Until the last moment there was a feeling among the public throughout the Western world that the Soviet Union was preparing some kind of surprise
18.7.1999
By: Avi Blizovsky
Until the last moment there was a feeling among the public throughout the Western world that the Soviet Union was preparing some kind of surprise. In the editorial of "Haaretz" from July 21, 69, the opening question of which we addressed in the first chapter, the members of the editorial team at the time write that the journey of the Soviet spacecraft Luna 15 around the moon is still shrouded in fog.
The experts make guesses and most of them imply that the chances of the Soviets to wrest the primacy crown from the Americans are very slim. But until the last moment, not many experts will continue to believe that the Soviets are preparing a surprise.
Well, there was no surprise there, and the Americans could say with peace of mind: We came, we saw, we won. No Soviet cosmonaut (a term that has since been phased out of the world) has not crossed the 500 kilometer altitude line.
In retrospect, the Russians actually won the battle for space in a completely different way. They set up space laboratories where cosmonauts spent months in space conditions, unlike the Americans who flew the shuttle, orbited for a week or at best two weeks in low Earth orbit and returned. It is a fact that until recently, the Americans paid hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia's depleted coffers to share American astronauts with the long stay on the Mir space station.
In any case, the story of the race to the moon is a continuation of the story of the inter-power arms race. The Russians prepared a surprise for the Americans. Jim Schefter, author of the book "The Race: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia on the Road to the Moon" wrote in an article in the "Popular Science" magazine that it was an unknown rocket engineer - Leo Sadov whose name was hidden from the public eye, who ran the competition against the Americans As a game of chess, he used the few German scientists who remained after Werner von Braun took most of them to the USA and became one of the leaders of the program started there.
While the Americans revealed their plans to the public back in '55, the Russians acted quietly. Shortly before the Americans were supposed to launch a satellite into space, the Russians did it with Sputnik - a simple ball that contained a transmitter. He only knew how to tweet. But this did not prevent Prova from proving the victory of Soviet socialism in his headline. The rocket that the Americans sent - Vaamgard exploded a few meters above the launch pad on December 5, 1957, and so did the next rocket in January 1958. Only the next attempt - on January 31, '58 was successful when the Jupiter C rocket was launched and released the Explorer satellite, which by the way also discovered the radiation belt surrounding the Earth.
The Russians also had failures, several missiles including one manned exploded on the launch pad or on the way to space. The Americans had a problem with the Redstone missile that had a chimpanzee inside it, so von Braun refused to send Alan Shepherd on the next missile. Again the Russians seized an opportunity and on April 12, 1961 they launched Gagarin, which brought
President Kennedy unequivocally promised that by the end of the decade a man would be sent to the moon and return safely. He believed that the Russians would not be able to get there before the Americans.
Meir Cohen's book The Mysteries of Space reveals that the rest of the 2s were devoted by both the Americans and the Russians to improving space flight techniques - especially connecting and working in space conditions. Extended the amount of time the astronauts and cosmonauts spent in space. The Russians had the Vostok (one-person) and Voskhod (three-person) spacecraft. The first spaceflight was theirs - Sergey Leonidov (Veskhod, March 1965, 9). Since then, the advantage has passed to the Americans who carried out Project Mercury (single astronauts to orbit the Earth) and then Gemini - spaceships including a pair of astronauts who performed docking maneuvers in space against unmanned spaceships. The Russians launched unmanned spacecraft to the moon but only Luna 1969 succeeded. A large multi-stage rocket intended for a launch experiment to the moon exploded on the launch pad in XNUMX. To this day it is not clear if there were cosmonauts on it or not. In any case, the first American spy planes or perhaps spy satellites photographed its sooty wreckage in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
Operation Apollo began in 1967 with disaster, when Apollo 1 burned up in the launch pad when it was all about a test during which the rocket was not even supposed to take off. The three astronauts in the spaceship perished. In the same year, the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov also perished. The first spacecraft that was actually launched was Apollo 8 which orbited the moon and photographed the earth from lunar orbit for the first time. This aroused the feeling of many that all humans are in one fragile ship, and this stimulated the movements for the quality of the environment. Then came Apollo 9 where the landing vehicle systems were tested, Apollo 10 whose astronauts descended in the landing vehicle up to 15 km above the surface of the moon and returned to the spacecraft orbiting the moon. And finally on July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins took off to the moon. Collins remained to circle the moon and wait for the other two to land on the moon. In one of the next episodes of the series, we will elaborate on the mishap that almost caused their death on the moon, but in the end they returned safely and Kennedy's promise was fulfilled by NASA.
