Post by lordroel on Jun 14, 2017 17:35:38 GMT
What if: Soviets win the space race?
What if the Soviets had won the space race?
I think they would have perhaps established some kind of permanent lunar base in the way they colonised Earth orbit [in the Seventies and Eighties]. It might have been that they continued to run with a presence on the Moon instead of just sort of going there for a few days and coming back and then never returning, as essentially what has happened now. However, you’ve got to imprint upon the effect that the break up of the Soviet Union had on the space programme. That really caused a massive underinvestment, which might have ultimately led to any lunar base being abandoned – and we’d be back where we are today.
Did the successful launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 in 1957, the first man-made satellite in space, inspire America to reach for the Moon?
Oh yes, undoubtedly. The ‘Sputnik effect’, as it’s called, was a significant player in ensuring that Apollo succeeded. President Eisenhower commissioned the Saturn V rocket and he boosted brainpower by investing in universities. I think Apollo made America smarter for that period – and the legacy of that was, of course, not just to win the Moon race but the spin-offs that happened. Not least the micro-computing processing revolution and ultimately the Internet, of which the early DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] structures were the forerunner, as they were all wrapped up in the Cold War investments the government had made. We’ve got our modern society to be thankful for because of that initiative, that ‘Sputnik effect’. We’re still living off that. It was profound, what Eisenhower did.
When was the moment that the United States took the lead in the space race?
The Zonds [Soviet spacecraft] were racing around the Moon unmanned in 1968, so I think you have to point to Apollo 8 [in December 1968], which was this very audacious and perhaps even somewhat reckless mission to pull off. Apollo 8 was previously just an Earth orbit mission, but they instead went straight [around] the Moon on the first Saturn V launch, which was a very, very brave thing to do. Ultimately that bravery, that gamble that they somehow managed to pull off, was the turning point without a doubt.
Was there any other major turning point that happened during the space race?
The N1 disaster [the Soviet Moon rocket that failed five times] was obviously a colossal setback. But it wasn’t just about booster technology; the Russians easily matched the Saturn V, they were ahead in booster lift for many years. But the clincher was the computing power, that is where the Russians were really falling short.
How far behind were the Russians in terms of their computing power?
While the Russians might have been able to orbit the Moon, it was a far cry from landing on it. The thing that really clinched the success of Apollo, in no uncertain terms, was their computing power. The fact that NASA had invested significant amounts of money in the manufacturing of integrated circuits in order to create the micro-computers that were light and small enough to be able to fly on these [Apollo] spacecraft, and make these precise landings on the Moon. The Russians, as far as I’m aware, didn’t really have that sort of micro-processing capability in those days. Their systems probably wouldn’t have allowed them to really make a successful landing. It wasn’t impossible, but it was quite unlikely.
Did the Soviets realise this?
I think they were just sort of gambling on the judgement of their pilots and hoping they could pull it off without this computing power. The Russian approach to spaceflight in the Sixties, both robotic and human, was a little bit of fingers firmly crossed behind your back as they launched. Everybody needed an element of luck; luck goes hand in hand with skill and engineering when it comes to spaceflight, of course. But the Russians relied on luck a bit more, and the reason I say that is because they essentially ran for all these very quick firsts in human spaceflight in the Sixties. For example, they were the first to put three people in a capsule, and they only did that by depriving them of their pressure suits so they could squeeze them into a two-man capsule. Things like that were clearly a bit reckless with the way they went forward. While they probably were aware that their computing power was inferior to the Americans, I think they just thought they’d wing it and their pilots would hopefully be able to pull off just manually.
If they had landed first, how would it have changed the Soviet Union as a whole?
Well you’ve got to look at how they reacted to Gagarin returning [in April 1961] and Valentina Tereshkova [the first woman in space in June 1963] and the other heroes of spaceflight that placed Russia so high on the world stage. I think a successful returning lunar cosmonaut would have been celebrated and lauded around the world in exactly the same way. If you look at the ‘Giant Step’ tour that the crew of Apollo 11 went on in the summer of 1969 when they got back, 40 countries in 30 days or something like that, touring the world with millions of people coming out on the street and giving these ticker tape parades wherever they went, you can imagine that absolutely would have happened to the Russians as well. Whether it would have had a material change on the course of Russian history and how their society changed in the Eighties and Nineties, I don’t know. It would have been great when it happened in the Sixties, but perhaps it wouldn’t have made a big difference in the grand scheme of things.
