The Soviet Union denied the N1 existed for many years even after the explosion had been picked up by British intelligence and CIA satellites had photographed the ruined pad. Officially, the Soviet Union had never had a Moon programme; the Zond lunar missions weren’t tests of the lunar capsule and they had never tried to rival Apollo. The official story was that the Salyut space station was always the main thrust of the space programme.
There was even scepticism in the West when NASA director James Webb said the Soviets had built a rival to the Saturn V. The N1 was sometimes called ‘Webb’s Giant’ by the sceptics.
When the programme was cancelled, the Soviet Union went to great lengths to destroy all the evidence. Mishin was summarily dismissed as head of the space programme as were numerous other directors of the N1 programme.
There was at least one complete N1 ready to launch and several under various stages of construction. They were all broken up and the documentation largely destroyed. Photographs and film only really appeared in the West in the Gorbachev era when the Soviet Union finally had a rocket, Energia, that surpassed the N1.
I’ve always wondered how much high quality photography and film of the N1 is sitting in the archive at Roscosmos.
I’m still not sure of how success could be claimed in the event of a total destruction of the vehicle even if by just a whisker the failure didn’t damage the launch pad. No amount of brain-wracking on my part can accept that qualification.
A fair point. The discreet megalomaniac has the grace to hide their 400ft tall rocketship in a hollowed out volcano.
Or at the very least on an offshore oil platform in international waters…
it was amazing to watch, and i do think it was a success to get it off the pad and to that critical point where the failure occurred. i feel bad for all the people who worked so hard on it, too. it’s literally rocket science. space science, like all science, is hard – two steps forward, one step back. but i’m glad someone is out there doing it.
I should state that “damage” was not the word used by Musk. I believe the word he used was “destroyed”. Musk being Musk, he will play on this if asked.
Yes it can. Things like filling a rocket and igniting it without engines disintegrating are huge challenges in themselves. The process of starting a single rocket engine is insanely complex when cryogenic fuels are involved.
If you can rapidly iterate designs then building, failing, fixing that mistake, rebuilding… is a good way of fixing your design.
Going the other way, testing and failing followed by lengthy redesign process might mean you never get a viable product in a reasonable time. Back to rocketry, the UK’s Black Arrow rocket developed in the late 1960s was cancelled in good part because it was taking so long to build each rocket after a failure.
Ironically, the programme was cancelled after the fourth rocket was completed and on its way to Australia. That launch was a complete success and put the a satellite in orbit. Tell me this is not a cool photo:
Originally named ‘Puck’, the satellite was re-named Prospero by the bitter engineers after Shakespeare’s magician who pledges to give up his powers:
But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.
It’s still up there, and until very recently, still working.
Those amazing engines. The Soviet Union designed oxygen-rich pre burners which required new alloys that could survive in oxygen at thousands of degrees Celsius.
There is a very old Channel 4 documentary made just after the fall of the Soviet Union about the N1 and its engines with some footage of the N1 launches which interviews some of the original designers - here in glorious low-resolution…
Years back, Rocketdyne (while under P&W, my first employer) acquired a number of RD-180 engines from Energomash for research purposes. The aim was to upgrade the engine’s materials (advanced ceramics were looked at) for even greater operational temperatures and pressures. Sanctions, the Ukraine, and Realpolitik ended all that.
I mean, you set your criteria low enough, anything can be considered a success.
This launch shredded the concrete pad, which is significant because Apollo and the Shuttle used substantial flame diverting trenches, which people who could do math said was a good idea, and Elon basically said “too much work at Boca Chica, no flame diverters on Mars anyway. YOLO! Also brick that one up at 39A in Florida, no way we’ll need it”
Lo and behold, the pad shredded into concrete projectile funtimes, and from then on it was basically "roll 1D12 for each engine, on a 1 your engine is demolished by concrete upon launch, roll a 2 and it will be taken out somewhere midflight, likely due to fratricide from the other wrecked engines. Lose attitude control, do a couple of high altitude backflips, and explode.
Will be interesting to see the other damage to the infrastructure, particularly the tank farm.
Too late now, but did SpaceX at least hot-fire on a test stand with the entire cluster configured as for a launch… and what the flame bucket (if any) was like? I’m thinking that the massive plume and forces at launch ko’d at least some of the Raptor engines while still on the pad.
it’s pretty clear that a lot of the commentators here are not closely following SpaceX and equate boom=failure. The stated goal for this launch was to ensure that the ground system survived and to gather information on the performance of Super Heavy. It was highly expected that it would go boom at some point in the flight.
The SpaceX model has been iterative testing - they are not afraid to physically test their designs and then feed this back into their modelling. Explosions are expected in their method.
They are also working on making space flight cost effective, this means reusability and working out how to do things more cheaply.
NASA can’t afford to follow this model - not because of cost but because it would be a political disaster. As a consequence they have to overengineer and have a lot more riding on each launch.
Falcon9/Dragon is SpaceX’s human launch system and will be for many, many years.
Starship is SpaceX’s truck and may eventually launch humans but for the first few years, this will be for launching cargo and transporting people outside of the earth’s orbit.
Starship (not Super Heavy) will be used for the moon landings, but it won’t be the way that the people get into space from earth, it will be their transport while they are up there.
