this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024

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submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 4 days ago (1 children)

...and we only did it because there was a dick-waving contest between two nations.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Soviets had no interest in going to the moon (yet) and were more focused on living in space before going outside earth's orbit. The US was waving it in public on its own

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

The US wanted to beat the Soviets at space, and the reality was when it came heavy lifting rockets the soviets were way, way ahead. The moonshot was a different problem that would require a different solution than simply "bigger rocket," so the US made that the goal. They weren't sure they could beat the Russians to the moon, but they knew they couldn't beat them in a lifting contest for something like a space station.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Impressive rewriting of history.

I guess the N1 was never built, right?

[+] [email protected] -16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Not seeing how building a rocket to compete with Saturn V means they were also racing to the moon

From the references of the wiki article on the N1 rocket

https://web.archive.org/web/20161031200800/http://www.starbase1.co.uk/pages/n1-project-history.html

Salyut and Mir prove the Soviet's focus was on manned missions in low earth orbit and not the moon, and considering nobody has gone back to the moon since they've made the right call

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You don't need anything that powerful for earth orbit. Salut and Mir launched on much less ambitious rockets. They became the focus after the moon race was decided.

Wikipedia

The N1-L3 version was designed to compete with the United States Apollo program to land a person on the Moon, using a similar lunar orbit rendezvous method. The basic N1 launch vehicle had three stages, which were to carry the L3 lunar payload into low Earth orbit with two cosmonauts. The L3 contained one stage for trans-lunar injection; another stage used for mid-course corrections, lunar orbit insertion, and the first part of the descent to the lunar surface; a single-pilot LK Lander spacecraft; and a two-pilot Soyuz 7K-LOK lunar orbital spacecraft for return to Earth.

You build an N1 or Saturn V to go to the moon.

Had the N1 launched without incident, the Soviets were on target to get a man on the moon first. When the Soviet Union fell all the details of the program became available.

[+] [email protected] -18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So if they were racing the US to the moon why didn't they also publicly proclaim their intent to go to the moon? They rejected the race, tried to make a Saturn V, didn't work, moved on. Hardly seems like a race to me

From the references in that same wikipedia article you're referencing, the one I linked in my comment:

"On June 23, 1960 the USSR gave the go ahead to the N-1 project via a decree: "On the Development of Powerful Launch vehicles, Satellites, Spacecraft, and Space Exploration 1960-1967". This was Sergei Korolev’s design for a family of launchers, the key one being the largest, the N-1.

This initial design while a powerful heavy lift rocket, had a planned payload capacity of 75 tonnes - a lot less than that for a lunar landing mission. Korolev was thinking flyby missions of Mars, which require a much lighter payload."

Why is it so hard to accept the moon landing was just pompous Americanism?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago

The whole thing was about national pride on both sides. The soviets didn't admit they were striving for the same thing because they never wanted to be seen to lose. Their pattern was always the same:

They didn't say they were working towards having the first satellite. They just announced it when they were successfully.
They didn't say they were working towards having the first living animal in space. They just announced it when they were successfully.
They didn't say they were working towards having the first man in space. They just announced it when they were successfully.
They didn't say they were working towards having the first man on the moon. They just denied it when they were unsuccessful.

However, the Soviet lunar program was confirmed many years after the fact under Gorbachev's policy of Glastnost when the Soviet Union fell. The Soviet Lunar program is fact. Their lunar landers were built just months after the US. Some still exist. There's one on loan for display at Disneyland in Paris. I've seen another at the London Science Museum. Russia loans them out to show how advanced they were at the time. To take pride in what they accomplished, and rightly so.

This is all very public, yet you're trying to convince me that 50yo face saving propaganda is the truth?