There are a lot of achievements in national rocket engineering which Ukrainian specialists can quite deservedly be proud of. They used to design formidable war missiles as well as spacecraft to explore near and far outer space. It is not common knowledge, however, that our designers took an active part in mounting the Soviet expedition to Mars and building a manned spacecraft for landing on and taking off the lunar surface. People in the know claim that the “Lunik” (moon probe), designed at the Dnipropetrovsk-based Pivdenne rocket design bureau and manufactured at the Pivdenmash plant, was on a par with its US counterpart and stood very good chances to be the first to deliver cosmonauts to the Moon. The prehistory of this project began half a century ago, in January 1959, when the first spacecraft blazed a trail to the Moon.
The idea of landing a man on the Moon swept the minds of the leaders of the two superpowers, the US and the USSR, soon after the first artificial Earth satellite was put into orbit on October 4, 1957. The success of Soviet designers dealt a resounding blow to the national prestige of Americans who had a more powerful economic, scientific and technological potential. As early as 1958 the US began to draw up a program of developing a multistage launch vehicle and a lunar spacecraft capable of delivering an expedition to the Moon. President John F. Kennedy had approved this ambitious project three years before to eliminate a lag in the space race. A what was then considered a staggering amount of $25 billion was appropriated for implementing the moon project. Following these efforts, the Americans finally managed to build a super-powerful rocket, Saturn 5, and organize a manned Moon-landing flight. But at the initial stage, the US experienced dismal failures. In August 1958 the US was the first to try to send a spacecraft to the Moon, but the carrier rocket exploded a minute after the launch. Although these attempts continued almost every months, Soviet designers again beat the Americans.
In January 1959 they successfully launched the Luna-1craft that achieved the escape velocity and became the first to blaze a trail to the Earth’s natural satellite. To tell the truth, the Soviet rocketmen failed to “hit the target”: the probe flew 6,000 kilometers off the lunar surface. In September 1959 the Luna 2 probe made a “hard” landing on the Moon, delivering a plaque with the USSR state emblem there. Just a month later, the next probe, Luna 3, took the first, even though of low quality, photographs of the Moon’s far side. Much to their regret, the Americans managed for the first time to land Ranger 4 on the Moon as late as March 1962. The probe crash-landed on the far side of the Moon, without transmitting even one photograph.
For obvious reasons, the Soviet Union closely watched the American efforts because nobody was going to yield “the palm”. After the US had announced its lunar program, the USSR leadership decided to beat the rivals again and land a Soviet cosmonaut on the Moon in 1967. The Aug. 3, 1964, resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers set a very tight Moon mission schedule, although work on the super-heavy N-1 launching vehicle had begun two years before. “Competing for the making of a launch vehicle were three firms headed by Sergei Koroliov, Vladimir Chelomei, and Mikhail Yangel”, says Stanislav Koniukhov, chief designer at the Pivdenne R&D bureau. “Their rockets were of different power capacity. The Dnipropetrovsk-based designers with Yangel at the head suggested using two rockets capable of putting a payload of about 50 tons into an Earth orbit, after which the two spaceships were to dock. The teams of Chelomei and Koroliov favored a single vehicle capable of carrying 100 and 120 tons, respectively. And although we lost the competition, as did Chelomei’s group, the team of Koroliov failed to cope with this enormous task on its own. So it was decided to share work on the principle of complementary production”.
