A fascinating discussion of the Soviet moon landing program. The Soviet space program came as an immense psychological shock to the American public and American politicians. The US was preparing to launch a satellite, there were articles in things like Scientific American and Popular Science, explaining how it was going to work. Then, suddenly, there was Sputnik. And another Sputnik, bigger and heavier than anything the US imagined. Then a man. Then a woman. Then three at once. It seemed obvious that the USSR had a meticulously organized space program – a triumph of socialist central planning over the disorganized capitalists in the US.

Reality, according to author Eugen Reichl, was rather different. The Soviet space program started out as byproduct of ballistic missile development. Sergey Pavlovich Korolev was supposed to be developing an ICBM, and the satellite launches were presented to the Soviet military and politicians as steps toward that end – in short, it seems like Korolev – who was interested in space exploration – essentially hijacked a military program. Once the Soviets had a space program they were stuck with it – they had to keep up appearances and keep presenting the world with Soviet space triumphs.

Ironically, the US countered with NASA – a tightly structured organization with centralized control; what the US thought the Soviets had. The Soviets, in turn, thought that President Kennedy’s announcement of a US Moon program was just propaganda; thus the Soviets got off to a late start with their own Moon program. (One of the things Reichl points out was that the after the US moon landings, USSR mounted a very successful propaganda campaign to claim that they had never planned a manned lunar mission; this was believed in the West until glasnost opened up the records.

So why didn’t the Soviets succeed? They were years ahead of the US at first, and originally thought the could do a manned lunar landing by September 1968. Reichl blames a number of things:
• Byzantine Soviet politics. There wasn’t a Soviet equivalent of NASA with central control; instead whatever engineer could get the ear of Khrushchev or Brezhnev would get a project funded.
• Soviet paranoia. Reichl notes that the American Saturn and the Soviet N1 both needed hundreds of subcontractors. In the US, all the contractors advertised their participation; American astronauts visited factories and talked to workers and management. The contractors were proud of what they were doing. In the USSR, all the subcontractors knew was that they were working on yet another secret project.
• Socialist economics coupled with the above. There was no incentive to do a good job. If a product was well made or finished ahead of time, the central planners would just expect the factory to make it even better next time and finish it faster. Since the factories didn’t know they were making stuff for a Moon rocket, they didn’t take any special care with it. When the remains of the second N1 were examined after it blew up, all sorts of foreign objects from the manufacturing process – metal scrap up to an inch in diameter, metal shavings, bits of fabric and rubber – were found in the fuel pumps.
• Infrastructure. The Soviets were unable to test a completed N1; they had no test stand big enough at the manufacturing site. The N1 had to be shipped by railroad to the launch site in pieces and assembled there; it was tested by launching it. The US could test engines in Mississippi and ship them by barge to Florida. Similarly, the Soviets had no reliable source of liquid hydrogen, so the Soviet rockets were fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene.
• The death of Korolev. With the driving force and most effective negotiator gone, the Moon program became subject to competing designers, depending on who could talk to the politicians better. (It’s noted that Korolev was completely unknown in the West. When he was buried in the Kremlin wall with a coterie of high-ranking pallbearers, the best the New York Times could come up with was that he might have contributed to Sputnik design).

Ironically, after the failure of the manned Moon program, the Soviets got their act together and launched a series of successful space missions. The N1 program was erased from history; the Soviets claimed they had never been interested in a manned Moon lander and the remaining N1 boosters, engines, and equipment were ordered destroyed.

Reichl explains some of the interesting features of Soviet rocketry; rockets from this era are cone shaped because the Soviets couldn’t make cylindrical fuel and oxygen tanks. The spherical tanks were stacked on top of each other, with the smaller fuel tank above the larger oxygen tank, leading to the characteristic shape. The “latticework” connection between stages is there because the second and third stages fired before the first and second stages were completely burned out, avoiding the problem of temporarily weightless liquids. The lattice allows exhaust gas to escape. (The Americans dealt with the weightless fuel problem by using small thrusters to add acceleration during stage separation).

All this is well and good, fascinating stuff. The illustrations are plentiful and include detailed drawings of the N1 with a side-by-side comparison to the Saturn. However, Reichl provides no references or bibliography; perhaps his sources didn’t want to be mentioned or perhaps it would be pointless to refer to archives that were only temporarily open during Glasnost. ( )