Politics always drove the space race. The Russians, who thrilled the world with the launch of Sputnik, the first artifical satellite, in October 1957, were determined to keep their lead. The Americans, shocked and galvanised by the Soviet success, spent almost unlimited funds to catch up. And they did. It was, memorably, an American who took the first small step for a man on the Moon 40 years ago. He came, he said, for all mankind. In fact, he came to assert American dominance in the most competitive propaganda contest of all. And it was an American flag that Neil Armstrong left behind. No Russian has ever planted either a Red Flag or a Russian tricolour on the Moon.
For the Russians space was the ideal field in which to compete. They had established an early lead in rocketry. They had on their side one of the most brilliant rocket engineers of all time — Sergei Korolyov, who emerged from the gulag where he had been a prisoner, took over the development of the V1 and V2 rockets captured at the fall of Nazi Germany, demonstrated his brilliance and assumed complete control of the Soviet space programme in 1964. He pushed ahead with the advantage of heavy rockets, simple robust technology and a military budget lavishly supported by the Soviet State.
The Kremlin was not slow to see the propaganda advantage. It was an age when Khrushchev boasted that communism would “bury” capitalism. But there was precious little material advantage to demonstrate its superiority. Apart from arms and nuclear weapons, there was little to show the Third World that communism could deliver. But space was a new frontier that captured the imagination of everyone. The Russians were the first to launch a rocket into solar orbit, the first to crash-land on the Moon and the first to photograph the dark side of the Moon. And in Yuri Gagarin, the fresh-faced cosmonaut pioneer, whose first manned flight in 1961 earned him the adulation of the world, Moscow was perfectly poised to exploit its prestige.
The Americans understood early on that this was a race they could not afford to lose. The US was still locked in a Cold War with the Russians.
Espionage was at unprecedented levels. The Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, had heighted East-West tensions. Many former European colonies in Africa and Asia were emerging as independent states, and Moscow and Washington were determined to woo them to their side. Whoever won the race to the Moon could claim to have the greater resources, the smarter system and the future on their side.
The effect of Sputnik was dramatic in the US. Suddenly the Americans realised that they were falling behind in vital areas. The Russians spent more on education, they gave greater priority to engineering, they were able to command more resources for their military and they were achieving results. President Eisenhower authorised a massive catch-up programme in education and research, and his successor, President Kennedy, took the decision to authorise the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to go all out.
The programme was shielded from a 1963 tax cut and all resources were concentrated on the most spectacular race of all — the race to be first on the Moon (a decision that many in Nasa originally opposed). Lyndon B. Johnson, the Vice-President, put forward a powerful case, citing possible medical and scientific breakthroughs.
This won over those on the left who wanted more money spent on social programmes and those on the right who wanted a military programme.
In the early stages both sides suffered a series of disasters. Many of the rockets and space shots failed, blowing up on the launch pad, disintegrating in space, veering out of control or failing to achieve their objective. The US programme, originally managed by the US Air Force, was carefully guarded to prevent the secrets being betrayed and most Americans were unaware of how many launches ended in disaster or how much it all cost, even when Nasa assumed overall control.
In contrast to the Soviets’ early successes in lunar exploration, America’s initial efforts with its Pioneer and Ranger programmes were disastrous. Over six years, from 1958 to 1964, 15 consecutive US unmanned lunar missions ended in failure. These included three attempts in 1962 to land hard, small seismometer packages on the Moon’s surface after they were released by the main Ranger spacecraft. The Pioneer lunar probes, designed to takes images of the Moon’s surface, study radiation, measure magnetic fields and take other readings, did not survive the launch on an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile.
Despite the Kennedy Administration’s enthusiastic backing, one thing after another went wrong. It was only the success of the Ranger 7 mission in photographing the Moon at close quarters that persuaded Congress to pass the budget appropriation for Nasa in 1965 without a reduction in funds for the Apollo moon landing programme.
