Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 7, 1994 TAG: 9407080020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: It would have been a complete bummer if Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the lunar surface, said, ``That's one small step for'' and suddenly tripped over a vodka bottle. That was a real possibility for a while there. The physicist Edward Teller, asked in the early '60s what we would find if we landed on the moon, answered simply, ``Russians.''
Remember, the Soviets had a great space program. In 1957 they launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, to which Americans had a calm, measured response (diving into bomb shelters, screaming in the streets, forcing kids to learn science). In 1961 the Soviets put the first man in space. Throughout the 1960s they sent unmanned probes to the moon. If for some reason you look at a map of the far side of the moon you'll see that all the big craters have Russian names.
So why'd the Soviets lose the biggest race of all?
A lousy surgeon was partly responsible. The Soviet space program's mastermind, Sergei Korolev, who was even more important to the Soviets than Wernher von Braun was to the Americans, went to the hospital for routine polyp surgery in January 1966. The inexperienced surgeon discovered a cancerous tumor and labored eight hours to remove it, until finally the bleeding Korolev checked out permanently.
That was a devastating loss, but the Soviets probably wouldn't have beaten us to the moon anyway. For one thing, the United States was moon crazy, pouring about 3 percent of the entire federal budget into the space program. Our best minds were involved. The Soviets, by contrast, waffled for a couple of years in the early '60s before deciding to shoot for the moon. Even then they were more interested in bombs than spaceships.
``They were never as excited about space flight as they were about ballistic missiles,'' says Jim Harford, former head of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who's writing a book on Korolev.
You could probably trace the Soviet missile obsession back to American superiority in making airplanes. We had B-52s that could fly intercontinental distances and potentially drop nukes on Moscow and the like, but the Soviets lacked long-range bombers - there was no Soviet version of Boeing. To make up for that, they built intercontinental missiles (stashing medium-range missiles in Cuba was another idea but it kind of backfired as you may know). The best Soviet rocket designer, Valentin Glushko, wouldn't work for the space program, in part because he wanted to use exotic, toxic fuels that worried Korolev.
The result was that, even as the Americans were polishing the Saturn V rocket that would eventually take us to the moon, the Soviets were dithering with a huge go-nowhere contraption called the N1. They already had built a lunar lander and wanted to go to the moon in 1968, ahead of Apollo. But four times they tried to launch the N1 and every time it fizzled or blew up. The problem wasn't the rocket so much as the diagnostic equipment used to test it. Rockets are impressive, but what's more important are the unseen gadgets that measure temperature, pressure and so forth with extreme precision.
``When it came to the difference between our two capabilities, far and away the biggest difference was not so much in the rockets but in the instrumentation we had, our ability to test things,'' says Robert Seamans, who was deputy administrator of NASA during the 1960s. ``Before the Saturn V was launched, we'd check around 70,000 different points in the last few minutes before liftoff, and if something was out of tolerance, one of the launch crew at their console inside the launch facility would get a signal that something was wrong and electronically could move in and find out which item was out of tolerance.''
The Soviets had rockets more reliable than the N1, but they just weren't big enough for a moon voyage. Putting men in orbit around Earth doesn't require a particularly large booster. A moon shot is another story: Not only do you need enough oomph to get your spaceship to the moon, you also have to lug along all kinds of extra boosters and rockets for getting back.
When the spacecraft reaches the moon it has to brake itself so it won't just whip around the back side and zip right back to Earth. A key strategy for both the Americans and the Russians was to keep the command module in lunar orbit, with one astronaut, and only send a largely disposable landing craft to the moon itself. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left the moon by crawling into the equivalent of a tin can and launching themselves back into orbit for a rendezvous with the command module, which then fired more rockets for the return to Earth. Had NASA not used this tricky lunar orbit rendezvous strategy the Saturn V would have had to be twice as large. Maybe they would have called it the Saturn X.
The Soviets considered going to the moon until the late 1970s before giving up. Then they tried to cover up their moon program so no one would know that they had failed.
But of course the Soviet Union failed in bigger ways, which is why, although someday there may be Russians on the moon, there will never be Soviets.
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB