Part 2. Crewed Lunar Craft book.

Status of the Soviet Crewed Lunar Craft book.

Feb 25, 2023

An older draft page from the book

Those of you who have been following me since this was a Revue newsletter will be aware that this originally started as a way to keep people in the loop, while I gathered material for a book. You get to see the research and samples, I get potential customers.

I’ve not provided any updates since the move to substack, and I’m going to put that right now.

The original idea was to focus on archive illustrations, with my own additions to cover gaps, and to cover only the crewed lunar craft. This was partly to get some distance between my project and the 2^nd edition of “N1 for the Moon and Mars”.

RGANTD photo, LK trainer for lunar gravity parabolic flights

I’m not that confident of my abilities as a writer, but by chance I ended up in discussion with Jeremy Stern. It turns out that Jeremy is a historian, with a keen interest in the Soviet Space program. So I asked him if he would do the writing, and he said “Yes”! His skill set is pretty much perfect for the project, and Jeremy has an exceptionally clear writing style.

Since then, he has been doing background research, and reading key references, including some rather messy computer translated Russian documents. And I have been working on more research, and building the CGI models we require.

This is what the rough contents looked like at the time Jeremy joined the project:

(I know, it’s a mess, I need to learn Affinity Publisher!)

Even at this point I was expecting it to grow by about 50%, but with a proper full narrative to explain what was going on in all the projects, it’s going to get a lot bigger.

The original outline plan was that if this joint project worked well, we would move on to something more ambitious, probably covering the rockets in depth. But I recent realised that a book on the rockets would have a LOT of overlap with the current project. So we have decided to go for the whole thing, and do proper coverage of the rockets as well.

This will NOT go to the level of fine detail for modellers as the 1st edition N1 book, and we are also excluding launch facilities. But it gives us the chance to print the many great new photos that have been uncovered, and print as many as possible full page.

All this will add time to the project, and right now we don’t have a target or a credible estimate for when it will be ready. Under 6 months would be cool, I’d really hope for this year, even in the worst case. But I have high hopes that we will make the definitive book on the subject, with many new and little known illustrations.

But we do already have a first draft cover!