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?
In: 14546
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.
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