L3 - Soyuz Lunar Landing
The L3 project was part of the lunar program, which was drawn up in September 1963. L-3 had many versions and was constantly changing and supplemented. The first version of this project was developed by Korolev. It consisted of a 200-ton spacecraft assembled on Earth orbit from elements orbited by three launches of the RN N-1 and one RN Soyuz, which would make a direct landing (without entering the Moon’s satellite orbit).
The first N-1 would launch into space an accelerating unit and a lunar ship (without an apparatus for returning to Earth), two subsequent launches would ensure the delivery of the required amount of fuel. After all these operations were completed, the Soyuz spacecraft with a crew of 2-3 people was launched and docked with the created complex. The "Union", moreover, was used to return to Earth. Thus, in the L-3 project, an apparatus was created in orbit, consisting of a propulsion system (weighing 138 tons), which brought the entire apparatus to the flight trajectory to the Moon, a braking system, also used to correct the trajectory (at a distance of 100,000 km and then 150 000 km from the Earth to ensure getting to the desired point) and the return system.
In the course of a single flight under the L-3 program, 2-3 Soviet astronauts were to visit the moon. The total time of the entire flight would be 10-17 days, of which 2.5-3.5 days should have been spent flying on the Earth-Moon and Luna-Earth sections, and 5-10 days — directly to work on the lunar surface.
This project was completed without starting (although it served as the basis for H1-L3), since everything was started too late. Maybe if the work on the L-3 began five years earlier, there would have been chances for the implementation of this idea, but by the end of the 1960s it became clear that direct landing on the moon was too expensive and inefficient, and the USSR had to go the way of the USA : create a system of two devices: landing and orbital.
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