Soviet Union: five reasons to miss the moon
After the launch of Sputnik in 1957 - which had a devastating impact on the morale of
the West - the United States collected what seemed to be the final defeat on April 12,
1961, when Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) aboard Vostok 1 flew around the Earth for the first
time.
It was a huge media success for Soviet technology and America was annihilated.
But there was immediately a reaction.
Just a week later, on April 20, President John Kennedy (1917-1963) wrote to his deputy
Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973), who was also head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council
at the time, asking him to identify a space endeavor that would restore pride and prestige
to the country.
Asked about it, the director of NASA's space flight center, Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977),
proposed to attempt the human exploration of the Moon: a great feat that would take
about a decade, so far enough in time to make up lost ground.
Thus, on May 25, 1961, Kennedy announced to Congress the USA's firm intention to bring
man to the Moon in a short time.
The result was a burst of pride for the nation, even if, according to the experts, the games
were already done: the Soviet Union would also win the race to the Moon!
Which then, as we all know, did not happen.
And at this point the question can only be: why?
Why did the Russians lose the Moon?
The reason why the Russians, starting from an advantageous situation, lost almost without
fighting the race to the Moon is an argument long debated by historians.
In the United States, the problem has been dismissed for decades with a very simplistic
explanation: the Soviets could not compete with the superior American technology and
had no hope even at the start.
In reality, it seems that the reasons were multiple, at least five of great importance,
and that among them technological inferiority is only marginally included.
The first reason was the total lack of organization.
The idea that in the '60s the West had of the Soviet space program was that of a giant,
perfectly oiled machine, all devoted to the success of the country and the Party.
And instead it happened quite the opposite: the Soviet Union didn't even have a real "space
program", no multi-year forecasts, allocation of funds or political direction.
Projects were approved from time to time, unrelated to each other and according to the
media opportunity of the moment, often without even verifying their economic coverage; under
these conditions, success depended exclusively on the talent and merit of some engineers.
Very often, the administrative directors were bureaucrats without the slightest technical
preparation, who simply decided on promotions and punishments on political and racial grounds,
or applied the directives coming from the Party.
In short, a complex project such as the flight to the Moon would have required the joint
and coordinated efforts of an entire nation, while in the Soviet Union everyone went their
own way and often institutes, politicians and the military put obstacles in each other's
way, chasing only prestige and personal power.
The second reason for the Soviet failure was the insufficient political and financial commitment.
While the United States, since 1961, dedicated a substantial portion of the national budget
to the space enterprise and involved some of the largest national industries (Boeing,
Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, IBM.
General Electric, etc.), in the USSR until 1964 the only top politician to show any interest
in space was Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971).
From the point of view of financial commitment, the gross domestic product of the United States
in the 60s was about double that of the Soviet Union, but according to some analysts the
expenditure that the U.S. incurred for their space program was five times higher.
An economic commitment completely unsustainable for the USSR, especially since Leonid Brezhnev
(1906-1982), contrary to his predecessor Khrushchev, believed that military and agricultural spending
should take priority over space spending.
From this point of view, it is clear that the cost of sending a man to the Moon was
badly balanced with the effort to equip himself with thousands of intercontinental missiles,
an effort made at a time when agriculture was going through a particular crisis and
the people were starving.
Moreover, after the gauntlet launched by Kennedy in 1961, the Soviet government underestimated
for a long time the positive media effects of a possible conquest of the Moon and believed
that the Americans would never be able to complete such an ambitious project,
The idea of responding to the challenge of the Americans came only in 1963 to the "big
boss" of the Soviet space program Sergei Korolev (1907-1966), but for a utilitarian and far
from "noble" reason: the N-1 rocket he had designed was poorly financed and was accumulating
years of delay.
The lack of funds was in turn caused by the lack of political interest in the possible
applications of the new launcher, so Korolev decided to "invent" a purpose that was politically
attractive and attracted the necessary money.
He proposed to Khrushchev and his ministers to respond to the American challenge, but
for over a year his demands fell on deaf ears, mainly because of the exorbitant cost involved;
then, in 1964, with the successes of the Gemini missions and the first launches of the Saturn
V, the Soviet leadership began to worry seriously about American progress, at least in words.
In recent years, faced with the spectre of the first defeat in space, the Russian government
issued a series of provisions, threatening its officials with retaliation if the Americans
arrived first on the Moon... but the level of funding increased only marginally and the
deadlines were compressed beyond reasonable limits.
Obviously, the project leaders, overburdened with ever-increasing workloads, instead of
feeling spurred on by government threats, lost all hope and began to blame each other.
It is clear that such a short-sighted attitude on the part of the Russian government could
only lead to failure.
The third cause was the lack of leadership.
As the complexity of the systems and the number of institutes involved increased, Korolev
had to enlarge the design team from the initial number of six to over twenty components, which
made it unmanageable.
Every time Korolev tried to take the initiative and impose his will, his subordinates accused
him of despotism, sometimes voting against him out of spite.
With his progressive loss of power, Kolorev's ambitious plans began to creak.
The situation worsened by health problems and then in 1966 his premature death.
The position of head of the space program was thus taken by Vasily Mishin (1917-2001),
a person totally inadequate for that role.
Mishin was a first-rate mathematician, an excellent engineer and a brilliant inventor,
but he did not have Korolev's managerial or human skills.
On the contrary, he had a temperamental and undiplomatic character, he was unable to mediate
and listen to the opinions of others and often behaved embarrassingly.
