eli5: Why did Russia stop trying to go to the moon after the space race?
In: Technology
Space exploration didn’t begin and end with the moon race – there were Soviet missions to Mars and Venus, for instance, and the Soviets were the first to land an unmanned craft on Venus.
There was also the development of manned space stations.
While the space race did have a number of benefits including exploration and scientific development, it was fundamentally a political stunt. It was about showing off Soviet and American technological superiority at the height of the Cold War’s battle of ideology (Communism vs Capitalist Democracy).
Once the Americans succeeded the Soviets didn’t see the point in continuing because it was too expensive to continue the program. The Soviet Lunar program had faced a variety of technological challenges that they had yet to resolve, so continuing to spend gratuitous amounts of money on the program just to prove they could do it was seen as a wasted effort.
They didn’t have the required machinery and technology to do it, in addition the space race was extremely expensive and the budget was stretched enough as it was they couldn’t afford to spend any more money.
Going to the moon is super expensive! And the Russian’s never got their rocket to work
The US used the Saturn V rocket to be able to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon, and the US was diverting around 2% of their budget into NASA for several years to pull that off (4% from 64-66!)
The Russian N1 rocket started development later, didn’t have the same budget as the Saturn V, had its lead designer Sergei Korolev die during the process, and had a fundamental plumbing issue that kept it from successfully launching (though it did become the 9th largest accidental non-nuclear explosion! Whoops!)
Basically, going to the moon is stupid expensive and attempting to match the USA cost the USSR a ton of money that it desperately needed to divert back into programs at home. They did land several probes on Venus and Mars providing some of the only images we have from Venus, and their Soyuz spacecraft has remained important and is in use to this day ferrying people to/from the ISS.
Same why no one else is going there at the moment. There is currently no need for it. Russia focused more in other projects and is currently flying all the people to the ISS.
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