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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A lot of answers here already but I’m not seeing a few important points I think so here goes.
Many of the initial Soviet successes were enabled by the fact that their first ICBM, the R7, was simply so large. The earliest Soviet warheads were very heavy, so up front they began with a massive rocket to carry them. The earliest American ICBMs were far smaller, as the nuclear program was further along, and the warheads much lighter. Everything up through voskhod fit in lightly modified R7s. Us went through redstones, atlas, and titan boosters in that time, all while developing the Saturn in the background. The Soviets got started a bit late by comparison on their moon rocket, with serious development in the N1 only beginning in 1965. Then in 1966, they lost Korolev. He was like their von Braun, Chris Kraft and James Webb all in one, and his death severely derailed their entire space program.
Another overall factor is disunity in the Soviet scientific community. The various design bureaus are all competitive, and trying to sabotage each other. In particular, Korolev had a very understandable beef with Glushko, for having denounced him and landed him in a gulag for years. This is thought to have contributed to his early death as well. Besides that though both Glushko and Chelomei had totally different moon programs in mind, and they never got all 3 to cooperate effectively. Nasa and its contractors were much more united and cooperative around the development of Apollo.
When I was in 2nd grade, we had this class project where we would build a tower out of straws. One other team in the class built upwards as fast as they could. They would go straight up from wherever they were, and if one part started to slouch or tip over they’d fix that part and then go back to going straight up. Our team made sure that everything was solid; we had a good, consistent, repeatable design of cubes with cross beams. We wouldn’t built the next layer unless the current layer was strong. The other team was the first to 2 feet, then the first to 3 feet, then the first to 4 feet, but at some point the fact that their entire tower was half measures meant that they couldn’t add anything to the top; regardless of what they added to the top, their entire everything was too weak to just reinforce one or two parts of it. The best way for them to make progress was to throw everything away and start over from scratch. So our team was the first to 5 feet.
Von Braun’s personal mission was to colonize Mars; the official mission of the US space program was to land a manned mission on the Moon. The mission of the Soviet space program was to beat the US space program at everything.
The US had smaller (in terms of size and weight) nukes than the Soviet Union did. This meant that the US ICBMs were much smaller than Soviet ICBMs. When it came to converting ICBMs into space science vessels, the Soviet Union were already a step ahead. The R-7 was an *enormous* ICBM. So Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, etc were all launched on R-7s.
The US knew they’d need a large crew and some sort of orbital rendezvous to make a moon landing work. So they built the larger Gemini mission that could support two people. The Soviet Union wanted to beat the US to a multiple crewed mission, so they took their single person R-7, removed a bunch of stuff (including some essential life support systems) and put another person in it. The USSR did beat the US to that milestone. The US mission was a stepping stone but not a milestone; the Soviet mission was a milestone but not a stepping stone.
The US had to learn how to rendezvous two spacecraft in order to make the moon mission work. So they set out to start doing that. The Soviet Union wanted to beat them, so they launched one R-7 to orbit, waited for the orbit to line up with the ground station, and launched another R-7 into an identical orbit. They were able to get within 3 miles of each other, at which points their orbits diverged; bada bing, bada boom, rendezvous! US beaten. But the US needed to actually connect them together. Remember the larger Gemini capsules? It also had substantially more fuel for maneuvering. So Gemini 6 and 7 were able to maneuver to within a few feet of each other and stay there for 20 minutes. Gemini 8 had the docking adapter and was able to actually connect to another spacecraft.
The US knew they’d need an absolute monster of a rocket to land on the moon, so they started designing the F-1 engine in 1957 and the Saturn V in 1962. The engine and the rocket were absolute fucking monsters, totally in excess of the needs of the time. The US hadn’t even launched a thing into orbit in 1957 when the F-1 first hit the drawing board. The Soviets didn’t see the need for a rocket that big; there was no milestone for ‘big rocket’ to beat the Americans to, and the R-7 was fine, so they didn’t build one.
By 1965, it was clear that the next milestone after rendezvous was the moon, so focus turned to that. The US was already almost done building the Saturn V. And the Soviet Union looked to scale the R-7 up again, but–it wouldn’t work. The R-7 was already as big as it could get with the technology of the day. So they had to throw away everything and try to rebuild from scratch with the N-1. The N-1 hit the drawing board in 1965. The Saturn V would have its first launch in 1967. The N-1 prototype hit the launch pad in 1969 and exploded shortly after takeoff. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th and final launch attempts also failed. It was just too rushed.
Basically the US thought of space as a series of stepping stones; each thing has to be in service of the *next* thing. The Soviet Union thought of the space race as a series of milestones; each thing has to be the first. It’s just a philosophy that doesn’t engender itself to a decades long space exploration program.
Derivatives of the R-7 still fly today, by the way. The Soyuz, the workhorse of the Russian space program, is an R-7 derivative.
An interesting historical irony is that the Soviet space program shifted to compartmentalized labs who were competing with one another while the US program was collaborative and centralized.
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