How Close Were the Soviets to Putting a Man on the Moon Before the U.S.?

In the first episode of the AppleTV series For All Mankind, the people of the world gather around their television sets in the summer of 1969 and watch in awe as the first human being sets foot on the moon. But in this reality, that human being is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, and his first words from the lunar surface are not “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, but “I take this step for my country, for my people, and for the Marxist-Leninist way of life, knowing that today is but one small step on a journey that will someday take us all to the stars.” From this shocking left turn in the historical timeline, the series diverges into alternative, supercharged version of the Space Race where neither side backed down or cut its space exploration budget, leading to the establishment of a permanent moon base in the 1970s, an orbiting space hotel in the 1990s, and a manned mission to Mars by the end of the century.

Given the astounding success and cultural impact of the Apollo lunar landing missions, it is easy to forget that the Space Race was, well, a race. But is the alternative timeline of For All Mankind realistic? Could the Soviets really have won the race to the moon? As was often the case throughout the space race, the Soviet approach to landing on the moon was in many ways very similar to NASA’s, but in others very different and sometimes even superior. But a combination of factors including lack of resources, political meddling, unfortunate design decisions, bad luck, and the untimely loss of a key technical figure ultimately conspired to cripple the Soviet lunar programme, allowing NASA to pull ahead and win the race to the moon. Here now is the largely forgotten story of the doomed Soviet moonshot.

In 1961, the year cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth, the Soviet Government made a series of public announcements about landing a man on the moon and establishing a permanent moon base. However, little work was done in this direction – at least at first. Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the OKB-1 design bureau, was far more interested in orbital space stations and manned missions to Mars and Venus. Such missions would require a launch vehicle with massive payload capacity in excess of 75 tons, so as early as 1959 Korolev had commissioned studies on a super-heavy booster that would eventually become the Soviet counterpart to the American Saturn V: the N-1. In May of 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced his country’s intention to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. But the Soviet response to this challenge was underwhelming. That same month, the Kremlin granted Korolev a small amount of funding to start N-1 development between 1961 and 1963, with the first launch anticipated sometime in 1963 or 1964. Keen to accelerate the project, in November Korolev appealed to the Strategic Missile Forces of the Soviet Army, pitching the N-1 as a super-heavy intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM capable of launching massive nuclear weapons like the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba tested the previous October – or up to 17 smaller warheads. However, the military saw little practical utility in the massive N-1, which could not be launched from a protected silo and was thus extremely vulnerable to an American first strike.

With the N-1 project mired in Soviet bureaucracy, Korolev proposed an alternate lunar mission based on the Earth Orbit Rendezvous profile. Instead of launching a lunar spacecraft all at once using one massive booster, the components would be launched aboard multiple smaller boosters and assembled in earth orbit before setting off from the moon. A similar mission profile was extensively investigated by NASA in the early days of the Apollo Programme, being heavily favoured by future designer of the Saturn V rocket, Wernher von Braun – and for more on this, please check out our previous video ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’ – How NASA Learned to Land on the Moon. Korolev’s proposed lunar spacecraft, known as the Soyuz A-B-C Circumlunar Complex, would be assembled from three modules derived from the multi-role Soyuz capsule then in development: the 2-man Soyuz 7K, and the unmanned Soyuz 9K booster and Soyuz 11K tanker. Each component would be launched using the Soyuz rocket, a development of the reliable R7 booster which had already launched Sputnik 1, Yuri Gagarin, and dozens of other payloads into space. Once the complex was assembled, the Soyuz 9K booster would fire, sending the whole assembly on a 7-8 day circumlunar mission. The manned 7K spacecraft would be fitted with cameras and other instruments, allowing the crew to study the lunar surface as they flew by.

In September 1963, Korolev developed an ambitious scheme for achieving a manned lunar landing, which involved three launches of the much larger N-1 rocket. After the spacecraft was assembled in earth orbit, a trans-lunar injection rocket stage would fire and send it towards the moon. 200 metres above the surface, a braking stage would fire to slow the assembly down before detaching, allowing the 5 ton spacecraft to descend the rest of the way, guided by a radio beacon aboard a robotic lunokhod rover landed ahead of time. Then, using variable-thrust descent engines, the spacecraft would make a soft landing on a set of tubular landing legs. On completion of the mission, a powerful ascent engine would propel the crew aboard their Soyuz L1 away from the surface and back towards the earth.

