posted December 19, 2010 07:35 AM               

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.

posted December 21, 2010 09:28 AM               

By first did they mean an orbital flight like Apollo 8? Or was Leonov/Gagarin to make the first landing (a'la Apollo 11)?

posted December 21, 2010 11:09 AM               

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

posted December 21, 2010 09:44 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Lou Chinal:
I thought I read somewhere that Pavel Belyayev would have made the first flight to the moon?

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posted January 01, 2011 11:47 PM            

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 LM.

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, Leonov, like Shepard, would have been very tempted to attempt a landing in violation of the mission rules. However, with only 15-20 seconds of hover time to pick a site, this would have been extremely high-risk.