The lunar project was, in a way, the “swan song” of the country’s No.1 rocketman Sergei Koroliov. He put this program on the top-priority list of his Moscow-based OKB-1 design bureau, relegating all the other fields of work — space communication, navigation, and unmanned planet probes — to subsidiary design bureaus and plants. Like their US counterparts, Soviet designers had to address difficult technological problems and commission new rockets in order to create a launching vehicle powerful enough to deliver a human to the Moon. The lunar mission was to have three stages. At first, the unmanned and manned Soyuz spaceships were to fly around the Moon, and only then there was to be a flight to land a man on the lunar surface. The third stage required the N-1 launch vehicle with a lunar module. Veterans of national rocket-making say that it seemed in those times that there was nothing impossible in technology. This mood followed from the first successes of Soviet spacecraft. However, landing a man on the Moon proved to be an immeasurably more complicated task. To fulfill this, the creators of the N-1 launch vehicle and the lunar module had to marshal the country’s best designers. Experts of the Dnipropetrovsk-based OKB-586 (later Pivdenne R&D bureau) were invited to develop the “Lunik”, a module in which the cosmonaut was to land on the lunar surface and then return to the command module. “In August 1964”, says Yurii Tymoshyn, the former leading designer at Pivdenne, “Koroliov turned to our boss Yangel for help in developing the so-called Block E. A large group of Dnipropetrovsk experts soon went to OKB-1 to hammer out the details of cooperation which then lasted for a few years. Under the project, a gigantic 111 m-tall rocket was to consist of several blocks that performed different functions. The first three clocks – A, B, and C – ensured putting the ship into an Earth orbit. Block D provided the spaceship with a proper speed to reach the Moon. Then Block E made sure that the rocket was put into a lunar orbit, where one of the two cosmonauts was to space-walked from the command module to the landing one. As the ship was descending onto the Moon, it was to turn on the engine of Block F which ensured maneuvering over the surface and a soft landing and, on completion of the program, the return of the cosmonaut to the orbiting command module. It goes without saying that the success of the entire expedition and the very life of the cosmonauts depended on the reliability of our ‘Lunik,’ particularly its engines”.
Meanwhile, landing on and taking off the Moon was a problem in many unknowns. First of all, no one was sure that the lunar surface is hard and even enough for a manned spacecraft to land. “Koroliov solved this problem for those who hesitated by a stroke of the pen: he wrote an instruction that the Moon is covered with a ‘hard pumice-type soil’ and assumed responsibility for all the consequences”, Tymoshyn says. Soviet designers received a great deal of help from... their rivals, the Americans, who had published thousands of high-quality photographs of the lunar surface, which their space probes had taken in the mid-1960s. Our specialists had to rack their brains very much while designing the “Lunik” itself. To make it robust, they placed both the main and the auxiliary engines between four spreading uprights. The fuel tanks were shaped like a ring bread, and the control panel had to be installed in the cosmonaut’s cockpit. The “Lunik’s” height, as well as the span of its legs, was a little more than five meters. To ensure a steadier landing, the ship’s legs were to be adjusted to the lunar surface by means of special powder charges. In general, the design of Block F and the pattern of its landing on the Moon was the matter of a heated debate among experts. The designers, especially the young ones, often came up with very unconventional ideas — from “looping the loop” over the lunar surface to reduce speed to the landing of a ship immersed in a water-filled vessel. Indeed, a number of original ideas were lately implemented in technological concepts. Incidentally, the small size of the “Lunik” allowed only one cosmonaut in the cabin, who was to control the flight, looking through a big porthole in an almost vertical position. To enable the cosmonaut to walk on the lunar surface, he was equipped with bulky backpack-type space suit which could protect one from solar radiation and a tremendous temperature difference in the shadow and in the sun. Interestingly, to be on the safe side, there was an automatic rope winch in the module, which could pull a fainted or immobilized cosmonaut back into the cabin. The available air and electricity allowed the cosmonaut to spend not more than 30 hours on the lunar surface. Unlike the American moon craft, the Soviet “Lunik” had two, not one, engines. They were to be engaged together during the launch, which raised the cosmonaut’s chances to return to the lunar orbit. Besides, to take off, the Soviet module did not need a special launching device, while the American module could only be re-launched from its landing pad. To make things still more reliable and guarantee the return of the cosmonauts to Earth, our designers intended to use one more “ruse”. Before the main ship was launched, it was planned to launch a “stand-by” ship to the Moon, on which the cosmonauts could return home in case of an accident.