However, like the Americans, Korolev soon realized that his Earth Orbit Rendezvous scheme was extremely risky. For it to succeed, the multiple required launches and dockings would have to be conducted in extremely rapid succession, or else the three spacecraft modules would run out of consumables like oxygen and rocket propellant before they were ready to depart for the moon. Consequently, Korolev eventually opted for a version of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR approach also selected by NASA, in which a lightweight lander was used to ferry cosmonauts between the main spacecraft and the lunar surface.

Meanwhile, engineer Vladimir Chelomey, head of the rival OKB-52 design bureau, proposed a simpler mission profile using the single-man LK-1 capsule. This spacecraft would be launched directly on a lunar flyby mission using a UR-500 booster, assembled from a cluster of four UR-200 or SS-10 intercontinental ballistic missiles. This plan was later changed to use the brand-new UR-500 heavy booster design developed by Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Union’s chief designer of rocket engines. This design would eventually become the Proton family of rockets, still used to this day. Both Korolev and Chelomey aggressively lobbied for a manned lunar mission, but were largely met with apathy from the Kremlin. Finally, in August 1964 – more than three years after the United States announced Project Apollo – the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued Decree 655-268 – On Work on the Exploration of the Moon and Mastery of Space – officially greenlighting a manned lunar program. The effort was divided into two parallel projects: one headed by Chelomey with the goal of achieving a manned lunar flyby by the end of 1966, and the other directed by Korolev with the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of 1967. However, following a coup in October 1964 that saw Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev deposed and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, both projects were centralized under Korolev at OKB-1. For the flyby mission, Chelomey’s LK-1 was replaced with Korolev’s 2-man Soyuz 7K-L1 Zond or “probe” capsule, launched on a cislunar trajectory by Chelomey and Glushko’s UR-500 or Proton booster. Meanwhile, for the lunar landing mission, Korolev modified the N-1 design to increase its maximum payload capacity to 95 tons, allowing a 2-man Soyuz 7K-L3 or TOK capsule and 1-man LK lunar lander to be sent directly to the moon in a single launch.

But almost immediately, the various chief designers began to butt heads over the design of the N-1’s propulsion system. Korolev favoured conventional kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants, which were safer and provided higher specific impulse, while Valentin Glushko favoured a combination of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide or red fuming nitric acid oxidizer. These propellants, used in the American Titan II ICBM and several of Glushko’s previous missile designs like the R-16, are hypergolic, meaning they ignite on contact with each other. This eliminated the need for igniters and other components, making the engines simpler, lighter, and more reliable – but also greatly increased the risk of accidental fires and explosions – and for more on this, please check out our previous video When Dropping a Wrench Almost Caused Armageddon as well as Catastrophe: the Soviet Space Program’s Darkest Day over on our sister channel Highlight History. In testing, Glushko’s proposed hypergolic engine, the RD-270, achieved higher specific impulse than the Rocketdyne F-1 first-stage engines used on NASA’s Saturn V, but also encountered the same fundamental problem that plagued its American counterpart: combustion instability, uncontrolled vibration that could potentially shake an engine apart and destroy the rocket. This problem nearly killed the F-1 and the entire Apollo Programme until, at the last moment, Rocketdyne engineers devised a system of metal baffles on the propellant injector plates that finally brought the instability under control. Glushko faced the same daunting task, only without the benefit of a 4-year head start. For this and many other reasons, Korolev pushed aggressively for the adoption of more conventional kerosene/LOX engines.

The bitter rivalry between Korolev and Glushko also had a personal dimension. In 1938, at the height Stalin’s Great Purge, Korolev was arrested by the NKVD secret police, tortured, and convicted of various trumped-up charges, spending six years in a Gulag labour camp in Kolyma, Siberia, before being brought back West in 1939 to design aircraft for the Soviet war effort. Among the many figures who denounced Korolev to the Soviet authorities was Valentin Glushko – whom Korolev never forgave. With the two men at loggerheads and the N-1 project at a standstill, in 1962, a special government committee was formed to resolve the matter. While the committee ultimately sided with Korolev, Glushko refused to work with him or with kerosene/LOX engines and quit the project, returning to OKB 456 and going on to design a several successful heavy-lift rockets including the Proton, Zenit, and Energia.

