#n1 rocket

[redarmyscreaming]

Soviet Union's N1 rocket, a colossal counterpart to NASA's Saturn V, suffered a catastrophic failure during its second test launch at Baikonur Cosmodrome. https://www.instagram.com/p/DVoG0KWiFoc/?hl=en

[edwhiteandblue]

June 26, 1971: The third launch of the Soviet N1 moon rocket ends in failure

Shortly after liftoff around 2:00 AM Moscow time, the rocket experienced an uncontrolled roll its control system could not correct, accelerating from 6 degrees per second to 40 degrees per second. At T+48 seconds, stress caused the vehicle to disintegrate and the first stage's 30 engines shut down. The upper stages separated and hit the ground about 4 miles downrange from the launch site and the lower stages continued to soar through the night sky before finally crashing 9 miles downrange, creating a 50-foot crater in the surrounding grasslands.

Read more about the N1 program here!

pictured is a mockup N1 (left) and N1 5L (right)

[toaarcan]

One of my favourite spaceflight facts is that, due to some heavy technicalities on what the universally accepted definition of an astronaut is, and the intense secrecy surrounding the Soviet Union at the time, the entire Vostok program, AKA the thing that first took humans into space, technically doesn't count and everyone just agrees to ignore that.

Submitting my claim that Vostok is actually the cutest spacecraft ever, which is an entirely normal statement.

When they sat down and defined what counts as a successful manned flight, part of the requirements included the astronaut(s) landing in the vehicle. But Vostok didn't do that. Instead, the Vostok cosmonauts ejected from the vehicle after re-entry and parachuted to the ground separately. This continued until the later Voskhod missions, where they ripped out the ejector seat so they could fit more guys inside (and on the second one, one guy and an inflatable airlock so one of them could do the first spacewalk), and put in a rollcage so that landing inside the vehicle wouldn't turn them to goo.

But by the time Voskhod 1 blasted off from Baikonur, all of the Mercury flights had already been flown, so this means that, according to the rules, America technically completed the first manned space flights.

Another technicality was added to the list a couple of years back, when the guys that make the rules futzed with said rules in order to deny Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson astronaut status, because fuck 'em. Now, in order to be an astronaut, you have to actually do something on the flight, otherwise you're just a passenger. And many of the Vostok flights were indeed more like passengers than crew. The Vostok spacecraft is pretty much a big satellite with a passenger compartment and a re-entry module, and it's fully automated.

So why didn't these technicalities get called out? The USA and USSR were never shy about trying to embarrass each other, or make each other look foolish on the world stage. One of the biggest reasons why we know the Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory is total stupidity is that the USSR congratulated NASA on the successful landing, because if it had been recorded on a soundstage in Area 51, the Soviets would've been the first to call bullshit.

Well, part of it is just that the Americans didn't know about the specifics of the Vostok program at the time. Whereas the American space program was a very public affair with cheering crowds showing up to watch every launch, the Soviets were much, much more clandestine than that. Baikonur is in the middle of the Kazakh desert, and the Soviets were keen to lie about anything that went wrong.

When their attempt at a moon rocket, the N1, endured four successive failures on launch, mostly caused by the Soviets lacking the funding and the facilities to properly test the thing, and instead just had to launch fully built rockets and hope they worked, the Soviets simply scrapped the last two and declared that they'd never intended to go to the Moon and were all about Earth orbit instead.

The N1 was actually more powerful than the Saturn V, but because it never reached operational status and the Soviets preferred to pretend it didn't exist, the Saturn V remained the world's most powerful rocket until Artemis 1 flew last year. A similar situation is happening now, with SpaceX's Superheavy being more powerful than the SLS, but also being basically a giant bomb at the moment.

Most Americans had no idea how Vostok worked, and didn't even know what it looked like. They didn't get to see what a Soviet spacecraft actually looked like up close until the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975.

Behold, the setting for the most expensive handshake in history.

By the time the full details came out, the world had known that the Soviets did it first for decades, and challenging that doesn't really do much for anyone besides the people that want to go "Um, ackchully" about everything.

Additionally, the rules weren't even written yet at the time, so there's even less reason to start changing shit up now. Vostok might be technically breaking the rules, but nobody cares, and downplaying the immense technical achievements of Sergei Korolev, Yuri Gagarin, and everyone else that worked on the early Soviet spaceflights on account of a rules quirk that wasn't even written yet is just kinda dumb.

