I was working on a sort of sci fi project which reuired me to do a bit of cursory research into the Soviet space programme.

Now history tells us that although at the time the Soviets were saying they were never trying to get to the moon, later revelations showed they had even designed and tested a lunar lander (The LK Lander), but the heavy lift rocket the N1 was beset by so many problems that allowed the Americans to beat them to it.

I thought, after looking at other available rockets at the time, the UR-500 (The proton) could have been used, which for the story line I am working on I have an over eager general demanding to be used. (You can relax I do not change history as I have the soviet craft meet a bizarre and horrific fate, sci-fi style after which the action moves into the present)

Any hue, I go to this page and discover this little passage

So the question is, had the change in the Soviet leadership not swung behind Korolev, and Vladimir had been able to use the UR-500, would that have allowed the Soviets to beat the Americans to the moon?

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

By "later revelations", I assume you speak of things we learned of the Soviet programs that we didn't know at the time.

Anyway, with just one more click, you would have learned that LK wasn't tested until nearly a year and a half after A-11.

That tells me that even with a different launch vehicle, they might not have been ready. Maybe tests might have been stalled because of N-1 since the original schedule called for a 1967 test of LK.

The overall state of the projects, funding, and issues that the Soviets had by the race, makes me think something would have broken along the way no matter what decision they would have made.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

By all means leaf through Asif Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo (scanned PDF here )for amazing detail from when the Soviet archives opened up. The most realistic case might have been a single cosmonaut on a free-return circumlunar mission - if earlier test flights had worked out better, that might have been possible before Apollo 8. Cosmonauts being first to the lunar surface would have been a stretch, though some fairly desperate-looking plans were sketched out involving EVA transfer to a single-person open-cockpit lander which could have been flown with a Proton launching some of the hardware.

Ah, the N1, that rocket looked BIG. Sure it was big, just like like the Saturn V was big, but it looked big. Unfortunately, the design was craptacular, especially the first stage. Getting all those rocket motors synchronized? *shudder* Not a job I would want. There was other designs on the board, as this website attests. Occasional errors with the English, but a fine website nonetheless.
Russian Space Web

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Sorry that was what I meant, according to Wikki, they did testing around about 1971 and then scrubbed the whole Luna mission in 1974.

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Sticks. I also think that the slow progress to miniaturization of computing circuits slowed the Soviet attempts. Our computer edge left them baffled in the 70's....having difficulty remembering first reading source though. pete

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A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

Turned out the initially lesser payload of the early US rockets was a blessing in disguise, it gave an incentive to develop smaller, more officiant circuitry. This and the fact that the soviets tended to prefer the Spam in a Can approach to astronautics (rather opposing goals) meant that the complexity of the moon craft might not have been doable with the technology they had.

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Hindsight is always 20-20

Here's what I would have done if I were a big Soviet Supreme in the 1960s

1Dump the N-1, it was useless & do not land men on the surface

2Fly a Soyuz around the Moon

3Use a Proton to land a Robotic lander or rover on the Lunar surface, plant the Kremlin flag and scoop up samples

4 Both manned and unmanned craft now in orbit : rendezvous your manned Soyuz with the unmanned lunar sample return

5 Job almost done - return home safely and have a vodka party

Although if I read the Wikipedia article correctly, the Proton was proposed in advance by Vladimir Chelomei, so it could be argued at least one man had foresight, but the political leadership at the time went with someone else.

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Personally, I believe that if politics weren't involved, we could have landed a man on the moon, and recovered him, a full decade before we actually did.

However, said political influences and their negative abberations go all the way back into the middle of WWII.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

I think it's possible, though IMO it would have required an unlikely number of failures and setbacks on our part to fall behind them.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Any books to add to my wish list on Amazon?

I have the Space Race BBC TV series on video tape somewhere, which was also an excellent series for showing us the soviet side of things.

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

I dont think the soviet economy was ready for such project, especially after the krushev reforms were left

Anyway, the proton can do the job?, how about the modern proton?