Having lost Glushko, Korolev instead brought in jet engine designer Nikolai Kuznetsov from the OKB-276 design bureau to design the N-1’s propulsion system. Recognizing that large, powerful rocket engines like Glushko’s RD-270 were too prone to combustion instability, Kuznetsov instead proposed the smaller, more reliable NK-15 engines, each producing 1,735 kilonewtons or 394,000 pounds of thrust. However, achieving the thrust needed to launch the massive N-1 and its 95 ton payload to the moon required the use of no fewer than 30 NK-15 engines in the N-1’s first stage. To squeeze even more performance out of the first stage, Korolev and Kuznetsov split the engines into an inner ring of six and and an outer ring of 24 with a gap between them. Air was admitted into this gap through slots higher up on the stage to produce a modest thrust augmentation effect. This design also allowed the exhaust plume to adjust itself to the varying pressure as the rocket rose through the atmosphere, effectively producing a crude version of a so-called “aerospike nozzle.” However, keeping 30 engines running simultaneously required a fiendishly complicated fuel delivery and control system – a major achilles heel that would ultimately doom the entire project.

Finalized in October 1965, the N-1 stood 105 metres tall, had a first stage diameter of 17 metres, and a loaded mass of 2,750 metric tonnes – around 95% as large as the American Saturn V – yet each of its rocket stages produced more thrust and total impulse than the equivalent Saturn V stages. Indeed, with a total thrust of 45,400 kilonewtons or 10.2 million pounds, the N-1’s Blok A first stage stood as the most powerful rocket stage to ever fly until the first full-up test flight of the SpaceX Starship on April 20, 2023. Whereas the Saturn V had three stages – the S-IC, S-II, and S-IVB – the N-1 had four: the Blok A, B, V, and G. The first three stages were used to lift the payload into earth orbit, while the fourth Blok G stage was used to perform the Translunar Injection or TLI burn and send the spacecraft and its crew towards the moon.

However, all four stages of the N-1 were fuelled by kerosene and liquid oxygen while the Saturn V used liquid hydrogen and oxygen in its S-II and S-IVB upper stages, giving it a significant advantage in specific impulse. Further, the structural design of the N-1 was very inefficient, the propellant being stored in spherical tanks housed beneath conical fuselage sections. The Saturn V, by contrast, used cylindrical tanks with domed ends and shared bulkheads for the fuel and oxidizer, giving it a much larger propellant mass fraction. Consequently, despite its more powerful rocket stages, the N-1 could carry 95 tonnes of payload into low earth orbit compared to 119 tonnes for the Saturn V. Another notable difference between the two rockets was the guidance system; while the Saturn V used gimballed engine nozzles to steer, the N-1 used differential throttling of the engines as well as a set of fold-out grid fins on the first stage. Finally, while the Saturn V was assembled vertically in the Vertical Assembly Building or VAB at Cape Canaveral and rolled out to the launch pad using a special tracked Crawler-Transporter, the N-1, like all Soviet rockets, was assembled and transported horizontally before being erected onto the launch pad.

At the same time, however, the payload the N-1 was designed to carry was much more efficient than the American Apollo spacecraft. As covered in our aforementioned previous video ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’ – How NASA Learned to Land on the Moon, the Apollo Command-Service Module or CSM was originally conceived prior to the announcement of the Apollo Programme as a general-purpose spacecraft for a variety of roles such as ferrying crews to and from space stations as well as lunar flights. A three-man crew was selected to allow the spacecraft’s instruments to be continuously monitored in three eight-hour watches, while the size of the spacecraft and volume of consumables stored aboard were sized based on a 14-day mission – the maximum anticipated duration of a lunar mission. However, at the time of the spacecraft’s design, lunar missions were still seen as a far-off possibility, and little thought was given as to how the Apollo capsule would actually land on the moon. But when, in May 1961, the U.S. Government announced its intention to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the Apollo design found itself hastily pressed into service as America’s first lunar spacecraft. However, the spacecraft retained many design features which made it less than optimal for this role. For example, it was divided into two sections: the conical Command Module, which contained the crew cabin, heat shield, parachutes, and everything else needed to get the crew safely through the earth’s atmosphere and down to the ground at the end of the mission; and the cylindrical Service Module, which held the orbital maneuvering engine, thruster quads, fuel and oxygen tanks, communications gear, and all other equipment required for the rest of the mission. The conical shape of the Command Module was chosen for stability and controllability during reentry, but this shape, combined with the need to fit large amounts of critical equipment into a small space, left the astronauts with only 6 cubic metres of usable living space. Furthermore, the CSM’s electrical systems were powered by a set of hydrogen fuel cells which required large tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, further increasing its size and mass. These and various other design decisions resulted in a spacecraft weighing nearly 29 metric tons.

