Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

This book tells the story of the Soviet and Russian lunar programme, from its origins to the present-day federal Russian space programme. It concludes that political mismanagement rather than technology prevented the Soviet Union from landing cosmonauts on the moon. Little is known of Soviet and Russian lunar exploration although, in fact, the Soviet Union/Russia: Sent the first spaceships past the moon, the first to hit the moon and the first to circle the moon Was first to soft land on and orbit the moon Was first to send a spaceship around the moon and recover it on Earth Came very close to sending a cosmonaut around the moon first Built and successfully tested, in Earth orbit, a lunar lander Pioneered sophisticated, precise high-speed reentries into the Earth's atmosphere Came close to perfecting a giant moon rocket, the N-1 Retrieved three sets of rock samples from the moon by automatic spacecraft Landed advanced roving laboratories that explored the moon for months on end, traveling 48km Designed long-term lunar bases. These were remarkable achievements requiring a considerable level of engineering sophistication and have a place in the contemporary story of astronautics. Recent landings on Mars use, essentially, the very techniques developed by Russia to land on and explore the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. As an acknowledged expert and author of several books on the Soviet and Russian space programme, Brian Harvey is ideally suited to cover not only the engineering and scientific side but also the human stories of the Soviet and Russian lunar programme. These include those of the cosmonaut squad that trained to land on the moon, but was stood down, and of the designers who tried to realise the dream of a Russian moon, from Tikhonravov to Mishin: a Soviet lunar programme was first proposed by designer Mikhail Tikhonravov in a children’s magazine in 1951 and he persuaded a sceptical Soviet leadership of the value of a moon programme. Following Sputnik, the first lunar flights quickly achieved the key goals of hitting, circling and photographing the moon in 1959. The Soviet Union achieved all the early‘firsts’ in lunar exploration, such as soft landing and orbiting the moon, and Brian Harvey will recount the frantic efforts to rival America’s Apollo and the dramatic hours of 21st July 1969, when Russia tried to soft land Luna 15 in the Sea of Crises even as Armstrong and Aldrin explored the moon in the nearby Sea of Tranquility. When the Soviets experienced a series of setbacks in their space program the USSR switched emphasis in their manned space program away from the Moon towards the creation of orbital scientific research platforms, the Space Station. With the success of Apollo, the Soviets claimed they had never actually intended to fly to the Moon, and that the space station was always their long-term goal. However, recently disclosed Russian archives show that, contrary to official statements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a planned Soviet program to send cosmonauts around the Moon and eventually to land on the surface. For the Americans, having lost their only competitor in the race for the Moon, the need for the Apollo program was questioned even before the first landing was achieved. With the near tragic flight of Apollo 13 in 1970 the pressure was on to cut the program and redirect efforts towards more Earth-focused objectives. At the height of success, the Apollo missions were reduced from 20 to 17, and plans for extending the flights to include lunar stays of 14 days to create a lunar base were scrapped. In the three decades since Apollo there has been very little exploration of the Moon by either America or Russia. The final Soviet Luna probe flew in 1976 and the following year the network of scientific experiments left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts were switched off. Whilst many plans were put forward to return to the Moon, only two probes, Clementine and Lunar Prospector have supplemented information from the Apollo era.