The Secret at Complex J

Neat article about how the US kept track of the Russian equivalent of Apollo by photoreconaissance.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Thanks for the link, ToSeek...good article.

It's always struck me as funny...the Soviets basically saying, "What, we're not trying to go to the Moon! We never were!!"

Talk about a "sour grapes" approach to space exploration.

A lot of people bought it, though. I remember reading several articles criticizing Apollo for being a race with no competition.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Yup, the USSR won the Hoax race that's for sure. Funny thing. The USA did it for real and some people claim it was a Hoax, the USSR claimed they didn't even attempt it and everyone bought it with sliced bread. I guess it's one of those "Right Wing Capitalise Pigs lie through their teeth about everything while Clean as a whistle leftist Communist saviours would never tell a mistruth abut anything" sort of deals.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Everyone bought it? That's not how I remember it. Everyone I knew, and all the media reports I remember, assumed that the Soviet denials of a lunar program were obvious face-saving measures.

Maybe the same mental defects that lead some individuals to become hoax proponents also make them more willing to accept "sour grapes".

I heard about the Russian moonshot launchpad disaster in the early 1970s. My father told me about it. He heard it via a PBS news program wherein it was a speculation. Can't be more specific than that though.

Careful - as many leftists are not commies and many capitalists are not right wingers your joke is coming close to a violation of house rules here. Best to keep politics off the board.

Well, I've definitely read articles from people who accepted the Soviet claim (not that I could track them down now), which struck me even at the time as being credulous if not gullible.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Chip--

I believe your criticism is unfair. Discussing politics related to the moon hoax is certainly on topic.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

Perhaps, but I think the sentiment could have been phrased in a less incendiary fashion.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I always thought it was a face saving claim and recall this being the belief here at the time. The Soviets were not above reinventing the past when it suited them.

It would have been strange,as someone put it in another context, "to fire the starting pistol in a race and then decline to compete".

The first Soviet space scientists that I met in 1988 still denied the Soviets ever intended to land a man on the moon.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

The Soviets didn't race against the US with Kennedy's starting call. It was just around '64 or '65 when they finally decided to go to the moon. That was way too late.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Well, at the political top level. Folks such as Korolev had the plans in their pockets. I've just been reading a recent Russian history of the space race (in English, check out Asif Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo). Tikhonravov developed the concepts that were essentially the final Soviet landing program as far back as 1962, and they came pretty close to the first person around the Moon in 1968 (although either lunar orbit or landing by 1969 was pretty much out, since they could only follow successful automated flights with the N-1 booster). There is a lot of interesting speculation on just why their program stalled (death of Korolev, results of infighting among various design bureaus, erratic allocation of resources...). I've even read one Russian theory that (for the USSR's achievements) the best result upon Stalin's death would have been for Lavrenti Beria to take power, on the theory that most of the economic problems afterward were due to irrational decisions, and he was above all supremely cold and calculating. (Is there a "shiver" emoticon?)

That was before the end of the Soviet Union; I'm sure that was still the party line (literally) at that time.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

These guys were too young to have worked on any of the moon programs. I think they literally believed in its absence and hadn't been told any of it. Unfortunately I haven't spoken to any of them since everything thawed out.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

We certainly did maintain an eye on the Soviet space program, as we did their other military activities. The Corona satellites took photos of the launch complex on several missions. The book The Corona Project discusses the observations of the N1 rocket on the pad in 1968 and a couple before and after pictures of the July 1969 explosion. Photos such as these were one of the reasons for revamping Apollo 8 as a lunar orbiting mission. It appeared the Soviets were on the verge of launching a "quick & dirty" mission of their own.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

They were, but it failed. They were planning a two step mission (a podsadka mission) by sending up an L1S (basically a stripped down 2-man Soyuz) up into low Earth orbit on the N1 then the crew on Soyuz, the crew would do a space walk over to the L1 and fire its Block D trans-lunar injection stage to get to the moon where it would orbit while Luna-15 (launched sperately) did an automated landing and soil retrieval. Of course it all went kaboom with the N1's engines shut down at 200m and it blew up taking out the launch platform, and then Luna-15 crashed while attempting to land on the moon.

The Russian Moon Hoax

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran