Why did the former Soviet Union fail in the race to the Moon?

According to Izvestia, it was because the Soviet Union was not yet fully prepared, so it allowed the US to set foot on the Moon earlier.

The moon is not just an object in space. The Soviet Union was well aware of this in the early 1960s. The moon was a political arena. The Soviet Union also adopted the program to conquer the Moon. Funding for this program is much larger than reclamation programs. This program is conducted completely secretly, not mentioned in any special document. In August 1989, the new Izvestia newspaper revealed the Soviet "Moon" program for the first time.

The Moon subjugation program is the last " love affair " of Sergey space designer Korolev, who dreams of making an interplanetary journey. A group of Soviet astronauts, headed by Alessey Leonov (the first person to walk in space) is about to fly to the Moon.

Missile N1 (Photo: TTO)

The most difficult of the program is how to build a rocket that can bring astronauts to the Moon. The missile was named N1 with five floors, using kerosene and liquid oxygen. The first floor has 30 NK-33 engines, the second floor has eight NK-43 engines, the third floor uses four NK-39 engines, the fourth floor uses an NK-31 engine and the fifth floor uses dynamic RD-58 motor. This missile is considered to be equivalent to the US Saturn-V missile.

Suddenly, the genius designer Korolev died in 1966 , since then almost everything was stuck with the new master architect Vasily Mishin. From 1969-1972, the Soviet Union launched the missile test four times but failed, and failed to take off twice in the first two times, only to fly 50.1 seconds and 107 seconds and then explode. The failed space engineering tests are normal, and the US is equally ' scratched ' before bringing astronauts into space. When the time was born, designer Korolev also planned to design the N2 and N3 missiles to replace the N1 missiles, but not in time.

Anyway, these failures were the reason why the chief designer Vasily Mishin had to leave. The new boss, Valentin Glusko, is more impatient than his American rival in the moon subjugation program. Glusko decided to develop a space shuttle that is not a space shuttle, especially at that time the US had no shuttle fleet. But then the Soviet Union " gave up " and now the US has a shuttle that the Soviet Union does not have.

The more depressing is that the N1 missile has failed four times, now it is used by the US. Academics Nikolay Kuznetsov designed very powerful engines for N1. When the program conquered closed space, Soviet officials repeatedly demanded destruction. Nikolay Kuznetsov must hide his products in a hangar. Today Energomash Company sold the improved RD-170 engine to the United States. America used this best type of engine for its new missile program. This is Russia's most popular ' floating ' contract with the West for military technology.

Russia's Buran space shuttle program also repeated the tragedy of failure as the Moon exploration program. Why fail? These failures represent a weak economy. The Soviet Union lost the technical race to the Americans although the genius designers were Soviet. The United States spent $ 25 billion in Apollo 25, while the Soviet Union spent only about 4.5 billion rubles, according to unofficial sources.

Can blame the failure for weak management. In the Soviet Union, no agency has the same autonomy as NASA of the United States. There have been too many political reasons for scientists, not from real problems. Each head of the Soviet design work, in order to protect his plan, must find a high-ranking official to support him. There are also institutional issues that make it difficult to reach new approaches to science and technology.

GOOD