The U.S. Edges Ahead in the Race for Space, Shoots for the Moon

Exploration for Political Purposes – Part 2

By Bob Granath

The “Space Race” between the United States and the Soviet Union remains an often studied and debated period of the 20th Century. While the Russians began with a lead, once challenged, the Americans surpassed their Cold War rival on the way to the Moon.

President John F. Kennedy set a goal for the United States during a speech before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961. When he addressed crowds at Rice University in Houston on Sept. 12, 1962, he spelled out his reasons.

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people,” he said. “For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.”

Dr. Bill Barry, NASA’s recently retired chief historian, pointed out that the United States expended a substantial amount of resources to achieve the goal of landing on the Moon which continued under President Lyndon B. Johnson following Kennedy’s assassination.

“If you look at the NASA budget, there’s this huge spike in the ’60s in order to get us the money and the facilities to (reach for the Moon),” he said during a 2020 NASA podcast.

Kennedy predicted more Soviet achievements would follow cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight. Under Chief Designer Sergei Korolev’s leadership, they flew the first daylong human spaceflight, first multi-spacecraft flight with two cosmonauts orbiting separately, the first woman in space and they performed the first spacewalk.

In October 1964, the Soviets flew the Voskhod 1. The spacecraft looked like a technological breakthrough. While the Americans were preparing to launch a two-person Gemini spacecraft, the Russians flew three cosmonauts.

It later was revealed that Voskhod was a one-man Vostok with the ejection seat removed and three passengers squeezed inside. It was so tight, there was not room for them to wear pressure suits. The Russians accepted the risk.

“Since the Vostok capsule, and the Voskhod derivative, were completely unable to maneuver in space,” Barry said, “in a sense, we were ahead with the first Gemini launch.”

Gemini III, which began the piloted portion of the two-person project, lifted off March 23, 1965 and became the first spacecraft to maneuver in space. Astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young fired thrusters to change the shape of their orbit, shifting their orbital plane slightly and dropping to a lower altitude.

America — First to Rendezvous

NASA’s Gemini missions bridged the Mercury flights to the Apollo missions to the Moon. In December 1965, the in orbit rendezvous by Gemini VII and Gemini VI marked the first time a major human spaceflight milestone was achieved by the United States first. In the eyes of many, that marked the tipping point in the space race with the U.S. edging ahead.

“While the Gemini VII and Gemini VI missions provided clear public recognition of U.S. operational supremacy in human spaceflight,” Barry said, “the historical record is now clear that the Soviets were operating a very thin program of one-off spectaculars.”

Barry believes that what gave the Soviets the appearance of a lead was “the agility and brilliance of the Soviet engineering team in coming up with ‘firsts’ that would score public relations points.”

While he was unknown outside the Soviet space program at the time, Korolev led that team effort. In his 2004 book, Two Sides of the Moon, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space, described the authority Korolev commanded.

“Long before we met him, one man dominated much of our conversation in the early days of our training, Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the mastermind behind the Soviet space program,” he wrote. “For those on the space program there was no authority higher. Korolev had the reputation of being a man of the highest integrity, but also of being extremely demanding.”

The Russian’s primary launch vehicle continued to be derived from the Korole’vs R-7 ICBM. It was not only used to launch Sputnik, but the same rocket launched the Vostok and Voskhod. The rocket also launches the Soyuz spacecraft first flown in 1967 and still is in use today sending crews to the International Space Station. While it is impressive, it uses brute force not high technology. It has a core stage with four engines and four similar strap-on boosters totaling 20 engines firing at liftoff.

Powerful Rockets

“The U.S. was ahead in almost every measure from the start except in the size of our boosters,” Barry said.

By 1961, the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency team moved to NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama with Dr. Wernher von Braun serving as director. His engineers were developing Saturn rockets more powerful than any in the Soviet Union.

On Nov. 21, 1963, the day before he was assassinated, President Kennedy referred to a Saturn 1 launch in a speech at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

“While I do not regard our mastery of space as anywhere near complete, while I recognize that there are still areas where we are behind – at least in one area, the size of the boosters – this year I hope the United States will be ahead,” he said.

