How The Soviets Didn’t Beat Us To The Moon

THE N-1 MOON ROCKET, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL, LIFTED FROM ITS launch pad in Kazakhstan with the thrust of 30 engines. A cacophonous roar rolled across the steppes, a roar that carried hope. It was July 1969; at Cape Kennedy, half a world away, NASA was preparing to launch Apollo 11, which would carry the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to man’s first lunar landing. The N-1 was unmanned, but if its flight proved successful, the Soviets might be in a position to match the Americans’ achievement.

All engines were firing normally as the immense launch vehicle rose several hundred feet. Then a stray piece of metal, a bolt that a technician had failed to notice, entered the liquid-oxygen turbopump of engine number eight, causing it to explode. The blast broke cables in the electrical circuitry, damaged adjacent engines, and started a fire. An onboard fault-detection system shut down all propulsion. The N-1 moon rocket, fully fueled and weighing as much as a destroyer, fell back onto the launch complex and exploded in an enormous fireball.

Its builders had hoped to use the N-1 to set records. They succeeded; it had just become the biggest rocket ever to blow up on its pad. Yet less than a year earlier, the Soviets had come tantalizingly close to winning one leg of the space race by sending a cosmonaut around the moon.

The N-1 was part of a manned lunar program that was as ambitious and extensive as Apollo. The program was an exercise in rivalry, internal as well as international. It was at first shaped by the personal animosity between two leading designers, Vladimir Chelomei and Sergei Korolev, who were vying for favor within the Kremlin. Chelomei sought to reach the vicinity of the moon by sending cosmonauts on a looping flight around it. He almost succeeded; only a last-minute surge of American effort defeated him. Korolev had less success but greater ambition; he sought a true lunar landing.

The roots of the Soviet effort lay in the late 1950s, when Chelomei, then a minor industrialist, rose to glory through the expedient of hiring the son of the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Sergei Khrushchev joined Chelomei’s organization in March 1958 as a senior manager in a department that was building guidance systems for missiles. “Chelomei was an absolute master at using their personal triangle for the advancement of his ambitions,” one scientist later wrote. By showering the Soviet leader with tales of his son’s expertise, he won personal access to Khrushchev on a regular basis. He also won strong support from key leaders in the defense ministries and the Communist party, and his industrial empire expanded accordingly.

In 1961 Chelomei developed plans for “universal rockets” that would serve as both ICBMs and space launchers. The largest of these would be the UR500, which would be big enough to carry a 30-megaton warhead. He pitched the concept to Nikita Khrushchev in February 1962; two months later, he received formal approval to proceed with development.

It was clear that the UR-500 would make a superb space booster. The Kremlin decree that authorized development of the rocket as an ICBM also approved its eventual use as a launch vehicle. Chelomei proposed to use it to send a man on a circumlunar mission. With two million pounds of thrust, the UR-500 would have power aplenty for the job.

In winning entry into the realm of manned space flight, Chelomei was challenging the king of that domain, Sergei Korolev, who already had more than just plans. His own ICBM, the R-7, had powered the entire Soviet space program to date, launching every key satellite and probe. He, too, enjoyed direct access to Khrushchev. In addition, he had strong support from a key cabinet minister, Dmitri Ustinov, who had been minister of armaments and now chaired the cabinet-level MilitaryIndustrial Commission.

From the start Korolev hoped to build rockets considerably larger than Chelomei’s. His initial plans for the N-1, the rocket that blew up on the launch pad in July 1969, received preliminary endorsement as early as 1960, with approval for development coming in September 1962. The design called for a behemoth nearly as large and heavy as America’s Saturn V, but with greater thrust. Its 10.2 million pounds of thrust—five times that of Chelomei’s UR-500— would make the N-1 the most powerful rocket ever to fly. Like the Saturn V, the N-1 was to be a true lunar rocket, able not just to orbit the moon but to land a cosmonaut on its surface and return him safely to earth.

