Red Star: A Soviet Lunar Landing

I'd hate to see Soviet Union collapse ITTL. Of course, planned economic is probably doomed to crush, but the dissolution itself happened OTL only after a failed coup of soviet hardliners. I hope that we are going to see some new form of Union emerge during the 90's at least here, and not just have it follow OTL down to the last letter.
Also, it would be good if at least Kristall would be finished before the economic collapse. Mir too, as it would likely be left in 2 base modules configuration till it's decommissioned.
And does Kristall assembly require cosmonauts on all stages, or would they only arrive in 1988 and assemble it in one go?
 
It wasnt really the Coup that dissolved the Union.
More the ineptitude and incomplete form of the Coup. Not only did the Hardliners wait too long before finally acting which had allowed Gorby long before his Dachau extented stay to wreck the Economy and Logistics Apparratus while undermining the Credibility and Reson Detre for the USSR via Glasnosts turning the Media against the State and Socialism itself. Gorby had already removed many old guard Politicians and Generals from Moscow and other Key positions etc but also Yeltsin Shelling the Whitehouse, Stadium Massacres and RSFR Secceding under Yeltsin were the final Deathknell.
 
I'm glad that Red Star is back in action

on FREEDOM station it nice to see advance Skylab configuration
but putting an Nuclear Reactor on it, brings problem to this configuration
the Reactor must be install on long pole leading away from station, next to that a very large "Shadow Shield"
Not only to protect the Station&module from Radioactivity, but also approaching Apollo CSM !
who are forced on using one approach path toward the station MDA

This Link show what i mean


on Soviet Union Collapse
It depending on allot factors, like if Gorbachev not get in Power but Grigory Romanov or if Yeltsin is killed during Coup of August 1991.
We have allot of PODs here
 
I really hope the USSR does not collapse, more like be reformed into the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics, and continuing the Race with more vigor than the former USSR.
 
It wasnt really the Coup that dissolved the Union.
More the ineptitude and incomplete form of the Coup. Not only did the Hardliners wait too long before finally acting which had allowed Gorby long before his Dachau extented stay to wreck the Economy and Logistics Apparratus while undermining the Credibility and Reson Detre for the USSR via Glasnosts turning the Media against the State and Socialism itself. Gorby had already removed many old guard Politicians and Generals from Moscow and other Key positions etc but also Yeltsin Shelling the Whitehouse, Stadium Massacres and RSFR Secceding under Yeltsin were the final Deathknell.

The USSR was disintegrating even before the coup.

The coup merely sped things up a little more.

Either, whatever exists in Russia won't be capable of a serious sustained space exploration effort. Its economy simply can't cope.
 
I'm glad that Red Star is back in action

on FREEDOM station it nice to see advance Skylab configuration
but putting an Nuclear Reactor on it, brings problem to this configuration
the Reactor must be install on long pole leading away from station, next to that a very large "Shadow Shield"
Not only to protect the Station&module from Radioactivity, but also approaching Apollo CSM !
who are forced on using one approach path toward the station MDA

As stated in the Post in question, the Nuclear Reactor was dropped from Freedom due to Negative Public Opinion, the Solar Cell Area increased by 50% with a separate launch of the additional Cell Arrays to make up the difference.
 