The Soyuz spacecraft, by contrast, followed a different design philosophy. Unlike Apollo, Soyuz comprised three modules. During launch and reentry, the 2 or 3-man crew sat in a cramped, hemispherical Descent Module, which contained only the equipment needed for those phases of the mission. This module was connected to a larger Instrument Module which, like the Apollo Service Module, contained the orbital maneuvering engine, fuel and oxygen tanks, manoeuvring thrusters, communications gear, and other mission-critical equipment. However, instead of fuel cells, the Soyuz was powered by fold-out solar panels, making the Instrument Module significantly lighter and more compact. Finally, upon reaching space, the cosmonauts could leave the Descent Module and enter the spherical orbital module mounted at the front of the spacecraft, which contained all the equipment not required for launch and reentry, including scientific experiments, rendezvous and docking gear, communications equipment, and a space toilet. These various design decisions resulted in a spacecraft with a full 9 cubic metres of living space and weighing only 5,000 kilograms – only as much as the Apollo Command Module alone!

But the Soyuz LOK could only get the cosmonauts to lunar orbit; to reach the lunar surface, they needed another vehicle: the Lunniy Korabl or “lunar craft”. While superficially similar to the Apollo Lunar Module or LM, the LK was in many ways substantially different. For example, while the Apollo LM was designed to carry two astronauts to and from the lunar surface, the LK only had room for one cosmonaut. Consequently, at 6 metres and 6,525 kilograms, it was only 85% as tall and 42% as heavy as its American counterpart. Unlike the LM, the LK also had no docking port or tunnel to allow cosmonauts to transfer over from the Soyuz. Instead, the top of the LK was fitted with the simple and rugged Kontakt docking system, consisting of a grid of 108 hexagonal holes. A matching hexagonal probe on the Soyuz LOK allowed the two spacecraft to dock without having to be precisely aligned. Once this was accomplished, one cosmonaut would don a Krechet lunar spacesuit, depressurize the Soyuz, and perform an EVA or “spacewalk” over to the LK. Once aboard, he would undock from the Soyuz and fire the Blok D rocket stage attached to the bottom of the LK, propelling him towards the lunar surface. At an altitude of 4 kilometres, the Blok D would fire again, slowing the LK to a speed of 100 metres per second before detaching. The LK’s Blok E engine would then fire, further slowing its descent. This stage actually consisted of two rocket engines: a main, one-chamber 11D411 engine and a backup two-chamber 11D412 – both burning a hypergolic mix of unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. This gave the LK a useful degree of redundancy; by contrast, if the ascent engine on the American Lunar Module failed, the astronauts would be doomed. However, due to the craft’s small size, the LK carried only enough fuel for 50 seconds of engine operation, giving the cosmonaut very little margin for error.

Throughout the descent, the LK would be automatically guided by its Planeta landing system, which used an array of four doppler radar antennae to measure the vehicle’s altitude and rate of descent. Further, ahead of the manned missions, the Soviets planned to land an unmanned LK-R spacecraft and a pair of robotic lunokhod rovers at the chosen landing sites. The rovers would carry radio beacons to further guide the LK to a landing while the LK-R provided the cosmonaut with a backup means of reaching lunar orbit if his spacecraft was damaged on landing. The lunokhods would also be fitted with manual controls to help transport the cosmonaut to the LK-R in an emergency or assist with general research and exploration work on the lunar system.

A major challenge which arose during the LK’s development was the design of its landing gear – the Lunnyi Posadochnyi Agregat or LPA. While three legs was the simplest and lightest configuration, it was also the least stable. Its designers thus opted for four legs – just like the American Lunar Module – but to further ensure a solid, stable landing, they also added a set of upwards-firing solid rocket motors that would fire just before touchdown, pressing the LK into the lunar surface and preventing it from bouncing or tipping over.

