Blog Post Number 64 Written:07-28-2023 Uploaded 08-04-2023
There’s a lot of people who, for one reason or another, who wish the Soviets had won the race to the moon. They’re just fans, or perhaps they want to be edgy, and vote for the other team. I mean, they made a whole TV show (For all Mankind) about just that. (A show I have never seen, so please don’t take this as a disparaging remark against the show, I know nothing about it, beyond that its based on the hypothetical that the Soviets beat the United States in the space race, with a manned landing on the moon.) But to rain on all the fanboy’s parades, I don’t think the Soviets could have, under even the best circumstances.
I’m going to share some thoughts about that, based on what I know of the planned Soviet manned lunar missions. It is of my enthusiastic and extremely amateur opinion, that the Soviets, could not have made it, with men /women to the moon. At all, ever.
Allow me to list the contributing factors to why I think, Space race or not, the United States or not, they would not have made it to the moon, or at least not alive, or not first, or not come back from it afterwards.
Giving the Soviet’s the benefit of the doubt, lets say, Sergei Korolev didn’t die in 1965. With this top rocket engineer still alive, the Soviets are able to figure out the problems with the N1 Rocket and the Kord system and the NK-15 engines get tested to a higher standard to weed out the bad seeds before they got installed. Even with all that, ignoring the pressure from the Apollo program rushing (pun intended) them, or causing them to give up early once they realized they wouldn’t catch up after the first couple successful Saturn V launches. For the sake of this hypothetical discussion, allowing the Soviets all that, I still don’t think they would make it to the moon.
I’ll start at the beginning, with the N1 itself. The N1 didn’t have the same payload capacity as the Saturn V. While the big American rocket was lofting 130 tons per launch for the Apollo program, the N1 could only lift 95 tons. Ton for ton, that’s only 73% the capacity, less than three quarters the payload to orbit compared to the Saturn V. Because of this, the Soviet Spacecraft designed to get men to the moon (The LK lander and the 7K-LOKmother ship) were much lighter, much smaller, much less capable than the Apollo/LEM counterparts that did get to the moon. (Six times)
To facilitate this lighter weight, for starters the Soviet plan was only to launch 2 cosmonauts, not 3 astronauts. And due to the configuration lacking a docking ring, or egress tunnel, the cosmonauts had to perform an EVA to transfer between the two vehicles. (so in an emergency both men couldn’t transfer to it to use it like a life boat as the men of Apollo 13 did) The LK lander did not have separate descent and ascent engines/stages. So if something went wrong with the engine, there was no way to abort the lunar landing with a second engine, or if the pilot expended to much fuel trying to make a landing, they might not be able to take off again, or make lunar orbit, or be able to rendezvous with the LOK. The Soviets also didn’t have Hydrogen/Oxygen fuel cells like the Apollo system did, so they would be entirely reliant on batteries. Batteries that are heavy. Heavy weight they couldn’t afford to lift. This meant the LK lander only had enough batter power onboard for six hours of operation, for one man. That’s what I believe is six hours total, to un-dock from the LOK, descend, land, Perform lunar EVA, collect samples, perform science, take pictures and plant the propaganda victory flag, get back in the LK, ascend, and rejoin with the LOK. That’s not much time, if there was a problem and the LK was left independent in orbit, they wouldn’t have time to complete multiple orbits while troubleshooting and working on problems, before it would get dark, quiet and stuffy for the man onboard with no hope of rescue from lunar orbit. And all those ‘ifs’ are on top of a lack of redundant systems to save weight on the spacecraft stack. If any of a number of major systems went down, there was no back up, they were all single point failures, and if they failed, not only would that be a mission failure, but it likely would have cost the lives of one or both men aboard the mission. But they couldn’t carry redundancies because of the weight limitations.
So, with that in mind, aware of all the limitations of their design, they planned their mission to the moon. A mission that that would have ended up requiring 5 N1 launches, to put one man on the moon for a couple of hours. Two of these launches would have been to put communications and landing site scouting satellites in orbit over the moon. The third launch would have been to put a rover on the moon to more carefully scout out the chosen landing zone. Because of their concern about the single descent ascent engine not restarting, or not having enough fuel or something else going wrong and leaving their lone cosmonaut stranded on the lunar surface, the 4th launch would have been a second, but this time unmanned LK lander. Before finally on the 5th launch putting up the two cosmonauts. Before landing this second LK with a man aboard, at the same landing sight. They would have to land at the same spot, three times. In a row. They recognized that even that was kinda dubious, and made some modifications to the lunar rover, to be able to carry the Cosmonaut like an unmanned lunar buggy, extra air supply and everything. Even ahead of time, they were ware of this being a long shot, and tried to plan accordingly, giving their one man on the moon as much help as they could. But this leads me to my next point…
About the manufacturing quality of Soviet equipment, sure it was designed by well educated engineers, but most of it was built by unskilled laborers, who were just working for the party. The quality of their output was not so good, and when it was good, it could not be counted on to be good twice in a row, or five times in a row. Even if the N1 got its design faults sorted out, would the production process get the manufacturing discrepancies sorted out? Could they successfully launch it, 5 times in a row? Could they land within a few kilometers of the same spot, three times in a row?
