”Socialism is our launching pad!” declared this poster by Valentin Viktorov from 1962, one year after Yuri Gagarin ushered in the age of human spaceflight with his solo Vostok 1 mission. (Courtesy Russiatrek.org)
Uh, I think I found yer problem, Capt. Buckeroo-inski.
From Asif Siddiqi at Air & Space Magazine: "Even with a late start, cosmonauts might still have made the first lunar landing. But by the end of 1968, it was game over."
Simply put, the USA got the best of the German rocket scientists after WWII. With the introduction in the mid-1960s of the very successful family of Saturn rocket lauch vehicles for the USA, coupled to a series of explosive lauchpad disasters for the Soviets, it wasn't long before the clear winner in the space race to the moon emerged. Moreover, the communist Soviet Union was going broke over an arms race against its capitalist enemy, the USA.
I like Siddiqi's article for its informative, 'inside-baseball' examination of the former Soviet space program. It lays bare the polit-bureau fustercluck of that old communist regime which was / is antithetical to the creativity, innovation, cooperation, and efficiency required to make a new technology successful and economical.
Siddiqi continues:
"In a market economy, the loser of a design competition is expected to move on. In the Soviet space program, that didn’t happen. Glushko had influential friends in the Communist Party and allies in the space program. He partnered with a fellow usurper, Vladimir Chelomei, who oversaw a giant conglomerate of firms that designed ICBMs and cruise missiles. In 1967, when Korolev’s N-1 program was moving full-steam ahead, Glushko and Chelomei managed to secure approval from the Politburo to mount a parallel project, known as the UR-700, to compete with Korolev’s moon rocket. It was as if a NASA contractor refused to accept that it lost out to another firm, and just kept going with its own version. Although the UR-700 was canceled soon after, such cases—and there were many in the Soviet space and missile programs—dissipated badly needed resources."
A great read as we come up to the 50th anniversary of the successful Apollo 11 lunar landing of July 20, 1969. More photos at the link, too.
