Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration (Springer Praxis Books)

When, in July 1969, the Americans decisively beat the Soviet Union in the race to put an astronaut on the moon, this event had profound historical, scientific and political implications. This book tells the story of the Soviet and Russian lunar programme, from its origins to the reconsideration of a lunar programme in the present-day federal Russian space programme. Following Sputnik, the first Soviet lunar flights achieved the key goals of hitting, circling and photographing the moon in 1959. The Soviet Union planned to achieve the biggest prize of them all –the first person to land on the moon – and built all the key spaceships required to do so, such as a lunar orbiter and lander. Brian Harvey describes the techniques devised by the USSR for lunar landing, from the LK lunar module to the LOK lunar orbiter and tested versions in Earth orbit. He asks whether these systems would have worked and, examining how well they were tested, concludes that they would have: the Soviet Union lost the moon race for political, not technical reasons. Designs for moon bases were even drawn up. In the end, the Soviet Union ran an impressive series of robotic missions from 1968 to 1976 to circle the moon, map the far side, conduct scientific observations from orbit, recover samples and rove over the surface. The scientific haul from these missions is surveyed: what was actually learned about the moon, its rocks and the lunar environment, that will be useful for the present plans by the United States to return to the moon and for other countries, such as India and China, to conduct their own lunar exploration.

The book opens in Surgut, Siberia, in August 1976, with a largely forgotten event: the return to Earth after a three-day journey from the moon, under a single parachute, of the tiny Luna 24 cabin, with a core sample drilled deep into the Sea of Crises, a remarkable scientific and engineering achievement. It ends with an examination of projected missions, fromplans to explore the far side and set up lunar observatories to the Luna Glob explorer of the 1990s. There is also discussion of lunar tourism, using a modernized version of the Zond spacecraft which flew around the moon from1968 to 1970.

Little is known of Soviet and Russian lunar exploration although, in fact, the Soviet Union/Russia:

Sent the first spaceships past the moon, the first to hit the moon and the first to circle the moon

Was first to soft land on and orbit the moon

Was first to send a spaceship around the moon and recover it on Earth

Came very close to sending a cosmonaut around the moon first

Built and successfully tested, in Earth orbit, a lunar lander

Pioneered sophisticated, precise high-speed reentries into the Earth's atmosphere

Came close to perfecting a giant moon rocket, the N-1

Retrieved three sets of rock samples from the moon by automatic spacecraft

Landed advanced roving laboratories that explored the moon for months on end, traveling 48km

Designed long-term lunar bases.

These were remarkable achievements requiring a considerable level of engineering sophistication and have a place in the contemporary story of astronautics. Recent landings on Mars use, essentially, the very techniques developed by Russia to land on and explore the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

As an acknowledged expert and author of several books on the Soviet and Russian space programme, Brian Harvey is ideally suited to cover not only the engineering and scientific side but also the human stories of the Soviet and Russian lunar programme. These include those of the cosmonaut squad that trained to land on the moon, but was stood down, and of the designers who tried to realise the dream of a Russian moon, from Tikhonravov to Mishin: a Soviet lunar programme was first proposed by designer Mikhail Tikhonravov in a children’s magazine in 1951 and he persuaded a sceptical Soviet leadership of the value of a moon programme. Following Sputnik, the first lunar flights quickly achieved the key goals of hitting, circling and photographing the moon in 1959. The Soviet Union achieved all the early‘firsts’ in lunar exploration, such as soft landing and orbiting the moon, and Brian Harvey will recount the frantic efforts to rival America’s Apollo and the dramatic hours of 21^st July 1969, when Russia tried to soft land Luna 15 in the Sea of Crises even as Armstrong and Aldrin explored the moon in the nearby Sea of Tranquility.