We're Back

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Proposed Apollo Applications Program Vehicles
Ever since the first manned lunar landing and even quite some time before that NASA had been in the planning stages for a follow-up to the Apollo Programme, LESA (Lunar Exploration System for Apollo) with the aim and intention of leading to a permanent lunar base, utilizing the global high-resolution data gained from the last "traditional" or "heroic" (meaning without backup facilities on the lunar surface) lunar mission, the Apollo-20 lunar orbital mapping/survey mission in 1974. This program utilized the Apollo Command/Service Module, the Lunar Excursion Module, Saturn V and the launch facilities developed for Apollo but included an additional hardware element, the Habitation Module or "Hab" for short. Launched unmanned by a Saturn V it included it's own unique orbital capture/descent stage with (being a one-way surface habitat) no fuel left over for ascent. While by no means an inexpensive undertaking it was a far superior strategy in the long run compared to flying dozens of individual Apollo missions just in terms of sheer man-days spent on the lunar surface (paying off on the very mission). Also although not a permanent lunar base in and of itself the addition of permanent surface Hab certainly greatly extended the capabilities of manned lunar missions by allowing longer duration surface stays lasting not only beyond the short three-day sorties of Apollo 15, 16 & 17 but beyond multi-week missions to missions lasting as long as 90 days (the then-current Skylab crew rotation) on the lunar surface. With the habitat left behind after each mission on the lunar surface it could be reused, with more equipment and more supplies launched to the same site with each follow-up mission. Eventually leading to the first continuously occupied outpost on another world other than the Earth. At least, that was the aim. In addition minor alterations to other mission hardware systems would also need to be made in order for the program to progress. The most important was the modification of the Lunar Module.
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Selected LESA System
In order for long duration lunar missions to become possible the Lunar Module needed to be upgraded and altered to allow it to remain dormant for a period of at least 90 days while the Astronauts were exploring the lunar surface (either at the base site or on long-range field explorations) and then be capable of being relied on for the mission-critical ascent to low-lunar orbit for rendezvous with the orbiting Command Service Module. With this basic hardware set in place NASA proceeded to launch 30, 60 and 90 day missions to the lunar surface beginning in 1976. Each mission deployed a three-man surface crew in a LM to a pre-selected exploration site where a LESA surface habitat had been landed. Meanwhile the CSM orbited in Low Lunar Orbit unmanned waiting and studying the lunar surface & it's gravity field. Despite the lumpiness and irregularity of the lunar gravity field it was still possible to leave the CSM in orbit for a few months, sufficient time for a full crew rotation. However while this strategy was a significant improvement in terms of scientific exploration & research over the traditional H-Class & J-Class Apollo missions of the early 70s (which were designed for little more than achieving the geopolitical goals of Apollo rather than scientific objectives), the early LESA program still faced challenges. First was the high launch rate required, in order for one site to be explored once by a single crew for 90 days would require a total of two Saturn V launches. This was expensive and still not sufficient for NASA's stated goal of a Permanently staffed lunar base.
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To achieve these ends NASA designed the unmanned Lunar Surface Resupply Shuttle to allow for the delivery of consumables to the lunar surface for extended operations of a lunar outpost. While some mission planners proposed using a Saturn V launched "cargo-LESA" to deliver consumables on a quarterly basis this would have required an unacceptably high launch rate for the Saturn V (4 per year just for cargo launches). Instead the Lunar Surface Resupply Shuttle would use a medium lift Titan IV (capable of launching 45,000 kg to LEO) to reach the lunar surface. Optimised specifically for delivering cargo and utilizing hardware heritage from the Lunar Module this allowed for resupply of basic consumables. In addition early LESA missions had demonstrated a process for producing oxygen from the Moon's own regolith. Not only would this cut down on mass uplifted for breathable air but potentially could allow the oxidizer portion of propellant (the majority of propellant by mass) needed to reach the CSM in lunar orbit to be manufactured on the Moon, further increasing the amount of usable payload that could be landed on the Moon. This allowed a continuous presence of 3-6 astronauts on the Moon with just four Saturn V launches per year (each launching a new crew of three quarterly), less than the December 1968-November 1969 peak of 5 launches (Apollo 8 through 12).

However before any of these plans could be put into action a site had to be selected and LESA Habitat modules would need to be pre-landed with sufficient supplies to last until the first LSRS is sent.
 
LESA can bring 25000 pound or 11340 kg to lunar surface.
That roughly the mass of the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module used on ISS
Here the LESA Logistic Module could be used to expand the Moon station

Boeing study a way to bring module down landing stage, the "Material Handling Vehicle", using forklift technology

Grumman study a Three man LM Taxi
The CSM pilot would sit on accent engine in restrain harness, He plug in the LM life support system.
the LM taxi descent stage feature Fuel cell and water cooling system for 90 day stay on moon.