Korolev soon learned that while the Council of Ministers might issue a decree calling for development of the N-1, it was another matter for Moscow to provide the necessary funds. President John R Kennedy had thrown his support behind the Apollo program in May 1961 in a memorable address to Congress. But although the N-1 represented a potential riposte, it had no priority within the Kremlin. Korolev was well aware that this neglect stemmed from the success of his own earlier creation, the R-7 booster. With it, Moscow already had the big rockets and America didn’t. Ironically, the reason the Russians were so far ahead in big rockets was that they were behind in building nuclear weapons. America’s weapons, far more compact and lightweight for their explosive power, simply didn’t require such huge delivery vehicles. Korolev had used the R-7 to run off a dazzling series of achievements: the world’s first satellites, the first lunar probes, the first man in orbit.

But at Cape Canaveral (later renamed Cape Kennedy), plans were now under way to surpass the Soviets, and they were rapidly taking shape as hardware. As early as October 1961 an initial version of the Saturn I flew in suborbital flight with 1.5 million pounds of thrust, setting a record that the Soviets would not match until the UR-500 was ready. In January 1964 this Saturn flew to orbit. Four months later it carried an unmanned test version of the three-man Apollo spacecraft. Both launches put payloads of more than 37,000 pounds into orbit.

Amid Apollo’s looming challenge, Korolev met repeatedly with Khrushchev and pressed strongly for a true commitment—a Soviet decision to go to the moon. In June 1963 he enthralled the premier with a personal presentation of his lunar-landing plans. But Khrushchev’s feelings cooled when Korolev stated that the project would cost the equivalent of $40 billion.

Korolev persevered, sending the powerful Military-Industrial Commission a formal report warning about Apollo. In March 1964 he met anew with Khrushchev, who promised that he would commit to a full-scale lunarlanding program. Then in May, on the eve of the unmanned Apollo test flight, Korolev wrote to Leonid Brezhnev, the nation’s top space leader, complaining that Khrushchev hadn’t followed through on his promise of support and pointing to NASA’s impending unmanned flight as proof that “the U.S.A. has already surpassed the Soviet Union.” He noted the rapid progress on the enormous Saturn V and predicted that it would fly in 1967, “at which time the U.S.A. will be able to fly into space many times without limitations.”

Days later the success of that unmanned Apollo flight showed that NASA now had an operational launch vehicle with far greater power than the Soviet R-7. This gave new significance to Chelomei’s UR500, which had not yet flown. It also showed that NASA would soon have an operating three-man spacecraft. Korolev just then was preparing his own three-man flight, which would reach orbit in October—another first for the Soviets. But in contrast with the sophisticated Apollo, he was merely cramming three cosmonauts into a capsule built for two, in a modified version of the spacecraft that had carried Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Clearly the time was at hand for a new generation of space programs to challenge the onrushing Yankees.

The commitment came in August 1964 in the form of decrees from the Central Com- mittee of the Communist party and the Council of Ministers. The first decree guaranteed additional funding for Korolev’s N-1; the second declared that the two manned lunar programs would go forward together. Chelomei’s program would aim at a looping circumlunar flight, while Korolev’s would pursue a lunar landing.

Then in October, the day after Korolev’s three-man crew landed safely, Khrushchev fell from power. It passed into the hands of Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin. The resulting shakeup in the government gave new responsibilities to the minister Dmitri Ustinov, Korolev’s long-time patron. This was good for Korolev and correspondingly bad for Chelomei, who had depended on Khrushchev’s personal support. His UR-200 ICBM was canceled, and part of his industrial empire went over to Korolev.

Chelomei’s UR-500 also came under severe criticism within the Kremlin. He responded by staking its fortune on a test launch in July 1965. It was successful; the rocket flew to orbit with a 27,000-pound payload and then repeated the feat in November. America was still ahead in the game of weightlifting, but these two missions set a record for Moscow. They also stilled the critics, who allowed Chelomei’s launch vehicle to go forward.

