Eli5: why was the US the first to make it to the moon despite the USSR being first in nearly everything else in the Space Race?
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With the exception of Sputnik, all of the Soviet “firsts” were the result of the relatively low level of technical complexity involved and the fact that the US publicly announced launch dates months in advance of the actual launch, whereas the Soviet Union didn’t.
The Soviets would just wait for the US to announce a launch date for something, then make sure that their own launch date was earlier. Sometimes this involved doing risky and/or technically useless things. A good example of this is the Soviet Voshkod program, which beat Gemini to the first multicrew mission.
To beat Gemini, the Soviets just stuck an extra two seats into leftover crew modules from their single person Vostok missions and, viola, they now had a multicrew spacecraft. But the Voshkod modules didn’t represent any new development in anything – to free up space they removed the abort module and the crew couldn’t wear space suits, so any problem – even a minor one – would have resulted in the entire crew dying. So the Voshkod modules were just objectively worse Vostok modules that let them stick 3 people in orbit and call it a win over the purpose built Gemini modules.
Low Earth Orbit missions – particularly short duration ones being flown during the early space race – have a relatively low technical complexity because you’re just sticking a person inside of small metal box and the putting that on top of an ICBM and that was very much what early spacecraft were.
The Apollo missions were a big departure from that – they were real spaceships that had to be able to land on the moon, take off again, then land back on Earth – all using only stuff that they could bring with them on a single rocket (and to do that, the Saturn-V had to be a lot more complex than the repurposed ICBM’s that both countries were using prior to that). Also they had to do all of that while keeping their crew alive in deep space for a week.
Doing all of that stuff required a level of technical sophistication that the Soviet Union never came anywhere close to achieving, which is also why the moon landing is considered the most meaningful first.
The early space programs of both the US and Soviet Union were just outgrowths of their ICBM program. Both countries realized that warheads weren’t the only thing they could put on an ICBM – they could also put satellites and people. So they just went ahead and did that for the free PR, but any country with an ICBM program could have done that and, again, the Soviet “firsts” were largely the result of them deliberately not publicizing their launch dates so they could set them earlier than the US.
The moon landing, on the other hand, was a monumental technological achievement that had relatively little overlap with any pre-existing military program. The only country that could have done it was the US – even if you had given the Soviets another 20 years to put a person on the moon, its unlikely that they would have been able to do so. And the Soviets were the only country other than the US to have a meaningful manned space program during the Cold War. When the US was putting people on the moon and the Soviet Union was putting people in space, Europe was still trying to figure out how to build rockets and the rest of the world was even further behind.
edit: I think the best way to understand this is to look at the question that both space programs were trying to answer with their respective firsts:
The Soviet Space Program was trying to answer the question: how can we frame something that can already be done as a victory over the US?
The US Space Program was trying to answer the question: how can we do something that no one thinks is possible to do?
The two countries had different strengths. (ELI5). The US probably always had the lead in terms of the computation and communications end of things, essentially better electronics (simply because most of it was invented in the US). The USSR was pretty good at rocketry and airplanes (although the US was no slouch).
Getting something into orbit is primarily about having a big enough rocket if you didn’t really care much about how long that thing had to stay in orbit. This is oversimplifying things of course.
Getting something to the moon, though, has a great deal more to do with the controls, communications and computation.
Because the Soviet “firsts” weren’t really what you think.
The United States set the schedule for the entire “space race.” From the first satellite launch to the last Moon landing, it all went according to a schedule that the US worked out years in advance.
Actually there wasn’t even a space race at first, because nobody knew there was anyone else aside from the United States even trying to get into space.
This may sound strange to you, as you look back on “the timeline of the space race” or whatever, but that is the distorting effect of hindsight. In the mid-1950s, the US started talking about launching an artificial satellite into Earth orbit by 1957. What you have to understand is that at that point, there was no race. There was no competition. People wondered if the Americans could do it or not, but aside from that, that’s all there was.
As the US effort to launch a satellite encountered some very public delays, failures, and catastrophes, the expected launch by 1957 started to seem unlikely. The US started to say that it might not be until 1958. But it was still kind of an, “Oh okay” thing for most people.
And then out of the blue, with literally no warning whatsoever, the Soviet Union announced they had launched a satellite first, in 1957, beating the original American deadline. (Even though the Americans by then had given up on that deadline for their own reasons.)
Their satellite did nothing except go “beep, beep, beep.” It was a complete troll. An “in b4” hack. But it beat the Americans to the “first” claim. And it had come out of nowhere, with no failed launches, no explosions, no nothing. By a country that had only a few years ago been on the brink of total devastation. The Soviets seemed like they had done it effortlessly on the first try.