Or sabatauge. In fact before I knew the facts, I too wondered why the Russians didn't the to the moon first. One theory I postulated was American sabatauge. Now that I have had a look at the N1, my guess is bad engineering. Imagine what it would be like if they had both made it at the same time. What would that have been like? How would it have affected funding and development do you suppose? This musing is for any who care to respond, not just who I am quoting.

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I believe the only reasons we beat the Soviets is because we had Von Braun. He was on of the meanest, most driven, and most brilliant rocket scientists alive. Someone smart in upper management knew it, put him in the right positions with the right folks around him, and worked hard to keep the friction to a minimum.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

Sticks, I suggest you get both books by Asif Siddiqui. They are very detailed and informative, way above and beyond what you can easily find about the Russian space program.

After I read them I came away with the distinct impression that the Russian space program was actually a mish-mash of programs and no-one could decide which to support. In the US there was a dedicated space program: NASA ran the show, NASA got the money, NASA was charged with getting the job done. In the USSR there were proposals from different bureaux headed by Korolev and Chelomei, and no political figurehead saying 'go with this guy and devote all the spending on space to their project. EVen when the N-1 was in production funds were diverted to Chelomei's UR-700 project. The Zond probes were launched on a Proton booster because, under pressure to choose one program and dedicate spending, some spineless politicians merged the two instead. Zond, which was Korolev's design, should have been launched on a modified R-7, or Chelomei should have had his own lunar probe on the Proton. Instead Korolev's Zond ended up on Chelomei's Proton and both teams were still charged with developing future lunar flights using the money that was split between them when it should heve been dedicated to one or the other. If Chelomei's UR-700 had been cancelled then there might have been enough funding for a test stand for the fist stage of the N-1 so they could have worked out their problems before trying to fly one. If the N1-5L fault had happened on a test stand then all that would have happened was engine shutdown. Because it happened in flight engine shutdown led to the rocket falling out of the sky and exploding on impact. They could have replaced the damaged engine, figured out the wiring and tested again, and only launched when they knew it was working.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.

So you're saying that instead of picking the right course of action, they tried hedging their bets, and when that didn't work they tried merging the two, which created a quagmire?

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

As I understand it, both from Siddiqi's and a Russian-language history, there wasn't enough of a long-range central plan for the Soviet space program to attribute even that much organization to it. Oddly enough for the home of central economic planning, many Soviet space efforts were supported and funded piecemeal based on who had more influence where it counted. Korolev had lots, although at first he had to mostly work on military rockets - but after his death there was a scramble. On top of that, it took a while for the politicians to decide how serious they were about responding to Kennedy's implicit challenge - clearly too long.

Something along those lines but, as ngc says, there was scarcely even enough planning to say Russia really had a space program at all. They did a few things in space, but it was all very half-hearted and lacked long-range goals. Or, more precisely, the politicians couldn't agree on long range goals. People like Korolev and Chelomei had very definite plans, and some were very impressive. They never got the full support they needed to come to fruition, though. As a result they all floudered. Korolev's Salyut program was used as a cover for a couple of Chelomei's Almaz launches. Almaz was basically a military version of Salyut. At least two stations listed as Salyut were actually Almaz.

There really was no strong political commitment in Russia to manned space activities except when it came to upstaging the US. The Vostok flights were not a planned series of missions like Mercury, but were very much a case of 'what shall we do next with this thing?', hence the long gaps between flights. According to Siddiqi's books, Korolev was furious at being directed to undertake Voskhod, as this was a complete technological dead-end that offered nothing to the development of the space program, only an opportunity to get a multi-person crew up first and do the first spacewalk. He would rather have concentrated on Soyuz, which would have acheived both these goals for the Russians but not before NASA launched Gemini. Some consider the Voskhod program to be an expensive sideline from which the Soviet space program never recovered, since it diverted resources from Soyuz.

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"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views." The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Face of Evil.