Having safely landed, the cosmonaut would depressurize the LK’s cabin, open the hatch, and climb down a short ladder to the lunar surface. Due to the spacecraft’s small size, it had only enough consumables for a brief 4-hour stay on the lunar surface, while the Krechet spacesuit only had an endurance of 1.5 hours. Further, there was little capacity for scientific instruments. For the first few landing missions, the cosmonaut could do little more than plant the Soviet flag, take some pictures, collect a few rock samples, and deploy a very limited array of scientific experiments before climbing back aboard the LK and blasting back into lunar orbit. Unlike the Apollo Lunar Module, which had separate descent and ascent rocket engines, the LK used the same Blok E stage to launch the cabin into lunar orbit, the LPU landing gear serving as a launch pad. Once in orbit, the cosmonaut would rendezvous and dock with the Soyuz LOK, spacewalk back over to rejoin his comrade, and jettison the LK before firing the Soyuz’s engine and returning to earth. Later plans called for a larger LK lander capable of carrying two cosmonauts as well as the establishment of a permanent moon base called Zvezda, comprising nine inflatable modules delivered separately and linked together on the lunar surface.

The design of the N-1, Soyuz LOK, and LK were finalized and ready for testing when the Soviet space program suddenly suffered a devastating blow. In December 1965, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev was diagnosed with a bleeding polyp in his large intestine and admitted to hospital for surgery. However, Korolev’s heart, weakened by his years in the Gulag, gave out during the procedure, and on January 14, 1966 he died without regaining consciousness. The Soviet space program had lost its main guiding light – a loss from which the lunar landing effort would never recover. Following Korolev’s death, his role at OKB-1 was taken over by his deputy, Vasily Mishin, who unfortunately lacked his former boss’s engineering genius and political astuteness. Nonetheless, work on the lunar programme continued. On November 28, 1966, the first unscrewed test flight of the Soyuz spaceflight was conducted under the designation Kosmos 133. While the launch was successful, the capsule’s attitude control system malfunctioned, sending it into an uncontrolled spin. After two days controllers finally succeeded in carrying out retrofire, but when it was determined that the spacecraft would likely land in China, it was self-destructed. A second unmanned spacecraft, designated Soyuz 7K-OK No.1, was supposed to rendezvous with Kosmos 133, but it was destroyed when its launch vehicle exploded on the launch pad. A third unmanned test flight, Kosmos 140, was conducted on February 7, 1967. After a largely uneventful orbital mission, the capsule descended at a higher-than-expected rate that would have been lethal to any human occupants before crashing through the ice of the frozen Aral Sea and sinking in 10 metres of water. Nonetheless, the mission was deemed a success and approval was given for the first manned test flight. This mission, Soyuz 1, was flown on April 27, 1967 by cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. However, due to dozens of unresolved design flaws and political pressure for the flight to coincide with the anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, the mission was plagued with problems and ended in Komarov’s death as his parachutes failed to deploy and his spacecraft slammed into the ground at 140 kilometres per hour – and for more on this, please check out our previous video The Most Disastrous Space Mission Ever Executed.
Following extensive modifications, the Soyuz space capsule was successfully tested during the Soyuz 3 mission, launched on October 26, 1968 and commanded by Georgy Beregovoy. Soyuz 3 was supposed to rendezvous and dock with the unmanned Soyuz 2 – demonstrating the capability that would be needed for manned lunar landing flight – but due to technical issues Beregovoy failed to achieve a successful docking. This would not be achieved until January 14, 1969 during the dual flight of Soyuz 4 and 5. After successfully docking, cosmonauts Aleksei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov donned spacesuits and spacewalked from Soyuz 5 to Soyuz 4, commanded by Vladimir Shatalov. Soyuz 5 commander Boris Volynov then returned to earth alone.

