Xref: utzoo sci.space.shuttle:2021 sci.space:8375 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!mike From: mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Mike Smithwick) Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle,sci.space Subject: Re: USSR and the Moon [was "Beyond the Energia crisis"] Keywords: Soviet/American shuttle comparison Message-ID: <18420@ames.arc.nasa.gov> Date: 20 Nov 88 05:00:11 GMT References: <880@cernvax.UUCP> <18263@ames.arc.nasa.gov> Reply-To: mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Mike Smithwick) Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. Lines: 122 [ I am cross posting this to Sci.space, so any further discussion oughtta go there] In article <18263@ames.arc.nasa.gov> mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Mike Smithwick) writes: >In article <880@cernvax.UUCP> jon@cernvax.UUCP (jon) writes: > >[quote from The Guardian, a British rag] > >>He starts with a brief history of the Soviet space program. One thing I >>found curious was claim about the demise of the Soviet moon project. >> >> "The superbooster designed to put a Russian on the Moon first didn't >> work. A damage-limitation exercise was started. They didn't want to >> go to the Moon they said. What they intended to do along was to build >> space stations. Curiously the West believed them." >> >>This is the first time I have heard that the Russian ever had serious >>plans to land a man on the moon. Is it true? >> > >See if you can pick up a copy of Jim Oberg's book, "Red Star in Orbit". You >won't be able to put it down. > >Yes, according to him and other Soviet space watchers, the moon race >was every bit as real as we thought it was. The problem was that the >Soviets underestimated our ability to beat them, thinking that they had >at least until 1972. Apollo 8 changed all of that. > >There was an extraordinary article in Astronomy magazine a couple of years >ago by Peter Pasevento (sp? I'm working from memory, since that issue is >packed well away). > For those interested, I found the article. It is in the December 1984 issue of Astronomy, pages 6 to 22. What follows are some excerpts: "About December 2, 1968, A Zond spacecraft and Proton booster were erected on a pad at Tyuratam launch site in Soviet Kazakhstan, in preparation for a launch within a week. A cosmonaut was . . . placed in the Zond on December 9th. The countdown went off without a hitch, but the launch was cancelled. From information gleaned by Western experts, there seems to have been an electrical problem in the spacecraft". "The later space shots in the Luna series - Luna 16, which returned 3.5 ounces of lunar soil in September 1970, and Luna 17, which soft landed the first robot rover in November 1970 - probably used lander components for their descent stages. . . . Luna 15 (which crashed the day after Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon) is believed by some analysts to be a stripped down version of the actual Soviet lunar lander." "[CIA Informant Peter N. James] a Sovet Space technology specialist, had good friends among the Russian group that was attending the [symposium on space science, Venice, Italy, May 1969]. The group, . . . also included a few cosmonauts and KGB agents. At one evening reception James recalls a heated debate with KGB Col. Nikolai Beloussov: I told him 'All things considered, the USA is going to beat the USSR to putting men on the moon, and you Soviets can't do a thing about it'. Beloussov, who had been looking at the ceiling with a drink in his hand, fired back 'You may be surprised!' He then paused, considered what he had just said, and then walked away. "At Tyuratam, the much-rumored G-1 rocket and its smaller Proton counterpart were erected at their respective pad sites sometime in mid or late June. The payload for the Proton launcher was a manned Zond spacecraft; for the giant G-1 booster, it was an operational lander with an added fuel stage." "As June 1969 waned into July, three men from the cosmonaut corps were flown from the Gagarin Training Center. . .On the morning of July 4th, the men entered their Zond spacecraft." "A planned series of holds delayed the countdown until early afternoon, when the first launch signal was given. The G-1 booster roared to life and rose from the pad, but the rocket never cleared the launch tower. Some analysts believe that on-board sensors detected a fuel-flow problem. . .[while others] think that the second stage collapsed. In any case, the rocket fell back on the pad and blew up. Everything within a mile was either destroyed or heavily damaged in the fiery explosion. THe gantry observation towers, support equipment, and pieces of the launch pad itself flew in all directions, while some of the attending Soviet engineers perished." "The simultaneous countdown of the Proton booster/Zond spacecraft was halted and the cosmonauts left the capsule." Perhaps the most amazing thing about this story is the fact that the Soviets were trying to fly such a complex mission, with 2 of it's 3 major components, completely untested. The G-1 had never flown successfully, and the lander had never flown at all. It would have been almost as it the Apollo 7 mission attempted the landing itself, and tested the the Saturn 5 while they were at it. One also wonders what might have happened had the Soviets actually launched successfully. Would they then cover the misson live, to scoop the Amerikanskis, while risking public embarassment from a possible mission failure during the landing or lunar stay? Or would they wait until the cosmonauts were on their way home to announce their landing. One never knows, do one. . . -- *** mike (starship janitor) smithwick *** "Some people say I'm arrogant. But I know better then them" - Mike Dukakis at the Al Smith Banquet [disclaimer : nope, I don't work for NASA, I take full blame for my ideas]