[LINK] Two spaceflight links

[rfmcdonald]

First, via io9, Space.com's Alasdair Wilkins suggests that there could have been a Soviet lunar mission if not for the repeated failures of the N-1 rocket.

Between February 1969 and November 1972, Soviet space engineers repeatedly saw any dream of landing a cosmonaut on the moon literally go up in flames.

A succession of four failures of the Soviet-built N-1 mega-booster led to the project’s cancellation by decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

A fifth launch of the super-booster was slated in the fourth quarter of 1974, one that gleaned lessons learned from the earlier unsuccessful flights.

Up in smoke and millions of rubles spent, the terminated N-1-L3 space project was to be topped by a lunar system to support a two-cosmonaut crew on a maximum flight time of 13 days to the moon and back to Earth, with one crew member setting foot upon the lunar surface.

Trying to gain access to relevant American intelligence information remains extraordinarily difficult.

Meanwhile, 80 Beats reports that a US-European team is interested in salvaging the cancelled Ares I booster.

The partners are Alliant Techsystems of Minneapolis (ATK) and the European company Astrium, which builds Ariane 5 rockets to carry satellites into space. Today they are announcing their collaboration on the new 300-foot rocket.

The new rocket, named Liberty, would be much cheaper than the Ares I, because the unfinished NASA-designed upper stage of the Ares I would be replaced with the first stage of the Ariane 5, which has been launched successfully 41 consecutive times. The lower stage of the Liberty, a longer version of the shuttle booster built by ATK, would be almost unchanged from the Ares I.

To truly go ahead with the project, the two companies will need to snag at least some of the $200 million in funding NASA is set to give next month to private companies developing space taxi technology. Giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as newer private space companies like SpaceX, are all competing for these dollars and contracts.

There has been deep concern in the US Congress about the length of time it might take to provide commercial alternatives, leaving America reliant on Russian Soyuz vehicles until perhaps the latter part of this decade. But ATK and Astrium believe their experience means they could have the 90m-high (300ft) Liberty rocket ready to fly by 2013, and operational with astronauts on board by 2015.

The two companies are targeting a price of $180 million per launch as a way to undercut the price of the Atlas V rocket launches by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin collaboration called United Launch Alliance, which currently dominates the market. And launching astronauts may not be the only ambition of ATK and Astrium.

Go, read.