If say, all the hardware actually worked, in a repeated fashion as they needed for this mission plan, that doesn’t mean the cosmonauts could do all the tasks needed. The Soviets didn’t have a Gemini equivalent program where they took a crash course learning approach to do things like docking, or lunar rendezvous, or performing an EVA more complex than just getting out and floating around. Or even learning to make accurate landings close to a chosen sight. Because remember, not only does the cosmonaut have to perform an EVA to get from the LOK to the LK before landing, they have to return from the LK to the LOK after landing, and bring what ever samples and experiments with them in order to make the return journey back to earth.
Now let’s say all that worked, the N1 worked 5 times in a row. It works five times in a row before the Saturn V works once. They landed in the same area 3 times in a row, the performed multiple EVA’s, successfully rendezvous in lunar orbit, they get back to earth, the batteries hold out for the short duration landing, the descent/ascent engine restarts and gets them back into lunar orbit, the heat shield holds out, and they survive atmosphere reentry. Their space suits hold out, the cosmonauts are able to get in and out of the vehicles multiple times, the lone man on the moon doesn’t have any problems down there by himself, It all works flawlessly, text book execution. Even then, their performance envelope is so much smaller, that I would still call the Apollo mission a win, even if it came afterwards. Because they had one man on the moon for less than six hours, with one bag of samples, say what, ten, twenty kilos? (Apollo 11 collected 21.5 kilos and between the 6 Apollo missions a total of 381 kilos were collected) Even if the N1-L3 program had worked, and even if it did work first, the much shorter and more limited scope of its operation would have paled in comparison to even when compared to just the Apollo 11 mission by itself.
For all those reasons, I don’t think it would work even if given more time, funding and better opportunities, and even if by some miracle it did work, and by a longer stretch of the imagination, worked first, it still would have been a weak showing compared to the Apollo program. Let’s say they got it to work six times, they made six landings just like the Apollo program. Six landings with 20 kilos of samples for every landing, for six hours each. The six Apollo landings still would have put twice as many men, collected more than twice the weight in lunar samples and compared to the 36 hours on the surface, Apollo would have cumulatively spend roughly 160 man hours on the surface. So their victory would have only been in timing, and those 6 landings, would have requires launching 30 N1’s. Could that be done, successfully, 30 times? Could Saturn V’s even be launches successfully 30 times? I hang my hat on that hook, even if it had worked as planned on paper, the Soviet lunar mission would not have been close to the Par set by the Apollo program, even if it worked as planned, and worked first, it would have been a comparatively weak showing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to throw shade at anything the brave cosmonauts or gallant Soviet engineers did accomplish, my point is, that I don’t think the plan would have worked, even if everything went textbook smooth for them. And above all else, I would like us all to take a moment to honor the memory of those who died in pursuit of Space, and science in space. Below is an incomplete list of people who died in space, in atmosphere while traveling to, or returning from space. But this list is not complete, for these are just the astronauts, and does not include any of the engineers or technicians that were killed in tests or experiments and mishaps on the ground. Nor does it include any of the lost cosmonauts that the Soviets wrote out of history to conceal their failures.
23rd March 1961 Valentin Bondarenko
31st October 1964 Theodore Freeman
Feb 28th 1966 Elliot See and Charles Bassett
Apollo 1 on 27th January 1967 with Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee
Soyuz 1 24th April 1967 with Vladimir Komarov
5th October 1967 Robert Henry Lawrence Jr.
X-15 flight on November 15th 1967 with Micheal Adams
Soyuz 11 30th June 1971 with Dobrovolsky, Patseyev and Volkov onbaord
The Challenger disaster on January 28th 1986 with Jarvis, McAuliffe, McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Smith and Scobee.
11th July 1993 Sergei Vozovikov
The Columbia disaster on Feb 1st 2003 with Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark and Ramon aboard.
And Micheal Alsbury on 31st October 2014.
Peace to the Fallen
Chace Randolph 
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