(Random sidenote, Korolev was the chief designer of much of the USSR's early spacecraft, including the R7 rocket that carried both Sputnik and Vostok into space, and still carries some of the Soyuz flights to this day. And, like pretty much every major achievement of the USSR, he wasn't Russian. He was, in fact, Ukrainian.)

[minersedgarsart]

N1/L3 Tidal Wave Working with the idea of a counterpart to my Orion Omega Supreme, tough Im not sure how the real world scale would work out. Like his original toy, this design splits into three pieces and combines to form the robot mode. The components here are the first, second, and 3rd stage with payload, of the N1 moon mission stack.

[lethe-the-shoggoth]

On 3 December 1960, Korolev suffered his first heart attack. During his convalescence, it was also discovered that he was suffering from a kidney disorder. He was warned by the doctors that if he continued to work as intensely as he had, he would not live long. Korolev became convinced that Khrushchev was only interested in the space program for its propaganda value and feared that he would cancel it entirely if the Soviets started losing their leadership to the United States, so he continued to push himself.

In the mid-1960s, though, the Soviet Union's leadership had begun to shift away from the Stalin-era generation which had led the development and transfer of heavy industry during the Great Patriotic War, to younger officials which had helped to carry it out on the ground. More energetic, they favored increased attention to light industry and consumer goods in the post-war world. These new leaders like Podgorny, Kirilenko, and Kosygin also supported the continuation of the space program for the purpose of scientific progress and eventual human colonization of other worlds.

By then, Korolev's health problems were beginning to accumulate and he was suffering from numerous ailments. In 1964 doctors diagnosed him with cardiac arrhythmia. In February he spent ten days in the hospital after another heart attack. Shortly after he was suffering from inflammation of his gallbladder. The mounting pressure of his workload was also taking a heavy toll, and he was suffering from a lot of fatigue. On top of everything, he was experiencing hearing loss, possibly from repeated exposure to loud rocket-engine tests.

In December 1965, he was diagnosed with a bleeding tumor. He entered the hospital on 5 January 1966 for somewhat routine surgery, but died nine days later due to complications arising from his heart problems. Under Soviet policy for important state employees, the identity of Korolev was not made public until after his death in order to protect him from foreign agents. His obituary was published in the Pravda newspaper on 16 January 1966, showing a photograph of Korolev with all his medals, and his ashes were interred with state honors in the Kremlin Wall.

Korolev is often compared to the western Wernher von Braun as a leading architect of the Space Age. Like von Braun, Korolev had to compete continually with rivals, such as Chelomei and Glushko. Unlike the Americans, he also had to work with technology that in many aspects was less advanced than what was available in the United States, particularly in electronics and computers, and to cope with extreme political pressure. He led the program with a very autocratic style, and demanded the testing of fully-assembled rockets rather than ground experimentation on individual components.

Fortunately for the program, his deputy and right-hand man Vasily Mishin was appointed head of OKB-001 by Alexei Kosygin, who became general secretary that same year. Kosygin, who was working to diversify Soviet economic goals, was very interested in the N1's long-term potential to be an interplanetary launch vehicle. He worked to relieve pressure on the program to produce flight tests while increasing its funding.

Perhaps most importantly, he worked to control interdepartmental rivalry by organizing an executive board to unite the design bureaus under a cohesive plan. Under these conditions, the much less dictatorial Mishin and his team were able to conduct more rigorous ground testing with less waste than had occurred under Korolev's command, without the threat of being replaced. As a result, the N1 as well as the orbital and landing modules began to make serious progress, with a successful uncrewed flight in March, 1969.

The Soviet electronics industry experienced rapid new development going into the 1970s. By the end of the decade, the KORD computer control system had been fully implemented, along with successful high-yield vernier engines, fire control system, fuel pumps, cabling, and a new hyperefficient exhaust system. At the same time, OKB-586 was tasked with creating a lander light enough to be transported by the N1.

In the summer of 1969, as Apollo 11 made its journey to the moon, the rocket's existence was made public in order to demonstrate the USSR's commitment to continuing space exploration in spite of the US's victory. The chief engineers were fond of the early "N1" designation, so upon its announcement it was officially named the Naos 1 as a backronym, after the blue-supergiant star ζ Puppis.

