Five Soviet probes try for Mars and all five fail
Between 1960 and 1962 the Soviet Union launched five probes at Mars. Four never escaped Earth; the fifth, Mars 1, fell silent 106 million kilometres out.
On 10 October 1960 a modified R-7 rocket lifted off from Tyuratam carrying a 650-kilogram probe that the West would later call Marsnik 1. Vibration from second-stage ignition damaged the gyroscopic pitch control, the rocket veered off course, the engines were cut at 310 seconds, and the wreckage fell from 120 kilometres into eastern Siberia. Four days later its identical twin flew the same profile and died at almost the same point for a different reason: 290 seconds after launch the third-stage turbopumps could not build enough pressure to ignite. Engineers traced that one to a failed valve on the ground, which let the kerosene freeze before it could flow into the pump. Two spacecraft, four days apart, and neither made it off the planet.
The next launch window came in 1962, and the Soviet program picked a bad fortnight for it. Sputnik 22 went up on 24 October, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and either broke apart on the way into orbit or had its escape stage explode during the burn for Mars. The debris was detected by the US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar in Alaska and was momentarily feared to be the opening of a Soviet nuclear attack. Eleven days after that, Sputnik 24 — an attempted lander — also came apart, scattering pieces that stayed in Earth orbit for days.
Exactly one of the five got away. Mars 1 launched on 1 November 1962 and made it onto an interplanetary trajectory, the first spacecraft ever to do so. Then a gas valve in its orientation system began to leak. Controllers fell back on gyroscopic stabilisation and kept talking to it through 61 radio sessions, first every two days, then every five. On 21 March 1963, with the orientation system finally gone and the antenna no longer pointing anywhere useful, Mars 1 went quiet at a range of 106.76 million kilometres. It coasted on, dead, and passed within roughly 193,000 kilometres of Mars on 19 June 1963 without anyone on Earth knowing what it saw.
None of this was admitted at the time. Probes that stuck in Earth orbit were given Sputnik or Kosmos numbers and quietly forgotten; only missions that worked got real names. The failure rate was not incompetence so much as arithmetic. Reaching Mars meant restarting a rocket stage in vacuum, hitting a moving target eight months out, and keeping a spacecraft alive through all of it, and in 1960 nobody had done any of those things. The tally for the first window that mattered: five launches, zero science.