Sometimes he would explode into hysterical scenes because of trifles and refused to obey
the orders of his superiors, even those of the Council of Ministers, unless accompanied
by technical justifications that would convince him.
Once Khrushchev, speaking of him, said that he was a genius at calculating interplanetary
trajectories but had no idea how to deal with people.
Cosmonauts also believed that he was a weak person and incapable of making important and
risky decisions.
Because of his way of doing Mishin quickly lost the support of the cosmonauts and military
leadership, plunging the Soviet space program into chaos at the very moment when the United
States was supporting its maximum effort with the first Apollo tests.
The fourth reason for the defeat was a series of wrong technical choices, one of the most
important of which was the strategy of relying almost entirely on automatisms.
It has often been said that the Russians could never have done something similar to the American
project because they did not have an electronic industry advanced enough to realize the computers
that Apollo capsules were equipped with: in the West the Russian electronics was always
considered (rightly) primitive and little developed.
Yet the Russians, with the little they had, wanted to do amazing things!
The system thought by the Americans was built around the three crewmen, who were the real
computer of the Apollo: the machines took care of the routine tasks but on board there
were three pilots who knew the equipment in detail and could take the controls and cope
with any eventuality.
In addition, some complex maneuvers, such as docking between the spacecraft, were carried
out completely manually, after dozens of hours spent in the simulator.
The choice involved a high initial risk, because the tests of the integrated systems could
be done only in orbit, with the men on board, and this was the reason of the four manned
missions that were necessary before attempting the actual landing.
But it was a choice that proved to be a winner in the long run, since in every single Apollo
mission there was at least one serious inconvenience that was promptly solved by the crew.
On the other hand, the Russians insisted on developing almost completely automatic missions,
with cosmonauts who were little more than passengers.
This approach derived from a global technocratic ideology, according to which the real masters
of any decision in space were scientists and engineers, who wanted to have everything under
their control, even if in fact someone else was going to space.
This way of thinking led to frequent tensions with the staff of cosmonauts, who on the one
hand felt belittled and treated as laboratory guinea pigs, on the other hand saw their role
threatened by the engineers' attempt to replace them even during orbital flights.
Gagarin more than once, in a sarcastic tone, asked himself: "Who am I?
The first man in space or the last dog?".
If the automatic flight approach was feasible in the first Vostok orbital missions and had
been successful, going to the Moon was something tremendously more complex and probably outside
the technological possibilities of the time.
The choice of automatisms is even more surprising if you think that one of the biggest problems
of Russian vehicles was always the weight: not having the same miniaturization capabilities
of American industries, the Soviets did even more complex things but with systems generally
larger and heavier, usually compensating the greater load with more powerful launchers.
For example, the first Soyuz didn't have a real digital computer on board and couldn't
perform the orbital calculations necessary to make the hooks between aircraft, but they
succeeded anyway, using a complicated analog system based on successive attempts and approximations,
called Igla (needle).
The system, however, was rather unreliable and in 1977, after some failures and missed
connections, its designer Armen Mnatsakanyan (1918-1992) was fired.
The weight, in particular, was such a critical parameter that every kilogram could make the
difference, so the desire to fill the inhabited ships with heavy electronics could lead to
a dead end, as in fact happened.
The choice of flight almost totally automatic, with cosmonauts acting only as backups in
case of failure, also led to the development of navigation and docking systems that were
much more complex and had a very low flexibility.
In fact, since it was not possible to have computers on board to perform all the calculations
in real time, the orbits and operations were pre-calculated by the scientists on the ground
and entered into the systems just before departure.
This resulted in extremely narrow launch windows and the risk of having to abort the trip at
the first slightest inconvenience.
In addition, development time expanded enormously and, as we will see, there were many unmanned
missions that failed in their attempt to fine-tune the systems.
The fifth reason, finally, is a bit of bad luck, mixed with managerial naivety.
The launchers developed by the Soviets for the lunar missions, the Proton and the N-1,
went through many problems and failures before reaching an adequate level of reliability.
The Proton failed thirteen of the first nineteen launches with lunar spacecraft on board, while
the N-1 never successfully completed any takeoff.
But this is a path of refinement that almost all the rockets of that time went through:
the qualification process of a ballistic missile could require up to a hundred launches.
After all, even the vectors developed in the 1990s with the support of sophisticated computer
simulators often failed the inaugural takeoff.
The American Saturn V was a lucky exception: it worked perfectly from the beginning and
in its thirteen launches never missed a shot: almost a miracle!
To give credit where credit is due, however, it should not be forgotten that the reliability
of the American vehicles was achieved with a very accurate system of controls and checks
put in place at every stage of production and integration.
This system today is a standard in the space industry, but the Russians neglected it and
discovered it almost 20 years later, after losing an endless series of rockets, probes,
shuttles and space stations for even trivial failures.
Evaluating rivals with their own "meter" was another fundamental mistake of the leaders
of the Soviet space program: in 1967 and '68, when the flights of the Apollo missions began,
the Russians did not expect at all that within a few months NASA would be able to land a
man on the Moon.
Still in the spring of 1969 they were convinced that the real lunar mission would have happened
in '70 or '71, which would have left them the possibility to recover the lost time.
In the Soviet experience, before having a working vehicle it was necessary to launch
dozens of prototypes and fail as many missions, because the culture of ground testing simply
did not exist.
In the United States, on the other hand, when the first Apollo shuttles took off, the systems
had already been verified and tested for years and it was "only" necessary to accomplish
the final mission.
After 1969, the Soviets tried again for a year or two to chase the United States, but
soon became aware that the race was lost, and that there would be no payback.