Good afternoon, everyone! Last week, we took a lot at some of the "might have beens" from within the universe of Eyes (and by the way, the RP is still ongoing--if you're interested, come on down and toss in some comments!). This week, we're checking in with some people who only wish their options were so open: the Russians, and specifically their unmanned program.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part IV: Post #14
In the dark days of the early 1990s, NPO Lavochkin--the design bureau responsible for building and operating the Soviet Union’s planetary probes--had been on the verge of exiting that business altogether, with Russia’s government too broke to pay for high-flying missions of exploration. Fortunately, international collaboration--first with ESA on the “Grand Tour” near-Earth object multiple-flyby mission, then with NASA on Fobos Together--had kept Lavochkin working on planetary probes, maintaining Russia’s skill base in the field, if by the slenderest of threads. By 2000, with Fobos-Grunt nearing completion, however, Lavochkin and Roscosmos were forced to confront a new question: What next? Without further missions, the skill decay and loss of experienced personnel that had nearly destroyed the planetary program in the early 1990s would resume, and Russia would recede from its position as a first-rank space power. The ongoing decay of Mir’s MOK base block and delays in the hoped-for semi-commercial Mir-2 only heightened this concern, highlighting how even maintaining what the country had was proving a struggle, let alone pushing forwards.
During the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Russian economy and government had begun to recover and stabilize. If the country was clinging to a fragile recovery by the barest stretch of its fingernails, there was at least enough money available in government coffers to contemplate resuming Russia’s program of space exploration, and more than a few both within and without government that favored launching at least a few missions. Russia had been the first country into space, the first to send spacecraft to the Moon, and one of the first to dare reach out across the interplanetary gulf. The great Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of rocketry, had developed the fundamentals of rocket flight by himself in Kaluga, only 200 kilometers from Moscow. Resuming independent interplanetary flight--not missions funded by American dollars, not putting cosmonauts on the Moon with American vehicles--would be a potent sign that Russia had returned, that Russia was no longer the poor country the West could kick around at will. And, given the still poor state of the country’s finances, the fact that interplanetary probes could be developed and launched for a pittance compared to new space stations or other human missions was itself a major attraction.
The only question the Kremlin posed to Lavochkin when they came asking for Roscosmos to begin a new interplanetary exploration program was, therefore, “What do you want to do?” Here the firm faced, ironically, its toughest challenge; despite their difficult state throughout the 1990s, their staff had continued thinking and designing missions, giving them a broad selection of possibilities to choose from, ranging between the relatively simple Venera-A mission to explore Venus’ atmosphere in more detail than ever before to the complex and risky Mars-Grunt mission to return samples of the Red Planet. With the Kremlin more favorable to new mission spending than in the last decade, the buried fault lines between the proponents and developers of each mission concept cracked and shifted, faintly visible tremors revealing, to those who knew what to look for, the internecine conflict raging at Lavochkin to determine which mission would be recommended to the politicians for further development.
In this civil war, the first to fall were the most complex and risky designs, such as Mars-Grunt. While they had dedicated cliques of supporters, most of the firm’s engineers and technicians could agree that Mars sample return was far too large and expensive a task for Lavochkin to take on at the moment, with a high probability of failure or delays or both. Similarly quick to fall were proposed missions to the giant planets and a solar mission paralleling ESA’s Aristarchus, again due to the significant technical and financial risks entailed. Instead, three major advocacy groups emerged, each backing a single mission concept, and all roughly evenly matched in size. The first were the Venus advocates, who after a short conflict between proponents of the Venera-A atmospheric mission and Venera-P radar mission had settled on the former as the safer bet of the two, with the latter perhaps a follow-on mission borrowing from Venera-A’s development. These argued that Russia’s greatest successes had historically been with Venus, which beside had a relatively benign orbital environment, abundant solar power, and short transfer times, all factors that would make Venus missions easier and simpler while still being impressive achievements in exploration.
