There really was a race for the moon in the late 1960s. The Russians had a secret program to send a two-manned spacecraft combination to orbit the moon where one of the cosmonauts would land the LK (Lunniy korabl) and then return to rendezvous with the orbital spacecraft. The project was never realized because problems with the massive N1 booster were not solved before the Apollo 11 success.

This is the third in my series of real spacecraft. Except for the interior the mesh is finished. I still need to finish rigging the Poser figure and create the materials. Here are a couple of Poser toon renders.

what detail! Looking good!

Rigging complete. Some progress on cabin instruments:

Fabulous work!

The interior is complete. Now, the big job of texturing.

Ascent stage, partially textured:

A couple more partially textured views of the ascent stage:

Here's a view of the landing stage:

Nearly finished. Just some clean-up needed:

Really nice work. :)

The figure is essentially finished. Now on to the packaging and images for the market. Here's a view of the interior:

I've submitted the Russian LK Manned Lunar Lander to the Marketplace. Here's one of my test renders using a DAZ lunar moonscape:

Looking great. :) No seat for the astronaut though. Is he standing the whole way to the moon?

The LK lander like the Apollo LM, which was similarly cramped with similar arrangements and carried two astronauts, was used only to descend to and return from the moon. Photos of one mock-up show a sort of bench, but those of engineering versions do not. The LK lander was accompanied to the moon by the Soyuz 7-LOK, which was equivalent to the Apollo Command/Service Module and had more room as well as couches for two cosmonauts. Of course during most of the flight the cosmonauts would be weightless.

The LK is now available in the Marketplace: There is also an associated freebie of the Soyuz 7K-LOK Lunar Orbital Spacecraft, mentioned above, released under and compliant with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, based on the original mesh created by Fac-tory-o, available as a STL file in the Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the same license.