Soviet/Russian Spacecraft & Space Program Pt. 9

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Five days after Voskhod 2 returned to Earth the Americans stepped up the pace and launched Gemini 3 with John Young and Virgil “Gus” Grissom aboard. The parallels between Vostok and Mercury are obvious, they both comprised six flights of single seat vehicles with little or no steering capability. Even the parallels that would develop between Soyuz and Apollo are self evident, but there is simply no way to compare Voskhod and Gemini. While the Soviets had wasted time modifying a patently unsuitable spacecraft to stage two publicity stunts, the United States had methodically assembled a spacecraft that handled like a race car. Even Korolev’s right-hand man, Vasiliy Mishin, admitted years later that Voskhod had contributed nothing to space research. With one notable and tragic exception the Soviet manned space program would now grind to a halt for almost three and a half years while the Americans would blaze ahead, flying nine more manned Gemini missions in seventeen months.

Mikhail Yangel.

Korolev’s original vision for an orbital lunar craft had been offered as an alter native to Chelomei’s LK-1. It consisted of three stages and was rather confusingly referred to as the L1. Then there was the L2 configuration which was an unmanned lunar roving vehicle. L3 included a modified crew compartment with an attached lander, this version required four launches to accomplish. An L4 mission was just a manned lunar orbiter and the final type, L5, would carry an advanced lunar rover. These motifs were quite different to the American approach which was a linear progression, the Apollo mission types were designated A - J, with each one improving on its predecessor, culminating with the missions. The Russian L1 through L5 motifs were to be applied as and when necessary. So although L1 was an orbital mission and L3 was the manned landing mission, the other three motifs were supplemental flights that could be used as re-supply missions or simply as stand-alone delivery of hardware.

The key to Korolev’s extensive lunar architecture was the 7K spacecraft which later became known simply as the Soyuz. Korolev fully expected that an L1 or L2 mission would require six launches by an upgraded R-7 while the L3 landing would require an upgraded R-7 and as many as three N-1s. The reason for such a hefty launch schedule was because he was originally shooting for an Earth-orbit rendezvous profile, with a very large 50-ton lander, Korolev’s L1 orbital motif was in direct competition with Chelomei’s LK 1/ UR-500 configuration and so it was cancelled almost as soon as Korolev’s L3 landing mission had been given the green light.

The end of the Voskhod flights also heralded the end of Khrushchev’s domination of Soviet politics. Korolev and Khrushchev had been at odds in recent years and so when he fell from power it was less of a blow to Korolev than it was to Chelomei who had been deriving some benefit from having Khrushchev’s son working at his bureau. Chelomei soon found himself being methodically stripped of his assets, including one important division originally known as OKB-301 which became today’s Lavochkin agency, and would take over the Venera, Luna and Mars planetary probes. Meanwhile, Chelomei’s large UR-500 somehow managed to survive the attacks coming from the Kremlin. In fact at the end of 1964 he was able to devise a larger version which he called the UR-500K that included a third stage and would be able to pull off an Apollo 8 style mission without any need for supplementary launches. The LK-1 space craft chosen for this mission had a similar shape to an Apollo CSM but with large solar panels attached. Superficially, at least, this is very like one of the configurations being examined today, but Chelomei’s craft was only a single-seater, while the pro posed NASA CEV is expected to carry up to six people.

LK-1 proposed lunar orbiter.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome was a massive facility spread over a vast tract of flat land in Kazakhstan. Heading northwards from the (new) town of Baikonur, the first thing a visitor encounters are tracking stations and radio masts. Continuing north the road sends branches east and west. The west road heads towards the giant UR-500 complex built specifically for Chelomei’s boosters in 1962.Taking the east road you come to the Vostok launch site. Back on the main northern road from Baikonur the huge assembly buildings for Soyuz and the N-1 super booster are conspicuous, and beyond them lies the Soyuz and N-1 launch pads. The first UR-500 booster was successfully launched from the Baikonur complex on July 16, 1965, carrying a satellite called Proton 1. The UR-500 performed perfectly and marked Chelomei’s first orbital launch—using storable propellants. The UR-500 would soon adopt the name of its first payload and become known as the Proton.

