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Author
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Topic: Soviet Lunar Program: Two-person crew
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Fezman92
Member Posts: 1031
From: New Jersey, USA
Registered: Mar 2010
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posted 12-17-2010 08:24 PM
   
Why did the Soviet lunar program have only a two man crew? |
jasonelam
Member Posts: 691
From: Monticello, KY USA
Registered: Mar 2007
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posted 12-18-2010 09:02 AM
I think it is because of available space issues. From what I have been reading, each cosmonaut would have a Kretchet suit, one for the landing and the other in case the first needed help. Plus, the descent module had a hatch in it to allow outside access to the module, I'm assuming if the Orbital Module hatch refused to open. So I think the issue was that there was not enough room for three in that situation. |
dom
Member Posts: 855
From:
Registered: Aug 2001
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posted 12-18-2010 09:36 AM
Although the idea of a solo N1-L3 lunar landing attempt might have been something the cosmonauts would have tried, to me it seems suicidal. It's probably just as well they never got the chance!Interestingly, later more advanced Soviet moonlanding plans had more than one cosmonaut touching down on the moon's surface. |
alanh_7
Member Posts: 1252
From: Ajax, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Apr 2008
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posted 12-18-2010 10:51 AM
I think weight restrictions may have also been and issue in the design phase as well. |
dom
Member Posts: 855
From:
Registered: Aug 2001
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posted 12-19-2010 07:35 AM
Absolutely a weight issue. The Soviets didn't take Kennedy's challenge seriously until 1964 and quickly wrapped their lunar landing plan around the inferior N1 design.Unfortunately Korolev's booster wasn't up to the job and we now know there were two better designs that could have flown by the late 1960s if they'd been funded. The N1 was only able to carry a crew of two men to the moon. I recently had the chance to meet Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov - who would have been the Soviet's 'Neil Armstrong'. When I shook his hand I had the feeling that he was extremely lucky he wasn't asked to make a solo lunar landing. In my opinion it would have been a one-way trip. Anyway, I hope I explain it all a little better in my "Eagle and the Bear" chapter in Footprints in the Dust  |
Jay Gallentine
Member Posts: 287
From: Shorewood, MN, USA
Registered: Sep 2004
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posted 12-19-2010 07:42 PM
Dom is absolutely correct. The N-1 was incapable of supporting more than a two-man crew, and I would suggest it could barely support even that!Although the N-1 was as tall as the Saturn V, and weighed more than half a million pounds less, and kicked out over two million more pounds of thrust, it carried over a hundred thousand pounds less payload. |
Lou Chinal
Member Posts: 1306
From: Staten Island, NY
Registered: Jun 2007
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posted 12-21-2010 09:28 AM
I thought I read somewhere that Pavel Belyayev would have made the first flight to the moon?By first did they mean an orbital flight like Apollo 8? Or was Leonov/Gagarin to make the first landing (a'la Apollo 11)? Or was it that they just hadn't gotten that far along in there thinking (Nikolayev or Popovich)? |
dom
Member Posts: 855
From:
Registered: Aug 2001
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posted 12-21-2010 11:09 AM
As you probably know the Soviets had two separate lunar projects - a lunar fly-by mission using the 'Zond' craft and the N1-L3 lunar landing mission.Most of the lunar cosmonauts trained for both as the hardware was roughly the same - only launched on different boosters. Alexei Leonov was picked for the first mission. The Soviets planned three circumlunar missions before attempting a landing with the original first fly-by crew. The crews for first three missions would have been: Leonov/Makarov
Bykovsky/Rukhavishnikov
Popovich/Sevastianov Unfortunately Gagarin died before serious training for lunar missions could begin. |
FFrench
Member Posts: 3161
From: San Diego
Registered: Feb 2002
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posted 12-21-2010 09:44 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Lou Chinal:
I thought I read somewhere that Pavel Belyayev would have made the first flight to the moon?