Which Soviet cosmonaut do you think might have taken the first steps on the Moon?
Alexei Leonov’s name often comes up as the first Moon walker, having done the first spacewalk [in March 1965] and contended with those difficulties and survived the mission. I think he likes to think he would have been as well from his writings and interviews since – and I dare say he’s right.
Would they still have proclaimed the Moon ‘for all mankind’ as the Americans did?
If you listen to Khrushchev’s speeches at the time, they were all about how Gagarin’s flight was for everybody. The whole point was it was a gift to the world and it was Russia’s great gift to human history, so they would have, I’m sure, done the same thing [on the Moon]. Whether they’d have taken a UN flag, which was proposed initially for the Americans to fly rather than the stars and stripes, or whether they’d have planted their own hammer and sickle I don’t know. I suspect they would have planted their own flag, but their speeches and plaques that they unveiled I’m sure would have had the same sentiments [as Gagarin’s flight].
What might their first words on the Moon have been?
Well, [Neil] Armstrong was given complete freedom, as were all of the previous crews of Apollo 8. They decided what they would read or speak, and no one intervened. In fact, while Armstrong had obviously given it a lot of thought, he had a number of options from what his mother told me last year and he made his final decision as to what was going to be said when he was going down the ladder. I think with the Russians, knowing a bit about how their society worked at the time, it would have been very carefully written. There’s a speech that Gagarin makes before he climbs in the rocket [on the first spaceflight in April 1961] and it’s beautifully and poetically sculpted in terms of its message to the world, and it was completely written for him by the central government. I think it would have been a similar sort of speech that would have been written for the first lunar cosmonaut.
Do you think a successful lunar landing would have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union?
No, I don’t. If you look at what it did to America, they won this race and very quickly the country got sick of spending money, and within a few missions after Apollo 11 the programme was cancelled. The political direction afterwards, both in positive and negative terms, was not really influenced by the success of Apollo, perhaps sadly. So I suspect in Russia it would have been exactly the same. They would have had this time that they carried on running their bases, maybe on the Moon as we’ve talked about, certainly building a space station in Earth orbit, until effectively politics and perhaps society and the rest of the world overwhelmed them.
Would the USA have tried to one-up the Soviet Union by attempting to go to Mars?
It’s nice to imagine that the race could have hurdled us down the Solar System to further away, and there’s some sort of validity in that the Cold War had continued to sabre-rattle its way into the Nineties. Would America have gone even further to prove a point? It’s possible. Remember Spiro Agnew, the vice president at the time Apollo 11 left for the Moon, said they were going to be on Mars by 1980! So there were plenty of plans; [American rocket scientist] von Braun’s bottom draw had loads of concepts in it for adapting and modifying Apollo configurations to send them further. It’s a lovely thought to imagine that with Apollo hardware, you could have actually had a human footprint on Mars by now.
Would they have succeeded?
I don’t know. I mean, it took four million human years to put those 12 Americans on the Moon – the work of 400,000 people for a decade. I think you could have multiplied that by 100, maybe 1,000, to land on Mars. It would have been very difficult to do, and it still remains so.
How would modern space exploration be different if the Soviets had been first on the Moon?
If – and this is an enormous if, and not one I think likely – the Russians had got to the Moon first and the Americans had gone to Mars, we would have skipped the space station stage as it were. The [International Space Station] was largely conceived and built to justify the Space Shuttle, so we probably wouldn’t have gone down that route. We would have just been pushing the frontier of human footprints across the Solar System. I think if we’d gone as far as then changing this mindset from racing to collaborating as a community, we’d again be looking at a sort of equivalent to the space station – a laboratory, but somewhere on the Moon or Mars instead, rather than in Earth orbit. It would have ultimately been a completely different picture from the years of shuttle flights and space stations that we’ve lived through instead.