Korolev and his deputies spent much of 1965 and 1966 whittling away at their Apollo-class spacecraft Since the circum-lunar mission had now been given to Chelomei, Korolev’s lunar spacecraft continued on as Soyuz. It was to have three principal modules instead of Vostok’s two. The stack consisted of a living module on top, the crew cabin and re-entry vehicle in the center and the service/instrument module at the base. Soyuz would weigh in at about six and a half thousand kilograms and would stand almost eight meters tall. Somewhat ironically the de-orbit engine for Soyuz would be powered by storable propellants. The launch vehicle would again be the ubiquitous R-7, but with a slightly more powerful ”I” third stage that used the RD-110 engine instead of the RD-10B. Soyuz would also have a launch escape tower, the first time any Soviet manned vehicle had such a basic safety device. This new R-7 variant is known today by the same name as its primary payload, Soyuz. The Soyuz stack would stand a full 20 meters taller than the R-7 that had launched Sputnik, but the first two stages remained essentially the same, a testament to the capability of the ten-year-old design.

One of the major problems with the Soyuz, faced by Korolev and his team, was the hazardous landing back on Earth. Gagarin and his five Vostok compatriots had been obliged to eject at around 7000 meters because the capsule faced a potentially hard landing, despite the parachute system. So with Soyuz an advanced landing system was created that would use a special altimeter to fire four, small, solid rockets an instant before landing, thus considerably softening the final impact Make the booster more powerful and more efficient and make the payload smaller and lighter (and effectively less safe.) One of the most obvious things that came out of this redesign was a similar solution that von Braun had used. When von Braun was faced with the ever increasing mass of the Apollo spacecraft complex he apparently made the decision to add another F-1 engine to the center of the Saturn V first stage. Korolev did the same thing but in the case of the N-1 the first stage went from 24 to 30 engines. It was increasingly apparent that Glushko’s continued resistance to building large cryogenic engines was going to haunt the Soviet program for years to come. In fact, just before the end of Khrushchev’s reign, Glushko and Chelomei had pitched an engine, spacecraft and booster system that was specifically aimed at taking the whole lunar program away from Korolev. Once again funds were sapped from OKB-1. Meanwhile, the only way that Korolev had managed to get support for his N-1 was by using it to derive new military applications. One of these was to have been the test-bed for the N-1 engine program but even that was cancelled. Korolev had been refused the funds to build a test stand big enough to house the first stage, and so the engines were never tested all-up until the first time they flew. This ridiculous state of affairs was in sharp contrast to the extensive F-1 engine testing that was taking place every couple of weeks in Alabama and Mississippi.

N-1 on pad.

The lack of high power cryogenic engines forced the N-1 to start looking more and more like Jules Verne’s space-train. Without the additional power of liquid hydrogen, the OKB-1 team was obliged to rely on more kerosene engines and more stages. Evolving over six years of designs, the final N-1 with its revised L3 lunar landing payload consisted of five stages below the space craft complex. The stages were con figured as follows:

The L3 lunar vehicle was then comprised of three more components:

The Saturn V by comparison had only three main stages capped off by the Apollo spacecraft and a launch escape system.

L3 lunar landing aggregate with LOK orbiter, LK lander and upper stages.

While the LOK orbiter would be the antecedent of the Soyuz spacecraft the LK lander was comprised of a landing stage, a crew cabin and an engine module designated Blok E, all to be built by Yangel; including the engines. The Blok E engine was used for both landing and lifting off from the moon. It had two engines that both fired simultaneously but once the computer determined the primary engine was working, the secondary engine would shut down. The Blok D stage would be used for velocity changes in lunar orbit and would take the LK lander down to within a few kilometers of the surface before dispatching the lander for final approach, so in that respect it was performing the function covered by the Apollo SM engine and the LM descent engine. On Apollo the lunar module had two separate engines; one for landing and one for take off, while the descent stage and its engine were left behind on the moon. On the LK the same engine was used for both take off and landing. It fired through a hole in the descent stage and then returned to orbit with the ascent stage, leaving just a donut with legs on the lunar surface. Once the LK returned to lunar orbit it docked with the LOK but there would be no transfer tunnel so the cosmonaut would have to EVA to get back to the orbiter. The lander could only sustain one cosmonaut and at one point it was discussed that there might be two separate landers, one would take the cosmonaut down and the other would bring him home. He would travel from one to the other using a robot rover.

LK lunar lander.

