When Apollo 11 touched down on the moon in July of 1969, the Space Race was won. At the time, the USSR’s space missions were kept secret, and the US didn’t know their plans and progress until after the fact, so there was some suspense about Russians beating us to the moon. The Soviet Union never landed on the moon. As time went by, many of us assumed that the risk and expense of coming in second was not worth it to the USSR, but that’s only a small part of the story. As the long-buried stories of the Soviet space program have been revealed, we’ve learned that they were never even close to beating the US to the moon.

The documents from April 1963 testify how the Soviet engineers just completed an analysis of 26 different scenarios for the lunar expedition and were only able to narrow them down to four diverse architectures, which still needed more detailed studies before the final plan could be picked. In retrospect, it’s stunning to see how far from the final architecture, these four finalist scenarios had been with the plan’s less-than-feasible hopes for multiple launches of super-rockets, yet-to-be-tried docking procedures, and ambitious refueling in Earth’s orbit.

For comparison, in the middle of 1962, fathers of the Apollo project had already favored the rendezvous in the lunar orbit as the key element of the flight scenario and a single-launch architecture, thus clearing the way for a fast-paced development of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo missions.

Even at this early paper phase—when serious investments of money and materiel had not been required from the Kremlin—the Soviet engineers were almost a year behind the U.S., and it went only downhill from there for the Soviets.

But the Soviets carried on, to the point of testing the N-1 rocket, built to go to the moon, in the summer of 1969. Read how that spelled the end of the Soviet moon mission at Popular Mechanics.

Tags: space