Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

engineering and scientific sense, although it would have been costly [11]. Mishin [12]:
We were able and should have implemented such an expedition after the USA. 'Only a
sense of political embarrassment, out of coming second, after the great rival, prevented
this from happening,' he said. Most of all he regrets the cancellation of the N-1,
the wasted effort, the bitter resentment this caused in the industry and its replacement
by an even more expensive programme which was ultimately cancelled in turn.
Mishin's final comment: 'We were just a step away from success with the N-1. We
could have built a base on the moon by now without stress or hurry.'
Having said this, these accounts are somewhat one-sided. Vladimir Chelomei did
not leave memoirs, nor did Valentin Glushko. Although Glushko published technical
papers, he never left behind a political statement defending his role in the space
programme. When he died in 1989, his vast Energiya bureau was re-divided much
as it was before he clustered its constituent companies together in 1974. The original
OKB-1, now RKK Energiya, published a vast, colourful company history of the
bureau and its projects, providing much of the detail on which an important portion of
our knowledge of the Soviet moon programme is based. More critical comments and
views come from General Kamanin. A diehard Stalinist, his severest criticisms focused
on what he regarded as the poor quality of leadership given by the party and
government, his own military and the space programme leadership, like Mishin
and Keldysh. He was critical of the N-1 from the start, which he always regarded
as an unsuitable and bad rocket: Chelomei's UR-700 would have been better. Patriot
though he was, he was overwhelmed in unconditional admiration of America's
stunning lunar successes. He resented the way in which they were under-reported and
downplayed by the Soviet media and that he could not speak publicly and approvingly
of them. He felt just how tough it must be on disappointed Soviet cosmonauts not to
fly to the moon. Kamanin was especially critical on how good decision-making was
undermined by the corrosive secrecy with which the Soviet lunar programme was run.
Retelling the Soviet side of the moon race, with its setbacks, 'grandiose failures'
(Kamanin's words), waste and poor decisions, seems to have given these writers little
satisfaction, apart from the unmeasurably important one of making the facts of this
hidden history known. They seemed to derive little comfort from the fact that from the
chaotic final stages of the moon programme, a plan emerged for the building of space
stations. This was a field in which their country became the undisputed world leader
and remains so to this day. In his own way, Glushko was vindicated, for in 1987 his
replacement for the N-1 did fly, Energiya giving the Soviet Union the most powerful
rocket system in the world. Its subsequent cancellation, for economic reasons, can
hardly be laid at his door. Unlike the N-1 and more like the Saturn V, the Energiya
flew perfectly on its first two testflights and it was not for technical reasons that it never
flew again.
Some of the writers refer to the general loss of interest in going to the moon among
the Soviet political leadership, now that the Americans had achieved the feat and
demonstrated it several times. Afanasayev [13] said that this was the considered view
of the Soviet political leadership by 1972 and suggests that the decision to wind down
the unmanned lunar programme was taken at around the same time as the decision
regarding the manned programme. It is interesting that the political leadership of both