Conspiracy Claims: The Soviet Space Programme was more advanced than the US one, but they never made it to the moon because it was impossible.

History Claims: The Soviets were slow in moving towards the Moon as a goal and then their moon program was continuously held back by a lack of funding, resources and infighting. They never managed to get faults out of their heavy lifter rocket and finally the under-funded and problem plagued program was scrapped so the resources could be used in the space station programme.

A Moon too Far...

Much is often made about the fact that the Soviet Space Programme started so far ahead of the US one, but never made it to the moon. While the previous pages should have shown up the Myth of this claim of early superiority for what it was, it still often makes one wonder why the Soviets failed to make it. Probably the best place to start with the Soviet Programme is back at the beginning. Unlike NASA who was looking towards the moon from 1958, the Soviets were more interested in getting men into orbit and setting firsts in Earth orbit. It wasn't until much later that the Moon became a goal. Even with NASA announcing the moon as their goal in 1960, and Kennedy's commitment in 1961, it would take another 3 years until August the 3rd, 1964, that the Soviet Government would finally concede that to keep in the Space Race they had to get to the Moon, and before the Americans. In this regard, Nikita Khrushchev stated to the leaders of the Soviet rocket industry, "Do not leave the Moon to the Americans. Anything you need in order to do it will be provided."

Unfortunately for the Soviets, Khrushchev was deposed on October 14th, 1964, and with him gone, so was the will to provide the resources that he had committed to the programme. A number of captains of the Aerospace industry began to fight with each other to lead the project and in doing so drained and stretched their already limited resources further. Their infighting left no one to convince the Soviet Military of the need for a true heavy lifter and so their resources began to be rationed even more. Add to this the splitting of the Soviet Space Budget into four different directions, the Unmanned Lunar missions, the unmanned planetary missions, the space station programme and the manned lunar programme and something was always going to suffer. In the end it was the Manned Lunar Programme that suffered most and with the death of the main Soviet rocket designer, Sergei Korolev, following complications after surgery in 1966, things went from bad to worse.

Without his expertise, the Soviets were never able to work out the problems that US had encountered with the creation of huge rocket engines. This meant that unlike the US, there was never a Soviet version of the F-1 Saturn V engine. Instead they had to develop their heavy lifter with a huge number of smaller rocket engines. This rocket was named the N-1 and had an incredible 30 rocket motors to power its first stage. Problems plagued its development, from lack of funding and resources meant that they were never able to fully test the engine array fully installed in the rocket before the test launches and this to having trouble controlling so many individual engines. With the N-1 proamme flaundering and the Soyuz program falling behind schedule, the Soviets could do little but watch helplessly as the American's Gemini programme surpassed them and then the Apollo Program launched.

Along with the N-1, two other craft were being developed for the trip to the moon, but without the N-1 these would be of little use. The LOK was a modified Soyuz capsule. Slightly elongated, the two man capsule would have the solar array removed and fuel cells added to power it. The second was the Soviet Lander, the LK. Much smaller that NASA's LM, it had no tunnel so the Cosmonaut would have to do a space walk to and from the Lander. It was also only a one man craft, rather then the two man system of the US. Most of this was because of the N-1. While its theirty engines provided more thrust than than the the Saturn-V's five F-1 engines, the heavier structure of the N-1 meant that it was only able to lift 70% the mass of payload and so the Soviet Lunar Craft had to be lighter than those used by the Americans.

