from Hacker News

The reason the USA beat the USSR to the Moon

by georgecmu on 12/13/24, 12:54 PM with 7 comments

• by anovikov on 12/13/24, 1:04 PM

  Totally wrong take. President Kennedy picked the goal of landing a man on the Moon for the reason that this was a goal which Soviets couldn't achieve first by out-smarting or out-tricking America: it was defined by size and complexity of the systems to be created, it required vast industrial power, lots of brute force thrown at the problem. No workarounds could help. Soviet Union was poor and could not afford it.

  N1-L3 failed because it tried to rely on tricks to avoid investing enough resources into proper stuff: for example, they could not afford a test stand to test the entire massive first stage, it could only be tested by launching. Engines themselves were one-off, so they couldn't be tested, after starting once they had to be trashed. Easy to see why this never worked.

  The landing scheme itself was incredibly risky and as now known, will most likely result in cosmonaut stranded on the Moon, because same engine was to be used for both landing and takeoff and Apollo LM's landing engines received considerable damage from lunar dust and rocks thrown back into it due to the gases they produced when firing - which wasn't a problem because those engines were no longer used after the landing was achieved - but same thing meant a cosmonaut would be stuck and dead on the Moon. In a way Soviets were lucky their rocket never worked, that saved them from a much bigger embarrassment which they wouldn't be able to hide.