- Chertok, Boris E.
Rockets and People. Vol. 4.
Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [1999] 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4700-1437-7 NASA SP-2011-4110.
-
This is the fourth and final book of the author's
autobiographical history of the Soviet missile
and space program.
Boris Chertok
was a survivor, living through the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian
civil war, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, World War II, all of the
postwar conflict between chief designers and their bureaux and rival
politicians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Born in Poland in
1912, he died in 2011 in Moscow. As he says in this volume,
“I was born in the Russian Empire, grew up in Soviet Russia,
achieved a great deal in the Soviet Union, and continue to work in
Russia.”
After retiring from the RKK Energia
organisation in 1992 at the age of 80, he wrote this work between 1994
and 1999. Originally published in Russian in 1999, this annotated
English translation was prepared by the NASA History Office under the
direction of Asif A. Siddiqi, author of
Challenge to Apollo (April 2008),
the definitive Western history of the Soviet space
program.
This work covers the Soviet manned lunar program and the development
of long-duration space stations and orbital rendezvous, docking,
and assembly. As always, Chertok was there, and
participated in design and testing, was present for launches
and in the control centre during flights, and all too often
participated in accident investigations.
In retrospect, the Soviet manned lunar program seems almost
bizarre. It did not begin in earnest until two years after
NASA's Apollo program was underway, and while the Gemini
and Apollo programs were a step-by-step process of developing
and proving the technologies and operational experience for
lunar missions, the Soviet program was a chaotic bag of elements
seemingly driven more by the rivalries of the various chief
designers than a coherent plan for getting to the Moon.
First of all, there were two manned lunar programs,
each using entirely different hardware and mission profiles.
The Zond
program used a modified Soyuz spacecraft launched on a
Proton
booster, intended to send two cosmonauts on a
circumlunar mission. They would simply loop around the Moon
and return to Earth without going into orbit. A total of
eight of these missions were launched unmanned, and only one
completed a flight which would have been safe for cosmonauts
on board. After
Apollo 8
accomplished a much more ambitious lunar orbital mission in
December 1968, a Zond flight would simply demonstrate how
far behind the Soviets were, and the program was cancelled
in 1970.
The N1-L3
manned lunar landing program was even more curious. In the
Apollo program, the choice of mission mode and determination
of mass required for the lunar craft came first, and the
specifications of the booster rocket followed from that.
Work on
Korolev's
N1 heavy lifter did not get underway until 1965—four years
after the Saturn V, and it was envisioned as a general purpose
booster for a variety of military and civil space missions.
Korolev wanted to use very high thrust kerosene engines on the
first stage and hydrogen engines on the upper stages as did
the Saturn V, but he was involved in a feud with
Valentin Glushko,
who championed the use of hypergolic, high boiling point, toxic
propellants and refused to work on the engines Korolev requested.
Hydrogen propellant technology in the Soviet Union
was in its infancy at the time, and Korolev realised that waiting
for it to mature would add years to the schedule.
In need of engines, Korolev approached
Nikolai Kuznetsov,
a celebrated designer of jet turbine engines, but who had no
previous experience at all with rocket engines. Kuznetsov's
engines were much smaller than Korolev desired, and to obtain
the required thrust, required thirty engines on the
first stage alone, each with its own turbomachinery and
plumbing. Instead of gimballing the engines to change the
thrust vector, pairs of engines on opposite sides of the stage
were throttled up and down. The gargantuan scale of the lower
stages of the N-1 meant they were too large to transport on
the Soviet rail network, so fabrication of the rocket was done
in a huge assembly hall adjacent to the launch site. A small
city had to be built to accommodate the work force.
All Soviet rockets since the
R-2
in 1949 had used “integral tanks”: the walls of
the propellant tanks were load-bearing and formed the skin
of the rocket. The scale of the N1 was such that load-bearing
tanks would have required a wall thickness which exceeded
the capability of Soviet welding technology at the time, forcing
a design with an external load-bearing shell and separate
propellant tanks within it. This increased the complexity of
the rocket and added dead weight to the design. (NASA's
contractors had great difficulty welding the integral tanks
of the Saturn V, but NASA simply kept throwing money at
the problem until they figured out how to do it.)
