Science / Medicine : Racing to the Moon : Space: The Soviets, in the spirit of openness, display for American visitors the hardware they had hoped to use to beat the U.S. to a lunar landing. It’s clear now that they came close to pulling it off.
Twenty years after American astronauts first set foot on the moon, Russian scientists have at last acknowledged that the Soviet Union was in a race with the United States to be first to reach that long-sought goal.
It is now clear that the Soviets came much closer than had been believed to winning the race to land a man on the moon. It is also clear that the Soviets lost the race not because they did not embark on a manned moon-landing program, as they had claimed previously, but because they had difficulties in developing a massive booster rocket capable of performing the launch.
The admission was part of a surprisingly candid and open Soviet presentation made to a group of Caltech and Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers who were visiting Moscow last fall to set up joint research and educational programs in the space sciences.
The Americans were the first Westerners to be shown the sophisticated spacecraft--very similar to our own Apollo spacecraft--with which a Soviet moon landing would have been attempted.
The group was also shown the factory where the Proton booster rockets that are the foundation of the Soviet space program are manufactured, as well as a variety of other research and testing facilities that were previously off-limits to outsiders.
In fact, the Soviets displayed a “surprisingly high degree of openness,” said Caltech aeronautical engineer Frank Marble, a member of the delegation. “It was very clear that they would get credit if they could work out an exchange or a cooperative program with somebody from the U.S., and that the wish was coming from somebody pretty high up. We got a good look at what glasnost and perestroika means.”
But that increased openness and the prospects for future cooperation may have been overshadowed by the admission that the Soviets hoped to beat the United States to the moon with what planetary scientist Bruce Murray of Caltech has called the “Apollo spoiler mission.”
One of the major, oft-stated justifications for the $25-billion Apollo program launched by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 was that the Soviets were attempting to reach the moon. That conclusion was drawn primarily from evidence that the Soviet Union was developing a massive booster rocket, similar to the U.S. Saturn 5, that would be able to accomplish such a mission.
But no Westerner ever saw a Soviet spacecraft that was capable of making a trip to the moon and landing, and Soviet officials never before acknowledged their efforts to make such a flight. After the Apollo success in 1969, in fact, they claimed that a manned mission to the moon was too dangerous and that their efforts had always been directed toward putting manned satellites into Earth orbit.
In the face of such Soviet denials, U.S. critics of the space program frequently charged that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had invented the Soviet program for a moon landing to justify its own program. According to Thomas Paine, who was NASA administrator during the Apollo years, “The lack of hard evidence (of a Soviet moon mission) was always the stumbling block.”
Now, says Paine, who is head of Thomas Paine Associates in West Los Angeles, “I think it is quite thrilling to finally get a picture of the . . . thing we all speculated about for so long. At last we’ve seen that they were finally unable to solve the hardware problems, particularly the large booster required to move that much weight out into orbit.”
“They came very close,” added Caltech’s Murray. “Had (the booster) developed on time, they would have beaten us.”
The American group, which included five professors from MIT and Marble from Caltech, visited Moscow the week after Thanksgiving as a follow-up to a previous visit in which Edward F. Crawley and Jack L. Kerrebrock of MIT had agreed to establish collaborative efforts with the Soviets.
Two days during the week, the researchers held technical sessions with the Soviet scientists in which each side described the work they were engaged in. The rest of the week, Academician Yuri Ryzhov, rector of the Moscow Aeronautical Institute, “organized as many trips for us as they could organize and we could stand,” Marble said.
Then, during a tour of the Moscow institute, they were shown an unfamiliar module. “It was one of the most dramatic moments that I can ever remember,” said Laurence R. Young of MIT. “I said, ‘What is that?’ ” Prof. Oleg Alifanov casually told the group that they were viewing lunar landing equipment, now being used for educational purposes at the institute.
According to Crawley, “The return-to-Earth module looks almost identical to a conventional Soyuz capsule, its principal difference being an improved re-entry heat shield. The lunar landing craft bears a similarity to Soyuz, but is distinguished by having both descent and ascent propulsion stages and four extendable landing legs. The landing craft has three rocket nozzles.”
The Soviet spacecraft had “great similarities to our Apollo vehicles, which is not surprising because they were trying to do the same job we were,” Marble said. “The most striking difference,” he added, was that only one cosmonaut at a time would land on the moon, compared to two in the Apollo mission, while his fellow traveler would circle the moon in the return vehicle.
Another difference--and what proved to be the downfall of the Soviet moon program--was in how the spacecraft would be launched into orbit. Unlike the Apollo spacecraft, which were launched on a single Saturn 5, the Soviet spacecraft were to be launched by two separate vehicles.
The manned spacecraft in which the two cosmonauts would return to Earth would be launched by the reliable Proton booster, which is still the workhorse of the Soviet space program. The lunar lander was to be placed in Earth orbit by the larger N1 booster, the prototype of the Energiya booster that is now used with the Soviet space shuttle.
The two spacecraft were to be joined in Earth orbit to carry out the mission in a manner virtually identical to the U.S. Apollo mission.
Young said their hosts told them the lunar lander itself “was ready to go in 1968, ahead of Apollo. . . . The hold-up was not on the spacecraft, but on the booster.”
According to Marble, the Americans were told that the lunar mission was eventually put on hold in 1972 and canceled in 1974 when the Mir space station attained a higher priority. One of the landing vehicles was consigned to the Moscow Aviation Institute. A second vehicle is apparently at a technical museum elsewhere in Moscow.
Marble believes the Soviet scientists were excited to finally be able to display their work. “A lot of us knew each other, but they had never been able to show anybody this type of stuff before,” he said. “They were really enjoying it.”
Paine believes that the Apollo successes had a calming influence on world politics. “It’s difficult to look back now and remember the mood, but that was the era when Mr. (Nikita S.) Khrushchev came to the U.N. and took off his shoe and pounded the table, shouting ‘We will bury you!’ That was right after their early space successes.
“You always worry about the degree to which leaders in the Kremlin had an accurate view of the world. Soviet rocket scientists were undoubtedly telling the Kremlin they were far ahead of the Americans. And when the Kremlin itself could turn on television in 1969 and watch Americans walking on the moon, that was the most effective communication we could get about the relative technological strengths of the two systems.”
But, he added, “I never felt the only reason to go to the moon was to beat the Soviets. Our goal was to become the foremost space-faring nation, and to learn how to explore other worlds. . . . It was satisfying to outperform them, but it was even more satisfying simply to be doing it ourselves.”
And he anticipates even more revelations. “There’s a new, fresh wind blowing over there. I look forward very much to some of the scientists writing their memoirs so that we can look over their shoulders and see what their successes and their problems and failures were. It will be fascinating to hear their half of the story.”