What if the Soviets Landed on the Moon First? (YouTube)
What if the Soviets had won the space race?
I think they would have perhaps established some kind of permanent lunar base in the way they colonised Earth orbit [in the Seventies and Eighties]. It might have been that they continued to run with a presence on the Moon instead of just sort of going there for a few days and coming back and then never returning, as essentially what has happened now. However, you’ve got to imprint upon the effect that the break up of the Soviet Union had on the space programme. That really caused a massive underinvestment, which might have ultimately led to any lunar base being abandoned – and we’d be back where we are today.
Did the successful launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 in 1957, the first man-made satellite in space, inspire America to reach for the Moon?
Oh yes, undoubtedly. The ‘Sputnik effect’, as it’s called, was a significant player in ensuring that Apollo succeeded. President Eisenhower commissioned the Saturn V rocket and he boosted brainpower by investing in universities. I think Apollo made America smarter for that period – and the legacy of that was, of course, not just to win the Moon race but the spin-offs that happened. Not least the micro-computing processing revolution and ultimately the Internet, of which the early DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] structures were the forerunner, as they were all wrapped up in the Cold War investments the government had made. We’ve got our modern society to be thankful for because of that initiative, that ‘Sputnik effect’. We’re still living off that. It was profound, what Eisenhower did.
When was the moment that the United States took the lead in the space race?
The Zonds [Soviet spacecraft] were racing around the Moon unmanned in 1968, so I think you have to point to Apollo 8 [in December 1968], which was this very audacious and perhaps even somewhat reckless mission to pull off. Apollo 8 was previously just an Earth orbit mission, but they instead went straight [around] the Moon on the first Saturn V launch, which was a very, very brave thing to do. Ultimately that bravery, that gamble that they somehow managed to pull off, was the turning point without a doubt.
Was there any other major turning point that happened during the space race?
The N1 disaster [the Soviet Moon rocket that failed five times] was obviously a colossal setback. But it wasn’t just about booster technology; the Russians easily matched the Saturn V, they were ahead in booster lift for many years. But the clincher was the computing power, that is where the Russians were really falling short.
How far behind were the Russians in terms of their computing power?
While the Russians might have been able to orbit the Moon, it was a far cry from landing on it. The thing that really clinched the success of Apollo, in no uncertain terms, was their computing power. The fact that NASA had invested significant amounts of money in the manufacturing of integrated circuits in order to create the micro-computers that were light and small enough to be able to fly on these [Apollo] spacecraft, and make these precise landings on the Moon. The Russians, as far as I’m aware, didn’t really have that sort of micro-processing capability in those days. Their systems probably wouldn’t have allowed them to really make a successful landing. It wasn’t impossible, but it was quite unlikely.
Did the Soviets realise this?
I think they were just sort of gambling on the judgement of their pilots and hoping they could pull it off without this computing power. The Russian approach to spaceflight in the Sixties, both robotic and human, was a little bit of fingers firmly crossed behind your back as they launched. Everybody needed an element of luck; luck goes hand in hand with skill and engineering when it comes to spaceflight, of course. But the Russians relied on luck a bit more, and the reason I say that is because they essentially ran for all these very quick firsts in human spaceflight in the Sixties. For example, they were the first to put three people in a capsule, and they only did that by depriving them of their pressure suits so they could squeeze them into a two-man capsule. Things like that were clearly a bit reckless with the way they went forward. While they probably were aware that their computing power was inferior to the Americans, I think they just thought they’d wing it and their pilots would hopefully be able to pull off just manually.
If they had landed first, how would it have changed the Soviet Union as a whole?
Well you’ve got to look at how they reacted to Gagarin returning [in April 1961] and Valentina Tereshkova [the first woman in space in June 1963] and the other heroes of spaceflight that placed Russia so high on the world stage. I think a successful returning lunar cosmonaut would have been celebrated and lauded around the world in exactly the same way. If you look at the ‘Giant Step’ tour that the crew of Apollo 11 went on in the summer of 1969 when they got back, 40 countries in 30 days or something like that, touring the world with millions of people coming out on the street and giving these ticker tape parades wherever they went, you can imagine that absolutely would have happened to the Russians as well. Whether it would have had a material change on the course of Russian history and how their society changed in the Eighties and Nineties, I don’t know. It would have been great when it happened in the Sixties, but perhaps it wouldn’t have made a big difference in the grand scheme of things.
