Graylensman wrote to dwzmm:
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Your thread prompted me to do a bit of research (read: Google it for twenty minutes). From what I've read, the Voskhod project was simple grandstanding on the part of the Soviet leadership; those directly involved with the Soviet space effort were appalled at the dangerous shortcuts made in order to fly those ships. In fact, only two Voskhod flights were made.
So I wonder, even in an age of increased openness, if there is some residual embarrassment around Voskhod.
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With the U.S., once Mercury had begun t fly, and the plans for Apollo program were being started, NASA realized the need for an interim step to learn about rendezvous, space-walks, and staying in space for a long time - up to 2 weeks. So, Gemini was created as a logical next step. The Gemini capsule was sort of like a bit larger Mercury but there were also huge differences (not just two crew members, but the opening hatches for EVA, consumables to stay up for 2 weeks, and most importantly the ability to rendezvous and dock. Mercury proved Man could go up into space and come back alive, Gemini proved man could literally fly in space and do key things (proving what needed to be done for Apollo to work).
The Russians had Vostok, and their next step was to develop a spacecraft that could also rendezvous in space and ultimately play a role in getting to the moon, Soyuz. But the kremlin wanted more space firsts. So, Voskhod was created as a modified version of Vostok, to send up a crew of three first, and to do a spacewalk first. There certainly were concerns, indeed one of the three members of Voskhod-1 was one of the engineers who was involved in producing it, in part to allay some concerns about the cosmonauts. But those sort of concerns were not made public till decades later. Ironically one of the fears of Voskhod-1 was the fact there was not room for three people to wear space suits, if there had been a cabin leak they would have died, Then with Soyuz, they did that same thing, which caused the crew for Soyuz-11, the one that stayed at Salyut-1, to die due to decompression when a valve stuck open when an explosive bolt firing knocked it open (when the orbital module was jettisoned).
I sort of think the lack of information is not any sense of embarrassment, but simply that there were just two flights of a spacecraft that was not really that much different in some ways from Vostok (the biggest physical diffrence is the second stage, but not the spacecraft itself). to the Soviet public, those were huge successes. NASAs Gemini flights have sometimes been called lost among the public, since for even a lot of people who were alive in the 1960s, Mercury was Shepard, Glenn, the other guys, and then Apollo was the moon. A lot of the public forgot about Gemini, or the kids born since then dont tend to even hear aobut it since they are lucky to be taught we did send men to the moon, regardless of the moon hoax nutcases. And yet we flew TEN Gemini flights, four more flights than Mercury flew (and eight flights more more than Voskhod flew).
So, I think the lack of info is a combination of the secrecy at the time, and not as much interest in Voskhod compared to Vostok and Soyuz. And while the info has started to come out in more recent years, whatever was around then, and held in secret, may not have tended to be kept. Or, considering how some of the video and photos are being sold for profit, the profit motive is in digging up more popular things like Soyuz and N-1, and such, so if there is some good info on Voskhod out there, there has not been the incentive to dig it up as there has been.
I got intrigued by this so did some more checking around. I think you should go to the space-modelers group on Yahoogroups and ask. That group is oriented towards making static (non-flying) models mostly, though there are some there who also build flying model rockets. So, you should join, and ask there.
The files section has a lot of stuff. It has tended to get pretty full over time (getting close to the old max of 100 megs), so every year the files get archived to another site for long-term storage, at Ninfingers (Steve Knudsen) vault of Space-Modelers files:
Look for soviet in this list of files from 2000 thru January 2004:
https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault/vault.html
Inside there is this links for some Voskhod pics:
https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault/All kinds of Soviet space 3./index.html
Also look in the same place for voskhod. Included in there is this one with some pretty good pics which seem to be scans from a book:
https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault/Voskhod-2/
Interesting that the second stage portion seems to be painted black and white.
Then from the 2007 archives, lots of info on the R-7 (A-1/A-2) launch vehicle, with a lot of detail even if none seems to be about the Voskhod version:
https://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/vault2007/R-7/index.html
Mike Mackowski has model-oriented documentation a booklet on Soviet Spacecraft. It is not clear to me if it might include drawings of the Voskhod launch vehicle, or only the spacecraft. You may want to get in touch with him to find out:
https://www.spaceinminiature.com/books/sim4.html
I did some Google searching using keyword pairs like voskhod space, voskhod drawing, and voskhod rocket. And I did so by using Google images, so I could see and easily ignore the hits that did not show rockets (such as motorcycles).
This photo of a model:
https://www.spaceistheplace.ca/voskhod_2_launcher_1_144.jpg
As found only in a link on this page (in the text about the Soyuz-T launcher):
https://www.spaceistheplace.ca/page_3_jan_07.htm
1/240 scale drawing by Mark Wade:
https://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvs/vos11a57.htm
From:
https://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvfam/r7.htm
Voskhod-1 page (photo of rollout to pad at bottom of page):
https://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/voskhod-1.htm
https://www.spacefacts.de/graph/drawing/large/english/voskhod-1_rollout.htm
- George Gassaway