It was a comment made to and then reported by Mike Collins: for some of the context around the remark see P.370 of "Into That Silent Sea." The rest of that chapter also discusses Leonov and others training for hoped-for lunar flights, and what happened to those hopes. |
Lou Chinal
Member Posts: 1306
From: Staten Island, NY
Registered: Jun 2007
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posted 12-23-2010 08:53 PM
Thanks Francis. I knew I remembered from somewhere, senility hasn't set in yet. |
MadSci
Member Posts: 226
From: Maryland, USA
Registered: Oct 2008
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posted 01-01-2011 11:47 PM
To reiterate, the issue for the Soviets was the limited capacity of their boosters. The N-1 could theoretically place only 70% of the weight into lunar orbit that the Saturn V could. So even if the hardware remained the same, a three man crew would have needed much more lifting power than the N-1 could have provided just for the extra consumables required. And there was the question of what a third crewman would do? There was no chance of getting enough lifting capacity for a two-man lunar lander, so there would be little point to adding a third person. As to the spacesuits, only the crewman descending to the moon had a 'Kretchet' suit. The other member wore the simpler 'Orlon' suit. The suits were very critical as to save weight there was no docking tunnel between the orbital module (the "LOK") and the lunar lander (the 'LK'). The LK's one-man crew both entered and exited from it while exposed to space during a spacewalk. Similarly, lunar rock samples would be transferred to the LOK via spacewalk. Personally, I agree that the Soviet mission profile was very high risk, but the Soviets made some very clever decisions and built amazingly simple and robust hardware. I have a strut from the LK lander and you wouldn't mistake it for a piece of the LM. It is very heavily built — a necessary response to the landing profile for the vehicle. The pressure compartment is essentially two intersecting titanium spheres — nothing like the delicate, chemically thinned aluminum walls of the Apollo lunar module. Robustness aside, the Soviet mission profile required the LK to home in on a radio beacon delivered to the lunar surface by an unmanned probe. This was required to compensate for the extremely limited maneuvering fuel they could carry due to the weight restrictions mentioned previously. However this would have been unlikely to work as anticipate as the Soviets were unaware of the degree of variation in the lunar gravity field caused by the now famous mass-cons, that even threw off the Landing of Apollo 11 despite the high-resolution mapping of them done by Apollos 8 and 10. I think it was unlikely that they could properly position the LK's de-orbit burn in order to arrive at the much narrower landing window they had, even with the target to home in on. Of course, Alexei Leonov, like Alan Shepard, would have been very tempted to attempt a landing in violation of the mission rules. However, with only 15 to 20 seconds of hover time to pick a site, this would have been extremely high-risk. Of course, the cosmonauts were highly skilled, and the LK highly robust — and we will never know... |
Ian Limbrey
Member Posts: 124
From: England
Registered: Nov 2012
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posted 10-05-2015 05:19 AM
I recently visited the Cosmonauts exhibition at the Science Museum in London and was impressed by the exhibits and artefacts on display, which included the LK lander. I did not realise until then that there was only one main engine to be used for both the descent and the ascent from the lunar surface and hence it was not possible to have a back-up plan if there engine problems during the descent and the mission would end in disaster! With only one cosmonaut on board, a landing on the moon would be very tricky (even impossible?) even though the cosmonauts were highly skilled. |
chris_petty
Member Posts: 14
From:
Registered: Nov 2015
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posted 11-13-2015 10:45 AM
The N-1/L3 was the mission that involved a single cosmonaut travelling to the lunar surface in the LK while a second stayed in orbit in the LOK. Even within OKB-1 many thought this was too risky, but given that the N-1 at that time could lift a maximum of around 95 tons it was all they could do with a single launch.Korolev had pushed for upper stages to be powered by liquid hydrogen/ liquid oxygen which would have improved things, but this was so delayed that they had to stick with the Kerosene/LOX powered stages which were far less efficient. Post Apollo 11 work started on planning the more advanced N-1/L3M mission for extended stay two cosmonaut landings. I recently posted this on the subject (featuring the fantastic artwork of Nick Stevens). |
chris_petty
Member Posts: 14
From:
Registered: Nov 2015
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posted 11-27-2015 10:30 AM
Slightly off topic, but certainly related to the N-1/L3, I've just posted a follow-up article to my recent Soviet lunar landing piece, this time covering Zond and the other Soviet circumlunar projects. |
Mike Dixon
Member Posts: 1397
From: Kew, Victoria, Australia
Registered: May 2003
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posted 11-28-2015 05:06 PM
All credit to you for this effort.By the way, did we ever know how many mission were planned of landing sites? When I saw the size comparison between the respective landers, I was gobsmacked. |
Tom
Member Posts: 1597
From: New York
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted 11-28-2015 08:24 PM
Did the Soviet Union ever announce landing sites for their proposed manned landing(s)? |
chris_petty
Member Posts: 14
From:
Registered: Nov 2015
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posted 12-01-2015 11:16 AM
Not sure of landing sites. I'm going to see Alexei Leonov talk at London Science Museum in a couple of weeks, so maybe I'll get a chance to ask him! |
dom
Member Posts: 855
From:
Registered: Aug 2001
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posted 12-01-2015 05:33 PM
Apparently the Soviets selected three main sites for manned landings: Ocean of Storms; Sinus Meridiani and Sea of Tranquillity! |
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