Which Soviet cosmonaut do you think might have taken the first steps on the Moon?
Alexei Leonov’s name often comes up as the first Moon walker, having done the first spacewalk [in March 1965] and contended with those difficulties and survived the mission. I think he likes to think he would have been as well from his writings and interviews since – and I dare say he’s right.
Would they still have proclaimed the Moon ‘for all mankind’ as the Americans did?
If you listen to Khrushchev’s speeches at the time, they were all about how Gagarin’s flight was for everybody. The whole point was it was a gift to the world and it was Russia’s great gift to human history, so they would have, I’m sure, done the same thing [on the Moon]. Whether they’d have taken a UN flag, which was proposed initially for the Americans to fly rather than the stars and stripes, or whether they’d have planted their own hammer and sickle I don’t know. I suspect they would have planted their own flag, but their speeches and plaques that they unveiled I’m sure would have had the same sentiments [as Gagarin’s flight].
What might their first words on the Moon have been?
Well, [Neil] Armstrong was given complete freedom, as were all of the previous crews of Apollo 8. They decided what they would read or speak, and no one intervened. In fact, while Armstrong had obviously given it a lot of thought, he had a number of options from what his mother told me last year and he made his final decision as to what was going to be said when he was going down the ladder. I think with the Russians, knowing a bit about how their society worked at the time, it would have been very carefully written. There’s a speech that Gagarin makes before he climbs in the rocket [on the first spaceflight in April 1961] and it’s beautifully and poetically sculpted in terms of its message to the world, and it was completely written for him by the central government. I think it would have been a similar sort of speech that would have been written for the first lunar cosmonaut.
Do you think a successful lunar landing would have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union?
No, I don’t. If you look at what it did to America, they won this race and very quickly the country got sick of spending money, and within a few missions after Apollo 11 the programme was cancelled. The political direction afterwards, both in positive and negative terms, was not really influenced by the success of Apollo, perhaps sadly. So I suspect in Russia it would have been exactly the same. They would have had this time that they carried on running their bases, maybe on the Moon as we’ve talked about, certainly building a space station in Earth orbit, until effectively politics and perhaps society and the rest of the world overwhelmed them.
Would the USA have tried to one-up the Soviet Union by attempting to go to Mars?
It’s nice to imagine that the race could have hurdled us down the Solar System to further away, and there’s some sort of validity in that the Cold War had continued to sabre-rattle its way into the Nineties. Would America have gone even further to prove a point? It’s possible. Remember Spiro Agnew, the vice president at the time Apollo 11 left for the Moon, said they were going to be on Mars by 1980! So there were plenty of plans; [American rocket scientist] von Braun’s bottom draw had loads of concepts in it for adapting and modifying Apollo configurations to send them further. It’s a lovely thought to imagine that with Apollo hardware, you could have actually had a human footprint on Mars by now.
Would they have succeeded?
I don’t know. I mean, it took four million human years to put those 12 Americans on the Moon – the work of 400,000 people for a decade. I think you could have multiplied that by 100, maybe 1,000, to land on Mars. It would have been very difficult to do, and it still remains so.
How would modern space exploration be different if the Soviets had been first on the Moon?
If – and this is an enormous if, and not one I think likely – the Russians had got to the Moon first and the Americans had gone to Mars, we would have skipped the space station stage as it were. The [International Space Station] was largely conceived and built to justify the Space Shuttle, so we probably wouldn’t have gone down that route. We would have just been pushing the frontier of human footprints across the Solar System. I think if we’d gone as far as then changing this mindset from racing to collaborating as a community, we’d again be looking at a sort of equivalent to the space station – a laboratory, but somewhere on the Moon or Mars instead, rather than in Earth orbit. It would have ultimately been a completely different picture from the years of shuttle flights and space stations that we’ve lived through instead.
What if the Soviets Landed on the Moon First? (YouTube)