The result was a rocket which was simultaneously huge, crude,
and bewilderingly complicated. There was neither money in the
budget nor time in the schedule to build a test stand to
permit ground firings of the first stage. The first time
those thirty engines fired up would be on the launch pad.
Further, Kuznetsov's engines were not reusable. After every
firing, they had to be torn down and overhauled, and hence
were essentially a new and untested engine every time they
fired. The Saturn V engines, by contrast, while expended
in each flight, could be and were individually test
fired, then ground tested together installed on the flight
stage before being stacked into a launch vehicle.
The weight and less efficient fuel of the N-1 made its
performance anæmic. While it had almost 50% more thrust
at liftoff than the Saturn V, its payload to low Earth orbit
was 25% less. This meant that performing a manned lunar
landing mission in a single launch was just barely
possible. The architecture would have launched two
cosmonauts in a lunar orbital ship. After entering orbit
around the Moon, one would spacewalk to the separate
lunar landing craft (an internal docking tunnel as used
in Apollo would have been too heavy) and descend to the
Moon. Fuel constraints meant the cosmonaut only had ten to
fifteen seconds to choose a landing spot. After the
footprints, flag, and grabbing a few rocks, it was back
to the lander to take off to rejoin the orbiter. Then it took
another spacewalk to get back inside. Everybody
involved at the time was acutely aware how marginal
and risky this was, but given that the N-1 design was already
frozen and changing it or re-architecting the mission to
two or three launches would push out the landing date four
or five years, it was the only option that would not
forfeit the Moon race to the Americans.
They didn't even get close. In each of its test flights, the N-1 did
not even get to the point of second stage ignition (although in its
last flight it got within seven seconds of that milestone). On the
second test flight the engines cut off shortly after liftoff and the
vehicle fell back onto the launch pad, completely obliterating it in the
largest artificial non-nuclear explosion known to this date: the
equivalent of 7 kilotons of TNT. After four consecutive launch
failures, having lost the Moon race, with no other mission requiring
its capabilities, and the military opposing an expensive program
for which they had no use, work on the N-1 was suspended
in 1974 and the program officially cancelled in 1976.
When I read Challenge to Apollo, what
struck me was the irony that the Apollo program was the very
model of a centrally-planned state-directed effort along
Soviet lines, while the Soviet Moon program was full of the
kind of squabbling, turf wars, and duplicative competitive
efforts which Marxists decry as flaws of the free market.
What astounded me in reading this book is that the Soviets
were acutely aware of this in 1968. In chapter 9, Chertok recounts
a Central Committee meeting in which Minister of Defence
Dmitriy Ustinov
remarked:
…the Americans have borrowed our basic method
of operation—plan-based management and networked schedules.
They have passed us in management and planning methods—they
announce a launch preparation schedule in advance and strictly
adhere to it. In essence, they have put into effect the principle
of democratic centralism—free discussion followed by the
strictest discipline during implementation.
In addition to the Moon program, there is extensive coverage
of the development of automated rendezvous and docking and
the long duration orbital station programs
(Almaz,
Salyut,
and
Mir). There is also
an enlightening discussion, building on Chertok's career
focus on control systems, of the challenges in integrating
humans and automated systems into the decision loop and
coping with off-nominal situations in real time.
I could go on and on, but there is so much to learn from this
narrative, I'll just urge you to read it. Even if you are
not particularly interested in space, there is much experience
and wisdom to be gained from it which are applicable to all kinds of
large complex systems, as well as insight into how things were done in
the Soviet Union. It's best to read
Volume 1 (May 2012),
Volume 2 (August 2012),
and
Volume 3 (December 2012)
first, as they will introduce you to the cast of characters
and the events which set the stage for those chronicled here.
As with all NASA
publications, the work is in the public domain, and an
online
edition in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats is available.
A commercial Kindle edition is available
which is much better produced than the Kindle editions of
the first three volumes.
If you have a suitable application on your reading device
for one of the electronic book formats provided by NASA, I'd opt for
it. They're free.
The
original
Russian edition is available online.
March 2013 