New book “Red Moon” reveals secret Soviet lunar program

LOS ANGELES, CA — October 4th, 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of Sputnik’s launch and the kick-off of the Moon Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It’s also the launch date for Red Moon, a novel that tears away the veil of secrecy still shrouding the Cold War-era Soviet lunar program while spinning a gripping tale of international intrigue and space-based terror set in the near future.

Based on a decade’s worth of research by authors David S. Michaels and Daniel Brenton, Red Moon skillfully blends long-buried facts and informed speculation about the secret Soviet effort to land a man on the moon ahead of the Americans, which climaxed with the mission of Luna 15, a mysterious spacecraft that crashed into the lunar surface at virtually the same moment Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong took his historic “one small step” on July 20, 1969. This story in woven into an account of a future multinational Lunar mission arriving on the Sea of Crises in 2019, the year set in NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration for mankind’s return to the moon.

“Although a lot has come out about the Soviet manned lunar effort in the last 10 years or so, there’s still a great deal of mystery about much of what happened in the final months of the Moon Race,” said David Michaels, a historian and aerospace writer living in Valencia, CA who wrote Red Moon along with his longtime friend and collaborator, Daniel Brenton of Las Vegas, NV. “For example, our research turned up a letter by the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, written about a month before Apollo 11’s launch, that virtually ordered the head of the Soviet space effort to put men on the next launch of their super-rocket, the N-1, in a last-ditch effort to beat the Americans to a lunar landing.

“How the program leaders responded to that order is unclear. All we know is that N-1 exploded catastrophically on July 3rd, 1969, barely two weeks ahead of Apollo 11. Only a few days later, Luna 15 lifted off atop a smaller Proton rocket. This was supposedly an unmanned probe designed to scoop up lunar soil and return it to the earth. But there’s a lot about that mission that remains mysterious as well.”

In Red Moon, a multinational mission lands in the Sea of Crises on July 20th, 2019 (the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing). Led by American astronaut Janet Luckman, the crew searches for the Mother Lode, a subsurface cache of lunar ice laced with Helium 3, clean energy desperately needed by a dying Earth. Instead, Luckman stumbles across a manned Soviet lunar lander called Firebird resting in the spot where Luna 15 allegedly crashed. All trace of the craft’s pilot has vanished, save for the flight log revealing his name: Grigor Belinsky.

Back on Earth, a firestorm erupts as Russian and American authorities try to keep a lid on the Firebird discovery. Renowned astronomer Milo Jefferson flies to Moscow to investigate the mystery and soon unravels the story of Belinsky, a heroic cosmonaut blackmailed into flying a suicidal one-way mission to the moon in a desperate attempt to beat Apollo 11. But Jefferson quickly finds himself in a hall of mirrors created by the sinister genius who leads of Russia’s government, a man who will stop at nothing— even bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation—to conceal his role in Belinsky’s doomed mission.

Red Moon is published by Breakneck Books and can be purchased through Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and the Breakneck website, http://www.breakneckbooks.com. Authors David S. Michaels and Daniel Brenton are available for interviews and book signings by contacting them through their website, http://www.luna15.com.