The second instead argued that Lavochkin should aim for Mars with a so-called “Mars-Glob,” or “Mars-Sphere” mission, which would explore the planet’s geology and geomorphology. Despite a checkered initial history with the Red Planet, leading to dark jokes about galactic forces hungering for Soviet probes, during the 1980s Lavochkin had built and launched a series of successful Mars orbiters, and of course its most recent planetary effort had been to one of the planet’s moons, lending it considerable recent experience in dealing with the Mars orbital environment. By contrast, its most recent Venus spacecraft had been landers launched in the mid 1980s, almost fifteen years earlier, leaving the firm with a dearth of available experience in Venus orbital operations. Mars advocates argued that this would more than compensate for the environmental difficulties and somewhat longer flight times experienced by Mars-bound spacecraft.
The third and final group proposed to split the difference between Venus and Mars and remain at 1 AU from the Sun, calling for launching a spacecraft to the Moon. Like Venus advocates, they mobilized nostalgia for the Soviet program in their service, invoking the tremendous successes of the first twenty years of Russian spaceflight. If anyone could carry out useful scientific missions to the Moon, they argued, it was most certainly Russia. Besides, the fact that the Moon combined a relatively benign and familiar environment with recent experience in operating in the lunar environment from Artemis and Mesyat, not to mention the enormous heritage built up in the 1960s and 1970s from the Luna spacecraft would mean that it would be easier to operate on or around than either Venus or Mars. And, finally, there was their trump card: Artemis.
Artemis seemed at first to be a strike against the lunar exploration concept, producing far more scientific data per mission than even several of their planned Luna-Grunt (“Moon-Soil”) sample return spacecraft could. However, Luna-Grunt would be far cheaper and faster to prepare and launch than Artemis, meaning that Luna missions could explore sites that might be scientifically interesting but not worth an entire Artemis mission. More importantly, Luna-Grunt would need to be large, large enough to carry the rocket needed to launch kilograms of lunar material back to the Earth and the rover needed to collect the rocks, regolith, and sample cores it would be filled with. If it were modified, replacing the rover and rocket with cargo containers, it could carry a ton or more of food, water, equipment, or other supplies needed by the lunar base NASA presented as a possible post-Artemis mission. The landers developed for Artemis could carry far more, of course, but they also cost far more in time and money to prepare and launch than the Luna-Grunt spacecraft (hopefully) would. Like Minotaur compared to Apollo and AARDVark, modified Luna supply spacecraft could fill a valuable support role, ensuring that Russia would continue to receive seats on lunar missions.
And Russia needed that. Although the Kremlin could allocate enough funds to revive the Russian planetary program, human spaceflight was suffering, without enough money available to keep it steady. With Mir aging and at most a few years away from retirement and a similar story for much of their workforce, with new hires having been thin on the ground during the lean period of the 90s, Russia was in serious danger of losing any meaningful human spaceflight program. It might still be able to build TKS spacecraft and Vulkan launch vehicles, but it would have nowhere to send its cosmonauts, given the difficulty of refurbishing the MOK-2 base block and fundraising for the planned Mir-2 station, as well as China’s disinterest in further subsidizing the Russian space program. If Russia was to retain a toehold, however small, in human space exploration, if it was to maintain the cosmonaut program which had launched the first men and women into orbit, if it was to keep Korolev and Gagarin’s legacy alive, it had no choice; it needed Artemis, needed the United States to launch a lunar base program. And it needed Luna-Grunt, an argument for how it could contribute scientifically and operationally to a lunar base, a justification for the United States to continue launching Russian cosmonauts on American rockets.