For CSM it would be Block III with more supply for Fuel cell and more RCS fuel could stay for 90 day in moon orbit,
that would power down and under remote control from Houston.
 
The "Rise" of Mir & Kristall. The Decline of the USSR

Hi all, and sorry for the protracted wait, but here's the next instalment of Red Star, and things are not looking particularly rosy for one group...



Even as the Soviet Space Agency worked tirelessly to complete the initial modules of their Mir LEO Station and Kristall Lunar Base, long-standing crises were beginning to emerge.

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The still-common sight of 'Bread Queues' in the early 1980's

The precise nature of their economic decline would never be conclusively decided, but it was believed to have resulted from a combination of factors that built on each other to create the eventual collapse. Following an initial burst of growth during the Brezhnev years (the USSR reaching a peak of ~60% of US GDP by 1970), the soviet economy began to slow during the mid 1970’s, almost to a standstill by the mid-1980’s. Factors blamed for this included: The high priority given to the Military and Heavy Industry at the expense of Light Industry and Consumer Goods; the design of the Planned Economy rendering it unable to respond adequately to the demands of the very economy it helped to create; their increasingly antiquated computer designs that couldn’t be uprated; to the ever increasing fiddling of the numbers by the bureaucracy to make it look as if targets and quotas were being met, further entrenching the crisis. Adding all of this together and it would be of little surprise that the Soviet Economy was in serious trouble by the mid-1980’s.

This decline in the Soviet Economic Output was having an impact across the USSR, and even in their Space Agency which was effectively tied to their military, they were beginning to see a reduction in funding for certain areas. To try and operate within the constraining limits, they had to push back the launch dates so that the first module of Mir would not launch until at least early-1986 with Kristall beginning the following year, while the N1M and N11M would likely only enter service no earlier than 1990.

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Mir in its early stages

In spite of this they ploughed on and in the March of 1986, some five months behind their initial schedule, the N11’s engines roared into life to carry the core module of Mir to its 51.6°, 230x240 Km Orbit. Fifteen minutes after launch, and with the 3rd stage clear, the Solar Cell Arrays opened and Mir was confirmed to be online. At this low orbit, atmospheric interaction would be greater and frequent re-boosts required to maintain orbit, but the mass of the Service Module (slated for a late ’86 launch) for Mir demanded this low orbit until such time as it could be docked, then Mir could be raised to a higher, more stable orbit which the lighter remaining modules would still be able to reach.

The second module of Mir arrived in the December of 1986 and even with the extremely low orbit, demanded special measures due to its sheer mass. At 29,500 Kg it actually sat slightly above the maximum payload limit of the N11F as it currently was. Measures to increase the payload included increasing the engine thrust of all the engines by 10.4%, lightening the dry mass where they safely could, and the addition of a Tug Stage for the final insertion of this special, one-off design. Fortunately for the engineers, it worked well enough to place the module into orbit, docking with Mir the following day, following which ground controllers commanded Mir to move itself into a higher orbit of 299x304 Km.

The beginning of 1987 saw Mir now able to accept its first skeleton crew, who were already busy with routine maintenance and what human science experiments they could perform until the science modules could be delivered. And even as they were as busy as their circumstances allowed, work was still going on with the construction of the Kristall Lunar Base even as its schedule continued to slip.

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First Crew of Mir ready to be taken to LEO

Finally, on a cloudless June Day, the N1F’s 24 engines were lit to take the first piece into the initial parking orbit. Seemingly unusually, this first module would not a habitation or science module, but rather the dedicated Airlock/Suit Storage Module, carrying with it one of the tunnels that would connect them all as they arrived. Landing at a good patch of clear ground between the Clavius and Magnius Craters in the Lunar Southern Highlands, it was quick to deploy its temporary Solar Cells that would be sufficient to sustain it until such time as the Solar Cell Array could be delivered and assembled, slated for Launch 4.

