During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union took part in fierce competition to conquer outer space first. The creation of satellites, unmanned probes, and the ultimate goal of sending humans to space and returning them safely to Earth.
The Soviet Union initially met with a lot of success in this space race, including the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, in October 1957. The launch of Sputnik I caused panic in the United States government, as they raced to compete to send a human into space.
But they were too slow. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter the Earth’s orbit. The early successes of Soviet space exploration led President John F. Kennedy to announce the Apollo program. The Apollo program promised to put a man on the Moon by 1970.
Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union decided to do more than just put a man on the Moon. The idea was to create the Zvezda Moonbase, a self-burying, nine-module, livable base on the Moon. While this Moonbase was being tested and built, the Soviet Union forgot that they had not yet sent a man, let alone a crew of nine, to the Moon.
Ultimately the space race was “won” by the United States on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin officially became the first humans to land on the Moon’s surface. But what was so important about a lunar Moonbase for the Soviet Union?
Moonbase Zvezda
The Zvezda (which means “star” in Russian) Mooonbase, also known as DLB (Long-term Lunar Base), was a project and plan created by the Soviet Union that took place from 1962 to 1974. The goal of this project was to develop the first crewed Moonbase.
The Soviets planned to have a semi-permanent 9-12 man base on the Moon by 1975. The first step towards launching the Zvezda Moonbase was sending an unmanned Ye-8 spacecraft to the Moon in order to collect soil samples that would be sent to Earth to be analyzed.
When the soil was headed back to Earth, a “multipurpose Lunar Engineering Machines (LIM)” was left on the Moon’s surface. Called Lunokhod rovers, these three-ton machines would survey the site and determine the best location to place the Zvezda Moonbase.
Lunokhods were nuclear-powered labs on wheels designed to take cosmonauts from the landing site “over long-duration traverses of the lunar surface. One of the main objectives of the Zvezda Moonbase, besides creating a semi-permanent Moonbase, was to locate and mine Helium-3, which would be used in nuclear fusion reactors back on earth. Helium-3 is rare on Earth, but the Moon is full of Helium-3.
The Soviet space program was nothing if not ambitious and wanted to place the Zvezda Moonbase on the Moon before the Americans tried to establish their own high-tech Moonbase on its surface. The Zvezda Moonbase required these large Lunokhods to drill and create holes in the Moon’s surface and move rocks and dirt out of the way in order to have space to place the pre-fabricated habitation modules of the base.
Putting the modules beneath the lunar surface would help shield the inhabitants from radiation, allowing the cosmonauts inside to survive. Technology was rapidly advancing, which led to the plans changing constantly and the proposition of some unique living modules.
The Zvezda Moonbase would be built with the aid of self-propelling, self-burying habitation pods. Designers estimated it would take around 4.3 hours for the module to bury itself and went as far as detailing the complete process of unloading each module from the landing platform, transporting the modules from the landing platform to the base’s location, and the detailed building plans for the Zvezda Moonbase.
The Zvezda Moonbase was going to compose of nine such modules. Each module would have a length of 4.5 meters (14.8 ft) during the launch process and transport across the surface of the moon.
Once in position, the modules would fill with air and inflate to around 8.6 meters (21ft) in length. When inflated, each module would have a total floor area of 22.2 square meters (238.9 square feet.) Power would be provided to each module via nuclear reactors.
All nine modules were designed to perform specific functions. Three modules would serve as living quarters for the cosmonauts during their long-term lunar vacation. Other modules were intended to act as a medical/gym, a galley/dining area, a workshop, the command module, and a laboratory/warehouse module.
In 1967 a prototype of one module was used to hold a one-year closed-cycle living experiment. This meant someone had to live in a module for a year, being studied by scientists. Oxygen was pumped into the module, but there is little to no information about how other human needs (food, bathing/bathroom) were controlled in the experiment.
The experiment in 1967 took place at the Institute for Bio-Medical Problems (IBMP), which set the tone for the project. The scientists and doctors at the IBMP took the results and used them to enhance the Zvezda Moonbase.
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Each unit on the Moon was to have a false window. This was a sort of TV screen that only showed “scenes of the Earth countryside that would change to correspond with the seasons back in Moscow” designed to calm the cosmonauts.
The exercise bike in the gym module was equipped with a film projector that would synchronize with the rider to simulate a bike ride out of Moscow and the return trip. The modules’ new features were seen as critical psychological measures that would help maintain the crew’s mental health.
They Never Built It, Right?
The “Soviet Human Moon Project,” which the Zvezda Moonbase and other moon-centric space crafts were part of, was formally canceled in 1974. Only one year before, the Soviets had planned to have the Zvezda Moonbase established on the moon by 1975, an ambitious 24 month window.
The Soviet Union always publicly denied the existence of the Soviet Human Moon Project, and all information related to the Zvezda Moonbase and other Soviet lunar programs was classified. The US and Soviet Citizens had no idea that by 1971, the Zvezda Moonbase was pretty much complete on Earth and ready to go.
It wasn’t until glasnost that the information about the Zvezda Moonbase was discovered. According to the now unclassified documents, the moonbase was only the first stage of the Soviet Human Moon Project.
Along with major technical issues with rockets and other equipment needed to establish the Zvezda Moonbase. The Ministry of Defense was funding most of the project, and the weak Soviet economy would never have been able to handle the costs. At 1997 prices, the cost was estimated to be around 80 billion US dollars.
While the Zvezda Moonbase would never exist on the moon, there is a Zvezda module in space today. The United States bought the Zvezda module and launched Zvezda into space on July 12, 2000.
Today Zvezda serves as the living quarters of Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. It helps steer the ISS away from “space junk and compensates for the constant drag of the upper atmosphere.”
Top Image: Officially the Soviets cancelled their Moonbase project in 1974, when the timeline suggests it would have been all but finished. Source: Gorodenkoff / Adobe Stock.
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