The Soviet Union was first in space, first with artificial satellites and then first with dogged missions, manned missions, womaned missions, and space stations. NASA was unable to catch up until the moon landing, marking a gigantic first that hasn't been accomplished since. But the Soviets still dreamt big until the very end. Here are five of their most ambitious programs that never quite got as far as they planned.

Space Shuttle

Ralph Mirebs

The space shuttle was a three-decade workhorse for the American space program. From 1981 to 2011, it was how we got to orbit. Despite the two tragedies of Challenger and Columbia, it was largely successful, ferrying up parts for the International Space Station, deploying the Hubble Space Telescope, testing out new technologies, and once taking up a lightsaber.

The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle. Called Buran, it came on the scene in 1988. It flew exactly once. With superficial resemblances to the American space shuttle program, many called it a knock-off. But according to Buran.su, the Soviet version had some design differences that set it apart from the American shuttle program. It was designed to be entirely autonomous if need be, and its one and only mission was entirely unmanned, reaching orbit and returning to Earth without a pilot inside the ship.

Buran lacked the rear engines of the American shuttle. Instead, the Soviets worked on a heavy lift Energia rocket which would be responsible for firing the system into orbit. Energia was designed as a reusable system. Two of its four booster stages would deploy parachutes after they were expended, allowing them to fall gently to the ground for retrieval. (If this sounds familiar, it's because Elon Musk and SpaceX are trying to get reusable rockets to work now, a quarter-century later.)

While NASA's shuttle program launched a few classified payloads for the Pentagon, Buran was built to be more outright militaristic. It was even designed to deploy nuclear weapons out of its shuttle bay. You know, just in case. But it was ultimately cancelled in 1993, and the original craft was unofficially decommissioned in 2002 when the roof at the Baikonur complex collapsed.

Of course, it wasn't a total loss. As you may have seen in the past few days, somebody named Ralph Mirebs gained access to the derelict facility at Baikonur, returning stunning images of the shuttle bay with Buran still inside. Two of the derelict prototypes are still out in the hangar.

Moon Landing

Slavinskas

The Americans Apollo missions remain the only successful manned missions to the moon—or the surface of any other world. The Soviet Union had grand plans to land cosmonauts on the lunar surface before the USA, but the mission never launched. However, as historian Marcus Lindroos writes, the USSR refused to acknowledge this failure until the nation was close to collapse in 1989.

Planning began in 1963. A series of successive Soyuz rockets would have put cosmonauts into higher and higher near-Earth orbit until the space agency would go for a complete orbit around the Moon. The Luna missions would attempt unmanned soft landings as a lead-up to a manned soft landing on moon.

In addition to political turbulence back in the USSR, a few key events derailed the mission to the moon. In 1967, the Soyuz 1 craft crashed after its parachute failed to deploy, killing occupant Vladimir Komarov. In addition, a series of unmanned test flights failed to reach lunar orbit, further setting back Soviet plans. Specifically, Lindroos, says the failure of the Zond-6 craft showed the flaws of the automated system that would take cosmonauts to the moon.

The Soviets managed to dock Soyuz 4 and 5, creating what some have called "the first space station" in orbit and taking a step toward the moon. However, before they could take additional steps, their heavy lift craft (the N1) exploded on the pad, causing widespread damage. Finally, in 1969, Americans successfully made it to the moon, and Russia's plan to send humans there faded as a priority.

Things could have been different. While the Soviet Space Agency didn't have the rockets, it did have full-scale lunar landers at the ready. Today, though, they're stuck on Earth in a museum in Moscow. One of the would-be Soviet moon suits is also on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Manned Flybys of Venus and Mars

Wikimedia Commons

The Apollo program flirted ever-so-briefly with the idea of capping off the program with an ambitious flyby of Venus and Mars. It never went beyond the planning stages. Russia had a similar plan, and while it never got further than planning on paper, it was much more fleshed out and less of a pipe dream than what NASA was thinking about. The Soviets even drew up plans to build the spacecraft in Earth orbit. In the decades since, only space station components have been successfully assembled off-planet.

According to Brian Harvey in Soviet and Russian Space Exploration, the Russians were aware of the development of the Saturn V rocket and wanted to outperform the Americans. As early as 1959, they were already laying the groundwork for a manned recon of Mars and Venus. The timetable placed the mission in 1971, and the Soviets went as far as to subject three cosmonauts—Andrei Bozhko, Boris Ulibishev, and German Manovtsev—to a year-long test mission on Earth meant to simulate the isolation of long-term space travel. "The sheer duration of it, the monotony… It's hard. I mean the regimen, little things get to you," Manovtsev later told Russia Today.

In his assessment, Harvey went as far as to suggest that Russia's underplanning for the lunar missions, including an initial mission draft calling for sending up only about 50 tonnes, may have been evidence that there was no serious plans for lunar missions—that a Mars flyby was the Soviet Union's real goal. But America's lunar ambitions shifted course for the Soviet space programme, causing them to focus their energies on getting to the moon first. By 1966, the Mars plan was largely dead.

Military Space Station

Wikimedia Commons

The space race wasn't all peaceful exploration. After all, many rockets used in the early space program doubled as intercontinental ballistic missiles. But the Soviets had something no other nation has (acknowledgedly) had: a manned military outpost in space.

The Almaz program sent three total missions into space. The first, Salyut 2, failed after reaching orbit. Salyuts 3 and 5 were successful, entering orbit in 1974 and 1976. They were test projects for wider space militarization, even including Rikhter R-23 rapid fire cannons on board Salyut 3. Both of those spacecrafts were purported to be for peaceful purposes while actually serving as testbeds for military recon in space. (According to Lance K. Erickson, the Salyut 3 cannon was fired only once, on the last day of operations of the station.) A fourth station, called the OPS-4, was planned but scrapped. Simply put, the Soviet government found that orbital military outposts weren't as efficient as reconnaissance satellites.

Of course, none of this was a total secret. There were a few signs, to the public at large, that the space stations weren't as peaceful as they claimed. For one, the Soviet agency bragged that it managed to spend the longest duration in orbit affixed to any one point at the ground below, requiring 500,000 firings of the rocket thrusters, according to Philip Baker. Baker also hints that the cannon "weapon test" was performed in such a direction that the projectiles would quickly re-enter the atmopshere and burn up.

Had the Almaz program continued, the militarization of space, which was called for by such peaceful folk as Barry Goldwater and seriously proposed by other factions in the United States government, might have gained more momentum. Then again, what is X-37B doing up there?

Asteroid Sample Return

NASA Dawn

The USSR's space agency planned an asteroid mission in 1991. It would have visited Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, extracted a sample, and returned it to Earth. The joint project between France and Russia hit a little snag, though. It was delayed to 1994, and then cancelled entirely when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

According to Brian Harvey, the spacecraft would have used a Mars flyby to launch a probe to Vesta. To augment the mission, the scientists also might have tried to drop a payload toward Mars, perhaps landing it by balloon.The exact details about the mission continued to change as the USSR's political fortunes grew more dire. The final plan for the spacecraft was a grand tour of five asteroids after a Mars flyby, launching in 1996 and wrapping up its main mission in 2001. While plenty of planning went into the mission (and the European Space Agency became an eventual collaborator), no concrete hardware came out of the proposal.

Even after the collapse, the mission held on ever-so-briefly in a post-Soviet mission manifest for 1992, but disappeared thereafter.

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