So, I've been wondering what the possibilities are when it comes to creating a timeline for the N1 program that is a) realistic, and b) doesn't have a POD earlier than 1966.
So, because I have no actual writing skills, I created this (rather literal) timeline, and I was wondering what some of the experts that I know hang around here thought of it. Basic POD is Korolev lives.
1963 Mar - Design work on the N1 launch complex starts.
1964 Mar - Korolev attended a meeting with Khrushchev, where he advocated an aggressive plan of Lunar and interplanetary exploration. Khrushchev expressed some interest in the Lunar landing scheme.
1964 May - Korolev drafts a letter to Brezhnev, then in charge of missile development, complaining about a lack of funds. It is never sent.
1964 Aug - Command number 655-268 issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party sets the objective for OKB-1 to put one man on the moon and return him safely to Earth ahead of the Americans. The L-3 Lunar complex is redesigned to utilize a Lunar orbit rendezvous strategy.
1964 Sep - Construction work on N1 Launch Complex 110R starts. Of the 11 million rubles of funding promised for the construction, only 7 million have been received.
1964 Oct - Khrushchev is removed from power and Brezhnev's faction assumes control of Politburo.
1965 Jan - The decree for production of 16 sets of spacecraft and boosters is issued.
1966 Feb - Construction work on N1 Launch Complex 110L starts.
1966 Oct - The first N1 hardware arrives at Baikonur and construction of the 1M1 full-size launch vehicle mock-up begins.
1966 Nov - A government decree approves Korolev's plan for the first lunar landing.
1966 Dec - Construction work on the first N1 boosters begins at the Progress plant in Samara.
1967 Aug - Construction work on Launch Complex 110R is completed.
1967 Sep - hot-fire tests begin on the N1 second and third stages.
1967 Oct - The 1M1 mock-up is rolled out to Launch Complex 110R and erected for fit checks.
1967 Nov - Apollo 4 becomes the first test flight of the Saturn V booster. Pogo oscillations observed during the launch require that a second test flight will be needed before it can be man-rated.
1968 Jan - The first LEM to fly is launched atop a Saturn IB rocket into low Earth orbit on Apollo 5.
1968 Mar - Apollo 6, the second test of the Saturn V rocket, is launched. The pogo oscillation is still catastrophic, but the booster is man-rated anyway since it can be fixed before the next flight. N1 booster 4L is rolled out to Launch Complex 110R and erected.
1968 Apr - Construction work on Launch Complex 110L is completed.
1968 Jun - The first N1 booster is flown. 57.3 seconds into the flight a fire starts in the engine section, and the KORD engine control system incorrectly gives the command to shut down all 30 first stage engines. The vehicle is self-destructed 2 seconds later.
1968 Jul - Korolev writes to the Soviet leadership asking for money for the construction of a test stand for the Block A first stage. The funding is granted, and construction starts 2 weeks later. Launch Complex 110L will be modified to allow continuous firing of the Block A to save costs on constructing an entirely new facility.
1968 Oct - Apollo 7 becomes the first manned mission of the program, with a Saturn IB launching a CSM into orbit.
1968 Dec - Apollo 8 launches, with a Saturn V sending a manned CSM around the Moon for the first time. Construction of the Block A testing complex is completed. 19 days later, the first static fire of the N1 3L first stage is performed. During the test, catastrophic issues caused by foreign object damage to the turbopumps are observed. The LK-1 Lunar lander is launched atop a Proton rocket to perform an unmanned test flight in Earth orbit. It encounters issues with its guidance computer but is otherwise successful.
1969 Jan - The issues with the turbopump assembly have been fixed by placing filters over the propellent inlets, and N1 booster 3L is rolled out to Launch Complex 110R and erected. Work begins on modifying the Block A stage of booster 5L to fully utilize the superchilled propellents that were originally planned.
