Why Didn't the Soviets Ever Make It to the Moon?

Popular Mechaincs ^ | July 22, 2019 | Anatoly Zak

[C19fan]

On July 3, 1969, just 17 days before Neil Armstrong and Ed Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, the USSR made its second attempt to test-fire its own moon rocket, known as N1.

No official announcement about the secret mission had ever been made, but in subsequent passes over the Soviet test range in Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, U.S. spy satellites glimpsed utter devastation at one of the two launch pads known to host the moon rocket.

The Soviet Union didn't know it at the time, but its hopes for reaching the moon also ended on that charred launch pad in 1969.

[mad_as_he$$]

with a reach that exceeds their grasp.

[hoagy62]

IF they could’ve gotten the N-1 to work, and IF they also had a million other things go right (which they did for Apollos 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17), the Soviets MIGHT have made it to the Moon. But, (Chief Designer) Korolev believed in larger numbers of smaller engines rather than fewer big engines. With the Saturn V, that’s what worked. IF they’d developed an equivalent of the F-1 engine, they might have had greater success.

But, like they say...’if wishes were horses’.

[sparklite2]

Russians: Great mathematicians, lousy engineers.

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They really missed out by skipping the moon.
I mean, Tang and Teflon. Such a bonanza!

[blam]

"They were slowly going broke due to their central control economy."

Today, the Russian population is decreasing by 700 people every day.

[foreverfree]

bump

[mjp]

universal wage and price controls + elimination of profits and private property + central planning + government monopoly + bureaucratic management + force = anarchy of production + economic chaos + inefficiency and waste

[Migraine]

Everything to lose; nothing to gain.

[Ancesthntr]

Rocket go “BOOM!”

I’ll bet that after the first disaster, some Soviet scientist said the equivalent of “it’ll buff right out.”

[GingisK]

Yes. That was mainly because we got the best Krauts.

[GingisK]

Those were slightly more expendable.

[DungeonMaster]

Meanwhile in 2019 South Korea is 10 times the country that Russia is.

[Paal Gulli]

There was an unmanned Soviet lunar lander (Luna 15) in orbit around the moon when Apollo 11 arrived. Their goal was to collect moon soil samples (and other scientific data) and bring it back to earth, then brag that Sovietski automation was SO SUPERIOR that they could do with robots what the Americans could only do by putting human lives at risk.

It even was scheduled to land before Apollo 11 (so they could claim they’d got there first) but while in lunar orbit they found that their altitude sensor — which was supposed to be in control of the soft landing — produced wildly fluctuating readings, which meant the landing probably wouldn’t be very soft.

They tried to find a work-around but ran out of time when Apollo landed first at 20:17:40 UTC on 20 July. After that they conceded defeat and commanded it to proceed with the automated landing and it crashed in Mare Crisium, about 740 miles from Tranquility Base at 15:51 UTC on 21 July. Two hours and three minutes later, Armstrong and Aldrin left the moon for rendezvous with Collins and the trip home.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks C19fan.

1. Sergei Khrushchev (son of the dictator) worked in the space program, and has flatly stated that there was never any chance for the USSR to beat the US to the Moon, or indeed to maintain any kind of lead, other than propaganda victories.

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2. Planned economies suck, and they don't deliver. They are designed to fail in that way, in order to foster dependence and maintain control over everything, including food, transportation, communication, your very life... Sakharov's memoirs contain an anecdote about the problem with getting technical components he needed for his various nuke designs, and he had it succinctly explained to him by Beria himself. What it boils down to is, one-size-is-good-enough-for-you doesn't work.

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3. To mimic free enterprise, the Soviet Union tried funding two separate design bureaus. Korolev complained that he could complete the work if 'his' funding were brought back.

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4. Korolev's N1 booster was (as someone noted above) overly complex and furthermore was not very well made. Had it worked, it would have (perhaps) delivered 70 tons to LEO, and two more or less simulataneous launches would have been needed to send the lander separately from the two cosmonauts. A rendezvous of the two vehicles would have been followed by an untethered space walk by one of the cosmonauts, who would have fired up the lander and descended to the lunar surface, then returned using the same vehicle, do another untethered space walk, and the cosmonauts would then have returned. The lander would have circled the Moon for some period before crashing into it.