The crewed missions testing life-support systems and the LOK were given the name Euclid after the ancient Greek geometer; a mortal counter to the divine Apollo. With the operation now public knowledge, they were to be numbered from there in simple succession. On 2 August, Naos 1 successfully launched the crew of Euclid 1 into orbit, while the USSR went public with programs for the exploration of Venus and the outer planets, as well as an eventual crewed operation on Mars. This created renewed enthusiasm in the public consciousness for space travel as a long-term venture of world governments.

Science fiction at this time inspired people to dream of human habitation and terraforming of other worlds. Inspired by the name of the program itself, the name of each segment of the operation would be themed on ancient mathematicians, representing space travel as part of a grand historical project of the human species.

The next spring, a series of new launches were scheduled in quick succession, making use of four of the nine N1-L3 units that had been completed. The first was a second orbital test with no crew, the second an insertion into Lunar orbit. The third was a second Lunar orbital mission with a crew to test the LOK. It was at this point that planners suggested a landing location in the far hemisphere in order to collect geological samples of the unique terrain there. The third crewed mission, Euclid 3, was to conduct the landing and was set to launch in late 1970.

It was eventually decided that the mission would land at a spot near the southern rim of the Mare Ingenii, near the mountain range separating it from the crater Obruchev. The one-person expedition was to attempt exploration of the area just north of the mountains, hoping to capture images of them. In October, 1970, the sixth launch of the Naos 1 rocket took place from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The crew of two, A. Leonov and P. Belyayev, were some of the most experienced and decorated cosmonauts in the entire eastern bloc.

During the mission, they worked together with dizzying synergy, accomplishing phenomenally precise navigation and keeping all systems operational. They were allowed to work closely with the design teams in the later stages in order to ensure proper installation of valves and cables, and Kosygin made sure that their suggestions were implemented exactly with whatever financial resources were necessary.

Leonov would be the one to land on the moon itself and conduct EVA, and with the successful detatchment of the LK he and his colleague in radio communication guided the craft to the lunar surface very near to the assigned spot, and even closer to the mountains than had been planned. After exiting the vehicle, he took a famous self-portrait with large boulders and foothills in the background which illustrated the more varied terrain of the region.

He then ventured south towards the mountains, where he was able to crest a few lines of hills and obtain breathtaking views of the entire range, taking several experimental color photographs of rugged, sunlit peaks and fascinating rock formations. He was able to collect a substantial volume of invaluable samples which would be returned to earth and provide new insights into both the moon's geological past and the possibility of future alteration of its environment. At the end of the EVA, a Soviet flag was planted into the lunar regolith along with scientific instruments.

Several more expeditions to the moon were planned by the Soviet government as its economic situation improved in the early 1970s, while the stage was set for humanity's journey to Mars in that decade. The mission served to sustain human interest in cosmo-engineering and help our species embark on grand projects to expand our influence and habitation across the universe.

Following the Third World War (1972-1977), the Soviet Union, China, India, the SRJ, and the DPRK would cooperate to begin implementation of the Tranquil Abundance Project of Cosmo-Agriculture (TAPCA), the creation of the first subterranean lunar farms. These would export food and medicines back to earth, while rapidly generating a thick CO₂ atmosphere to help with further farming, to control radiation, and to melt ground-water. The first lunar lakes began to form by the turn of the XXII century, while at the same time the capture and harvest of comets had begun.

Translations:

Yevklid - Euclid

Arkhimed - Archimedes Pifagor - Pythagoras Eratosfen - Eratosthenes

Eridan - Eridanus Mare Ingenii - Sea of Ingenuity

[spaceexp]

On July 3, 1969 the largest explosion in space history happened, when N1 5L with Zond L1S-2 failed to launch. Just a few sec after launch, all the engines instantly shut down except № 18, and the rocket with 2300 t of fuel fall onto launch pad 110 East, totally leveling it.

[rocketgifs]

The Soviet N1 moon rocket exploding.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m79UO4HOQmc

[redarmyscreaming]

LK-1 1960 moon lander project During the 1960s, the Lunar Spacecraft, in Russian "Lunnyi Korabl" or LK, was conceived as a part of the L3 lunar expeditionary complex to be carried aloft by the N1 rocket. From the outset, Soviet designers understood that despite being the largest launch vehicle developed by the USSR, it could only carry two-person crew on a lunar mission and only one to the surface of the Moon.