1969 Feb - N1 booster 3L is launched on a test flight with the 7K-L1A spacecraft. At T+94.5 seconds the ring of center engines shuts down to reduce stress on the vehicle, but this sudden deceleration causes the propellant lines running to engine 12 to rupture, and the engine fails. At 112.7 seconds the propellent spilling out causes an explosion. The first stage disintegrates at 115.4 seconds, 1.1 seconds after staging. The second and third stages successfully make it to orbit, and the fourth stage pushes the 7K-L1A spacecraft to the Moon. However, the spacecraft fails to return safely, skipping off of the atmosphere. The Block A first stage of booster 5L is hot-fired with a full super-chilled propellant load. To Korolev's horror, the test fails. More propellant tank and engine modifications will be needed and they won't be available for the Jun 20th launch date. A crash program is devised to launch extra propellant into orbit on a Proton rocket and refuel the Lunar complex before it performs trans-Lunar injection.
1969 Mar - Apollo 9 conducts a manned test of the LEM in low Earth orbit. The LK-2 Lunar lander test is launched, with plans to rendezvous with a Soyuz 7K-OK and perform a test flight. However, the Proton rocket's second stage fails, and it falls into the sea. An investigation into the flight of N1 booster 3L finds the source of the failure of engine 12 to be excessive gee-forces induced by the core engine ring shutdown. To fix these issues work beings on modifying the center engines to deep-throttle down just before shutdown.
1969 Apr - Soyuz 7 and LK-3 are launched into Earth orbit by R-7 and Proton rockets. After rendezvousing and docking, cosmonaut Aleksei Yeliseyev transferred to the LK, undocked, and performed a test flight including a simulated Lunar landing. However, just after the ascent engine is fired for the second time, it explodes, ripping apart the lower half of the LK and tearing a 70cm hole in the cabin. The resulting explosive decompression disables the spacecraft, and Yeliseyev is nearly killed. Soyuz 7 immediately makes an emergency orbit change to rendezvous with the LK, and successfully recovers Yeliseyev before he dies of overheating from his damaged spacesuit. Both cosmonauts return to Earth safely, and after a 29-day investigation, the fault in the LK engine system is identified and fixed.
1969 May - Apollo 10 conducts a manned test of the LEM in low Lunar orbit, with the LEM descending to within 15 kilometers from the Lunar surface. N1 booster 5L is rolled out to Launch Complex 110R and erected. A proton rocket carrying 20 tons of propellant is launched into orbit.
1969 Jun - N1 booster 5L is launched from Launch Complex 110R, on a flight that is christened Zarya 1. Upon rendezvousing with the Orbital Propellent Carrier, cosmonaut Alexi Leonov performs a spacewalk and connects a fuel transfer line between the two craft. Both crafts fires their RCS in the prograde direction to settle the propellents while maintaining their relative distance. After the transfer is complete, the line is disconnected, and the trans-Lunar injection is performed. When the spacecraft breaks into Lunar orbit, Alexi Leonov spacewalks to the LK lander and undocks. Using the navigation beacon placed by Lunokhod 1, it lands at the Sea of Tranquility. After a 90 minute stay, where he goes on EVA and plants the Soviet flag, collects samples, rides around on the Lunokhod rover, and takes many pictures, he returns to orbit, transfers to the 7K-LOK spacecraft, and he along with Oleg Makarov return to Earth.
1969 Jul - Apollo 11 conducts the first manned American Lunar landing at the Sea of Tranquility, touching down 82 kilometers from the Zarya 1 landing site. Concerned with an abnormally high roll-rate observed on Zarya 1, the N1 design team add roll control motors to all future N1 boosters.
1969 Sep - Development on uprating the N1 for superchilled propellents is finished. Work starts on modifying N1 booster 6L for the new propellent begins.
1969 Oct - The second hot-fire test of the N1 Block A with superchilled propellents is carried out successfully. Two Proton rockets are launched to place communications satellites into Lunar orbit, to allow for a future landing on the far side. One of them fails to perform the trans-Lunar injection burn.
