's face it, NASA is going to be facing funding pressure, and that is going to affect what missions they prioritize.
fasquardon
Umm... polar free return is an option for the Soviets, because they have a launch site from which the N-1 could launch directly into a polar parking orbit and then a polar free-return trajectory, unlike the Americans.
Also, how did merely adding six extra engines to the first stage kill the N-1's reliability OTL?
Also, how did merely adding six extra engines to the first stage kill the N-1's reliability OTL?
It meant an additional 12 Oxidiser and Fuel Lines to feed the Propellant mix into them, which turned out to be rather more frail than they first realised.
And there was a lot more than just those six engines harming the OTL N1. The helium pressurisation tanks in the stages were switched from steel to plastic to reduce the dry mass was just one of the many other decisions made to increase the LEO payload of the N1 from 75,000 to 95,000 Kg to make the single-launch LOR profile possible. Combined with the rushed development and lack of adequate testing and it should be no surprise that it suffered so many early failures.
ITTL, there's been a few more years to iron out the bugs, along with not putting in those reliability-ruining performance-upgrades. It's only been in the more recent years that they're now confident enough in the N1 to start upping its payload capability, and not all in one go.
They tried all kinds of dubious tricks to try to shoehorn in a ton of payload here and there. The fuels were superchilled, right to the point of freezing I suppose, to make them as dense as possible. Imagine what a launch hold would do to that scheme! Besides lightening the helium tanks, another dodge was to omit most of the telemetry!
And according to Mark Wade anyway, the plan going forward with the N series was to keep these stunts up indefinitely, all the fuel for projected N launches was going to be loaded in superchilled for instance.Presumably, in addition to fortuitously omitting those especially troublesome 12 inner propellant feed lines and not cutting corners to such dangerously low tolerance, the ITTL project left in the telemetry, so when their early launches failed they had a much clearer idea, much sooner, just what went wrong. Some of that stuff can possibly be omitted from later launches, but given the complexity of the beast it seems wiser to keep much of it and incorporate it into onboard automation.
I would think that with the sustained and planned effort of making N-1 work, Soviet astronautics at least would foster superior avionics to OTL and might become a nucleus of advances, relative to OTL, in Soviet cybernetics and information systems--this could well spin off into the Soviet command economy in general. The military would get the lion's share of the benefit at least at first, with aircraft and other weapons systems being distinctly superior to their OTL counterparts. (This might not be obvious to Western analysts at first, since one source of intelligence on the Soviet military state of the art is examining models sold or donated to clients and nations Soviet diplomacy hoped to cultivate, like many Arab nations for instance, and the Soviets often deliberately dumbed them down, omitting or simplifying systems present in Red Army models--they called these "monkey models." The analysts would have to wait for some defector to deliver a real Red Army version to them--conceivably there might be fewer defectors ITTL!
)At any rate the onboard systems in Soviet spacecraft should be, across the board, lighter, less power hungry, more robust and reliable, and yet more sophisticated than their OTL counterparts.
I've just read through Shevek23's latest monster posts and had a question and a thought:
The question being: Could the authors tell us what the N1 is capable of doing? Reading so many posts pondering different N1 versions and what they can do leads to confusion when I try and keep straight what the N1 version in the timeline is actually able to do!
The thought being: We may see a TKS style design because Chelomei designs one as part of his (no doubt ongoing) efforts to get back into the big leagues of the space program.
And speaking of Chelomei...
As I understand it, Chelomei liked hypergolic propellants because they were more "modern" and "high tech" than primitive ker-LOX. That said, I am not sure of the reliability of the source I read this in. Do any better informed folks know why he was such a fan of hypergolics?
fasquardon
The question being: Could the authors tell us what the N1 is capable of doing? Reading so many posts pondering different N1 versions and what they can do leads to confusion when I try and keep straight what the N1 version in the timeline is actually able to do!
The thought being: We may see a TKS style design because Chelomei designs one as part of his (no doubt ongoing) efforts to get back into the big leagues of the space program.
And speaking of Chelomei...
As I understand it, Chelomei liked hypergolic propellants because they were more "modern" and "high tech" than primitive ker-LOX. That said, I am not sure of the reliability of the source I read this in. Do any better informed folks know why he was such a fan of hypergolics?
fasquardon
It was a debate from the 50s and 60s. At the time, the Soviets were debating between kerosene/oxygen and hypergolic propellants for their rockets and missiles. Remember that the R-7 family that's launched every Russian manned mission was also their first long-range ICBM, so there's not a big difference between "rocket" and "missile" at this time. Kerosene/LOX was better-performing by a 10s of ISp or so, but you had to worry about LOX boiling off if you stored it in the missile, and it required external ignition. Storables, by comparison, were pretty amazing. Open the valves, and they light: no muss, no fuss. They're slightly denser, they can be stored in their tanks for use in ICBMs, and there's no cryogenic oxygen that needs to be insulated. Chelomei was one of the hypergolic advocates, alongside Glushko. Up until the NK-15/NK-33 family, the point was arguable since the Soviets didn't develop hydrogen engines until very late.