Meanwhile, with the American Apollo Program gathering momentum, the Soviets focused their efforts on achieving a manned circumlunar mission. To test the space worthiness of the Soyuz 7K-L1 lunar flyby spacecraft, a series of unmanned versions were launched on free return trajectories around the moon. The first of these missions, Zond 4, was launched on March 2, 1968. However, the spacecraft’s guidance system failed on reentry and it was self-destructed to prevent it landing outside Soviet territory. On September 14, 1968, Zond 5 carried two Russian tortoises and a variety of biological samples around the moon to test the effects of cosmic radiation. Eight days later the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Indian Ocean, where it and its occupants were successfully recovered. Amusingly, the Zond 5 mission also saw the execution of an elaborate space prank, as Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich later revealed:

“In the late 1960s we were getting ready for a flight around the moon. At the time we sent to the moon the so-called probes, the very same Soyuz spacecraft, but with no crews in them. Each one of such probes was to fly around the moon and return to Mother Earth. A major problem was for the probes to land. Of all probes only one landed safely. When we realized we would never make it to the moon, we decided to engage in a little bit of hooliganism. We asked our engineers to link the an-the-probe receiver to the transmitter with a jumper wire. Moon flight missions were then controlled from a command centre in Yevpatoria, in the Crimea.

When the probe was on its path round the moon, I was at the centre. So I took the mike and said: “The flight is proceeding according to normal’ we’re approaching the surface…” Second later my report – as if from outer space – was received on Earth, including the Americans. The U.S. space advisor Frank Bowman got a phone call from President Nixon, who asked “Why is Popovich reporting from the moon?” My joke caused real turmoil. In about a month’s time Frank came to the USSR, and I was instructed to meet him at the airport. Hardly had he walked out of his plane when he shook his fist at me and said: “Hey, you space hooligan!””

This was followed on November 10 by Zond 6, which carried a similar biological payload as well as various physics experiments. This was intended to be the final test flight before a manned circumlunar mission, but following reentry Zond 6’s parachutes failed and the spacecraft crashed to earth. One month later, Apollo 8 made the first manned flight to the moon, dashing the Soviets’ hopes of pulling ahead in the space race. And while two more successful Zond missions were flown on August 7, 1969, and October 20, 1970, by this time the Americans had already successfully landed men on the moon, eliminating any propaganda value these flights might have had.

Yet despite the Americans having all but won the space race, the Soviet lunar program carried on for a few more years. On November 24, 1970, the Soviets launched Kosmos 379 – an unmanned orbital test of the LK lunar lander. The mission was a success and was followed by Kosmos 398 on February 26, 1971, and Kosmos 434 on August 12, 1971, both of which confirmed the soundness of the LK design.

Meanwhile, development work was underway on the massive N-1 rocket that would carry the Soyuz LOK and LK to the moon. On November 25, 1967, the Soviets rolled a full-scale mockup of the N1, the Facilities Systems Logistic Test and Training Vehicle 1M1, out to the newly-constructed launch pad 110R at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to perform various handling and pad integration tests. This rollout was photographed by U.S. reconnaissance satellites, and may have convinced NASA officials to move up their timeline and launch Apollo 8 around the moon in December 1968. Indeed, the Soviets were planning to conduct the first N-1 launch by early 1968 and the first manned lunar flyby by the end of that year, but due to various technical difficulties the first N-1 launch did not take place until February 21, 1969. Unfortunately, the extreme complexity of the 30-engine first stage came back to haunt the designers when, a few seconds after liftoff, an electrical fault caused the automatic engine control system, known as KORD, to shut down to engines. This resulted in severe oscillations that broke several components loose and started a fuel leak and internal fire that prompted KORD to shut down the entire first stage 68 seconds into the flight. As a result, the rocket crashed to the ground just 52 kilometres from the launch pad.

The next test took place on July 3, 1969 – just two weeks before the launch of Apollo 11. Shortly after the rocket cleared the launch tower, the first stage suffered an explosion and all but one engine shut down, causing the massive rocket to pitch over and drop back onto the launch pad. The 2,300 tonnes of propellant aboard ignited, triggering a massive blast with an explosive yield of nearly 7 kilotons of TNT – half the power of the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion obliterated the launch pad, flung debris as far as 10 kilometres, shattered windows across Baikonur, and could be seen as far as 35 kilometres away. The failure was eventually traced to a liquid oxygen turbo pump for engine #8 which had exploded shortly after liftoff.

