It’s an astonishing undertaking not only to script all that conversation, but then to get people to enact it with authenticity, urgency, and emotion. There were 2,502 hours of Apollo spaceflight, more than 100 days.
Put aside as well the thousands of hours of audio recordings-between spacecraft and mission control in mission control, where dozens of controllers talked to each other in the spacecraft themselves, where there were separate recordings of the astronauts just talking to each other in space. The Soviet space program continued making great contributions to humanity's exploration of space, including its famous Soyuz rocket, but the dream of a Soviet cosmonaut on the moon died on a Kazakhstan launchpad in the summer of '69.What of the reporters? Hundreds of reporters covering space, writing stories not just of the dramatic moments, but about all the local companies making space technology, from California to Delaware.
In the next several years, N1 made two more unsuccessful (though not as devastating) launch attempts before the Soviet government shut down the program in June 1974. The failure of the second launch sealed the Soviet's fate in the moon race and raised the question if a Soviet cosmonaut would ever walk on the moon.
#FIRST MAN ON THE MOON RUSSIA WINDOWS#
Some pieces from the rocket were apparently found as far as six miles away and windows were reported to be blown off in buildings located nearly four miles from the launch pad. The massive explosion almost completely wiped out half of the two-pad launch complex, a project that took several years to complete. With its flight control system paralyzed by an engine explosion, the giant rocket was unable to steer itself downrange and crashed back onto the launch pad with most of its propellant. At the tip of the rocket, the emergency escape engines fired and pulled the capsule, meant to carry the two-person crew, into darkness. The colossus then seemingly froze in mid-air and started tilting to its side. 5L blasted off into the night from July 3 to July 4, 1969.Īs it climbed to an altitude of around 100 meters, just 10.5 seconds after liftoff, some bright pieces ominously fell off from its tail section. As the sixth Saturn V rocket slated for the Apollo 11 mission was undergoing checks at Cape Canaveral, the second N1 vehicle reached the launch pad. The second N1 rocket, designated 5L, reached the pad in the summer of 1969, after Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 had already completed dress rehearsal missions ahead of the actual lunar landing attempt-an American victory loomed on the horizon. So the Soviet team pressed ahead with the second N1 launch attempt as soon as possible. Indeed, many Soviet veterans of the N1 project lived through spectacular failures of so many preceding rockets that this could almost be seen as good news. The leaders of the project were disappointed but not discouraged-after all, nobody died, the launch pad remained intact, and the rocket actually demonstrated some ability to fly (at least up an altitude of 30 kilometers). So when the brand-new engines first met together, they were supposed to work on the actual rocket in real flight.ĭuring the first launch attempt on February 21, 1969, the vehicle failed after one minute and eight seconds in flight due to a propulsion system failure. It meant that a total of 24-and when that proved not enough, 30-engines would have to be working in a precisely choreographed fashion to lift the monstrous vehicle off the pad.īuilding the large static-firing facility, which would allow engineers to tune up the capricious multi-engine cluster on the ground, was also abandoned to save time and money. Initially, there were various plans to equip the N1 with engines up to 600 tons of thrust, but the lack of necessary machinery and time forced designers to settle for a much smaller 150-ton engine.
For example, the launch site in Tyuratam was located far from sea ports, meaning the assembly of booster stages for the moon rocket would have to be moved to the arid steppes of Kazakhstan-along with an army of workers.įinally, the killing blow to the Kremlin's lunar efforts came from the main propulsion system of the N1 rocket. When the time came for production, the USSR also faced geographical disadvantages. Science & Society Picture Library Getty Images
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