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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

It kind of did? The Russians clearly had many more "firsts", but the Americans had the first man on the moon, so I'd say even though the Russians clearly had won by the numbers, the Americans didn't too bad either. Maybe not quite enough for a tie, but pretty close.

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The Soviets were ahead with respect to earth orbit [ADDED: for earth orbit manned flight, as well as other probes]. But their counterpart to the Saturn V, the N1, was basically a disaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

In fact, as I recall S1, For All Mankind is basically premised on the notion that the N1 worked and therefore, the Soviets kept their early lead and landed on the moon first.

> The Soviets were ahead with respect to earth orbit.

Soviets were the first to land on another planet orbiting the sun, Venus.

While the moon orbits earth.

I was specifically commenting on manned flight but, yes, the Soviets had a rocketry lead that also allowed them to take the first pictures of the far side of the moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_3 which is an interesting story of its own. (Basically they shot the photos on film and faxed them back to earth.) But they couldn't get the bigger rocket needed to send and return cosmonauts to and from the moon working.

Soviet Mars 3 was also the first probe to achieve soft landing on Mars. Like most of the Soviet Mars missions, it failed, but it failed only after landing (unlike most of the rest ...).

An urban legend goes that at least two Soviet Mars probes missed the planet because of a typo in the nav program. The code was in Fortran and one of the commas was mistyped as a dot (or vice verse).

I wonder if the Russians would have managed to get the N1 under control if Sergei Korolev had still been around to lead the project. As far as I understand it, the Russian moon project suffered heavily from political bickering after Korolev's death, and the technological problems might have been a direct result.

Certainly his death didn't help things. But, as far as I can tell, the consensus was that it was a much too complex (too many engines) approach for the time. So it's not clear that once they took that direction, they'd have been able to recover in a reasonable timeframe.

My guess Korolev would perhaps see earlier than others (he died January 1966) that the current trajectory - 95 tons payload of N1 with 30 engines on the first stage - is too risky, and would turn things significantly.

For example, coming back to 75 tons N1 and dealing with more dockings on orbit. That would at least reduce number of engines on the first stage; maybe not a very good idea though.

Or coming back to another idea, having N2 (which is N1 without first stage) a priority and fly to the Moon with ideas his team had before (in 50-s? there was a plan with multiple dockings and refuelings, which would use more modest rockets, but N2 with ~25 tons of payload would certainly help). N2 was even in a better tested state - it was the first stage of N1 which was the most problematic.

Or making even better with Chelomei (Korolev approved project Zond, which was a kind of joined project between two design bureaus) and use Proton for multi-launch schemas. Plenty of opportunities.

If Korolev would be lucky enough to avoid Komarov's death, Russians would have some spare time - in addition to momentum - to move things forward.

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