1969 Nov - Apollo 12 launches, and conducts a pinpoint Lunar landing 200 meters from Surveyor 3. N1 booster 6L is rolled out to Launch Complex 110L and erected. A replacement for the previously failed Lunar communications satellite is launched.
1969 Dec - N1 booster 6L is launched from Launch Complex 110L, on the Zarya 2 mission. The landing site is on the Lunar farside, and Valeri Bykovsky becomes the 4th person to step foot on the Moon. The surface stay lasted over 6 hours, during which time he sets up a small radio telescope.
1970 Apr - Apollo 13 lands on the Moon, and returns uneventfully. Development on the LK shelter is complete, and a test spacecraft is launched into orbit atop a Proton booster. The test flight is successful, and an LK shelter is slated to launch to the Moon in 4 months.
1970 Jul - N1 booster 7L is rolled out to Launch Complex 110R, and erected.
1970 Aug - N1 booster 7L is launched from Launch Complex 110R, on the Zarya 3 mission. The LK shelter successfully lands on the Lunar surface, while the 7K-LOK/B2 unmanned reconnaissance orbiter spends several weeks mapping the Lunar surface, before returning to Earth. N1 booster 8L is rolled out to Launch Complex 110L and erected.
1970 Sep - N1 booster 8L is launched from Launch Complex 110L, on the Zarya 4 mission. Pavel Popovich pilots the LK down to the Zarya 3 LK shelter, landing 730 meters away. After walking to the LK shelter, he deploys the small Lunar rover attached to its side, as well as the Lunar Surface Experiment Complex. He spends a total of 49 hours on the Lunar surface, and drives a total of 5 kilometers, before returning to Earth.
1971 Jan - Apollo 14 lands on the Moon and conducts the first usage of an American Lunar rover. The crew stays on the surface for just over two days before returning.
1971 Feb - N1 booster 9L is rolled out, erected, and launched from Launch Complex 110R. It carries a Lunokhod Laboratory, a small pressurized rover built out of an extended LK lander cabin. The descent stage fails, and it impacts the Lunar surface at over 1000 m/s.
1971 Jul - Apollo 15 becomes the last American Lunar landing for a long time. The crew spends 3 days on the Lunar surface, having landed on the farside thanks to a fleet of communications satellites launched a few months earlier. N1 booster 10L is rolled out, erected, and launched from Launch Complex 110R on the Zarya 5 mission (the previous failed mission having 'never happened'). It carries another Lunokhod Laboratory and successfully lands near the Lunar south pole.
1971 Sep - N1 booster 11L is rolled out, erected, and launched from Launch Complex 110R on the Zarya 6 mission. After a 5 day trip, cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov set down the LK 310 meters from the Lunokhod Laboratory, and he stays on the surface for 5 days, driving a total of 84 kilometers. During one EVA, he uses rock-climbing equipment to descend into one of the heavily shadowed and deep craters and finds a substantial amount of water ice.
1972 Mar - N1 booster 12O is rolled out, erected, and launched from Launch Complex 110L. Its payload is the Salyut 2 space station, which has been in development for the last year-and-a-half. With a total mass of 80 tons, it consists of 5 Almaz class station hulls attached together. Its predecessor, Salyut 1, had been launched half a year prior on top of a Proton rocket. This station was specifically constructed to outclass the soon to be launched American Skylab, so it was designed to be as spacious as possible, and this necessitated that it be launched on an N1. Upon reaching orbit, it entered standby mode and awaited its crew to be launched.
1972 Jun - N1 booster 13L is rolled out, erected, and launched from Launch Complex 110R on the Zarya 7 mission. It successfully lands its Lunokhod Laboratory at the Lunar north pole.
1972 Jul - N1 booster 14L is rolled out, erected, and launched from Launch Complex 110L on the Zarya 8 mission. Sitting atop it are cosmonauts Nikolay Rusavishnikov and Alyona Yakovlev. After landing 417 meters from the Lunokhod Laboratory, Yakovlev transfers over to it and stays on the Lunar surface for a total of 7 days, during which time she sets up a small ISRU unit which will use the water ice found in a nearby crater to make oxygen.