All this pressure was a powerful force in favor of the lunar mission, and Venus and Mars advocates slowly and grudgingly came around to recognizing that the lunar cabal had a point. By late 2001, it had been all but settled that Lavochkin would concentrate on a new series of Luna spacecraft, with formal approval by the Duma being more of a formality than the true beginning of work. Work proceeded slowly, dictated by the available resources and the fact that Luna-Grunt would, despite the similarity of its name with Fobos-Grunt, have to be an entirely new spacecraft to deal with the lunar environment and its more complex mission. Nevertheless, by the beginning of 2003 the design of each of the probe’s major elements--the landing platform, the sample-collection rover, and the return rocket--had been defined, and preliminary assembly and testing work was beginning outside of Moscow.
At the same time, however, Russia was still suffering from the aftershocks of the Union’s collapse, and its economy remained delicate. The implosion of the Internet boom early in the decade put serious strains on its finances, and the optimistic early schedules, which called for a landing about 2006, quickly became unrealistic. By 2004, Luna-Grunt had already been slipped two years, to 2008, with further delays looming on the horizon despite slow and steady technical progress. In an effort to accelerate the program and to deal with the increasingly obvious technical complexity of the Luna-Grunt mission, a cabal of engineers at Lavochkin designed an alternate mission, which they called Luna 25/Lunokhod 3. By abandoning the complex and heavy ascent rocket and return capsule, and focusing purely on in-situ science, it could be completed faster and more cheaply than the Luna-Grunt spacecraft could, especially if the already partially complete hardware at Lavochkin’s plant was recycled into the new spacecraft. Although this would further delay the Luna-Grunt mission, it would also increase the likelihood of that mission actually succeeding, by testing much of the hardware intended for it, especially the landing platform and rover, in the lunar environment. Any faults could therefore be discovered and corrected prior to the more expensive and complex mission, and before any Luna-Pe supply vehicles would fly (if the Luna-Pe program was ever initiated rather than the subject of occasional papers and announcements)
At first, Lavochkin management resisted the proposal. They were confident that they could build and complete the Luna-Grunt spacecraft on time and did not appreciate a proposal which seemed calculated to produce further delays in the Luna-Grunt program and divert resources, at least in the short run, away from existing programs to new ones. Arguments about preliminary testing and schedule acceleration fell on deaf ears, with management taking the attitude that proper engineering would take care of the former and hard work the latter. Instead, the Luna 25 proposal was relegated to archives, little more than an idea whose time had not, and perhaps never would, come.
Nevertheless, no program exists in a vacuum, and elsewhere forces were moving that would alter the calculus of the firm’s management. The election of a dynamic young US President, perfectly willing and able to call on the legacy of Reagan and Bush--including their space programs--for votes marked a shift away from the somnolence that had characterized Richard’s tenure, which had been marked mostly by the smooth maintenance of existing programs. In contrast, President Woods had promised new space initiatives taking advantage of decade and a half of technology development and more engagement with the private sector, tying into a general theme of privatization, in order to win votes in the vital swing states of Florida, home to Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, and Virginia, home to StarLaunch’s Wallops facilities. Although space was a minor issue at best for him and his campaign, once he was elected his administration still quickly moved to begin implementing his campaign promises. By the middle of 2005, the so-called “soonbase” concept was clearly well on its way to becoming an approved program, and observers within and without the United States were taking notice.
In Russia, the impact of the new concept was tremendous. Previously, Russian space experts and leaders had assumed, along with most observers and, indeed, NASA itself that any future lunar base would be built along certain, more or less conventional lines; a series of modules would be landed one-by-one, then assembled by astronauts using heavy construction equipment into a base, probably buried to provide thermal regulation and radiation protection. Such a base would then be inhabited more or less permanently, or at least for several decades, much like Freedom or Mir. Moreover, any such base would necessarily follow the Artemis missions, which after the extension approved by Richards would terminate in 2009 with Artemis 13. Given the several years necessary to design all the necessary base components, especially given the significant modifications needed to convert modules derived from the Artemis surface shelter or Freedom living modules to the specifications and standards needed for the lunar environment, it was unlikely that any such base would be built until the 2010s at best, giving plenty of time to develop and launch Luna-Grunt and prove the utility of the Luna-Pe supply vehicles.
