posted 03-30-2009 07:43 PM               

Like others, Asif points out repeatedly that, in essence, the Americans did get fooled by the Soviet disinformation-oriented manned missions Vostok and Voskhod. That, in effect, the Americans ended up racing to the moon all by themselves...

Here's my question: Were there, in America, any dissenters and whistle-blowers who had figured out what was going on?

posted 03-30-2009 09:43 PM               

Vostok and Voskhod wouldn't be the first time or the last time as the Soviets had played shell games with things before to make them seem more then they were. Anyone remember the MiG-25? Analysts in the west considered it to be a very powerful warplane with its projected speed and capabilities. Indeed it broke one of the YF-12's closed course speed records. The DoD set the specifications for what became the F-15 and when McDonnel Douglas designed the thing, it was every bit capable of taking down the MiG-25 as perceived by western intelligence agencies.

But when Viktor Belenko defected with one, we got our first real look at the jet. It was designed for a relatively specific purpose and not much else. Sure it was fast, but not as fast as thought and only beat the YF-12 closed course record because it wasn't as fast and could turn tighter at speed as a result and fly a slightly shorter course. So by building a plane designed to fight a plane that didn't exist, the USAF ended up with a plane that could rule the skies as it was so far in advance of anything else out there.

The big thing to keep in mind about the Soviets at the time is they have done things like this often and usually they end up paying for it by having to play catch up. Indeed they did overstate their capabilities in the early days with Vostok and Voskhod, but then they had to try and play catch up with an Apollo program that was already into its early development and do it quickly. As a result, their N-1 didn't exactly work as advertised and they never got to the moon. You can bet though if we hadn't tried Apollo 8 at the end of 1968, they probably would have made an attempt to send a manned Zond on a flyby of the moon just to say they got there before the Americans. It wouldn't have done much, but for world prestige, it would have been enough.

posted 04-18-2009 04:51 AM            

I think that the real paranoia-generator seemed to be the Apollo 1 disaster. The 'downtime' required to re-tool the Apollo hardware made it seem that the Soviets could take the lead any day. Sadly, the death of Komorov put their program back too, and gave NASA breathing room. But nobody knew how much, or for how long so the 'race' continued.

In the end, the Soviets really lost out because of the political in-fighting in their inefficient and never-ending squabbles between the Designers. Even if it had flown successfully, the N1 was not capable of meeting it's design parameters. As Glushko himself stated:

"the N1 could only carry air. The gross lift-off mass was about that of a Saturn V, but the stage dry masses were 2.5 x, 5 x, 3.5x greater."

This was largely a result of the rejection of the use of liquid hydrogen for the upper stages of the N1, and their decision to use many smaller rocket motors rather than develop a more efficient ger set of engines. This was a result of the late commitment of the Soviet Government to the lunar program, and the in-fighting between Designers over fuel-systems. So they gave themselves insufficient time, and were inefficient in their use of their resources. We know this now, but could not have known it during the 'race', so NASA couldn't let up.

Let's not forget too, that with or without the Soviets challenging them to get to the moon first, after the death of President Kennedy in 1963, his challenge to get to the moon and back safely by 1970 took on an almost mythical nature. Everyone was racing to meet that deadline too, and never let up. In the end, it was perhaps more of an incentive to go, go , go then the Soviets were.

It's a pity that the Soviets never got to fly their LOK/LK lunar landing missions. Personally, I think the LK landing profile was VERY iffy, but the lander was so simple and robust by comparison to the LM that they would probably have pulled it off.

Based on the problems with lunar navigation experienced by Apollo 11, I suspect it would have required several tries to get the LK to a suitable landing site as they had almost no capability to maneuver to a desirable landing site. But again, they had built a much tougher craft than the LM so I bet they would have succeeded after a few tries.