Chelomei would proceed with his manned circumlunar program, but he would build only the program’s rockets, not its spacecraft. That part went to Korolev, who was now nurturing ambitions for his own circumlunar missions that might supplant Chelomei’s. He was building a new manned spacecraft called Soyuz (union). A variant, Zond (probe), would conduct the lunar flight. Unfortunately, Korolev would not see his plans put into effect, for he died during surgery in January 1966 at the age of 59. His ineffectual long-time deputy, Vasily Mishin, replaced him.

Soyuz was an essential part of the program, but initial unmanned flights raised serious doubts about its prospects. One blew up on the launch pad; a second was destroyed during re-entry to keep it from landing in China. Only one returned safely from earth orbit, and it had to be fished out of the Aral Sea. Nevertheless, in April 1967 the Soviets set out to launch two Soyuz craft in a dual manned mission. One would carry a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, a veteran who had flown in the three-man flight in 1964; the other would carry a three-man crew and would rendezvous and dock with the first. Two cosmonauts would then spacewalk into the first Soyuz before both craft returned to earth.

Komarov flew into orbit, but one of his solar panels failed to deploy. The resulting power shortage left him without the energy that his craft would need to perform the rendezvous, so the second Soyuz stayed on the ground. “Devil-machine, nothing I lay my hands on works!” he scowled as he wrestled with the balky onboard systems. He managed to stabilize his spacecraft but had to return from orbit after only a day.

His parachute system had passed extensive drop tests from airplanes, but this time the main chute failed to deploy, and a reserve chute became tangled with the first one. His craft hit the ground at high speed. The crash killed him. His death was all the more regrettable because an ejection seat could have saved his life. Such seats had been installed on earlier one-man spacecraft, but on Soyuz, built to carry three men, they would have required too much weight and room.

NASA had suffered a similar loss only three months earlier, when the astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee had perished in a fire during a ground test of their Apollo vehicle. (See “‘Fire in the Cockpit!’,” Invention & Technology , Spring 1998.) The twin tragedies ensured that both nations’ lunar programs would now proceed at a more measured pace. If Komarov’s death had shown that a simple parachute landing could kill a cosmonaut, the planned circumlunar mission was vastly more dangerous. It called for Zond, a highly modified Soyuz, to re-enter the atmosphere at a particularly high speed. If it came in too steeply, the drag and deceleration would subject its crew to g-forces that could injure or even kill. The capsule would have to spend time in the upper atmosphere and bleed off velocity before making its terminal descent.

Apollo had faced the same problem and solved it with a re-entry craft that could develop a modest amount of lift. Astronauts used this lift to shape their path during atmosphere entry. But Zond would develop very little lift during re-entry, so it faced a particularly demanding task. On its return from the moon, Zond would have to hit a narrow corridor, an acceptable band of altitudes as little as six miles from top to bottom. Within this corridor Zond would lose some of its speed to atmospheric drag and slow from seven miles per second to around five. It would briefly exit back into space and then return for a conventional entry, as if from orbit. The margin for error would be small indeed. Too low, and the cosmonauts would face excessive g-forces; too high, and the craft would skip back into space like a flat stone over a pond without losing enough velocity. And before it could return to the atmosphere for a second pass, the crew would run out of oxygen and die.

Hence, before Zond could qualify to carry cosmonauts, it would have to demonstrate through actual flight testing that it could find the corridor under automatic control. If it succeeded, though, Moscow might yet beat the Yankees to the moon. The circumlunar mission, far less demanding than an actual landing, would merely send its crew on a quick loop around the far side. But this nevertheless would qualify in a sense as the first manned lunar voyage, and Moscow would be able to declare that Apollo’s astronauts were just following a path blazed by the Soviets.

The Russians thus hoped to win the space race by moving the finish line. During the fall of 1967 two UR-500 launches sought to carry out unmanned test flights. Both attempts failed because of engine problems, but in March 1968 the launch vehicle succeeded and flung its payload, Zond 4, to lunar distance. It did not approach the moon; on the contrary, it flew in the opposite direction, on a simple trajectory that could yield a clean exercise in atmosphere entry. The craft did not execute this step well; an onboard malfunction caused an altitude-control error, and it entered much too steeply. As Zond 4 hurtled earthward far from its recovery area, a ground controller triggered an onboard charge of explosive- installed as a precaution against the craft’s ending in the wrong hands—and blew it up. Still, the flight constituted an important step toward the moon.

