The 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing proved once again that Winston Churchill’s saying about “history being written by the victors” is true. Despite all the revelations of the post-Cold War era, the event is still largely depicted in the Western press as a one-sided American race against itself. A seamless, if danger -fraught, progression from Mercury, through Gemini to Apollo and ultimately the success of the Moon landing.
It was the perceived Soviet leadership in manned space flight and the Soviet effort to upstage Apollo, not the speeches of American presidents or even mighty Saturn-V rocket, which ultimately propelled NASA astronauts to the Moon. Soviet equivalents of US moon rockets and spacecraft remained largely forgotten by western journalists and writers. It’s true that the USSR not only failed to put a man on the Moon, it also failed properly preserve a record of its part of the Moon Race.
Had the giant N1 rocket worked as intended, it would have been the Soviet LK lander that stood on the Sea of Tranquillity at least two years before Armstrong and Aldrin achieved it in the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle, despite the fact that N1 development began several years after initial design work commenced on the Saturn-V.
