The reason the USA beat the USSR to the Moon | Hacker News Reader

The reason the USA beat the USSR to the Moon

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2 pointsgeorgecmu7 comments

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.

This is the correct reason. Ultimately Soviet Union lacked the financial resources to compete at this scale. All of the other problems that are listed as part of it, the engineering feats that are required, the technological advancements that are required, etc... all come down to money. If the Soviet Union was able to achieve the same or greater spending power that the USA was able to at the time, the competition would have been different. Because all those other problems get solved by throwing enough money at them.

The early achievements of the Soviet Union were natural logical progressions from the V2 rocket. It was a small step that replied on the same level of engineering. This is why they were able to achieve first man in space and for satellite and so forth. The scale of the problem to get to the moon and bring someone home is so massively different that it's even difficult for us to replicate currently.

Economic resources, not financial - it doesn't really make sense to compare a dictatorship economy based on money, does it?

I'd say it's a totally wrong take, but for a different reason. As a Cold War Kid, the reason I'd always heard for America's win was the Soviets were using base 3 computers while the US was using base 2. The base 3 systems gave the Soviets an early edge - they simply had greater computing power early on. That's the reason given for why the Soviets had so many firsts. The US achieved more computing power via the invention of the transistor and the miniaturization that enabled. The base 3 systems could not be miniaturized and so the Soviets had to start over from scratch. This gave the US the edge later on and so the US won the race to the moon in the end.

Could be a Cold War myth, but that's the story I've heard for the past 45 or so years.

Base 3 computers were just a historical curiosity, they were never produced at scale. Less than 100 were ever made. All Soviet computer series - BESM, Minsk, Ural, Iskra, M-series - were binary, with the only exception of Setun series. It never played a considerable role. So that's just an urban myth.

Dang it! :)

President Kennedy picked the goal of landing a man on the Moon because the Soviets had already handily beaten the US at everything else.

The US in the space race was like that meme of a guy standing in last place on the awards podium, bathing himself in champagne.

I also wouldn't necessarily discount the effect of losing someone like Korolev to the Russian space program. From what I understand, the Russians were so hamstrung by bureaucracy and politics that the loss of someone actually competent in a position of power could very well have devastated the future of the program. Look at the debacle that was the Vanguard project in the US, for instance, which was mostly the result of ruthless cost-cutting from higher ups who considered rockets to be a waste of time and money for any purpose other than delivering nuclear weapons. In a more centralized system like the USSR, the damage caused by political meddling can be more difficult to mitigate, I think.

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