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View of Clavius and Maginus Craters from LLO, taken from a prior visit

On the October and November of 1987 respectively, Mir received its first science module (Priroda) dedicated to biotechnology and material processing experiments, while the first of the two science modules (Kristall-2, plant growth and medical experiments) for the Kristall Lunar Base was landed just 226m from the first module, utilising its wheels to manoeuvre itself to just 10m from it. On the surface, progress appeared to be smooth and steady, if quite slow, and manned assembly/habitation of Kristall was believed possible by the end of 1988 or beginning of 1989.
 
I'm disappointed that the sort of incremental but proliferating improvements in the basic Soviet system appear not to have subtly but decisively transformed the USSR and its bloc after all. I obviously don't think the Soviet Union needs a makeover of miraculous depth and breadth to survive--but if the crises in the last post are occurring I do think the OTL terminal breakdown must be approaching inexorably. It is apparently too late to expect a successful turnaround.

None of this was plain OTL of course; I think the transformations after 1988 that happened under Gorbachev took everyone by surprise, and while at the time it still was not obvious they would lead to collapse of Soviet legitimacy in short order, in retrospect I don't think a save was possible at that point. And the final repudiation of the USSR and Party rule was a shock. Looking back it is easy and compelling for scholars to point out that the failure was deep-rooted, and in retrospect the fault lines ran back probably all the way to the 1930s.

Which was why I was hoping superior Soviet ability in the space race here was an indicator of subtle but deep changes that might have patched things up--but then we would not be seeing crises as OTL in the later '70s, not of this kind anyway.

We might see ongoing if modest improvement in material standards of living--coupled with rising levels of discontent and impatience among the Soviet subject peoples. Which in turn might lead to a breakdown of the Soviet system anyway--and in my opinion, despite objectively better conditions in terms of economic capability, the same degree or worse of economic collapse once the command regime was undermined. Because you see, only part of post-Soviet economic misery in Russia OTL is because of exposure of weaknesses always there but obscured by propaganda. Much of it is because the Soviet industrial economy is superfluous to the effective demand of the capitalist global market. Before 1991, the regime commanded industrial production that had no external market; once switched over to reliance on selling goods on a competitive market, there was no reason for Russian products, even if they could achieve comparable quality, to displace established capitalist producers. So even if ATL Soviet goods were of competitive quality, produced with overall competitive efficiency, that is no reason to expect a suddenly capitalist Russia to do well on the global market. At best, Russian made goods might remain competitive with imported ones in the Russian market.

Therefore my notion of better Russian success is if it remained Soviet and Communist, but with a more efficient and responsive command economy. This cannot happen if the experience of the ordinary citizen is as depressing as OTL. And even if those citizens are much better off but they still have the idea they'd be better off without the Party, they can still wind up ditching the regime anyway (and then regretting it later).

What this means for space exploration is, the Russian side of it's days are numbered. Until the final crisis, this won't be obvious and the regime might well continue to spend far more than a post-Communist republic would dare budget. But when the day of reckoning comes, the cosmonauts will be stranded as OTL; projects like Mir or a Moonbase might limp along on half-rations but the days of bold Russian initiatives will be all the more definitively over.

So I'll try to enjoy the ride while we've got it but I can't shake off the sense of doom hanging over all of it. Every project scheduled for a date past 1992 or so will be presumably fantasy; every slip in the schedule for earlier benchmarks will push more plans over that event horizon.
 
C'mon guys! Many people have made timelines about the USSR suriving and recovering as the Union of Soviet SOVEREIGN Republics (Union of Sovereign States Proposal). Just have the plane those idiots in the GkChP going to Foros were riding crash, and boom! USSR survives! It is the latest possible POD to make the USSR survive. In this way the USSR's space program lives on. It's not like the USSR had to be forever red/commie!
 
C'mon guys! Many people have made timelines about the USSR suriving and recovering as the Union of Soviet SOVEREIGN Republics (Union of Sovereign States Proposal). Just have the plane those idiots in the GkChP going to Foros were riding crash, and boom! USSR survives! It is the latest possible POD to make the USSR survive. In this way the USSR's space program lives on. It's not like the USSR had to be forever red/commie!

