Ten, nine ignition sequence start six five four three two one zero all engine
running
lift off , we have a lift off at that it's probably the most well-known
peacetime battle between the United States and the Soviet Union in both
technological and ideological terms of the 20th century and although the USA
won the race to the moon, if you've been a betting person from the mid-1950's
to the 1960's the chances are that you would have thought
that the Soviet Union would have a very good chance of getting there first,
so why didn't Russia put a man on the moon. At the time the Soviets were
leading in the space race, they had already started with the launch of
Sputnik, then launched several probes to the moon including one in 1959 that
orbited and taken photos of the far side and by 1961 they put the first man into
space,
so when Kennedy made his now-famous "We choose to go to the moon" speech in 1962
to rally public support the Soviet leader Khrushchev’s response was silence,
neither confirming nor denying that they had a plan for manned moon missions but
at the time Khrushchev wasn't really interested in competing with the US over
the moon,
he was more interested in ICBMs the intercontinental ballistic missiles for
strategic rocket forces of the Soviet Union but there were others in the
Soviet Union that had harbored plans for a manned moon mission for a long time
these included the man whose name was a state secret and the most powerful man
outside the Kremlin when it came to space he was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev,
off outside the inner circle of the top space scientists he was known only as
the "Chief designer" or by his first two initials "SP" because the Soviet
leadership feared that the Western powers would send agents to try and
assassinate him.
Korolev was the man who was behind many of the Soviet space successes and the
head of the OKB1 the design bureau, he oversaw Sputnik and the manned missions
including the first man in space
"Yuri Gagarin". His authority extended over most everything to do with space his
design group worked on missions to Mars and Venus, communication
and spy and weather satellites, ICBMs and the soviet manned moon missions. Korolev
have had a huge amount of control over the space program, in administrative
power he was almost a one-man version of NASA, covering areas that in the US were
done across multiple aerospace companies and flight centre's but even a man of
his power and connections didn't get everything his own way. He had to
continuously fight against rival designers and design groups. Although
Korolyev wanted the moon missions himself, in 1964 the job was given to his
rival, Vladimir Chelomei because of his patronage by Khrushchev but his lack of
experience meant that the missions progressed slowly. The progress of Apollo
on the other hand worried the chief designers and as a result of this and
the infighting between the design bureaus meant that they were multiple
overlapping designs for the moon missions at one point there were 30
different designs for launchers and spacecraft. In 1964 the Soviet Leader
Khrushchev was replaced by Leonard Brezhnev, Korolev was given the
complete control over the moon missions and pushed through his designs ahead of
Chelomei’s and the decision finally to compete for the moon was given with the
aim to land in 1967, the 50th anniversary of the october revolution
and to get there before the Americans. This however created a problem for
Korolev, in order to lift a payload weight of 95 tons he needed a very large
rocket this new rocket will be called the N1, be as big as the American Saturn 5 and
would require new large powerful engines similar to the F1 rocket engines used in
the Saturn. Valentin Glushko was the leading rocket designer at the time and
the head of the OKB 456 Bureau which had a near-monopoly when it
came to rocket design and production. He specialized in making engines that used
hypergolic propellants, these consist of a fuel and oxidizer that when mixed
together spontaneously ignite when they come into contact with each other.
Korolev thought these were too
dangerous for manned missions due to the highly toxic and corrosive nature of the
chemicals used to make up the fuel. Glushko said that it was not possible to
create a new large engine design that used cryogenic fuel of liquid oxygen and
kerosene and get it ready in time with limited resources and cash.
He also cited that at the time the Americans had been working on cryogenic
engines for the Saturn for 5 years and still hadn't got them to work
reliably. There was also a personal problem between the two men Korolev
blamed Glushko for denouncing him in the great purge under Stalin in 1938
leading to Korolev's near death serving 6 years in a Soviet labour
camp. Glushko on the other hand considered Korolev's to be irresponsibly cavalier
and autocratic towards things which were outside of his own of competence. This
clash between them led to Glushko refusing to work for Korolev and
caused delays the overall program
Korolev was forced to find a new engine designer and gave the job to Nikolai
Kuznetsov who was a leading jet engine designer but had not designed a rocket
engine before. The Kuznetsov design bureau looked at the problem and
realized that creating a rocket engine was not that different to the jet
engines they were used to but they ran into the same problem as Glushko, in
that the Soviets simply didn't have the industrial infrastructure that the
Americans did to produce a new large engine. The solution they came up with
was innovative but would have both negative and positive outcomes. Where the
Americans used 5 large engines for the initial booster stage of Saturn,
Korolev was forced to use 30 small but highly efficient engines arranged in a
ring of 24 around the base and 6 at the center in order to achieve the thrust
required. The design of these engines was very advanced and used a method called
for closed-cycle system this was capable of boosting the efficiency
power to levels to that which were believed impossible before. The Americans had
known about the closed cycle system but thought it was too difficult and
dangerous as the high-pressure high-temperature oxygen method could
cause the engine to burn up, so they used for more reliable but less efficient
open cycle system but with much larger engines. It had only been possible for
the Soviets to create a closed-cycle engine because they had secretly
developed advanced stainless steel alloys something which the Americans
didn't know about at of the time. Using so many smaller engines allowed the
N1 rocket to create more power than the Saturn but the likelihood of one or more
of them failing and making a rocket unstable was much greater. One of the
main problems was the complex fuel plumbing that was required to supply all
the engines which in time proved to be a very fragile system. But just as the
Soviets were working on the new engines, in 1966 Korolev died after undergoing a
routine operation, this was a setback because Korolev had a unique set
of abilities and connections and was the major driving force behind making sure
that the moon missions would be delivered. The work of continuing fell to
Vasily Mishkin, Korolev’s deputy but Mishkin didn't have the political
astuteness or power of his old boss. The Soviets also didn't have the facilities
to test all 30 of the engines of the main stage at once before they were
mounted to the rocket. The Baikonur launch complex could also not be reached
by heavy barges so the whole rocket had to be broken down into sections
transported by rail and then rebuilt again at the launchpad.
