Three years in the making by an international team of experts in Russia, England and the US, This gorgeous 235 page, full color, hardcover volume contains the complete history of the N-1 from its origins as a booster for missions to Mars and Venus to the abrupt change with a directive from the highest levels of Soviet government to beat the Americans to the moon!
Matthew Johnson, a long time science fiction and space program enthusiast began researching the N-1 in 2008 in order to create a thirty engine flying scale model for entry the National Association of Rocketry's Scale Competition. This competition requires the assembly of a data pack documenting the real rocket being modeled. That research put him in contact with Nick Stevens, CGI designer in London and the late Mike Dorffler of Estes. Mike was the American contact for N-1 historian Alex Shliadinsky in Russia; internationally known as the first and best historical expert on the N-1. The untimely death of Mike Dorffler in 2010 left Alex without a contact in the US, and Matt offered to continue working with him. With the enthusiastic support of Jack Hagerty at ARA Press, that offer lead directly to the creation of
N-1: A Reference Guide to the Soviet Superbooster. Matt is a resident of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Nick Stevens is a Computer Capacity & Performance specialist in the day job in London, and is an Artist member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists, and an administrator of the International Space Art Network. He founded and ran single-handed the UK's first online astronomy service Starbase 1 back in the days of dial-up. Nick lives outside of London and you can find his work on the spaceart1 website.
Alex Shliadinsky is internationally known as the man who first researched N-1 after records started being unsealed in the late 1980 s. His meticulous engineering drawings of the rocket, first by hand and then in AutoCAD, have been reproduced in professional aerospace histories, in the magazines Astronautics News, Russian Space, Spaceflight and Wings of the Motherland. Most notably, he provided the N-1 drawings for Boris Chertok s history of the Soviet space program, Rockets and People, Volume IV, The Moon Race.
Working with Mike Dorffler in the US, Shliadinsky s drawings of the N-1 were published on CD between 2005 and 2007 and in an enhanced New Edition shortly before Mike s untimely death in 2010. Alex lives in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
All through school Igor Bezyaev was fanatically interested the dream of interplanetary flight and dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut.
He first learned of the existence of the USSR s moon and Mars programs in the early 2000s. As he was already well versed in 3D graphics programs, he decided to recreate all the famous Soviet interplanetary ships as three-dimensional renderings. Since then, he has mastered working in three-dimensional graphics and has collected a large library of materials related to Soviet lunar and Martian ships. He is gratified to have participated in this book on the masterwork of designer Sergey Korolev, the rocket that was intended to carry out the long-standing dream of mankind: travel to other planets! Igor lives in Obninsk, Russia.
Vladimir Antipov worked at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for 27 years as an engineer where he was engaged in the testing of ground equipment and participated in spacecraft launches. When he first arrived in 1980 he immediately noticed the crater and a lot of debris from the N1-6L accident, as well as the giant abandoned structures used to prepare and launch it. Around 1990 when the first data on the N-1 started to appear, he began to collect information and reconstruct the history of the lunar rocket. He arranged a children s "study group for the N-1 rocket and, with the approval of the authorities, visited the Baikonur facilities associated with the lunar program of the Soviet Union, photographing and describing the fragments of the N-1 and L3 ships. The collected research is stored at the N-1 L3 museum in Baikonur. He currently lives outside of Moscow.
