KerbalX

Description

China has very large ambitions for the Moon and are planning to land on it in the early 2030s and establish a base by the end of that decade. Russia also has big lunar ambitions and want to land on the Moon in the 2030s also, so why not cooperate? This is a conceptual design of a international Russian / Chinese lunar landing based off of real in-development equipment. The vehicles included are the Russian Orel spacecraft, the Russian Lunar Lander (which I named LK2), and of course China’s in-development Long March 9. In reality Russia has their Yenisei rocket and China has the next gen Shenzhou and lunar lander designs with both systems being assembled in two launches Constellation style, but I thought a Saturn type system would be cooler.

Details

• Type: VAB
• Class: ship
• Part Count: 264
• Pure Stock

Long March 9

Provided by China, the Long March 9 would be the most capable vehicle every built and is the largest currently in development. Capable of orbiting 150 tons and sending 50 tons on a TLI, it would be a beast. It has three stages and four radial boosters. The boosters and first two stages put the vehicle on a 300 km orbital trajectory and the third stage performs the orbital insertion and TLI burn.The vehicles fuel and thrust levels have been extensively tweaked to make it not overpowered for a Mun mission in KSP. First launch is targeted for 2030.

LK2 Lunar Lander

Although it has not official name, I decided to call it the LK2. This Lunar lander has been designed by Roscosmos to land four Cosmonauts on the Lunar surface. It has a descent stage which brakes the complex into lunar orbit and an ascent stage to get off the ground. In real life it would be launched into a lunar orbit by Russia’s Yenisei HLV. If this design ever gets built, the vehicle could stage from the future International Gateway which would start assembly in 2026 and expand the base US Gateway. Whether this design will actually ever get funded is still very much up in the air but who knows?

Orel Spacecraft

For many years the Soyuz has been the workhorse of the Russian and formely USSR space program but that’s about to cahnge. The Orel / Federation spacecraft is Russians response to the original Orion CEV from the early 2000s. Like the original Orion it will have two variants, a LEO version to service the ISS and a long duration version to perform deep space missions. Scheduled to fly its first crew in 2025 to the ISS and lunar crews in the late 2020s. This scenario has it flying on top of the Long March 9 as the crews return vehicle from Lunar orbit.

Notes

I took down this craft about a month ago for reasons and here is my reupload. So yeah heres my build. I really wanted to do the Russian Yenisei and Federation but that was too boring and too small to fit the lander into one craft. So I went a step up and just strapped it all to a Long March 9, another craft I’d wanted to build. The Long March 9 is pretty balanced but I accidentally made the core way to tall, as big as the S-III, but it’s overall height is scaled with my Saturn V. I’ve had a design for the Orel, at the time called Federation, for over a year. The lander I did a few months ago but accidentally deleted it, I think it came out really good though. As for the logic behind this, in real life Russia is having a hard time building their next big rocket and China has no experience with manned deep space travel (I guess Russia doesn’t either but the Soyuz was originally designed as a lunar orbital vehicle and that turned out fine). Realistically this would probably never happen but I thought it was cool.

Controls

1 - Toggle Orel panels and antenna
2 - Toggle lander main engines
3 - Launch ascent stage
9 - Jettison LAS tower

A stock rocket called Joint Russian / Chinese Moon landing. Built with 264 of the finest parts, its root part is Size4.Tank.03.

Built in the VAB in KSP version 1.9.1.