Of course they hadn’t, they had labored greatly in secret, exploding many times, failing many times, sometimes tragically, but always in total secrecy so no one would know. The Soviets watched the American effort, copying, stealing, tinkering, improving, whatever it took — basically what we’d today call “disruptive” or “agile” or “just in time” development.
And after Sputnik they continued. The US started talking about sending people to the Moon — a long-term plan of breathtaking scope that started of course with first figuring out how to get people into orbit. The US plan was public knowledge at every step of the way, and the Soviets used each of the US deadlines to springboard their own attempts at the same thing.
So for example, when the US was talking about training women for the Apollo mission, the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova up. When the US was talking about needing astronauts to spacewalk for an early Apollo concept, the USSR did a spacewalk first. Why? The Soviets didn’t really care. Their own ideas for space achievement didn’t involve women or spacewalks or even necessarily Moon landings. They were just focused on how to achieve American milestones faster than the Americans.
The end result was that the Soviets were not really in command of a complete set of technologies that could be used to successfully execute a Moon landing. They had copied a bunch of stuff but at the expense of their own, integrated, focused goals. This became even worse for the Soviets when Korolev died. The Soviets had all the pieces, but they couldn’t get it all together.
Looking back on it historically, people tend to talk about the “space race” as if it were some random thing, spastically jumping around from one random technological achievement to another, accidentally ending up with a Moon landing at the end. Gosh, what a surprise!
Of course that’s not how it was. The Moon landing came after a nearly ten year plan during which every new technical capability that might be needed was tested and evaluated, all as part of a single, overarching plan. To simply cherry-pick certain parts of that process and describe them as a “race” as though no one knew what was happening, just that they were racing, is to totally misunderstand how it worked in the end.
Ironically, or maybe not, that was the Soviets’ own mistake, too, in thinking that it was just some herky-jerky process and at the end a Moon landing would pop out like toast from a toaster.
You could say that the whole of the American space program was greater than the sum of its parts. And the Soviets, by focusing on the parts, thought they were advancing faster, but they never really stitched it into a whole. The Soviet achievements were truly, legitimately astonishing, and may even have encouraged the Americans to move faster through rivalry. But… they were fundamentally operating a different kind of space program.
The main reason is that russia didn’t have a facility with test chambers large enough to test really big engines. So they did not have the capability to develop massive engines like the 5 F-1s powering the Saturn V rocket first stage.
Lacking that infrastructure, and not likely to get such a facility built in the near future, the russian space program decided to go for a rocket using a very large number of smaller engines. Which was a really bad idea in retrospect. Putting 30 NK-15 engines on the first stage was honestly just asking for failure (given that you’re sitting on a slowly exploding bomb and everything has to work perfectly, rocket launches tend to fail often enough when just using a very small number of engines). The subsequent launch failures of the N1 rocket first stage, led to the russian space program falling behind to a degree that they couldn’t catch up.
The Nk-15 engine would be developed into the extremely powerful NK-33 engine (using a closed-cycle combustion that was decades ahead of US rocket design and leading to interest in the engine as late as the early 21st century). The thrust-to-weight ratio and specific impulse is disgustingly high for a rocket with its design origin in the 1960s, and when used in relatively small numbers it used to be a relatively reliable engine. Modern engines are better (like for example the merlin engine on the Falcon heavy), but modern engines are designed using tools and experience that the first rocket programs never had.
The death of Sergei Korolev in 1966 put a major dent in the Soviets expertise in rocket development .
The Space Race put the space agencies of both countries under intense pressure, but the Soviets decided the make their milestones coincide with anniversaries of major events in the USSR’s history, such as Lenin’s birthday or the Revolution. They didn’t actually think about what was needed to be done, they set a time frame that had no real bearing on how long it would take and told the engineers, ‘get it done.’ The result was a lot of failures on the launchpads, but these weren’t reported. The Soviets only reported their successes, and they usually had a great cost hidden behind them. Technically, Yuri Gagarin’s flight doesn’t even count as the first ‘space flight’ because he parachuted out of his capsule rather than land with it, but the Soviets told the world for decades that he had. Most of their other ‘firsts’ were really just small evolutions of the same. They did have a Moon landing program, but it had all those same time-pressure problems – they had to beat the Americans – and worse, their most senior rocket engineer and designer, Sergei Korolev, died unexpectedly in the mid-60s. His successors didn’t have his reputation or political clout to get the same level of funding; the Soviet leadership expected continuing miracles, but didn’t give them the time or money to actually do it. There was a lot of infighting in the USSR’s leadership, lots of people trying to argue for their own projects instead of there being one primary project. Despite all those firsts, the Soviet space program wound up in a series of childish squabbles and slowed down.