By substituting an admittedly heavily modified version of the Artemis shelter for a true base, and by downplaying the items needed for truly long-term habitation, the “soonbase”--now known as “Project Orion,” after the famous hunter who was the only man ever to win the virgin goddess Artemis’ heart--could be completed much sooner than the usual lunar base. Indeed, there was significant interest in retasking Artemis 13 and possibly even 12 (depending on the exact timeline) to be base-visit missions, kicking off the Orion program, potentially putting base emplacement as early as 2007. With Luna-Grunt having slipped another year, to 2009, there was a high risk that the virtues of the Luna platform would not be demonstrated before NASA had already locked itself into domestic supply vehicles, especially given the quickly advancing American private space sector, threatening the very future of Russia’s place in human spaceflight.
Fortunately, when Roscosmos officials and Russian parliamentarians began to wonder what the country could do, Lavochkin already had a ready-made answer: Luna 25. Far from being dead, further informal study since its abandonment had even imbued it with a new purpose. Scientists at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow had noted that the Lunar Ice Observer and Lunar Reconnaissance Pioneer had, in the course of their missions, revealed a number of so-called “pits” in the lunar surface, apparently locations where the roofs of subsurface caverns had caved in to reveal the structures beneath. These pits were of some scientific interest in of themselves, and were potentially attractive base sites, given that a base emplaced in the caverns they presumably connected to would avoid the need to excavate or relocate tons of regolith for radiation protection. They also lent support to the “tube colony” idea popularized by the Lunar Society’s founder, Gerard K. O’Neill, and by his successors among the Society’s leadership, confirming that lava had once coursed through channels underneath the Moon’s surface. Nevertheless, the dangers of caving even on Earth, let alone the Moon, and the relatively low level of interest in the pits meant that no Artemis missions were planned to visit any of the known pit locations. Therefore, these scientists proposed, a mission to a pit seemed like a good use of the Luna-Grunt hardware, highlighting how robotic missions could complement human ones while still saving money compared to the full Luna-Grunt profile. Several of the pits appeared to have suffered collapse at one end, and thus could be directly accessible to a rover driving down from the lunar surface, without any need for a complex caving system or high-precision landing, and the proposed mission profile would take advantage of this and a modified Lunokhod sample-collection rover--with scientific equipment replacing the collection apparatus--to take the first look at the inside of a (partially) intact lunar lava tube or cave.
Unlike before, this proposal was readily accepted. As Lavochkin managers had feared, cannibalizing the partially complete Luna-Grunt hardware to launch Luna 25 would put that mission off even more, into the 2010s, but under the circumstances there was no choice but to accept this delay in exchange for launching Luna 25 by 2007 or 2008. With a test mission already in progress, Russian negotiators found fertile ground when they traveled to the United States later in 2005 to begin discussions on possible contributions to Orion. Their American counterparts expressed considerable interest in the Luna-Pe proposal, noting that it would be very useful for small cargo deliveries, offering more flexibility than the large Artemis-based cargo landers that they already had. Going into 2006, a tentative agreement was worked out, with Russia adding Luna-Pe resupply flights to its previous Artemis contributions. In return, Orion missions would feature Russian cosmonauts, instruments, and experiments.
However, before fully committing to Luna-Pe supply flights NASA wanted and needed to verify that the concept would work, that they were not buying, as the expression goes, “a pig in a poke.” In short, NASA demanded that Luna 25 fly before it would fully commit to the agreement, showing that the Luna-Pe platform would function with a usable, if smaller-than-desired, payload. With few other choices, and with Luna 25 already underway in any case, Roscosmos acquiesced to this demand, putting pressure on Lavochkin to quickly complete and fly the Luna 25 spacecraft, a pressure that transmitted itself quickly down the line to the technicians and engineers laboring to adapt the Luna-Grunt hardware to its new mission.