However, this high-profile project remained a non-starter. The OKB-1 general designer Sergei Koroliov suddenly died in January 1966. A few days later Soviet specialists accomplished the first soft landing of a spacecraft on the Moon, which was the last great victory in an exhaustive race. Then came a string of outright failures: an unmanned and manned circumnavigation of the Moon was postponed time and again due to technical faults. Those who at last made a voyage around the Moon in the summer of 1969 on a Soviet rocket were not cosmonauts but some living organisms, such as tortoises, flies, worms, plants, seeds, and bacteria. Soviet designers helplessly watched the American successes and could only respond to them later by launching automatic stations and two “moon rovers”. According to Soviet moon project veterans, the main cause of failures was in the flawed N-1 launch vehicle which went out of order or exploded four times during the tests. Besides, unlike the Americans, Koroliov’s OKB-1 designers never managed to achieve the required power of the launch vehicle. With the same launching weight, the US rocket could put 130 tons into an Earth orbit, while our payload could barely reach 100 tons. This was due to not only the geographic latitude of the launch area but also for purely technological reasons. The US managed to develop more powerful engines on liquid hydrogen and oxygen, while Koroliov’s OKB-1 used the traditional components — liquid oxygen and kerosene — for the moon rocket. Many concepts were hindered by a weak industrial base, absence of up-to-date materials, and a low technology of welding. In addition, as it became clear later, a far-from-the-best engine layout was chosen. Yet, some designers believe that what really thwarted the otherwise good Soviet moon project was absence of Koroliov’s willpower and bold decisions. The Soviet project of landing a man on the Moon was finally “deep-sixed” in September 1972, when the Americans had visited the Moon five times and were about to terminate the Apollo program. This refusal was caused by excessive the program’s prohibitive cost, which could only furnish political “dividends”. Soviet designers had to focus on automatic stations which could travel across the Moon and delivered samples of lunar soil to the Earth, which, incidentally, was also a major achievement. Then our designers pinned their last hopes of resuscitating the Moon expedition program on Energia, a powerful launch vehicle, that carried the Buran space shuttle into outer space. But it became clear very soon that the time of ambitious space exploration projects in Soviet cosmonautics was gone forever.
Whatever the case, most of the Ukrainian designers who took part in the moon project do not consider it their failure. The F Block, which they were told to design, was not only manufactured at Dnipropetrovsk’s Pivdenmash but also successfully tested three times in outer space. According to Mr. Koniukhov, general designer of the Pivdenne R&D Bureau, 12 “Luniks” were manufactures as a result, but, unfortunately, they all remained unneeded — not through the fault of our designers, incidentally. “Our bureau’s designers sadly joke that the F block effed off the rocket”, Koniukhov says. In his words, the “Luniks” were kept for a long time at Pivdenmash and when hard times came, now in independent Ukraine, they were cut to pieces and scrapped. What is left as a keepsake is one mockup and technical documentation. But the general designer still believes that the rich experience of making the lunar module may come in handy in the nearest future. As is known, Moon exploration projects are again in the highlight of US, European, Chinese, and Indian space centers. “We have repeatedly spoken about this with NASA representatives and offered them our designs”, Koniukhov says. “We also made proposals to the Indians, when their delegation led by the president of the country visited the Pivdenne R&D Bureau. Still underway are negotiations with China. The most valuable thing in our ‘Lunik’ is its engines that have been tested in outer space. This will allow potential partners to save time and money. Undoubtedly, flying to the Moon is an expensive thing, but this kind of projects also raise the national economy as a whole to new technological level. I would like to stress that, in spite of tremendous US expenditures on the Apollo program, space-related designs implemented in various fields have in fact offset all those expenses”. Koniukhov is convinced that, if not now then in the future, humankind will inevitably revert to the Moon exploration project. For this reason, the precious experience of Ukrainian designers may be of use again one day.