To come up with this I used information from Astronautix and Wikipedia, as well as some threads on this site like NASA's Waterloo. Most of it is real in one way or another, but for the last character I introduced, the female cosmonaut, I couldn't find any suitable women from that era to pick so I just used a random name generator. (If any of you know the names of suitable female test pilots from 1970 to 1972 that would be great)
The main POD for this is, of course, Korolev not dying. There's also a maybe-a-POD earlier in 1964 when he drafts the letter to Brezhnev, which may or may not have been delivered OTL. If it was, it certainly damaged their relationship (at least that's what Astronautix says), so I decided to just say it wasn't. I don't know how important that is.
The main things that I'm having problems with are finding sources for the details. For instance, I cannot find out when LC110L finished construction, so I guessed it was in April of 1968. I also cannot find out how many N1s were built, so I assumed it was the full 16 that was ordered in 1965. Though I'm not sure if that includes boosters 1L and 2L, I can't find any information on them.
Anyways, the main reason I'm posting this here is I want your input on what I should do next. I originally wanted to write a timeline about the Space Shuttle and Apollo based Mars missions flying side-by-side, and I figured that NASA would need a reason to develop both. So I thought a Soviet Moon landing would be good, and then I couldn't find any on the other threads here that worked perfectly, so I thought I would very quickly write my own. Three days and a lot of work later, and I have this thing, and now I'm not sure how to go from here. I do have a general outline, which goes as follows.
The US will want to respond to the Soviets beating them. Presumably, three options will arrive on Nixon's desk, LEO (OTL, but earlier and bigger Space Station Freedom), Moon (the TV series 'For All Mankind'), or Mars (NASA's Waterloo).
He decides that just LEO is not an option, it would be seen as a step back by the public. He realizes that a Lunar base is also not a good idea. The Soviets will pursue that one, but a response would be pointless, as there is a good chance the Soviets will beat him to it. The US would end up with a Moon base for the simple reason that the Soviets have a Moon base. Also, he realizes, if he instead chooses Mars, and the Soviets build a Moon base, he can spin it as the USSR stagnating, while the US is pushing forward.
But Nixon also realizes that once this is all well and done, going from Mars to LEO is going to be a huge step back if they are not ready, and so he decides to also do the LEO option, but push the Orbiter's developmental start to 1975, and the Shuttle's first flight back to 1985 to 1987, by which time the first Mars mission will just be wrapping up. That way the 1970-1975 period can focus on the flyback S-IC, and doing paper studies of the Orbiter to help refine it before it starts being worked on properly.
My basic idea for the rest of the program was that Apollo 13 never happens, the rest gets cut at 15, and so there are 5 Saturn Vs left. One of them would be used for Skylab, one would launch a NERVA engine powered S-IVC to test nuclear propulsion systems, and maybe send a probe to Mars or somewhere in the process, one would test the Saturn V-BX sold boosters and probably send an unmanned Apollo CSM around Mars in an endurance test, while one would launch a manned Mars flyby. The final one would be used as a reserve. The classes would be: a Saturn V-A has stretched tanks and upgraded engines, a V-BX has solid boosters, a V-B has solid boosters and no third stage, a V-C has a nuclear third stage, and a V-D has boosters and a nuclear third stage.
Meanwhile, Saturn V production would be restarted with the V-A and V-B. The NERVA program wouldn't be canceled and would produce a flight-worthy engine somewhere around 1975, at which point S-IVCs will go into production. These will be used to test the NERVA engines without needing to finish the design on the Planetry Propulsion Modules (a lot of this will be shamelessly ripped from NASA's Waterloo, sorry), and they can be used as space tugs later. The first Saturn V-C flight (and the only to use an original Saturn V) will probably just be used to launch a Mars probe, the second and third will probably be Saturn V-Ds used to launch prototype MEMs to Mars. The second-to-last of the original Saturn Vs will be used for a manned Mars flyby around 1978.
