N1 (rocket)

N1 (rocket)

The N-1 was a heavy lift rocket intended to deliver payloads beyond low Earth orbit, acting as the Soviet counterpart to the NASA Saturn V rocket. This heavy lift booster had the capability of lifting very heavy loads into orbit, designed with manned extra-orbital travel in mind. Development work started on the N-1 in 1959. Its first stage is the most powerful rocket stage ever built.

The N1-L3 version was developed to compete with the United States Apollo Saturn V to land a man on the Moon. The basic N1 launch vehicle had three stages, which was to carry the L3 lunar payload into low Earth orbit. The L3 contained an Earth departure stage and a lunar landing assist stage, in addition to the single-cosmonaut LK Lander spacecraft, and a two-cosmonaut Soyuz 7K-LOK lunar orbital spacecraft.

N1-L3 was under-funded, under-tested, and started development in October 1965, almost four years after the Saturn V. The project was badly derailed by the death of its chief designer Sergei Korolev in 1966. After four failed launch attempts, the program was suspended in 1974, and in 1976 was officially cancelled. The N1 program (along with the rest of the Soviet manned moon programs) was kept secret almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991; information about the N1 was first published in 1989. Due to the second launch attempt, the N-1 made the largest artificial non-nuclear explosion in history with about 14,000,000 pounds (nearly 7kt) of explosives.