The Soviet Challenge for the Moon Quiz

Answer: Sergei Korolev

Sergei Korolev, the visionary leading force behind the launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, and sending the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, laboured away in anonymity and was never officially identified until after his death. In contrast his rival in the American space programme, Werner Von Braun worked in the full glare of publicity and made the most of this. Korolev's design bureau, OKB-1, was responsible for all the early rocket and spacecraft developments that gave the Soviet Union its early lead in space.
Vladimir Chelomei was another rocket engineer whose OKB-52 design bureau developed the heavy lift booster UR-500 Proton.
Valentin Glushko was the principal designer of rocket engines in the Soviet Union and was head of the design bureau OKB-456.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was an early theoretician and rocket scientist and is regarded as the 'Father of Astronautics'. His most famous quote was: "The earth is the cradle of humanity, but man cannot stay in the cradle forever".

Answer: Soyuz

Work on Soyuz, officially designated 7-K OK commenced in 1964 when Korolev was given authorisation to develop a follow on spacecraft to Vostok. By this time Project Apollo was underway and the Soviet's own attempt at moon programme had been sidetracked by political pressure to mount a few more space 'firsts'.

Hence Korolev was forced to waste time adapting the one man Vostok spacecraft to Voskhod in order to be the first to fly a three man crew which was accomplished by Voskhod 1 in Oct 1964 and the first to perform a spacewalk by adding an airlock, accomplished by Voskhod 2 in March 1965. Politically these feats were triumphs and made good headlines but technically they were a dead end.

Answer: True

After initially dismissing Kennedy's 1961 pledge to land a man on the moon as so much political rhetoric the Soviets belatedly committed to a moon landing in Aug 1964 (in secret) after seeing the seriousness and scope of the Apollo programme.Incredibly Chelomei was given the go ahead to fly a man around the moon meaning that rival bureaus were now competing for limited funds.

A parallel in the US would have been if Douglas had developed an Apollo 8 style mission while Boeing developed the Apollo 11 mission using their own designs.

There was no equivalent to NASA in the Soviet Union at this time so there was wasteful competition for official patronage among the technology bureaus. Khrushchev's son, Sergei, worked for Chelomei, which probably had some bearing on his plans for a circumlunar mission being approved. With the fall of Khrushchev, Chelomei was stripped of his influence.

However his heavy lift UR-500 (Proton) booster survived the cutbacks and was proposed as the basis to launch a stripped down version of Korolev's 7-K (Soyuz) spacecraft on a circumlunar mission.

His own R-7 booster was not powerful enough for the job and the booster to mount the moon landing was still at the conceptual stage.

Answer: Webb's Giant

'Webb's Giant' was named after James Webb, the NASA administrator who bought its presence to the attention of Administration officials in his continuing quest to maintain official support for project Apollo and its goal of landing an American on the moon by 1970.

It was being developed by Korolev's OKB-1 but was suffering numerous difficulties and delays. The N-1 had originally been conceived as far back as 1956 as part of an early proposal for a manned Mars expedition and became the basis for the manned lunar effort once the decision had been taken to challenge Apollo.

In its original configuration it had a capacity of 50 tonnes to low earth orbit (later upgraded to 70 tonnes) and would have required two launches for the Mars expedition. For the moon landing its payload capacity was finally upgraded to 95 tonnes.

Answer: 30

Korolev was forced to cluster an amazing 30 engines producing 4,600 tons of thrust in order to provide the necessary lift for the N-1 booster and its payload. He and leading engine designer Valentin Glushko had a falling out over issues that went back to the purges during Stalin's time when Glushko was forced to denounce Korolev.

As a result Korolev spent many years in the Gulag before being rehabilitated at the end of the war to decipher the secrets of the German V-2 but his health was never the same again.

The specific issue relating to engine power for the N-1 was that Glushko refused to develop high energy cryogenic engines as the American's were doing preferring to stick with his proven engines which were powered by storable hypergolic (ignite on contact) propellents.

However these fuels were highly toxic, tricky to handle and offered a lower specific impulse than liquid Oxygen/kerosene/hydrogen cryogenic engines. As a result Korolev was forced to turn to jet engine designer Nikolai Kuznetsov who had little experience with rocket engines.

He came up with the NK-15, a Lox/Kerosene powered engine offering modest thrust which could be tuned to operate at different altitudes. Korolev used these engines in clusters in the 1st and 2nd stage and modified versions in the 3rd and 4th stage of the N-1.

Answer: True

Korolev was forced into this risky option for accomplishing the moon landing because of the constraints he was working under. The Saturn V, with its high energy upper stages, was able to place 130 tonnes into low earth orbit using three stages whereas the uprated N-1 with all its engines would only be able to place 95 tonnes into low earth orbit using a total of five stages (called 'Bloks').

The lunar orbit rendezvous flight profile, as used by Apollo, had been adopted after a debate similar to the one the Americans had gone through when deciding how to accomplish a moon landing. Korolev proposed to solve his payload dilemma from both ends.

He added more engines to the 1st stage (originally there were 24), and he would use a version of Soyuz known as 7K LOK to carry two cosmonauts instead of three on a trip to the moon while a small LK lander ferried a single cosmonaut to the lunar surface.