I'd like to see USSR going too, even if without Baltics and at least 2/3 of Transcaucasia. Still, it won't avert the economic collapse which would follow the transition to open market economy. But it probably could lessen the blow quite heavily, as many links throughout the soviet economy would remain open, and not abruptly cut down as after the dissolution. The Russian growth of 2000-s could also affect the union as a whole. I'd say it could rival Japan by GDP by 2008, and actually surpass Germany in absolute GDP value. It should be enough for it's space program to make a more rapid recovery after the 90's and give it more push then Roskosmos has, but I do not think that it would be able to rival americans more than in one field at best.
 
EcoBOOM, I am just one guy, not a bunch of plural guys, and I haven't seen a lot of others saying what I said yet. Particularly not the authors. I don't know if they agree with me or disagree; they may well see things your way I guess. If so I respectfully suggest you and they would all be wrong together, but it might be just me I suppose.

My point, or anyway claim, is that the Soviet Union operated on a fundamentally different economic basis than capitalist nations; its government's legitimacy and its very society were premised on the promise that the Communist Party had taken power in the name of the people and their future and that they were progressing toward a post-capitalist future. If that premise is dismissed, the whole basis of Russian society is up for debate--and in the competitive capitalist world, they have no welcome.

So yes, the USSR absolutely did have to be forever Red and Commie. Otherwise it had no justification for existing.

I think it is wrong to make an analogy with China, if someone wants to do that. The Chinese Communist Party was and is more bound up in the question of China existing at all, as a sovereign power and not just a paper republic torn by local warlords and invaders, or a toothless, ineffectual archaic pretense of an Empire. This is why the Chinese Communist Party can turn on a dime and recreate a fundamentally capitalist society. But note that there too, it isn't quite the same thing--the Party reserves the right to reorganize ownership, to control finance--the powers of private property ownership that in the West are viewed as fundamental human rights are in China a revocable gift of the Party. The economy can be run under capitalist rules, without the magnates enriched by it taking their money and fleeing, because the Party has not yet reneged on the promise to go on honoring the privileges of wealth ownership as though they were rights.

Nor is the Chinese version of reform exactly an inspiring picture of success from a human rights or general welfare point of view.

Anyway, the Soviet Communist Party did not, in my view, have the options the Chinese one did. Asserting the greatness of the Russian nation and people is one important function the Party did accomplish, but its legitimacy rested more on the promise of finding a new (and hopefully fairer as well as less inefficient) way than capitalism. Therefore all manner of economic activity there was often quite irrational from a capitalist point of view--Stalin ordering the buildup of industry far in the east, beyond the Urals, for instance. That would never have happened under laissez-faire capitalism, and even a capitalist society that recognized the need for strong government with effective eminent domain powers to steer decisions according to not strictly economic considerations would be very resistant to such an inefficient, costly way of proceeding. But the eastern buildup turned out, not by accident, to be a vital condition of Soviet survival in the face of Hitler's invasion.

More generally, the industrial economy the Bolsheviks promoted simply would not exist in the form the Communists chose under capitalism at all.

Russia was industrializing under the Tsars, it is true. They received a lot of French investment, since France was courting the Russian Empire as a counterweight ally against Germany. And the investments returned profits, because Russian labor could be very cheap. Since the attractions of investment in Russia turned out to be a combination of strategic interests leading to global war on one hand, and cheaply paid labor laying the groundwork for an inflamed revolutionary class on the other, I hardly see the growth of Russian industry under those conditions as a path toward a more peaceful and prosperous Russia. Had the Great War and the revolutions of 1917 somehow been averted, I think Russian industrial development would hit the same sorts of walls that snags up the partial, uneven development of the less developed nations in general today. Or more likely--a revolution of some kind would have changed the conditions somehow. If that revolution did not include the idea of going off the global capitalist "grid" and seeking alternate ways to organize an economy, then the outcome would be some mixture of a basically agrarian peasant nation, importing much of what relatively little machinery it could afford; or else a stagnant industry of little competitiveness or profitability with a state run by crony capitalists would dominate, by sheer ruthless use of force, over a sullen and powerless populace.

