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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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.
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