The following year as America’s Apollo program scrambled to recover from the near disaster of Apollo 13 the Soviets finally managed to pull off two minor victories. They landed on Venus and collected 23 minutes of data and they finally acquired their own moon rocks when Luna 16 successfully landed and retrieved 101 grams of lunar dirt and then brought it safely back to Kazakhstan. The date was September 24, 1970, just over a year too late for a political coup.
Two months later they managed to finally get the E-8/Lunokhod rover down onto the surface of the moon where it operated for an incredible eleven months, travelling over 10 km and returning more than 22,000 pictures. In many respects it was a major accomplishment because the distance traveled would be comparable to that of the American manned rovers of the following year, but, in the short term at least, for a fraction of the cost. It was an impressive display for the robot advocates who were now gaining support on both sides of the world.
During the course of the whole lunar race, Vladimir Chelomei had been methodically continuing his work on a military space station design. Chelomei, apparently more in tune to the needs of the military than Korolev, had started work on it in 1964. He called it Almaz and it was to have been launched by his UR-500 booster and later manned by a crew of three. Korolev had sensed another threat to his long term plans and had tried to foil Chelomei by proposing a military Soyuz derivative, but this time Chelomei would win the argument. The best part of Korolev’s plans were integrated with Chelomei’s .The Almaz station itself was to serve ass spying platform with a giant two meter camera aboard and so, along the lines of the American Corona sys tem, it would have an ejectable re-entry capsule to return pictures to the ground.
The station was basically two cylindrical sections connected together and was powered by solar panels spread like wings, similar to those on Soyuz. Political expediency brought the space station program back to the forefront after the race to the moon was over. More intrigue occurred between Chelomei and the old Korolev crew, now led by Mishin. Chelomei moved from one crew vehicle design to another in his pursuit of a means of transportation to the station, Almaz was deliberately designed as a counter move to the American military manned orbiting laboratory (MOL) program which used an upgraded Titan III and a Gemini to transport the crew. Chelomei’s solution involved a re-entry vehicle known as the VA (Return Craft or sometimes known mistakenly as Merkur) which could be launched along with a laboratory module known as FGB (Functional Cargo Block), the two units combined were known as TIKS (Transport Supply Ship). VA looked a lot like an Apollo command module but with an enlarged parachute compartment. Access from the FGB to the VA through a hatch in the heat shield proved problematic. The VA capsule flew unmanned at least ten times on a Proton booster between 1976 and 1979 and even docked with the Salyut 6 and 7 space stations. Later the basic FGB structure was used for the smaller space station modules.
The TKS (top) and Almaz.
Meanwhile, Mishin, following Korolev’s lead, was not prepared to relinquish an inch of ground to Chelomei and so he began his own military space station project, called Soyuz VI, that used an upgraded Soyuz spacecraft and a module called the OB-VI. But this design was not considered large enough for the higher-ups in Moscow. In fact, Ustinov specifically wanted something more substantial to counter Apollo and so he turned to Chelomei’s Almaz project Ustinov had made no bones about his dislike for Chelomei so he simply ordered the Almaz to be handed over to Mishin’s bureau for completion. It was another in a long string of setbacks for Chelomei who at one point had been in control of more spacecraft construction factories than any other designer in the USSR. Now he had to sit back and watch his latest brainchild appropriated by the opposition at Mishin’s TsKBEM. By early 1970 the Almaz had been partnered with another variant of Soyuz and the whole package was renamed the Salyut. This bizarre twist of circumstances was apparently something that neither Chelomei or Mishin wanted, but at Ustinov’s behest the two design bureaus became strange bedfellows.
In the summer of 1970 the Soyuz was finally launched again, this time with two passengers. The launch took place on 1 June and the crew conducted extensive experiments during their voyage, which lasted almost 18 days, setting a new world endurance record. On their return to earth the crew seemed to be suffering from serious physical deterioration from their long stay in space, giving planners reason to pause over even longer missions.
One of the last major accomplishments of 1970 was the launch of the Soviet lunar lander atop the three stage R-7 variant now known as the Soyuz. In 1967 the USA had flown an Apollo lunar module into low earth orbit without any legs, they called it Apollo 5, now the Soviets would do the exact same thing. The LK lander with no legs was dubbed theT2K and it performed an assortment of prescribed maneuvers, exactly as planned. The date of the first two flights were November 24 1970 and February 26 1971.
