Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

In Britain, the director of the large radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, Bernard
Lovell, was at home listening to Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasy and fuge. Jodrell
Bank had been established by a physics professor, Bernard Lovell, who had spent the
war developing radar to detect enemy planes and ships. In peacetime, he now adapted
ex-army radars to study cosmic rays and meteor trails. This work was so promising
that in 1950 he got the go-ahead for a large radio telescope for radio mapping of deep
space objects and this was, fortuitously, completed just in time for the launching of
Sputnik seven years later. There was some debate in Jodrell Bank as to whether the
huge dish telescope should be used to track spacecraft at all, but the station had
considerable financial liabilities and the glow of world media publicity attached to the
station's role in tracking spacecraft soon enabled that debt to be cleared. In fact, it was
not the Russians but the Americans who first brought Jodrell Bank into the moon
programme, paying for the use of its facilities in 1958 for the early American moon
probes. Jodrell Bank had tried but failed to pick up the First Cosmic Ship, but,
Bernard Lovell added, the station still believed that the probe existed! He put down his
failure to obtain signals as due to inexperience. He had imagined that it would
transmit continuously and had not understood the Russian system of periodic
transmission, the 'communications session' [6].
The early moon shots of the United States and the Soviet Union had much in
common. The first and the most obvious was their high failure rate. With the
successful launching of the First Cosmic Ship, Russia and America had each tried
four times. One Russian probe had reached but missed the moon. One American
probe had reached 113,000 km, the other 102,000 km before falling back. All the rest
had exploded early on.
Here, the similarities ended. The Russian Ye-1 probe was large, weighing 156 kg,
with a simple (albeit elusive) objective: to impact on the moon. Six instruments were
carried. By contrast, the American Pioneer probes were tiny, between 6 kg and 39 kg.
They carried similar instruments: for example, like the early Russian probes, Pioneer 1
carried a magnetometer. The early American missions were more ambitious, aiming
for lunar orbit and to take pictures of the surface of the moon. The camera system on
Pioneer was tiny, weighing only 400 g, comprising a mirror and an infrared thermal
radiation imaging device.
The First Cosmic Ship was hailed as a great triumph in the Soviet Union. The
third year of space exploration could not have opened more brightly. Stamps were
issued showing the rocket and its ball-shaped cargo curving away into a distant
cosmos.
SECOND COSMIC SHIP
Although there was much celebration at the achievement of the First Cosmic Ship,
Korolev still faced the task of hitting the moon and doing so before the Americans. In
March, the Americans at last passed the moon, but the accuracy of Pioneer 4 was
much less than the First Cosmic Ship, for Pioneer 4 missed the moon by 60,015 km.
The first half of 1959 saw continued Soviet difficulties with the R-7 launcher and a new