NASA didn't do it first, the USSR did. And the only reason they didn't land people on the moon first too is because their country was falling apart and they reduced investment in their space program.
You're the one downplaying actual history.
You're the one downplaying actual history.
Most mention Korolev's failing health and death.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3riyh3/why_d...
Summary: Khrushchev wanted the moon for cheap, lunar rockets weren't useful for ICBM research, the transition to Brezhnev threw a wrench into the program.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22pled/why_d...
Summary: infighting, N1 had too many rockets and not enough quality control, exhaustion on the team, and Soviet electronics were way behind U.S. electronics.
Comments from the soviets themselves: https://web.archive.org/web/20121002063209/http://www.astron...
Saturn V had the same problems (dynamic instability) which nearly destroyed it. It just barely worked.
For an informal international pissing match, you're assuming some pretty formal rules. The point was nearly entirely to show off how much more impressive one country was over another. The USSR was winning until they weren't, sure, but then the USA started winning until the USSR literally died.
I had never even heard of unmanned, automated landers making it to the moon before humans! They had some computers and I happened to have picked up that they've sent things into orbit, but predetermined engine burns (with time to apply corrections from the ground) in a vacuum with nothing around you is quite a different level of achievement.
I don't care as much about the history so much as the science and future, but I am a space nerd so I'm actually rather surprised that I never knew this. The USA manages its public image about as carefully as China I feel like, the advantage being that they're often genuinely on the good side (no concentration camps for a minority group tends to help, for instance) but by no means selfless, impartial, or genuine. (The best example of public image management may be immigration desire stats. You'd be foolish to immigrate from a poor place to the USA when you can immigrate somewhere with higher social mobility as well as security, but the number of people in such a situation that wish to immigrate to a place like Denmark is tiny by comparison. The American dream, it's called, not the Danish dream. It's a huge, well-managed PR campaign to look to the USA as a leader, shoving competitors' achievements under the rug.)
My point is not who won and who lost, it's that the USA has basically erased the USSR's achievements through its PR campaign and framing it as a race to put people on the moon, instead of the USs effort to catch up to the way more advanced USSR.
However, because of a decades long PR campaign, people think the US "won" and don't even realize all of the USSR's achievements. That's the rewriting of history that I'm referring to. I'm happy to acknowledge NASA's achievements, as long as it's not at the expense of others.
You could argue that was moving the goalposts, since at that point the Soviets were (significantly?) ahead of the Americans, but the Soviets had just put Gagarin briefly in orbit. It seems hard to say that there had been that much of a "race" to that point?
Matter of fact is that the US was behind the USSR in terms of technology. Kennedy declared a symbolic goal that was extremely risky and served little scientific purpose, and then accomplished that. That's the moving of goalposts. It was never a race to put a man on the moon, it was a rapidly developing scientific field, and the USSR was ahead of the US until their country started falling apart.
And now, because of that symbolic goal and a successful PR campaign, people don't know the USSR's achievements. The commenter above didn't know the USSR was the first to land on the moon and just claimed it was the US. That's the part that irks me.
My interpretation of the history of the USSR space program is that they more often than not went the hard way and used remote controlled/preprogrammed vehicles not because it was easier but because it was hard (sorry). I fail to see how landing people on the moon is a bigger achievement than if it was done by remote control in a time with, well, hardly any computer power at all. In my opinion this is part of the rewrite of the history of the space race to an alternative version where the goal was actually landing a man on the moon and not a moving goal post that changed every time something new was achieved.
I also think there's a case to be made that, given their history of success and expertise, they could have also landed a man on the moon first if things had gone differently.
This is most definitely not the case in the late 60s. The Soviets very much wanted to land on the moon up until the Apollo landing.
The cuts to the Soviet space program came after.