September brought Zond 5, a considerable advance over Zond 4. Carrying a pair of turtles as well as an assortment of flies, worms, and plants, it flew around the moon, approaching within 1,200 miles. On the way back it obtained fine photos of the earth. Then, as it maneuvered to hit the atmospheric corridor, an error by a ground controller again led to an excessively steep re-entry trajectory, but the craft came down in the Indian Ocean and was recovered with the turtles alive. The director of NASA, James Webb, was impressed enough to describe the flight as “the most important demonstration of total space capacity up to now by any nation.”

Two months later Zond 6 did even better by executing its planned return with complete success. It hit the corridor accurately, dipping within 28 miles of the earth’s surface, decelerating below orbital velocity, briefly returning to space, and then making its second atmosphere entry and coming down inside a standard recovery area in central Asia. It had encountered some problems, including a faulty rubber gasket that brought a loss of cabin pressure and parachute malfunctions that caused the vehicle to crash. But it had also flown around the moon, reaching as close as 1,500 miles, and had excellent photos to show for it. And with the successful re-entry, it had carried off its most demanding task.

The Zond effort had demonstrated all the features needed for a safe manned circumlunar flight, though not on the same mission. The way now lay open for Moscow to put the pieces together and commit to a manned flight, perhaps as soon as the next launch. To underscore their readiness, the Soviets also completed a successful Soyuz flight, with a cosmonaut spending more than three days in orbit.

Meanwhile, what was NASA doing? It was conducting unmanned test flights of the Saturn V and preparing to orbit three astronauts aboard a Saturn I-B, in a reprise of the attempted mission that had cost the lives of their wingmates. This flight, Apollo 7, finally came in October 1968, when Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele flew their spacecraft into orbit and stayed aloft for almost 11 days. The mission exorcised the ghosts of the Apollo fire and confirmed NASA’s commitment for the next flight, Apollo 8, to go to lunar orbit. In humanity’s first such voyage, the spacecraft would not merely swing around once in the fashion of Zond. It would fire its engine to enter lunar orbit and circle the moon 10 times before lighting its rocket anew to break free of the moon and return home.

If one wishes to pick a particular date when America won the moon race, it is probably December 21, 1968. That morning brought the successful launch of Apollo 8, which carried Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders. Orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, they read from Genesis: “In the beginning. …” Here indeed was a beginning.

Now it was the Soviets’ turn to find themselves caught flat-footed on the launch pad. They carried out additional circumlunar attempts, with Zond 7 achieving full success in August 1969. It could have carried a cosmonaut, who would have looped around the moon and returned safely, but by then Neil Armstrong had already become the first man to set foot on its surface. The Zond program was too little, too late. It faded quietly into oblivion after one last launch in October 1970.

Meanwhile, Soviet space leaders were turning their attention to the enormous N-1, which they hoped would actually land on the moon. Due to a continuing budget squeeze, however, Korolev and Mishin had decided to take shortcuts in testing the stages of the N-1. It was standard practice to conduct extensive ground tests not only of individual engines but also of complete stages, with all their rocket engines firing together. Korolev expected to do this with the upper stages of the N-1, but he had no money to build a test facility huge enough to accommodate the first stage. One of his colleagues later recalled that “the unwritten law of rocket building was violated: that the bugs in the burn of the rocket stages must be worked out on the test stand.”

Korolev had not expected to enter such flight tests in complete blindness. He would test individual engines thoroughly on the ground; he would also rely on ground-test results from the second stage, which was to use eight of the same engines. In addition, the first stage was to incorporate an onboard fault-sensing arrangement known as KORD, which stood for engine-operation control system. It would detect malfunction in any particular engine and shut it down, also shutting down the engine placed diametrically opposite to maintain balanced thrust.