By August of 1965 the Soviet leaders were beginning to realize the waste of running two competing lunar programs. Korolev led an attack against Chelomei’s lunar spacecraft, which had been mired in design problems for over a year. The result of this was that Chelomei’s UR-500 would be combined with Korolev’s LOK lunar orbiter. The only problem with this scenario was that the UR-500 wasn’t powerful enough to lift Korolev’s LOK, so it needed an upper stage. Naturally, both Korolev and Chelomei wanted to use their own designs for this, but neither would be up to the task of lifting the full LI1 design, so it was decided to simply abolish the living module from the L1. Now all that was left of the L1 was a Soyuz stripped of all creature comforts, it would have made a very uncomfortable spacecraft had anyone been asked to fly in it for a week or more. The final configuration of the lunar orbital system was called the UR-500/7K-L1.The 7K was the basic designator for all Soyuz spacecraft. The rocket would use the Blok D second stage originally designed for Korolev’s N-1 so that it could be tested earlier in the program in much the same way as the Saturn IV-B was test flown before being used for Apollo. This small victory for Korolev was to be his last.

On January 1966 the Chief Designer, had been admitted to hospital for a routine operation to remove intestinal polyps. He was in surgery when the doctors discovered a large malignant tumor in his abdomen. His jaw had been broken in the Gulag three decades earlier and so the doctors had been forced to help him breathe through a tracheotomy. After considerable effort to remove the tumor, Korolev died due to overstraining his heart and respiratory complications. The blow to the Soviet program was incalculable. Korolev had been the driving force behind the Soviet efforts since the very beginning, and his tenacity and sense of purpose had pushed the program past innumerable obstacles over the previous three decades. OKB-1 would now fall to his right-hand man, Vasiliy Mishin.

“Soyuz Lite” The 7K-L1/Zond lunar orbiter

Mishin was a great supporter of Korolev’s dream for the N-11. After a state funeral for Korolev, Mishin regrouped the team at OKB-1 and pushed on. The Soviet pro gram was falling behind. The Americans had flown four successful manned Gemini flights in 1965 while all the Soviets had to show was a string of at least ten failed planetary and lunar probes. However, less than two weeks after Korolev’s death the Molniya booster finally delivered the Luna-9 payload to a semi-soft landing on the moon. It deployed its petals and sent back the first pictures from the surface of the moon. It was another major achievement for OKB-1, and for Babakin’s Lavochkin bureau, which had built the probe. But the Americans were close behind and placed their own lander, Surveyor 1, gently onto the moon only three months later. The race still seemed close, but no one in the west knew just how bogged down the Soviet program had become.

Luna 9.

All through 1966 Mishin tried to pick up the pieces of Korolev’s far-flung efforts, The design for Soyuz continued while Gemini flew another five missions with several dockings, spacewalks and even a high-flying ride with an Agena booster.

Mishin had been left with an unfinished, unmanned, Voskhod program. The next launch was three weeks after the Luna-9 landing. It was carrying two dogs again and was to conduct more long term studies on space exposure, especially in the problematic Van Allen radiation belts. It was to be the last Voskhod flight. Many more Voskhod structures would continue to be used as spy satellites under the Zenit name. In April the Molniya booster had another of its rare early successes and made Luna-10 the first satellite to orbit the moon.

Now that Korolev was gone, Chelomei once more tried to appropriate the lunar landing program by offering a giant upgrade to his UR-500, designated the UR-700.This became another momentary distraction to the N-1 / L3 being built at OKB-1 (the bureau had now been renamed TskBEM). The UR-700 would have offered a direct ascent to the moon, in much the same way as the many versions of the proposed Nova program in the United States. Its lander, the LK-700, looked almost exactly like the early designs for Apollo landers, like a CSM with legs. Meanwhile, Mishin’s team had capped off 966 with two more orbiters around the moon, another successful moon landing, Luna-13, and the first unmanned flight of Soyuz on November 28. The unmanned Soyuz flight had ended with the vehicle miles off course, requiring that it be destroyed, lest it fall into foreign hands. Another flight was ordered but this one ended up with a near repeat of the terrible R-16 catastrophe of six years earlier. The launcher failed to leave the pad and then after ground crews gathered to safe the vehicle the new launch escape system ignited causing a fire to quickly spread to the lower stages. The fire destroyed the launch structure but it spread slowly enough that there was only one life lost.

Next: Part 10

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