“In January 1964, the flight of the first Block II Saturn I vehicle known as SA-5 gave the U.S. the capability to launch a larger payload than the Soviets for the first time,” Barry said.

The SA-5 Saturn 1 rocket placed a 37,401-pound satellite in orbit, the largest ever.

While von Braun was the mastermind behind American rockets, Korolev played a key role in developing not only the Soviet launch vehicles, but their spacecraft as well. The strain of constantly having to come up with spectacular “firsts” began taking a toll. He was warned by Russian doctors to ease off his strenuous workload.

However, Korolev believed that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was only interested in the space program because of its propaganda value and feared that he would cancel it entirely if the Soviets started losing their leadership to the United States. Therefore, he continued to push himself. Hi died during surgery on Jan. 14, 1966 at the age of 59.

By the beginning of the Apollo era, America’s Saturn rockets surpassed the Soviet Union’s heavy boosters. The eight engines of the Saturn 1 series developed 1.5 million pounds of thrust becoming the most powerful launch vehicle in the world. Each of the 363-foot-tall Saturn V Moon rocket’s five F-1 engines equated to an entire Saturn 1 launch vehicle. Developing 7.5 million pounds of thrust, the Saturn Vs launched nine Apollo crews to the Moon between 1968 and 1972, six of which landed.

The loss of Korolev’s leadership was a significant blow to Soviet space efforts. At the time, they were developing their Saturn V counterpart, the 345-foot-tall N-1 rocket. With 10.2 million pounds of thrust, it was designed to send cosmonauts to the Moon. Like the R-7, the N-1’s first stage, had a large cluster of engines. Its 30 engines presented problems with the complex fuel and oxidizer feeder system that were not revealed during development and testing.

“The Eagle has landed.”

While NASA’s first flight test of the Saturn V came on Nov. 9, 1967, the first uncrewed test launch of the N-1 was Feb. 21, 1969. The rocket failed 69 seconds after liftoff. The Soviets tried again on July 3, 1969, less than three weeks before the United States was about to launch Apollo 11, its first attempt to land humans on the Moon. However, the second N-1 exploded just after liftoff and destroyed two launch pads at their Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan.

The Soviet Union attempted one last-ditch effort to reach the Moon first. On July 13, 1969, the Luna 15 robotic probe launched to land on the lunar surface, scoop up a small, random soil sample and return to Earth before Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed,” Armstrong said as he and Aldrin successfully touched down aboard their lunar module on July 20, 1969.

They spent more than two and a half hours exploring the surface, setting up experiments and collecting rock and soil samples. It was an extraordinary event witnessed around the world by723 million people watching on television. During the Moonwalk, President Richard M. Nixon spoke to the two astronauts, noting how spaceflight was bringing together the people of a divided world.

“Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world,” he said. “For one priceless moment, in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one. One in pride of what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely.”

Armstrong and Aldrin lifted off on July 21 to rendezvous with Collins who remained in orbit in the command module. That same day, Luna 15 crashed on the Moon about two hours before Armstrong and Aldrin lifted off.

As Apollo 11 was returning home, Dr. Roald Mykkeltvedt, professor of political science at the University of West Georgia, noted the irony.

“Apollo 11 landed successfully on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility, while the Luna 15 spacecraft crashed in the Sea of Crises,” he said.

‘We did it.’

Following celebrations in the United States, the Apollo 11 crew went on a 38-day world tour with the astronauts visiting 22 nations, including leaders of many. Collins observed that the reactions they saw around the world reflected the unifying effect noted by Nixon.

“The thing that really surprised me was that everywhere we went people didn’t say, ‘Well you Americans finally did it,’” he said. “They said, ‘We did it.’ All of us together, we did it. It was a wonderful sensation.”

There was no one point at which the United States pulled ahead of the Soviets. Launching larger rocket boosters, flying maneuverable spacecraft and developing more advanced technology all played a role in the nation’s success in the Space Race — a “battlefield” of the Cold War. The achievement was possible through Kennedy’s leadership, galvanizing the efforts of a government-industry team of more than 400.000 people working together toward a common goal.

Six Apollo crews successfully landed on the Moon. In December 1972 astronaut Gene Cernan commanded Apollo 17, the final mission. During a 40th anniversary celebration on Nov. 3, 2012, he noted that America’s success was because of the efforts of NASA and its contractors.