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5. The N1 never had a successful flight test (and the Elephant Man had a little puffiness around the eyes). No alternative to it was ever developed.

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6. The USSR reverse-engineered captured V2 engines, and continued to refine the design. All the old Soviet client states who got help with missiles have programs indirectly based on the V2. By contrast, we had the designer of the V2 engine.

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7. The F1 engine was ready by 1961. The USSR never developed an answer to that. Russia has not. No one has.

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8. Von Braun's design idea included 100% cryo upper stages. Korolev read that interview and scoffed that we'd never solve the problems inherent in that approach. A couple years later Korolev read about the successful test-firing of Von Braun's 100% cryo engine.

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9. Their launch location was at a much higher latitude than Florida.

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10. Korolev never saw the ultimate failures of the N1, dying in 1966 during heart surgery.

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[SunkenCiv]

Spacecraft orbiting the Earth have remained in space since the 1950's and may last for centuries more, but spacecraft orbiting close to the moon can crash within weeks. The reason for this is the lunar gravity field is lumpy, with geological features making the smooth orbits of space probes distort until they hit the surface. Footage and images taken from NASA's Apollo, GRAIL and LRO programs.

Why Do Lunar Satellites Eventually Crash Into The Moon? | Scott Manley | Published on May 22, 2019

• Keyword: potsdamgravitypotato

[af_vet_rr]

There’s old rumors they did a manned landing first, but kept it under wraps until a successful return, which didn’t happen.

That would have leaked out if it had been true. I mean truly leaked out, not a bunch of Art Bell stuff. They never had a functioning spacecraft/rocket system that could get them there and back.

I think it goes back to the Russians putting a lander on the moon - they soft-landed a probe with Luna 8 or 9 back in '66, but they had a probe (Luna 15) that was going to return a sample. That probe landed on the Moon when Armstrong and Aldrin were still there. And by "landed", I mean hit a mountainside at several hundred miles an hour. I think that gave rise to a lot of conspiracy theories.

[af_vet_rr]

I forgot about the Zonds - those could have easily formed the basis of the rumors as well, but those things were so dangerous, they were never going to use them, at least not before we got there. Heck, one of the Zonds even killed multiple people on the ground.

The Soviets, for various reasons, could not think and engineer like we could - when you look back 50 years, everything looks like it went smoothly, but the reality is that our engineers were constantly adjusting and redesigning things all the way up until '69. Apollo 1, while a tragedy, actually gave us the time and focus needed to get a lot of things right - I'm very convinced that if there had been no fire, and things continued at the same pace, that something bad would have happened later on.

And we had a lot of young engineers in the Apollo program - the average age was in the 20s. One of my few regrets - I graduated in the midst of the landings, and even had a waiver from the AF to join NASA, and pay back my scholarship (Vietnam was winding down as well), but I was tipped off by a friend working at NASA that there were going to be layoffs, and that I should follow the path I started. Still regret not joining NASA later on.

[Conan the Librarian]

And we had Von Braun. He not only had the knowledge, he had the vision.

The Russians did have Korolev, and, if the Russian/Soviet mentality had allowed it, they would have made it much closer. But he was hamstrung, and, Did the best he could with the tools he had.

[af_vet_rr]

The Russians did have Korolev, and, if the Russian/Soviet mentality had allowed it, they would have made it much closer. But he was hamstrung, and, Did the best he could with the tools he had.

I don't know how accurate this is, but folks I know from the Air Force, and a couple of friends from NASA, have mentioned over the years that Korolev's strengths, at least towards the end, was more in the organizational aspect, and less on the technical side, and it hurt their chances of putting a man on the moon. My impression was that it led to them having a ridiculously complex system that most engineers would assume would fail.

It's odd that the nation that gave us the AK-47 and MiG-15, could produce a rocket with 5 stages, with a base of 30 engines. Maybe it was a case of Korolev getting too many resources. Soviet engineers did their best work when they had severe limitations.

[Conan the Librarian]

Sounds about right. I highly recommend his biography (if you can find it). Read it, then Gene Kranz and throw in Jim Lovell’s book too. GREAT reads.

[northislander]

Science fiction...