Extravehicular transfer in Soviet moon plan | Mission Planning Workgroup | Forum

An interesting find:  I was reading the Wikipedia article on the Soviet's planned lunar lander and I noticed that "It had no docking tunnel like the LM's; the cosmonaut had to space walk from the LOK (Soyuz 7K-L3) Command Ship to the LK and back".  The LK was apparently tested several times in Earth orbit – the article does not explicitly say that this testing included an EVA from the Soyuz to the LK, but one would have to assume that it did.  This provides something of a precedent for our extravehicular transfer plan, which is reassuring.  I was worried that it was a risky thing to make an integral part of our plan, but apparently it can and has been done.

The LK had a few other similarities to our proposed plan, although they are fairly superficial: it carried a crew of one, as opposed to Apollo's two, and it used the same engine for ascent and descent instead of Apollo's two-stage lander.  It's a shame the Soviet moon plan is not better publically documented.