By 1976 to 1978 the Mission Module (aka Skylab for deep space) will be finished and a Saturn-VA will launch one into orbit as Spacelab, for long-duration endurance tests. By this point, NASA will have run out of CSMs and will have to have started building new ones.
The PPMs will be ready somewhere around 1976 to 1978, and a Saturn V-B will launch one into orbit for testing. Then around 1980 one will be launched to fly by Mars for an endurance test. After that, from somewhere around 1982 to 1984, the first all-up deep-space test (Ares 1) will take place, with a manned Mission Module being pushed by three Planetry Propulsion Modules to Mars orbit and back. The MEM will have been ready since 1980, and in all likelihood, one will have already been shot out to Mars by a Saturn V-D for testing, so Ares 1 might carry one and land it remotely. Then, around 1986 to 1988, Ares 2 will make the first manned Mars landing.
Meanwhile, the Shuttle program will be advancing. The flyback S-IC will have probably been dropped as OTL, and either replaced with the OTL Shuttle stack or more likely, the EDIN05 booster or LRBs, which for early flights will probably be expendable and then made reusable later on. Eventually, the F-1s would be replaced by a pressure-fed engine, that would be much cheaper to make and refurbish. The most likely course of action is probably the LRBs, with two F-1s each for the early flights, and 3 to 4 pressure fed engines for the later ones.
The Shuttle orbiter will probably have developed as OTL, maybe with better safety systems. NASA would probably forgo a full-blown crew escape system, but stuff like the gliding-escape procedures would probably have been there from the beginning. Challenger would have probably never happened, Columbia might have but probability dictates that it would have happed during a station or satellite servicing mission, so the crew would have been able to inspect the damage, and a rescue orbiter would have been launched.
I expect the first flights would occur from around 1986 to 1987. Apollo would keep flying for a few more years, primarily as a station resupply vehicle, or an escape craft for early shuttle flights. By 1990 the Shuttle will be flying quite regularly, and a heavy-lift vehicle derived from it would probably start flying by 1995 to 2000. After Ares 2, there probably wouldn't be any more manned Mars landings using that hardware, but a few S-IVCs would still be up there and could be used as tugs. By 2000 the original Space Transportation Architecture will probably be in full swing, with Shuttles assembling Apollo stacks in Earth orbit over the course of 3 launches (1 for the LEM, 1 for the CSM, and 1 for the propellant for the S-IVC). It would only be a matter of time before a Lunar base is constructed, probably by 2010 to 2015, and by the time Starship/Superheavy becomes operational in 2022, the shuttle and its heavy-lift vehicle derivatives will have been in service for 30 years and will be ready to be retired.
I really want to turn this into a fully working timeline, but unfortunately digging up all of the resources required, and actually writing the thing with my terrible skills, would simply be too much effort. That's why so far I've written it as a list of events, and I would like to continue doing that.
However, first I want to know what some other people think, and I would like to see if any of you know about some of the things I've had a hard time researching. Most importantly:
- When was Launch Complex 110L finished?
- How many N1s were originally made, did they have plans to continue, and what was their manufacturing setup?
- What happened to N1 booster 1L and 2L?
- How much would converting Launch Complex 110L into a static fire facility have cost? Could it still be used for launches?
- How would world politics work after a Soviet Moon landing? Would Apollo-Soyuz still be a thing?
- What sort of timescale was the NERVA program working on? When would the first flight-ready rocket be made?
- Could a manned Mars flyby take place (using the AAP study on a Venus flyby) as early as 1978?
- How much would the Ares program cost?
- Would a flyback S-IC, EDIN05 booster, LRBs or SRBs be chosen for the Shuttle?
- Could Shuttle-derived heavy-lift vehicles be built at a reasonable cost?
- What does all of this do to the Strategic Defense Initiative? Real-life 'Storming Intrepid'?
- While the US is out exploring Mars, what does the Soviet Union do?
Art by Maciej Rebisz.
