What do you think of the N1 rocket?

[hachiman]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/N1_rocket_drawing.png

Do you think had the soviets made it to the moon, there would be moonbases by now?

[Kosmos929]

Possibly.

At least there would have been a chance of that happening, instead of our looking back on the fact that it didn't.

I think the Russians made a mistake dumping the N1, then made another mistake not building Vulkan, and then made another mistake when they let Energia die.

Well, that's what happens when you put politicians in charge of a country.

Considering our situation here in the States, we don't have much reason to feel superior.

[ijuin]

The biggest technical issue with the N-1 was that it could not tolerate the failure of any one of its thirty first-stage engines--and with thirty of them, it was six times as likely to experience an engine failure (for any given per-engine reliability factor) as the Saturn V. Lose one engine and the whole stage goes bad--notice that every launch attempt resulted in a loss of vehicle while the first stage was still firing--and two of them were for issues that should have shut down only one engine but resulted in the loss of all or nearly all thrust for the entire stage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_rocket#Launch_history

However, I do think that if the Soviets had succeeded in a manned moon landing, US/USSR space competition would have continued and we would have seen a push for moon bases and a Mars mission.

[Tim_Barrett]

Can't believe they thought these monsters would work so great.

[hachiman]

Here's a vid of it launching in Orbiter.

[Kosmos929]

On the first N1 launch (I think it was vehicle 3L) one of the first stage engines shut down for no good reason. The engine diametrically opposite was shut down by the control system with no apparent affects on anything. The first stage failure that claimed the booster occurred c. 40 seconds later and was unrelated. So I don't think that a single engine failure would necessarily doom the rocket.

This can all be blamed on whoever decided not to cough up the money to build a static test stand for the first stage.

[cray]

Do you think had the soviets made it to the moon, there would be moonbases by now?

The N1 had a good idea to try that plug nozzle design (which the West never really took off the drawing board), though it wasn't as good as Energia, but Soviet quality control was crap and the Soviet space program...well, it wasn't a space program.

From Sputnik to Neil Armstrong's, 'One Small Step,' the US had something the USSR did not: a clear, focused space program. One program: The US was going to the MOON. It built an organization to accomplish this, then gave the organization several fire hoses filled with money, manpower, and political willpower to drown any fires that might interfere with success of the program. (There were other space projects at the time: spy satellites, Dynasoar, etc., but they were sideshows addressing the needs of specific customers, not the whole nation.)

The Soviets had no such central space organization. The USSR had separate engineering groups (US'd call those 'corporations') pushing different rockets on their potential customers. The USSR's space customers were various military branches that needed some nukes and spy satellites, and a government that could stand a few PR victories. When there was a charismatic, connected engineering group leader who could win contracts, the Soviets pushed a space program. When he died on the operating table, the program went away because the customers - military, mostly - didn't give a shit about the moon. So the Soviets got big ICBMs and a series of space stations that started as manned spy satellites.

Once the US won the space race, it shifted to exactly the same mode of behavior as the USSR's programs. Mars: too expensive. Power satellites and mega-stations: too expensive. To buy off aerospace corporations, the US paid for the shuttle and dinky ISS over a period of decades. Dynasoar was burned on the alter of the shuttle, MOL was rendered useless by Keyhole, which answered most military and intel needs for spy satellites, private companies got their cashcow communication satellites, and NASA survived on an IV dripline of modest scientific projects.

The N1 was a racehorse for a race that the USSR didn't care about. Had it worked, the N1 probably would've been used to launch bigger Salyut stations rather than go to the moon. Maybe if the N1 had worked early enough - on its first test flight - the Soviets might've continued to race for the moon.

But they probably would've dropped it after getting there ahead of the Americans, if they could put the moon lander and return system together. The N1 wasn't as capable as the Saturn V and the Rooskies' lunar stack was dicier than Apollo - the Americans still probably would've won had the N1 worked on the first flight.