The Soviet programme was far more secretive. Indeed, when the Soviet moonshot programme began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Russians assigned a launch number to a “Luna” mission only if the spacecraft went beyond Earth orbit. If it failed, it was reclassified simply as a sputnik or Cosmos Earth-obit mission to hide the number of failures.
Gradually, in the mid-1960s, the Americans began to pull ahead, helped by almost unlimited funds, by better rocket fuel and by better organisation. The Soviet side was severely hampered by the death of Korolyov in 1966, by several fatalities and by cumbersome bureaucracy that did not respond quickly to new challenges. Within four months of each other in 1966, the Soviet Union and the United States had accomplished successful moon landings with unmanned spacecraft.
The challenge now was to design craft that could land and then take off again, which also involved building a lunar orbiter for a rendezvous and a return to Earth.
Huge resources were spent by the Russians trying to develop a manned circumlunar loop in preparation. They set up the Zond spacecraft programme and flew its first mission in 1967 but it never properly achieved its goal. The Americans skipped this stage and never developed a separate spacecraft for this purpose. By then their third generation of Apollo spacecraft were proving themselves, and the craft was successfully adapted to a lunar orbit programme.
The last chance for the Russians to launch a rocket to the Moon and beat the Americans came in early December 1968. Cosmonauts were put on alert to fly the Zond spacecraft from the Baikonur launch pad but the Politburo, keenly aware of the risk to the men’s lives because of the programme’s poor performance, scrapped the launch. It was just as well: the rocket itself blew up in an unmanned test when it was finally launched several weeks later.
By contrast, the US programme was going well. Apollo 10 performed a dress rehearsal of a manned Moon landing in May 1969, which stopped short at 10 miles above the lunar surface. All was set for the final successful programme two months later.
When Armstrong finally stepped out of the landing module and set foot on the Moon, the Russians knew they were beaten. They could not conceal the event or their chagrin — and so Radio Moscow reported the news solemnly on the same day and formal congratulations were sent to Washington. The Russians had no match for the propaganda and quickly played down the importance of the space race. By contrast 24 Americans have travelled to the Moon, with 12 walking on its suface and three making the trip twice. But gradually even that prestige began to pall.
Nasa moved on to the exploration of Mars. The space race was over, the US had won, and communism, which once saw the race as proof of its superiority, collapsed in 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Where Dan dares
• My childhood in the 1950s was dominated by Dan Dare in Eagle magazine, and Journey into Space on the BBC’s Light Programme, with Jet Morgan and his crew, leading a British expedition to the Moon.
Dan Dare’s adventures took him to exotic planets such as Venus and Mars. These were fantastical stories and space travel was a fiction. At that time the Moon and our planets were mysteries. Was there life?
We were pretty convinced that Mars had some form of life. In conversations with my grandmother, we argued about the chances of getting to the Moon. I said it was certain and probably in her lifetime. She maintained that God would not allow it.
The Americans were developing rockets, based on Hitler’s Second World War V2, with Wernher von Braun’s team of German scientists. The Vanguard rockets failed miserably on the launch pad, and the chances of a trip to the Moon seemed remote, but then in 1957 the news of Sputnik 1’s launch stunned the world, The space race had begun. I was busy building my collection of space memorabilia, cuttings, photographs and magnificent models, many from museums in Moscow.
I was thrilled by a succession of space triumphs, initially by the Soviets — dogs Laika, Belka and Strelka; the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; the first woman cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkov; Luna 2, which hit the Moon; the first pictures of the far side of the Moon; and Luna 9, the first vehicle to land on the Moon.
This galvanised the American programme, with President Kennedy’s instruction to reach the Moon by the end of the decade.
The Saturn V rocket was built to launch this mission and, in the Soviet Union, the N-1-L3 rocket was being developed to beat the Americans. However, the Soviet Moon programme was a failure and was abandoned — the race was over.
David Driver, Head of Design at The Times (1981-2008)
