totm dec 2019 Russian Launch and Mission Thread

[Codraroll]

On 1/2/2025 at 4:56 PM, tater said:

On the one hand, very impressive, on the other, many wasted years. I say the latter in exactly the same way I do about the 30 years of the US Shuttle program. Shuttle was stagnant, and a lost opportunity to innovate more capable vehicles, and I think this family of vehicles is the same. Having a workhorse is great as long as you use that well-established fallback to push the envelope.

To be fair, they did try to push the envelope. Programs to replace the Soyuz, both the booster and the spacecraft, have been initiated since the 1980's.

It's just that they all failed miserably.

[SunlitZelkova]

4 hours ago, Codraroll said:

To be fair, they did try to push the envelope. Programs to replace the Soyuz, both the booster and the spacecraft, have been initiated since the 1980's.

It's just that they all failed miserably.

Not entirely true. Zenit, based on the boosters of Energia, worked just fine. It was supposed to replace Soyuz the booster, but… ya know.

[tater]

I'm fine with having a workhorse vehicle, I just wish we had all settled on one decades ago that was actually a "jack of all trades." Imagine the counterfactual history where the US and CCCP both had whatever their concept vehicles were from the late 60s, 70s and 80s—illuminated in the never built thread here largely populated with hazegrayart vids.

[SunlitZelkova]

1 hour ago, tater said:

I'm fine with having a workhorse vehicle, I just wish we had all settled on one decades ago that was actually a "jack of all trades." Imagine the counterfactual history where the US and CCCP both had whatever their concept vehicles were from the late 60s, 70s and 80s—illuminated in the never built thread here largely populated with hazegrayart vids.

I’ve dreamed of that world and tried hard to make it happen, but I am still of the belief that that world was never a real possibility. It was just a fantasy.

I’ve been going through Asif Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo trying to find a point of divergence where a counterfactual/alt history could reasonably start and make the Soviet space program of the 60s healthier, but there’s just none. Here’s some of the events that stood out to me:

1. Between 1962 and 1964, OKB-1 deputy chief designer Leonid Voskresensky argues with Korolyov over building a test stand for the N1’s first stage. He also tells him that the rocket cannot be built without annual funding ten times more than actually allotted (500 million rubles in 1964). Voskresensky eventually refuses to sign any document related to the N1 unless Korolyov concedes on the test stand issue but resigns in 1964.

2. 1964: Despite the N1 not being designed for a single launch LOR profile, instead having been conceived for EOR and direct ascent, someone (it wasn’t known at the time the book was written in the 2000s) proposes to change it to LOR. Korolyov received letters from many of his best (and most-well liked within the design bureau) engineers imploring him not to change the design but he ended up ramming it through government skepticism and criticism from other chief designers for approval. Consequently, many of these people were either dismissed, transferred to minor positions, or resign.

3. January 1965: Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovsky openly tells Air Force officials “We cannot afford to and will not build super powerful carriers to make flights to the Moon.”

4. In the rest of 1965, an ungodly amount of infighting over both the lunar landing and lunar flyby programs occurs. Korolyov finds himself writing his own “letters of imploring” begging various government, party, and military officials not to sign off on Chelomei’s UR-700 lest it divert funding from the N1, but meanwhile does his own jockeying and becomes responsible for the lunar flyby spacecraft, increasing his organization’s workload to the detriment of the N1.

5. Despite the objections of many of its members, including Mystislav Keldysh himself, who said “What kind of nerve must we have to disembark one man on the Moon? Imagine for a moment being alone on the Moon… that’s a straight path to the psychiatric ward,” a special commission headed by Keldysh signs off on N1 development in December 1965, giving it the complete go-ahead.

A loosely similar series of unfortunate events occurred in 1974 that led to the N1 being cancelled despite being close to working.

I wouldn’t say any of this was inevitable. If you look at what made the N1 and other big Soviet space projects fail in the 60s and 70s, there’s arguably so many contributing factors it’s a miracle they didn’t succeed in the first place. The failure of the programs are contingent on so many factors that if I was writing an alternate history where the Soviets did not land on the Moon first I would probably be mocked for writing a story akin to what happened in real life.

But on the other hand, it’s contingent on so many things that to think of a world where they succeeded one would basically be writing complete fiction.

In the 80s it’s actually a lot easier to get the dream vehicles going, because Energia was the main dream vehicle. With Energia literally complete by 1988, all that would remain would be to build lunar or Mars spacecraft. To get that to happen though, the USSR needs to survive, and that is equally contingent on so many factors such a counterfactual is pure fiction (there is no one point of divergence that can make that happen).

Considering Energia was complete, it may not be too hard to imagine a 90s or 00s Soviet government funding the building of a lunar lander and capsule, but on the other side of the isle it’s about as difficult as imagining N1 getting proper funding as it is to imagine SEI getting the funding to do anything at all.

[Codraroll]

On 1/6/2025 at 4:31 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

Not entirely true. Zenit, based on the boosters of Energia, worked just fine. It was supposed to replace Soyuz the booster, but… ya know.

Oh, at times, the rockets themselves worked. But the process of getting as far as replacing Soyuz always tended to peter out at some point, for various reasons. Hence the programs themselves failing.