“It was a tribute to American ingenuity,” he said. “If Apollo 17 was looked at as a success, don’t look at me, look at them. We built upon everything they did. We built upon the mistakes. We built upon what we learned from them. Apollo 17 wasn’t a piece of cake, but it was as close as you can possibly come to because of what they did.”

In 1999 Bob Ward, editor-in-chief of the Huntsville Times, interviewed Walter Cronkite, one of America’s most respected broadcast journalists who made a similar observation.

“As people later look back for those heroes that made (Apollo) possible, they will fixate undoubtedly on the astronauts,” he said. “But they will also look at the engineers. They will recognize it as an engineering feat.”

Barry pointed out that the Soviets lost the race to the Moon largely because they started their lunar landing effort too late and tried to do too much at the same time.

“They expended massive amounts of effort and treasury and all for the same reasons we did,” he said. “(It was) not to colonize outer space and have a long-term human space flight program, but to achieve a political goal of upstaging the other superpower.”

In 1972, the competition evolved into cooperation when Nixon signed an agreement with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin on a space mission that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. A Russian Soyuz capsule with two cosmonauts were launched in July 1975 to rendezvous with and dock with three American astronauts aboard an Apollo spacecraft.

That collaboration eventually led to the International Space Stanton where cosmonauts and astronauts from many nations have performed research in the orbiting laboratory for more than two decades.

Barry believes the Space Race has lessons for space policy makers today.

“Countries don’t spend a lot on space things unless they have a political purpose,” he said. “It’s not done for scientific reasons or engineering reasons. It’s done for political reasons.”

“Walk into any hospital and look at the technology. CAT scans, magnetic resonance, intensive care monitoring equipment — all derivatives of Apollo. No wonder Newsweek (magazine) called Apollo ‘the best return on investment since Leonardo da Vinci bought himself a sketch pad.’“

— Dan Goldin, Former NASA Administrator

Even with the political motivation for early flights into space, many experts point to the value of what was accomplished in efforts to explore and utilize space.

In 1992, then NASA Administrator Dan Goldin noted that the reason for exploration is not just the destination, it’s the journey.

“It’s not about going someplace, it’s about what you find along the way,” he said. “Walk into any hospital and look at the technology. CAT scans, magnetic resonance, intensive care monitoring equipment — all derivatives of Apollo. No wonder Newsweek (magazine) called Apollo ‘the best return on investment since Leonardo da Vinci bought himself a sketch pad.'”

“The reason to explore space is the boost to the economy and it changes our culture. People think differently, think about the future, think about inventing things, they think about making a better tomorrow rather than just surviving today. This happens when a nation embarks on something bold and audacious as in going to deep space.”

— Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, Princeton University

In an interview for the 2016 documentary film, Fight for Space, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Princeton University astrophysicist, spoke of the benefits of past and future exploration beyond Earth.

“The reason to explore space is the boost to the economy and it changes our culture,” he said. “People think differently, think about the future, think about inventing things, they think about making a better tomorrow rather than just surviving today. This happens when a nation embarks on something bold and audacious as in going to deep space.”

With the race to the Moon won, both Cold War super powers no longer needed a space program as big since they were not racing anyone anymore. Regarding NASA’s Artemis Program to return to the Moon and eventually send humans to explore Mars, Barry anticipates it will evolve differently than a space race with a superpower.

“I hope we go Mars for good reasons and not political reasons,” he said. “We need to find a way to do it within budget and collaboratively.”

NASA’s Artemis Program is doing just that with the first uncrewed flight test launched on Nov. 16, 2022 . The effort to return astronauts to the Moon is a collaborative effort with commercial and international partners using innovative new technologies and systems to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. From there, the agency will use what was learned on and around the Moon to send astronauts to Mars.

In March 1970, von Braun accepted the position of NASA’s deputy associate administrator for Planning at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. Officials with the city of Huntsville held an event to honor his service to that north Alabama community. Von Braun urged those in attendance to be ready to celebrate again.

“My friends we were dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the Earth,” he said. “We were dancing again when the first Americans landed on the Moon. I’d like to ask you, please don’t hang up your dancing slippers.”

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