Dispite pleadings by the Soviet Cosmonauts to use the Proton system to let them beat the US to a manned Lunar Flyby, and the apparent success of the unmanned, biological sample carrying Zond 5, the Soviet Leaders refused to consider a way other than the N-1, a position that was reinforced by the failure of the Zond 6 mission. However with so many delays in construction, it was to take until early in 1969, an entire month after Apollo 8 had orbited the Moon, before the first N-1 Heavy-lifter Rocket even made its way to the Soviet launch site. On February 21st, 1969, the N-1 made its maiden flight. Everything seemed good, until 68 seconds into the flight when the rocket motors suddenly went disastrously out of synchronization, causing a massive explosion that destroyed the rocket. The N-1 was a failure, and with the US posed to test out their Lunar hardware on Apollo 9 and 10 in the following months, the Soviets knew they were now unlikely to beat the Americans to the Moon. On July 3rd, 1969 came the second test for the N-1. There has been a lot of speculation that this rocket in fact carried a LOK which was to take a pair of cosmonauts to the Moon. It is belived that once the LOK was in orbit, the Soviets were to launch three Cosmonauts to meet it, with two crossing over to the LOK in orbit before heading to the Moon. This idea would mean that they would counter some of the victory that the USA would gain by landing in Apollo 11, which was to launch a few days after. Whether it really did or not will probably remain unknown however, because as the rocket launched, a bolt come loss and fell into one of the central engines causing it to cut out. The rocket lost power and it fell back onto the pad, destroying much of the launch complex in the resulting conflagration. With the second and most spectacular failure of the N-1, the Soviets had indeed lost the race to the Moon. Within the month, Apollo 11 was launched and successfully landed on the Moon, and then to add further humiliation to the Soviet cause, their first unmanned lunar sample return lander, Luna 15, crashed into the Moon's surface, its mission to beat the US with a sample return, a failure also.

This point was the lowest for the Soviet Lunar programme. Their N-1 was a total failure and even their unmanned programme had let them down. To make things worse, all they could do was listen in to and watch intercepted TV and radio signals as their opponents did what they could only dream of. Many would not have blamed them for cancelling their programme there and then, but while they would now be second, they were determined to make it and so they once more returned to the drawing board and fixing the N-1.

It was to be over a year before the next success in the Soviet Lunar programme would come. On November 24th, 1970, the first launch and unmanned test of the LK was performed. A few days later the D-Block Booster Rocket, the upper stage of the N-1 Rocket, was successfully launched into orbit by using a proton rocket, and unlike its first test a year earlier, this time the rocket that was to propel the LOK and LK stack to the Moon, fired flawlessly. Things were really looking up for the Soviet Lunar Programme, and in February of 1971 they accomplished a second successful launching and test of the LK. All the components were ready for the Soviet assault on the moon, except one. The N-1 was still yet to be tested successfully.

On June 27th, 1971, the third testing of the N-1 came. The rocket launched, but once again it was unstable, and just 50 seconds into its flight the rocket's uncontrollable roll meant that the range master had to destroy it. Once more the Soviet lunar missions were on the edge of a knife. With the Earth orbital missions and Space Station now well established and working almost flawlessly, the continual failure of the N-1 was putting more and more pressure on the Soviet Government to call an end to the Lunar Programme. With the pressure growing to get it right, the Soviets launched a third and final test LK, once more the craft performing perfectly, but this was to bring only a short reprieve. On November 23rd, 1972, came the final launching of the Lunar N-1. Though it lasted longer then the previous three flights, this one too suffered from the instabilities of the numerous engines, and only 107 seconds into its flight the rocket suffered a catastropic failure caused by it experiencing serious pogo oscillation. The failure caused the second stage of the rocket to rupture, destroying it in a massive blast. This failure was the last straw, and so the Soviet Lunar programme would not go out with a whimper as the US's would just a month later, but rather in the flames and explosion of a failure they could not solve, the N-1 heavy lifter.

With its funding slashed and given to the Space Station Programme, the Lunar Programme did limp on for a little over a year, continuing to train the Cosmonauts for a lunar mission, but early in 1974 this too was stopped. Its leader, Vasily Mishin, was ousted as a head of the industrial conglomerate responsible for the project and the Soviet Government ordered all of the remaining Lunar equipment be broken up, and the programme covered up. Though it was to be a claim that never really fooled the west, the official Soviet line for the next 17 years would now be that there was never a Race to the Moon because they had never planned on going there.