Soviet crewed lunar programs

• 1. Introduction

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  Soviet crewed lunar programs were a secret race the Soviet Union ran parallel to its public denials, chasing the same prize as the United States while telling the world it was doing no such thing. For most of the 1960s, Soviet engineers quietly built two separate programs aimed at putting a human being on the Moon, or at least around it, before the Americans could. The programs had different rockets, different spacecraft, different goals, and different fates. What did those programs actually look like? Why did the Soviet Union hide them? And how close did they come to winning the race they officially claimed never existed?

• 2. Two Programs, One Secret

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  Decree 655-268, titled "On Work on the Exploration of the Moon and Mastery of Space," was adopted in August 1964. It assigned two separate missions to two rival design bureaus. Chelomei's bureau was tasked with a Moon flyby program, with a first flight targeted by the end of 1966. Korolev's bureau was assigned the Moon landing program, with a projected first flight by the end of 1967. The two men ran competing fiefdoms within the Soviet aerospace world, and the division of labor reflected that rivalry rather than any single coherent plan. When the Soviet leadership changed from Khrushchev to Brezhnev in 1964, things shifted further. The government reassigned the flyby program from Chelomei to Korolev in September 1965, who then redesigned the mission around his own Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft paired with Chelomei's Proton rocket. The details of both programs were kept hidden from the world until 1990, when glasnost allowed them to be published.

• 3. Korolev and the N1

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  Sergei Korolev, the man who had launched Sputnik and Gagarin into space, was not actually fixated on the Moon. His real ambitions ran toward a heavy orbital station and crewed flights to Mars and Venus. With that vision in mind, he began developing the super-heavy N-1 rocket with a payload target of 75 tons. His initial Moon plan used a concept called the Soyuz A-B-C circumlunar complex, which would have assembled a lunar flyby vehicle by docking components in Earth orbit, all lifted by the reliable middle-sized R-7 rocket. By 1963, Korolev had shifted to planning a Moon landing using three N1 launches and orbital docking. Later, by increasing the number of engines in the first stage from 24 to 30 and adjusting the parking orbit, he managed to raise the N1's payload to 92-93 tons, enough for a single-launch Moon mission. Switching the upper stages to liquid hydrogen was among the improvements planned for later variants. Korolev organized full-scale development of both the flyby and landing programs, then died after surgery in January 1966, before either could fly.

• 4. The Zond Flyby Attempt

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  Zond 5, in September 1968, became the first craft to carry Earth lifeforms around the Moon and return them safely, among them two tortoises. The Zond spacecraft, formally the L1, was a modified version of the Soyuz family with two or three modules and a total weight of 5.5 tons. By comparison, the Apollo command and service module for the same kind of mission was five times heavier and carried three crew. A crewed Soviet flyby mission was scheduled for the 8th of December 1968, timed to beat the United States. It was canceled because the capsule and rocket were not ready. Apollo 8 then flew its crewed lunar orbit on 24-the 25th of December 1968, ending the flyby phase of the race. Soviet political interest in the L1 Zond program collapsed after that. A few reserve spacecraft made unpiloted flights, but by the end of 1970 the program was officially canceled.

• 5. One Cosmonaut on the Moon

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  Alexei Leonov, leader of the second cosmonaut training group, had the strongest claim to have been the Soviets' first choice to be the first man on the Moon. The Soviet landing plan bore a fundamental difference from Apollo: only one cosmonaut would land. The Lunniy Korabl, or LK lunar lander, held a single crew member and weighed about 40% of the Apollo lunar lander. The LOK command module carried two men and had three modules like the regular Soyuz 7K-OK, though the 7K-OK was itself about half the mass of the three-crew Apollo command ship. The entire L3 complex placed in low Earth orbit by the N1 was 93 tons, against the Saturn V's 137 tons. The cosmonaut transferring from the LOK to the LK and back would do so by spacewalk, not through an internal docking tunnel as in Apollo. During the surface stay, that single cosmonaut would walk on the Moon, operate Lunokhods, collect rock samples, and plant the Soviet flag, before the LK's engine fired using the landing structure as a launch pad to return to lunar orbit.

• 6. Catastrophic N1 Failures

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  Four N1 test launches took place, in 1969 twice, 1971, and 1972, and all four failed. The second launch, on the 3rd of July 1969, was an attempt to upstage Apollo 11 by thirteen days. Instead, the rocket exploded and destroyed the entire launch complex, setting the N1-L3 program back by two years. The first two N1 launches each carried a modified 7K-L1S spacecraft on automatic Moon flyby profiles. The third and fourth launches carried a dummy LOK and then a regular LOK with dummy LKs. Despite improvements after each failure, the rocket never achieved a successful test. A complete L3 lunar expedition complex with the 7K-LOK and LK was prepared for a fifth launch in August 1974. Had that mission and the next one succeeded, Soviet planners envisioned up to five crewed N1-L3 expeditions between 1976 and 1980, with significantly more surface time than Apollo. The N1-L3 program was canceled in May 1974 before the fifth launch ever flew, and the cancellation was made official in 1976.

• 7. What Remained

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  After cancellation, the physical hardware did not simply vanish. Five LKs and three LOKs survive today, kept in the museums of the designer's and producer's companies. Nearly 150 engines built for the first stages of the N1F were stored by the Kuznetsov Design Bureau, then sold for use on other launch vehicles beginning around 2000. The launch pad and assembly building used for the N1 were redesigned for the Energia-Buran shuttle program. Three uncrewed LK test flights had been conducted in low Earth orbit under the Kosmos designations 379, 398, and 434, and the Krechet lunar spacesuit and its support systems had been tested. The Moon base proposal called Zvezda, the Vulkan-LEK project, and a crewed Mars program all followed the canceled lunar effort, though none advanced to flight. As a partial substitute for the crewed landing, the Soviet Union ran a successful program of automated soil sample return and Lunokhod rovers, which operated on the lunar surface without the risk of human life.