What is the direction for this substack?

General plans for the future of the Soviet Space Substack.

This is not a full post, I wanted to share with you what’s going on behind the scenes, and what I expect to post in 2024.

Substack home page.

The declassification of surprising new documents via RGANTD seems to have slowed right down - and for me, these were the heart of the best posts. Some still comes, but it seems to be new documents on missions that were fairly well known, such as the unmanned lunar probes. Will it resume? Maybe, but I’m not counting on it.

I still have quite a backlog, but most of it seems to either be small fragments, (like the 6 fin version of the N1), or does not make sense except as part of a big article, such as the development of the RLA launcher family, and how it evolved into Energia-Buran. And these are too large for substack articles.

Still, the pause does give a chance to plan working on the book without the target moving every week! I will be spending more effort on writing for printed publication, and less on posts here.

I still have a good stock of collected references that are not well known, so there’s plenty there to drive new articles. I’m considering posts on Luna 16, Soviet Space Propaganda posters, the L5 crewed Lunar Rover, (needs more CGI!), seldom seen photos of the early cosmonauts, the history of the Zenit rocket from RLA through Energia booster to stand alone launcher. I’ve got plenty of info on the original plans for the BIG space station too.

If there’s something you would particularly like to see, leave me a note in the comments. I will read them all with great interest!

The next post is planned for Friday 12 January, and will cover historical documents on Yuri Gagarin, and what he did on his trip to Moldova!

Best of last year

The two most popular posts, by some margin, were:

N1-L3 detailed mission plans.

1987 mission plans for a crewed Mars mission.

1987 Mars, Part 2.

Big thanks also to Karl Dodenhoff, for his guest post on the Krechet Space Suit.

A cool link:

As you have made it this far, here’s a link for you, to scans and commentary on Yuri Gagarin’s report on his historic flight.

Click Here

In Russian, (of course), so computer translation will be needed. You may get a warning, as it uses Russian issued security certificates.

That’s all folks!