Author Topic: Soviet Moon Landing Project (Read 55786 times)

LittleBird · « **Reply #80 on:** 02/07/2026 03:05 pm »

Quote from: LittleBird on 02/06/2026 06:46 am

Quote from: Danderman on 02/06/2026 05:47 am
A personal note: after the collapse of the Soviet lunar lander program, everything was either destroyed or shipped offsite. The cover up was so effective that new employees had no idea about the N1 or LK.

The reason I know is because I had an idea for an orbital maneuvering vehicle based on the LK. When I showed the LK based requirements to the factory staff some 30 years after the cover up, they claimed that no vehicle could meet those requirements.

My response was that not only was it possible, but the factory had built and flown the vehicle (T2K). Again, the response was disbelief.

I had seen on the Internet that some guy had found an LK model hidden in the basement of a dental school. So, I brought the factory staff to the dental school, we went down to the basement, and there it was. Also a lunar Soyuz and other goodies.

The staff were amazed and impressed, so much so that they eventually removed the LK from the dental school and moved it to a museum on their territory. The first major visitor for the LK was Vladimir Putin.

Is that same model that was loaned to UK’s Science Museum for a special show ? Or is there more than one.

Turns out there are 5-I saw the MAI one at the science museum in London. Wikipedia is our friend:

There are five remaining LK in various stages of completion. They are at:[1][9]

Moscow Aviation Institute[10]
Orevo Research and Educational Facility of Bauman University in Dmitrov
RKK Energia plant at Korolev
Tambov air base
A.F. Mozhaysky Military-Space Academy in St Petersburg
The LK from the Moscow Aviation Institute was displayed at Disneyland Paris in the 1990s and at the London Science Museum during their 2016 “Cosmonauts” exhibition.[11][12]

I remember Aviation Week covered the MAI one in about 1990 or so-I think it also appeared in the documentary known in the US as The Russian Right Stuff.

Blackstar · « **Reply #81 on:** 02/07/2026 03:26 pm »

Anybody interested in this topic should also look in the Entertainment section for the N1 thread. In fact, a bunch of those links could be cross-posted over here, since they are mostly about this topic and not the book that came out years ago.