Despite this stress, the Luna 25 program progressed quickly, aided by the relatively high level of development of its underlying hardware. Unlike Luna-Grunt, which had been slipping by about one year for each year that passed, Luna 25 progressed steadily, buoyed by American funding and a well-defined and high-priority mission. By late 2007, just under three years since it had begun, and just shy of two years since NASA had insisted on it, Luna 25 was virtually complete, in the final stages of being checked out prior to its move to the launch pad. After a break for Christmas and the New Year, the spacecraft underwent final checks before being launched from Baikonur in early January of 2008. Launch and trans-lunar injection went smoothly, as did the three-day journey from Russia to the Moon’s vicinity. The burn to brake the spacecraft into its pre-descent parking orbit was also completed successfully, and ground controllers could have been forgiven for believing the rest of the mission would go just as uneventfully.
Unfortunately, it was not to be. Because of its derivation from the Luna-Grunt hardware, which would carry a bulky and massive ascent stage as well as platform scientific instruments and the Lunokhod rover, Luna 25 was carrying an engine that was, strictly speaking, more powerful than needed for its mission. To avoid possible damage to the spacecraft and to allow the developed and tested Luna-Grunt control software to be used with as few modifications as possible, it was planned for it to operate in a lower throttle mode while descending, ensuring that the Luna 25 spacecraft would follow Luna-Grunt’s deceleration profile. Curiously, however, when it initiated its descent burn it briefly operated the engine at full throttle, causing a significant deceleration spike. Before controllers could intervene, the probe began throttling down, and in seconds it was on the nominal acceleration profile.
Here the fatal flaw in the mission’s design finally manifested itself. To the horror of controllers watching from Moscow, the spacecraft began systematically overcorrecting for any minor flaw of control it directed, then attempted to maneuver even harder in a doomed effort to cancel out the flawed control inputs. In seconds, Luna 25 was spinning out of control, already lost, leaving controllers to wait out the time until it impacted the surface in impotent agony. The only trace left by the probe afterwards was a brief seismic pulse in the Artemis sensor network.
Finger-pointing began immediately, with dark whispers of sabotage (whether by Americans for some reason eager to see their partners fail, Chinese seeking to undermine their rival/partners, or even more exotic groups depended on the whisperer) flooding the Kremlin almost immediately, followed not too much later, as these tales became increasingly detached from reality, by Lavochkin’s management pinning blame on the workers at Luna 25’s assembly plant, supposedly lacking in morale and skill to complete the mission. The truth, when it came out during a set of investigative reports conducted by Roscosmos and NASA over the next several months, was much more prosaic, a simple matter of somewhat sloppy programming. For reasons that doubtlessly had made sense at the time, the program written to control Luna-Grunt’s descent phase had included a hardcoded variable representing the mass of the spacecraft, requiring recompilation of the entire module if that was changed by, say, removing the ascent rocket making up the bulk of the spacecraft’s payload. During the rush to modify Luna-Grunt into Luna 25, the descent software had been reused unmodified, as it had been tested in simulations several times with success, before being semi-permanently burned into the spacecraft’s computers. When Luna 25 had begun its descent program, it had thought it was much more massive than it was, explaining the initially high descent thrust, corrected when accelerometer readings went high, and the following loss of control, caused by excessive thruster inputs calculated on the basis of a larger mass than was really there.
Although both Russian and American programs had seen missions doomed by similar problems before, in particular the famous loss of Mariner 1 to a single missing character in a program description, Luna 25’s failure came at a particularly sensitive time for the Russian space program, with the ongoing saga of their quasi-commercial Mir successor limiting activity. Just as it had been from the start, the Luna program had become an unofficial torchbearer of Russia’s space ambition, a lone light to hold back the darkness and ensure that cosmonauts would fly at least one more time. Failure was not an option, yet it had occurred. Worse, given Russia’s poor reputation for reliability and quality control, Luna 25’s failure had quickly fed into an ongoing narrative of poor value, leaving NASA looking askance at the agreement they had signed just two years earlier. Forced onto the defensive, Lavochkin proposed that the first Luna-Pe mission be flown at no cost to NASA as a new demonstration mission, all the while vigorously affirming that any problems had been identified and fixed and had no chance of recurrence. With the relationship between Russia and the United States going through one of its “off” periods over the sale of Russian weapons to Iran, it initially seemed that NASA would drop the Luna-Pe proposal altogether, but ultimately lobbying from the State and Defense Departments, anxious to maintain at least one connection to the country, ensured that NASA would accept the offer and maintain Luna-Pe as an auxiliary spacecraft.
