The Soviet N1 5L Launch Failure in Detail

Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union attempted to steal some thunder from the American Apollo program by launching their giant N1 rocket on an unmanned mission to fly around the moon. The booster only made it a hundred meters into the air before crashing back to ground in an explosion that destroyed the launch pad. It was the largest explosion in the history of space exploration.

Now, space historians are able to piece together details of the doomed Soviet lunar exploration program. The excellent Russian Space Web site has published a long article on the N1 5L failure.

The first launch failure of the N1 rocket in February 1969 dealt a heavy blow to the Soviet space program, already hopelessly behind the US in the Moon Race. While engineers at Sergei Korolev's TsKBEM design bureau were picking up pieces, their Kremlin bosses watched the US to add to its triumphant flight of Apollo-8 around the Moon in the previous December yet another successful test of the Saturn-5 rocket during the Apollo-9 mission. Two months later, Apollo-10 hovered just a few miles from the lunar surface, setting the stage for the actual landing in the summer. Not surprisingly, new calls for changing the course came to the Kremlin.

Like in Khrushchev's reign at the turn of the 1960s, Vladimir Chelomei, the head of the rival TsKBM design bureau, reemerged on the scene with an "alternative" launcher to the troubled N1. Obviously, this time, there was no point in talking about beating Americans to the Moon, but instead, the Soviet response would be a manned mission to Mars! To this end, Chelomei proposed to upgrade his mighty but non-existing UR-700 rocket into an even bigger UR-900. (685)

However neither technical failures nor political pressure at home and abroad could deter Soviet engineers from pressing on with the N1 project. By that point, they had no illusions about winning the Moon Race, but the N1 still remained the centerpiece of the Soviet space program.

For anyone with an interest in space history, this is a must read article.