The inaugural launch of the N-1 took place in February 1969. During the initial minute of flight, the firststage engines throttled back to reduce loads on the vehicle. Then at T+66 seconds these engines returned to full power—but faster than planned. The resulting stress ruptured a liquid-oxygen line and started a fire. KORD did not just stop the engine in which the problems were centered; it shut down all 30 rocket motors. The N-1 crashed 30 miles downrange.

“This is normal for a first launch,” said Mishin. He placed his hope in the second N-1, which made its attempt that July. This was the one that stumbled over a bolt that entered a turbopump and caused an explosion. Again KORD shut down all the engines, leaving the rocket to fall to its doom.

Clearly the N-1 would require significant modification before anyone could trust it to fly successfully. KORD went back for an extensive redesign, and the faulty first stage received a Freon fire-fighting system. The engine builders laid on a major program to improve its reliability, including the installation of simple filters that could have screened out the bolt that destroyed the rocket and its launch pad. The pad was marked for rebuilding, and a second launch complex, already under construction, went forward to completion. Even so, the N-1 would not fly again for two years.

Mishin used this time not only to improve the N-1 but also to carry out the first flight tests of his moon ship, the L-3. Its centerpiece was a manned craft resembling Zond and derived from Soyuz, which by then was showing good reliability. In October 1969 three standard Soyuz craft flew simultaneously, carrying seven people. Eight months later Soyuz 9 set a record by keeping two cosmonauts aloft for nearly 18 days. The moon-bound variant was called a lunar orbiter (LO).

For a flight to the moon’s surface, the LO was to carry a lunar lander (LL). The LO would serve as a mother ship, firing a rocket engine to drop into orbit around the moon. One cosmonaut would enter the LL and use its engine to descend to the moon’s surface. He would deploy instruments, collect moon rocks, and plant the Soviet flag. Then, after returning to the LL, he would ignite his engine a second time to return to the LO and rejoin his comrade. The men would then light the engine of the LO anew, leaving the LL in lunar orbit while returning to earth in the LO.

The L-3 made three successful flights in earth orbit, all unmanned, in November 1970 and in February and August 1971. The LL engine fired repeatedly, simulating hovering over the lunar surface and flight from the moon’s surface to a rendezvous with the LO. Following these flights, the moon ship was ready to carry cosmonauts.

Unfortunately, the N-1 wasn’t. Mishin learned this when he tried yet another launch, in June 1971. As his moon rocket cleared the tower, unanticipated aerodynamic forces made it roll rapidly on its axis. This caused a breakup of the support structure between the second and third stages. Off fell the third stage, a substantial rocket in its own right that carried a mockup of the moon ship. It crashed and blew up near the launch pad.

The rest of the N-1 continued onward, not knowing for the moment that it had lost its head. The rolling continued; the guidance system, overtaxed, failed while trying to stop it. The first-stage engines had been performing satisfactorily, but KORD now shut them all down once again. The amputated moon rocket arced through the sky like an enormous artillery shell. It too blew up when it hit the ground, 12 miles from the launch site, leaving a crater 100 feet across.

A year and a half went by. Then in November 1972 the N-1 was ready for another try. This time it nearly worked, flying normally for the first 90 seconds. At that moment 6 engines in the center of the first stage shut down, as planned, to reduce the vehicle’s acceleration while the other 24 engines continued to thrust. Unfortunately, the shutdown was too abrupt, and a sudden surge of pressure ruptured some propellant lines. A fire broke out; the Freon extinguishing system did not activate; engines began to explode at T+105 seconds, and two seconds later KORD shut down the remaining ones. It was too late; now the entire rocket exploded. Its first stage had lasted until 10 seconds before normal cutoff, when the well-tested second stage would have ignited.