With Luna-Pe moving forwards, Lavochkin engineers and technicians buckled down to make sure it succeeded. Although the first Luna-Pe spacecraft had already been completed prior to Luna 25’s flight, workers returned to it, spending weeks painstakingly poring over it in a thorough review, exhaustively checking every part and every line of code for proper functionality. It was not until the middle of 2008 that the go-ahead for launch was given, and the supply spacecraft was loaded with a cargo of water, breathing gas, and other low-priority (and therefore expendable) consumables before being mated to its launch vehicle. As with its predecessor, launch and trans-lunar injection went smoothly, leaving ground controllers waiting with bated breath for descent and landing. Fortunately, whether because of improved quality control or simple better preparations, this time the spacecraft passed through descent and landing with flying colors; less than ten minutes after beginning descent, Luna-Pe 1 was safely sitting on the lunar surface just over a kilometer away from the Orion station, behind a low ridge selected to protect the base from any debris possibly kicked up from the landing. Later that day, the base’s crew traveled to the site, recovered the cargo containers carried by the Luna-Pe spacecraft, and carried them back to the base, where they recharged the station’s life support tanks. This single mission added more than 14 days of mission duration to the station’s capability, faster and cheaper than doing the same with one of the Artemis-derived cargo landers used to emplace Orion itself and provide its first load of life support consumables, scientific equipment, and other supplies.
This highly successful verification of the basic concept sank all remaining doubts at NASA about maintaining the Luna-Pe contract. Since then, the Orion base has depended on periodic Luna-Pe flights to help top off its supply of life support consumables, spare parts, and other equipment and needs, extending the time between Artemis resupply flights. As the Oasis permanent base program begins, it is expected that Luna-Pe flights will continue to be a vital part of the base’s supply chain, earning Russia continuing seats to the international lunar base.
While the Luna-Pe program has proven successful in maintaining Russia’s place in the Orion and Oasis programs, the requirements it has placed on Lavochkin have helped drive back Luna-Grunt even farther. Although work has been ongoing on the sample-return spacecraft, the need for most of the firm’s workforce to build Luna-Pe spacecraft and profitable commercial upper stages has slowed progress, and if it remains on schedule it will reach the launch pad nearly a decade and a half after being formally approved, surely a record for any space probe. Should it work--and with the unblemished record of the Luna-Pe spacecraft, this is considered likely by virtually all observers--Lavochkin and Roscosmos have talked about launching a mission to 4 Vesta, the second largest of the asteroids, in the early 2020s, building on Fobos Together and Luna-Grunt to return samples from farther away than any spacecraft in history. With this milestone achieved, Russian engineers and scientists want to launch the ultimate sample return mission--Mars-Grunt--in the 2030s. While far in the future, detailed planning has already been undertaken, leading to a mission architecture that eschews many of the complications of present NASA proposals for a simple “site sample” launched directly back to Earth aboard a large rocket. Current discussions between JPL, NASA, Roscosmos, and Lavochkin may alter this, however, with rumors that the Russian lander may be tapped to launch a cache of samples collected by a NASA rover, perhaps utilizing a Mars orbit rendezvous scheme to increase the mass of samples returnable. Whether or not these discussions amount to anything, however, the cloudy skies of the past two decades have been dissipating, allowing the once-famed men and women behind some of the greatest triumphs of robotic space exploration to, once again, turn their attention skywards.