This lone cosmonaut would then conduct an exploration before lifting off from the lunar surface using the same engines used during the landing, leaving a doughnut shaped descent stage behind and rendezvous with his companion in orbit. Amazingly he was then to transfer, carrying his samples, from the LK to the LOK by EVA as there was no internal hatch between the two craft.

The chances of something going wrong using this risky flight profile were very high and demonstrates how determined the Soviets were to steal Apollo's thunder. The LOK, hopefully by now carrying the two cosmonauts, would then leave lunar orbit and return to earth in a similar manner to the Apollo CSM.

Answer: 1966

Sergei Korolev died suddenly in January 1966 after complications from a routine operation to remove intestinal polyps. His death was an immense blow not only to the lunar programme but to the whole Soviet space programme. He had been the driving force from the beginning and his leadership, tenacity, and sense of purpose would be sorely missed. Only now did the authorities release the name of the 'Chief Designer'.

It was surely a terrible injustice that this great man was never able to be acknowledged by the outside world during his lifetime.

He was succeeded by his deputy Vasily Mishin who took over the leadership of OKB-1.

Answer: Soyuz 1

The Soyuz 1 mission was the first manned test of the spacecraft which was to take two cosmonauts to the moon. This was a 7K OK version of Soyuz developed for earth orbital missions while a 7K LOK version was being developed for the moon mission. There had been several unmanned test flights conducted under the Cosmos label which had revealed shortcomings of the design. However the pressure to answer the unchallenged string of 10 successful Gemini missions in 1965-66 led to the decision to commit to a manned flight before all the problems had been identified and corrected leading to this tragic result. It was 19 months before manned testing of Soyuz resumed. Both sides seem to have been affected by "Go-Fever" at this time and it took the Apollo 1 tragedy to identify a number of shortcomings of the Apollo design which set the programme back by 20 months.
Zond 4, launched in March 1968, was the name given to the first unmanned test of the 7K-L1 circumlunar craft launched by Chelomei's UR-500 booster. Two more flights in this series prompted the Americans to change the flight plan of Apollo 8 to include 10 lunar orbits in order to upstage any Soviet attempt to be the first around the moon. The triumph of Apollo 8 on Christmas 1968 took the wind out of the sails of the Zond 7K-L1 programme. As there didn't seem to be any point in staging a manned version of this flight, the Zond 7 and 8 missions were flown unmanned in 1969-70 as technical demonstrations.
There was no Vostok 7 or Voskhod 3 flight.

Answer: False

In fact the N-1 was completely destroyed 68 seconds after lift-off when a fire erupted at the base of the giant booster. The simultaneous operation of 30 engines was always going to be problematic and, given that there were no funds available to build a ground rig to test the first stage engine cluster, the chances of failure were very high.

The Americans were test firing the F-1 engines of their S1C stage fortnightly at their test stands in Mississippi and Alabama at a similar stage of the Saturn V development. Undeterred, Mishin and his team staged a second test on July 2 but this one had an even more spectacular ending when the N-1 crawled just 200 m off the pad before crashing back and destroying itself and the pad in one titanic explosion! These setbacks combined with two more launch failures of the UR-500 carrying a Ye-8 Lunokhod rover and a sample return mission spelled the death knell of the Soviet attempt to upstage the Americans.

The UR-500 finally succeeded in launching a sample return mission (Luna 15) at the time of the Apollo 11 flight but this probe crashed on the moon becoming the latest casualty in an unmitigated string of Soviet disasters.

By the early half of 1969 the Apollo express train was all but unstoppable!

Answer: Luna

The Soviets had more success with their automatic Luna probes than they had with their manned efforts to explore the moon. Luna 2 was the first craft to land on the moon in 1959, Luna 3 or Automatic Interplanetary Station (AIS), was the first to photograph the far side of the moon the same year, Luna 9 upstaged Surveyor to become the first probe to soft land in 1966 and in Luna 10 became the first craft to orbit the moon upstaging NASA's Lunar Orbiter.

After Apollo 11, Luna 16 finally returned samples from the moon, a feat which was trumpeted as having been completed without putting any cosmonauts at risk.

The greatest success was probably Luna17/Lunokhod 1 which was an 8 wheeled rover operated for many months on the lunar surface by a team on earth taking thousands of photos and performing various tests(see my quiz 'Lunokhod - Moon Rover'). Mishin attempted to pick up the pieces of Korolev's lost dream by staging two more attempts to launch the N-1 in 1971-72 but it was not to be with both attempts ending in failure.

The chances are that given a little more time the problems affecting the N-1 would have been overcome and it would have become a fine booster rocket but this never happened and the programme was dismantled in 1974. He had some consolation when the LK lander was successfully tested three times in earth orbit during 1970-71 performing flawlessly on each occasion. These missions were similar to the Apollo 5 'Fire in the hole' test of Jan 1968 which put the unmanned Lunar Module through its paces in earth orbit. In 1974 Mishin was replaced as leader of OKB-1, now renamed TsKBEM (today part of RKK Energia), by Korolev's long time rival Glushko. In an ironic twist, Glushko was now an ardent supporter of cryogenic engines the very issue which had led to the split with Korolev a decade before. Using this technology he went on to develop his own Energia super booster which had a similar capability to the N-1 and the Buran space shuttle. After losing the moon race the Soviets dropped all references to manned moon missions and concentrated their efforts in space on developing an increasingly successful space station programme.