Pad 110R took 18 months to rebuild, and it was not until June 26, 1971 that another N-1 could be launched. But once again, the test ended in failure as the rocket began to roll uncontrollably, twisting itself apart and crashing just a few kilometres from the launch pad. For the fourth launch, conducted on November 23, 1972, the N-1 was fitted with a brand-new control system which used dedicated steering engines rather than varying the thrust of the main engines. At first, these modifications appeared to have worked, and liftoff and initial climb went smoothly. However, when, at T+90 seconds, the first stage centre engine cluster was automatically shut down, the abrupt loss of thrust created a hydraulic shock wave that caused multiple propellant feed lines to burst, starting a fire in the first stage, causing the rocket to break up and crash at T+110 seconds. In the wake of these failures, the N-1 program was temporarily suspended. A fifth test launch was tentatively scheduled for August 1974, but by this time political interest in a manned moon landing had all but evaporated, and in May 1974 the N-1 and the entire Soviet manned lunar program was finally cancelled. The whole project was officially classified and the remaining N-1 boosters and launch hardware at Baikonur dismantled in an effort to pass off the whole effort as a deliberate hoax designed to deceive the Americans. It was not until the late 1980s, when Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his policy of Glasnost or “openness”, that the existence of a Soviet manned lunar project was officially admitted.

As we have seen, due to a combination of a late start, political infighting, faulty designs, and plain bad luck, the Soviets were nowhere near placing a man on or even around the moon by the end of the 1960s. But had they succeeded in catching up with the Americans, who would they have sent? In 1966, the Soviets formed two groups of astronauts for lunar missions: the first would conduct qualification flights of the Soyuz LOK and LK lander in orbit and perform trans-lunar missions aboard Zond spacecraft launched by Proton rockets; while the second would actually land on the lunar surface. The first group was commanded by Vladimir Komarov and included first man in space Yuri Gagarin as well as Andriyan Nikolayev, Valery Bykovsky, Yevgeny Khrunov, Vladislav Volvov, Valery Kubasov, Vitaly Sevastyanov, Georgy Grechko, and Viktor Gorbatko. However, following Komarov’s tragic death aboard Soyuz 1, Gagarin was removed from the group and officially grounded for political reasons – and for more on this and Gagarin’s extraordinary life and career, please check out our previous video The Mysterious Death of Yuri Gagarin.

Meanwhile, the second group of cosmonauts was commanded by Alexei Leonov and included Pavel Popovich, Pavel Belyayev, Boris Volynov, Pyotre Klimuk, Oleg Makarov, Anatoli Voronov, Nikolai Rukavishnikov, and Yuri Artyukhin. As the most senior cosmonaut who, during the Voskhod 2 mission on March 18, 1965, and performed history’s first EVA or “spacewalk”, Leonov was the clear front-runner for the first cosmonaut to walk on the moon – so in this respect For All Mankind’s alternate history scenario is accurate.

By the time the manner lunar program was cancelled, the Soviets had already shifted their focus to other projects including the establishment of long-duration orbital space stations. The first of these, Salyut 1, was launched on April 19, 1971, and became history’s first occupied space habitat. This was followed by five more Salyut stations, of which three – Salyut 2, 3, and 5 – were actually top-secret military Almaz stations equipped with sophisticated espionage gear and even guns – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Has Anyone Ever Fired a Gun in Space? Plus: Space Cannons and the Guns Designed for Astronauts. The Salyut program was followed by the Mir space station, which operated from 1986 to 2001, and the Zarya and Zvezda modules of the International Space Station. The Soviet space program also carried out extensive explorations of the solar system using unmanned probes, including the Venera program which, in the 1970s, succeeded in landing on and taking pictures of the surface of Venus – the first time a human craft visited another planet.

But while the Soviet manned lunar program was largely a failure, it did leave one lasting legacy: the Soyuz spacecraft, which despite its initial teething problems soon proved itself to be an extraordinarily robust and reliable machine, with one of the best safety records of any space vehicle in history. Indeed, from the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle in 2011 to the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule on May 30, 202, the Soyuz was the only means for astronauts and cosmonauts to get to and from space. It also inspired the design of China’s first manned spacecraft, the Shenzhou, which made its first crewed flight in October 2003. So while the Soviets never succeeded in landing a man on the moon, their efforts did, as Alexei Leonov’s fictional quote states, make one small step on a journey that has led mankind to the stars.

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