Unraveling Russia’s moon riddles

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - My first face-to-face meeting with the Soviet "moonsuit," built for a cosmonaut to wear while walking on the moon before Neil Armstrong, was in a dingy warehouse in an even dingier Upper East Side corner of Manhattan.

The large, dusty room was otherwise filled with art objects — statues, paintings, lamps, boxes of artifacts — that reminded me of the cluttered castle of Xanadu in the movie "Citizen Kane." And as was usually the case with my dealings with Russia’s mysterious space program over the years, my encounter with the moonsuit involved solving a puzzle.

This was in 1993, decades after the Soviet man-to-the-moon project collapsed, and not long after the entire Soviet Union disintegrated. With government salaries ebbing, space program veterans sought cash anywhere they could find it.  

One opportunity to find money involved offering artifacts, documents and other memorabilia at auction. Sotheby's hired me to authenticate the trove of shipped articles and help write the sales catalog.

So there I stood. In the center of the warehouse collection of space capsules, limp spacesuits and crates of smaller artifacts, there was a white spacesuit, standing erect inside a pipe framework. The helmet visor was dark. On its back, a suitcase-sized knapsack contained air and power supplies for the occupant. The owners claimed that it had been built for use on the moon.

Twenty-four years earlier, when it was Armstrong’s footprints, in an American moonsuit, that marked the moon’s surface, the Russian song was entirely different. With the stunning American victory in the moon race came Moscow's new propaganda line. Apollo proved nothing, because the Soviets had been too wise to waste its resources on such meaningless stunts.

That line — that the "race" was a one-sided American wild goose chase — sounded entirely reasonable to many in the West. Books and TV documentaries largely adopted that verdict: Apollo, while showing commendable virtuosity and courage, was an "empty victory."

It wasn’t until 20 years after Apollo 11, in the final months of the Soviet Union's collapse, that many of Moscow's long-hidden moon secrets began emerging into daylight. At first there were newspaper interviews with Russian scientists and engineers, then pictures of the spaceships and boosters they had tried to build, and finally a trickle of actual hardware, stashed away in back rooms here and there in Moscow.

By then, the USSR had collapsed, the space workers were starving, and a new purpose was found for the leftover lunar equipment: sheer survival. Money. Hence the private sales, the quiet exports, and then a series of highly publicized auctions such as the one that brought me face-to-face with a token of that hidden past.

Close encounter of a moonsuit kind
But was the suit held in the Sotheby’s warehouse really a lunar artifact? If so, how could I prove it? That was the puzzle of the day.

"We've assembled it from written directions in the packing crates," David Redden, my host, explained. "They tell us that the back of the suit opens up, to allow the cosmonaut to enter the suit. But we haven't been able to get it open." He stepped back and looked at me expectantly.

Alone, I faced the spacesuit and the challenge. About a dozen employees of the auction house stood in a semicircle behind me. They had paid for my airplane ticket and my hotel, and were paying my consulting fee, and now they expected to see the promised expertise in action.

Although I had never been up close to such a suit before, I had read accounts by cosmonauts about their experiences with similar versions aboard Russian space stations. The backpack was opened by a 50-centimeter (20-inch) lever on the right hip — there it was! — but the lever was also designed to prevent accidental activation. Opening the hatch at the wrong time would kill the spacewalking cosmonaut.

There! At the end of the lever, where a gloved right hand would grip the lever and lay its thumb, was a spring-loaded red button. I depressed the button and the lever moved freely. But now, which way to move it, up or down?

I asked myself, which way would it be pushed by accident? That's the way you would not want it to mean "open"! Otherwise, a freak bump backward against a wall could accidentally open the suit to vacuum. So cautiously — but with feigned confidence — I grasped the lever, depressed the button on the end and pushed the lever downward, away from the cosmonaut's torso.

It moved a few centimeters, and then there was a "click" as the suit's backpack lurched slightly on its hinges. The circle of onlookers inhaled in expectation.

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