This record of total failure with N-1 contrasted painfully with NASA’s record of complete success with Saturn. In more than 30 launches of Saturnclass rockets between 1961 and 1975, including 13 Saturn Vs, all reached orbit or accomplished their suborbital objectives. All upper stages operated properly, with the exception of the second Saturn V, in April 1968, which revealed engine problems that were promptly fixed. The reason could be summed up in one word: testing.

Apollo, to those who worked in the program, was pre-eminently an exercise in testing. It began literally at the level of nuts and bolts. A senior engineering manager once told a congressional hearing that the iron ore for those fasteners could be traced to a particular section in a specific openpit mine in the Mesabi Range near Duluth, Minnesota. The bolt then took 11 steps to manufacture, and the product had to be certified at every step with meticulous tests. This certification applied to the ingot smelted from the ore, the billet forged from the ingot, the steel rod extracted from the billet, as well as the bolts that were milled from the rod. The fasteners that resulted cost some 50 times as much as the ones we buy in hardware stores, but this was what it took to send men to the moon.

The Soviets didn’t do it that way. They never tried to match NASA’s Mississippi Test Facility, where even the largest complete Saturn V stages could undergo static operation. In Mishin’s words, “We tested in pieces and did not even dare to think of firing all 30 motors in the first stage as a full assembly. Then the pieces were assembled, without guarantees, of course, that they were properly run in. The Americans invested $25 billion in the program, and they reached the moon. We had almost ten times less.” In the words of another specialist, “The Americans spent $15 billion on the creation of an experimental base; we spent only about $1 billion.”

The Soviets failed to reach the moon because they tried to get there on the cheap. The same pattern appears in other areas of technology, such as nuclear power (in which the Chernobyl disaster dwarfs the worst American nuclear accident) and heavy industry (whose pollution has irretrievably poisoned countless square miles of Soviet and Eastern European landscapes for decades to come). These disparities reflected the merits of the two competing societies, which their rivalry in space subjected to its own test. More particularly, it reflected their relative wealth.

In announcing a manned moon landing as a national goal in 1961, President Kennedy had chosen the proper task. As long as this competition remained at the level of rockets that then existed or might soon be developed, Moscow would win. For instance, a contest between the UR-500 and the Saturn I-B, with a lunar fly-around as the criterion for success, might have become a real horse race. But the goal of a lunar landing raised the contest to a new level, one at which the Soviet lead of the early 1960s would count for little. This was the level of the Saturn V and the N-1, with the competition revolving on the ability of the two nations to come up with the enormous sums of money needed for a serious effort. Facing this challenge, Moscow proved bankrupt, as it so often would in the twilight years of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin did not walk away from the moon empty-handed. Chelomei’s UR-500 rocket took the name Proton and went on to become a keystone of the Soviet space program, achieving good reliability and frequent use. After the fall of communism, in 1991, with that space program in disarray, a joint U.S.-Russian agreement put Proton in the hands of Lockheed Martin. Proton flies today as part of a joint fleet of launch vehicles, courtesy of the Yankees’ commercial acumen. Korolev’s Soyuz, the parent of Zond, gained its own achievements as it became a standard manned spacecraft. It too continues to fly. But for the N-1 the launch of November 1972 was the last hurrah.

Dmitri Ustinov still held power in Moscow, and after 1972 he lost patience with Mishin. In 1974 he replaced him with one of Korolev’s long-time rivals, Valentin Glushko. Glushko was the nation’s leading builder of rocket engines, but he and Korolev were both proud men, czars within their own empires, and they had quarreled bitterly over the design of the N-1, particularly the choice of propellants. Now, with Korolev long gone, Glushko had no interest in salvaging the work of his rival. When he took over, two complete N-1 launch vehicles were at their space center. They represented as impressive a display of lunar capability as the Soviets would ever possess. Both would be ready to fly within the next few months. But, supported by the Kremlin, Glushko canceled the planned launches and suspended the program. In 1976 he terminated it outright. Nor would he even permit the N-1s to go on exhibit. He ordered them cut up for scrap, with portions of one fuel tank serving as a roof for a sauna. Moscow would build no monuments to failure. It preferred to toss the N-1 into the memory hole.