Mars 1M No. 1 and No. 2

The 1960 Mars window was set by celestial mechanics; the launch date was set by politics. Nikita Khrushchev had been promised a flight to Mars, and Sergei Korolev's OKB-1 had until roughly the middle of October to produce one. Boris Chertok, who ran the spacecraft side of the work at the launch range, wrote afterwards that everyone involved, from ministers down to fitters, understood the schedule was impossible and that nobody was willing to say so out loud. A brand new four-stage rocket had to be built (index 8K78, the machine later called Molniya) and a brand new interplanetary spacecraft with it (index 1M, from the Russian for first Martian). As late as the spring of 1960 there was still no working documentation at the factories. Two half-assembled 1M craft were flown to Tyuratam in an An-12 at the end of August, about six weeks before the launch date. September went on soldering. The onboard radio complex, built by a bureau that had never once run an integrated test of it, failed continuously: transmitters smoked, diodes punched through, a telemetry commutator died, and the daily defect list ran past twenty items. Leonid Voskresensky, preparing the rocket, offered Chertok his own forecast in plain language: forget the Martian tasks, on the first attempt we will not fly further than Siberia.

The spacecraft was close kin to the Venera 1 design: a sealed cylinder about two metres tall with two solar wings, a 2.33 m mesh high-gain dish and a long antenna arm, roughly 650 kg all up with only about 10 kg of instruments aboard. Those instruments were the entire point. There was a magnetometer on a boom, a cosmic ray counter, a plasma ion trap, a radiometer, a micrometeorite detector, a phototelevision camera that would shoot the Martian surface through a viewport when a sensor reported sunlit ground below, and a spectroreflectometer built by Professor Lebedinsky to look for the CH band, then considered a plausible signature of organic life. By late September the camera had produced one wobbly test image and then refused to repeat it, and the schedule had slid so far past the optimal date that the ballistics team came to the State Commission asking for mass back. On 3 October the commission voted to remove the camera and the life detector. To ease the decision, Korolev had the spectroreflectometer tested out on the steppe near the pad first; to general delight it reported that there was no life at Tyuratam. Lebedinsky, Chertok wrote, took the ruling like the death of someone close. Both 1M craft therefore flew with no means of photographing anything.

1M No. 1 lifted off on 10 October 1960 at 14:27:49 UTC (17:27 Moscow) from Site 1 at NIIP-5, the pad Yuri Gagarin would use six months later. It was the maiden flight of the 8K78. The first two stages worked. On the third stage, Blok I, the gyro horizon issued a false pitch command at around T+300 to 310 seconds, most probably because vibration had broken a contact in its command potentiometer. The stage swung more than seven degrees off attitude, a limit contact closed, and the engine was commanded off. The destruct command followed at about T+324 seconds. The stack reached roughly 120 km and burned up over eastern Siberia. Four days later, on 14 October at 13:51:03 UTC, 1M No. 2 arrived at the same ending by a different route. A leak in a liquid oxygen line had been chilling the third stage's kerosene valve while the rocket still stood on the pad, and by ignition the valve was frozen solid. The start command went out at about T+290 seconds, the valve did not open, the engine never lit, and the second Mars probe followed the first. Chertok noted the bitter detail that formal blame in both cases fell on OKB-1 itself and never on the subcontractors his team had spent six weeks cursing.

Nothing was announced. A launch that fails before orbit leaves no object to catalogue and produces no communique, so for years the two flights existed publicly only as rumour and a Western nickname. American reporters coined Marsnik, a splice of Mars and Sputnik. NASA's catalogue still carries them as Mars 1960A and Mars 1960B and, more confusingly, as Korabl 4 and Korabl 5, numbers from a retrospective Western sequence rather than anything Soviet engineers used. In 1962 the NASA Administrator told Congress that the 10 October launch had been a Mars attempt; some Soviet scientists denied for decades that it had been anything of the kind. The argument was eventually settled from the inside. V. G. Perminov, later the lead designer for Mars and Venus spacecraft at the Lavochkin bureau, wrote in a 1999 monograph published by NASA's History Division that both October 1960 launches were Mars missions and were identical to one another, and Chertok's memoirs describe preparing the pair side by side. What the failures bought was experience. The deep space complex at Yevpatoria in Crimea, whose antenna arrays were assembled on frames made from battleship gun turrets and railway bridge trusses, had been declared ready to work these missions. The same rocket, the same tracking station and much of the same team came back two years later.