Kennedy set a looser time frame – rather than matching the Soviets, they would leap-frog them instead, by the end of the 60s. NASA was also rushing, and they made major foul-ups. The loss of Apollo 1 with 3 astronauts in 1967 made them take notice of how badly the pressure was affecting them. The result was that they took a step back and decided they had to do it the right way, no cutting corners to meet deadlines. Getting to the Moon is a much, much bigger technical achievement than anything in Low Earth Orbit, where the Soviets had focused their efforts – in LEO, all you really have to do is go up really fast and you’ll make orbit, but going to the Moon, you have to calculate the orbits of both the Earth and the Moon intersecting, it’s a lot further away and so you have to design the spacecraft to carry enough supplies, and when you’re out there, you’re all alone. Nowhere is this more evident than the Apollo 13 mission – against all odds, the engineers brought all 3 astronauts back alive. The spacecraft had been heavily re-engineered after Apollo 1, and this contributed to the rescue.
All you really have to do is look at the rockets used for both countries’ Moon programs – the Saturn V remains the most powerful, reliable and biggest operational rocket (SpaceX is only now beginning to go bigger). Every launch of the Saturn V was a success. It was exceptionally well engineered with incredible attention to detail, thoroughly tested, and even unexpected failures were accounted for (Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during launch and caused strange problems, but flipping one switch made backup systems take over and the mission continued successfully). Every component was tested to destruction. It was built with the philosophy of ‘this HAS to work.’
By contrast, the Soviets had the N1 rocket, and it was a dismal failure. All 4 test launches failed spectacularly – the second launch crashed back onto the launchpad, and the fully fuelled rocket was obliterated by the explosion. It levelled the launchpad. It was rushed and had severe design flaws – it wasn’t well tested and those flaws only became obvious when they put the whole rocket together to launch it. The Soviet leadership again wanted the program to reach the moon for an anniversary, rather than when the rocket was actually ready. It was built with the philosophy of ‘this HAS to launch.’
The reason the US had to ‘win’ the Space Race was because this was the height of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons became smaller, and no longer needed slow airborne bombers to deliver them; they could be put on a missile and fired quickly, which meant if the other side decided to try a first strike, there would be literal hell to pay for it. Nukes became a deterrent, but early missiles were a disaster. They had to be accurate enough to threaten major cities, and reliable enough to survive the launch. Both countries used their space programs to develop the technologies needed to do this. Again, going into Earth orbit is relatively easy, and for a missile, what goes up, must come down. The trouble was, it was incredibly hard to pick an accurate re-entry point. By putting a man on the Moon, the US was essentially telling the USSR, ‘we can target any spot we like on Earth, and we will hit it.’ They basically picked a point over 250,000 miles from Earth and landed safely on it, which is over 10x the diameter of the planet.
Unfortunately, with that done, the US government drastically cut NASA’s budget and space firsts dramatically slowed after that. It’s said that if NASA funding had continued at its 1969 level, we’d have a Moon base and be on our way to Mars by now.
In 1961 John F. Kennedy picked a goalpost the US could win: “landing a man safely on the moon and returning him to earth safely.” Before that speech, he asked his advisers what the US could be first at. So, part of it was picking the right finish line.
As others here have said, it was due to the US’ ability to develop complex technical things, like guidance, communications and life support systems. The Russians were good at building ICBMs.
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The main guy in charge of the Soviet space program was named Korolov. He died before the moon race really kicked off but was very much responsible for the other achievements. When he died there was no one even remotely close to operating at his level. Took them a good long while to get back on track.
That was part of it.
Lots of “US announced first” on here but it has to do with miniaturization as well. The US was all in on getting rocket based nukes on subs and making the warheads smaller. The USSR was more into bigger booms and larger rockets. When it came to building an ICBM, the Soviet R7 could lift 5500kg into low earth orbit and the Vostok could do around 5000kg. The US had the Juipter (non LEO), the Juno/Vanguard rockets (12kg to LEO) and a year later the SM-65 Atlas (1,100kg) Basically, the US had the more advanced and lighter warheads while the USSR had the bigger rockets.
1. Death of Sergei Korolev
2. USA didnt pick a random goal, they picked the goal that they believed we had the best chance of winning.
3. Russia continued to divide their efforts on a variety of projects with conflicts among the different design bureaus whereas USA solely and jointly focused nearly exclusively on the Apollo Moon Landings.
4. Money and Resources. USA just had more of both.
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