The T2K “legless” lunar lander
By April of 1971 the Salyut space station had been moved from the assembly building and was sitting atop a three stage version of Chelomei’s, now relatively reliable, Proton. The station weighed almost 19,000 kg and it was 15.8 m long and as much as 4.1 m in diameter. It had four large solar arrays for power and one docking port awaiting the follow-on Soyuz crew, who were scheduled to leave four days later. On April I 9 the world’s first true space station was launched into a 200 km orbit around the earth and awaited its first occupants. The crew was to fly what was to be the first of the upgraded Soyuz-T model spacecraft. Unfortunately when the Soyuz 10 crew arrived it was to a badly crippled space station that was running with only 25% of its life support system as well as suffering from other crucial malfunctions in the scientific equipment Compounding the problem, the crew had some difficulty achieving the docking and then after getting a “soft” connection it appeared they were stuck.
Salyut 1 assembly
After involuntarily remaining docked for over five hours the problem was solved and the crew returned home. It was an unfortunate start to an ambitious new era of Soviet space efforts but there would be more bad news before the end of the year. On June 6 1971 the second crew, Soyuz II , would leave to hook up with the Salyut I station. This time they were able to accomplish the rendezvous and docking and they spent 22 days aboard the hapless station. By the time they returned to earth on June 30 the crew of Yladislav Volkov, Georgi Dobrovo and Viktor Patsayev had become national celebrities and had set another endurance record for the Soviets. Sadly this was to be the darkest hour for the Soviet program. A small equalization valve in the base of the Soyuz cabin, only about 1mm wide, had been jarred open when two sets of explosive bolts had fired simultaneously instead of sequentially during staging. The valve was supposed to open only on return into the atmosphere but instead it opened in space. It was too small to find and by the time the cosmonauts had realized their peril it was too late. They died of asphyxiation before they reached the safety of the atmosphere. It was only a tiny mistake but it demonstrated just how unforgiving and merciless the space environment can be. This was a terrible blow to the Russian people, but to the teams working at TsKBEM who were distraught at the loss of their friends, it was compounded further by the fact that only three days earlier, on June 27, 1971, a third N-1 launch had been attempted. This time an unstoppable roll began in the booster just 40 seconds off the ground and the rocket literally ripped itself apart 11 seconds later. The N-1/L3 was still destined to stay earthbound, it was a grim time for the Soviet space program.
Two months later on August 2, 1971, the T2K lunar lander made its last legless, unmanned flight in low earth orbit. Once again the lander went flawlessly through its paces. All it needed was a rocket big enough to get it to the moon. It was a small victory in a summer of terrible setbacks. Soyuz would not fly again for over two years.
N-1 / L3 lunar landing system
At the end of the year, on November 27, 1971, the Mars 2 crashed into the red planet. It could be held up as only a partial success since it had intended to soft land. A week later on December 2, 1971, Mars 3 made a better attempt but landed in the midst of the worst planet-wide dust storm ever observed on Mars. The lander is said to have transmitted for about 20 seconds, just enough time to send one photograph, before it’s believed static electricity in the dust- storm caused the delicate robot to die. On February 4 1972 another sample return mission was successfully launched to the moon under the designation Luna 20.Then in March the Molniya/R-7 sent Venera 8 on its way to a second successful landing on Venus, this time to transmit data for about fifty minutes from the hellish surface.
The next major Soviet launch was on November 23 1972 when the full N-1 / L3 complex would finally get to fly. This time all the hard ware was aboard including the small one-man LK lunar lander. The launch seemed to be going fine and the booster was only seven seconds away from staging when an explosion rocked the luckless first stage and destroyed the vehicle. The launch escape system saved the crew compartment and orbiter but the fragile Russian lunar lander was consumed by fire. The reason for the failure was controversial but it seems that it was due to an unscheduled shut down of one engine. This was the end of the Soviet lunar program because only a month later the Americans shut down their own Apollo program. There was no longer any political appetite on either side for such expensive sport.
Mars 3 probe
The next thing on the American agenda was their own space station, designated Skylab. The Soviets were clearly not going to relinquish the one thing they could call their own and so the second Salyut, which was in fact an almost unadulterated military Almaz, was launched on April 4 1973, just six weeks before Skylab. This time the station was crippled by an explosion in the upper stage of the Proton launcher, after it was in space.
Next: Part 13
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