This meant that the development of the N1 rocket as a whole was still ongoing
when it came to the launches, so it was almost expected that there would be
failures. The Soviets planned 14 launches the first 12 will be unmanned
and the last two would be the manned lunar missions. On the 21st February 1969
the first N1 rocket was prepared for launch. This would be the first time that
the whole system had been tested in fact it was revealed later but only two out
of every batch of six engines had even been run before the launch. This was in
contrast to the Americans which were fully able to test their F1 engines
before the Saturn was assembled. Once that have been done it was removed from
the assembly building to the launchpad nearby, fully assembled tested and ready
to go. Within seconds of the launch of the engine control system which was
called Kord shut down 2 the 30 stage one engines, then self oscillating
vibration started in the fuel system due to unstable combustion in some of the
engines, this ruptured fuel lines which caught fire and burned through
electrical control wiring, this then caused the KROD system to incorrectly
shut down all of the engines 68 seconds into the flight and the rocket crashed
32 miles from the launch pad. After the investigation and subsequent
modification, the second flight was due for the 3rd July 1969, the launch
took place at 11:18 p.m. as the rocket cleared the tower the liquid oxygen
turbo pump on engine number eight exploded causing a fire which
triggered KORD to shut down all the engines except one, the N1 fell back onto
the launch pad with nearly 2,300 tonnes of rocket fuel on board, the resulting
explosion was one of the largest ever to happen and was the equivalent of 3.8
kilotons of TNT or a small nuclear bomb. It destroyed the launch complex, blasted
debris over 6 miles away and was visible over 22 miles away. Some 30
minutes after the blast when launch crews were allowed onto the site they
found droplets of unburned
rocket fuel still raining down from the sky and afterwards it was discovered
that 85% of the rocket fuel did not detonate which actually
reduced the size of a blast. 17 days later
Neil Armstrong became the first man on the Moon with the Apollo 11 mission and
although the race for the moon had been lost, the Soviets carried on. The blast caused a
two-year delay whilst the launch complex was rebuilt and further modifications
were made to the rocket. In November of 1971 the third attempt also failed due
to unexpected Eddie and counter currents in the base of the main stage causing
the rocket to roll uncontrollably and ultimately break up due to the stress on
its structure.
One year later in November 1972 the fourth and final launch also failed 107
seconds into the flight after the program shutdown of the six centre
engines caused a hydraulic shock wave to rupture the fuel pipes and start a fire,
the main stage then exploded shortly afterwards.
Although there had been four previous launch failures the Soviets had actually
made huge progress and the design by trial and error was believed to have
ironed out all the problems but by the time of the fifth launched in August
1974 the whole moon mission was cancelled by Brezhnev
By this time the Americans had been to the moon six times and public interest
in space was waning. One theory is that if the fifth launch had been successful
it would have forced the Soviets to carry on the lunar mission where the
main goal of beating the USA had already been lost. The cancellation of the
project was therefore a way of sweeping a very expensive undertaking under the
carpet. Vasily Mishkin was ultimately fired and replaced by Glushko but by
1976 the N1 rocket program was scrapped.
The rockets were broken up to hide the failure and to make the U.S. think that
the space race was still ongoing.
It wasn't until Gorbachev's period of "Glasnost" when this cover story was blown and the
true story of the failed Soviet moon mission became widely known about and
why the Russians didn't put a man on the moon. But there is a strange twist to the
end of this story, the NK 43 rockets that had been developed for the N1 were by
the end much more reliable and the most efficient and powerful rocket engines
for their size ever made. 20 years after they were meant to have been destroyed
on order of a Kremlin, 60 of them were rediscovered and sold to be Americans
for $1.1 million dollars each.
A subsequent new larger model the RD-180 based on the technology of the NK 43 is now
built by the Russians and used by the Americans for their Atlas 5 heavy launch
vehicle.
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