I don't think I'm wrong in suggesting that the only premise on which the diverse peoples of the former Tsarist empire could be held together in any federation would be if all these nations were engaged in developing a radical alternative to western capitalism--and if I'm not, then a Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics would be a pipe dream, worthless paper as it so quickly was shown to be OTL. Say I am wrong about that though, and that by some sleight of hand the many peoples of the former USSR remain under this revised, Soviet but not socialist, banner. Often the reason they did not OTL was not, as with cases such as Ukraine or Lithuania, because they wanted out, but because the Russians wanted them out--this is how former Soviet Central Asia was freed of Soviet domination--because the Russians threw them out. Under the premise of working toward socialism, all people and the lands they live and work on are valuable--get rid of that premise and these invidious ethnic conflicts tend to take the upper hand. But grant the premise this will not happen despite the removal of assurances that regardless of what capitalists think a good investment zone is, every region will be maintained--that even so, the territories of the former Communist regime remain...

...without the socialist command economy, why would the new regime with its new cost-consciousness in more conventionally capitalist terms prioritize the level of resources the old Communist regime chose to lavish on space? If they wanted to, on what grounds could they tax those funds? Would the resources formerly available to the Communists even still exist to be mobilized for any caue? Or, as I contend, was the Soviet economy actually producing goods on a scale greater than it could under capitalism--so that actually those resources the Communist regime put into space ventures don't exist to be used, or if one likes, wasted, in this or any other way?

So no, EcoBOOM, I don't believe the USSR could exist without the intent to be socialist, and if under the initials "USSR" a non-Communist government tried to match theoutlay of the OTL Soviets, they will not find enough resources available..
 
One path that might lead to what Shevek23 seems to want would be if a Soviet leader, call him Gorbachev, were to look at some of the socialist ideas being thrown about by Solidarnosc in Poland. A third-way unionist socialism built up of worker controlled cooperatives. You might have a market in your communism, but you avoid the capitalists.
 
Well, the internationalism of Communism/Socialism will be replaced with (moderate) nationalism that is also pushing for solidarity between its member states. Remember the Soviet Peoples wanted to do just that, in March 1991: The Referendum on the USS/SSG.

They shall recover from the chaos of the late 80's and early 90's if this happened (unlike the sad joke of the post-Soviet era).

Well I agree that the cost-cutting would ensue and it would hit the Soviet Space Program, but sorry I beg to differ. This would have happened only in the early stages of this renewed Union. There would still be funds at least for the program, and the continuation of funds even though its cutting in the early 90's would have prevent disasters such as the destruction of the Buran program. There would still be resources, yes they would be cut, but later on when the USSR recovers and booms economically, there would be an increase in funds. They will cut, but not so drastic like in Yeltsin's Russia. Eventually this Soviet Space Agency would have evolved into something similar to (except in some areas of course) NASA.

They'll find resources, but it would come in the late 90's ITTL.


About the reformed Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics by Mr. Ryhs. More than what you said. My idea of Top 5 GDP rankings ITTL 2015:

1. USA
2. China
3. USSR - The welfare system of the USSR would have been reformed and refined even more, unlike OTL's cuts. This will cause a drastic rise in HDI and a lot of other indicators. The USSR is developed ITTL, maybe at 0.857 HDI. Also, economic growth of at least 9% annually could have been achieved by 1997 ITTL. By 2020, their economy is already on par with the US and China.

GDP Growth would have resumed in 1994 tops, with 1995 growth rate at 6%. Debt would have, of course, skyrocketed. As I want fairly optimistic figures, let's say they create a fund akin to OTL Russia's Stabilization Fund, but not using solely natural resources in paying the debt.

4. Japan

5. Germany
 
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