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Buzz race into space accident messages10/27/2022 ![]() ![]() Young pressed them, saying they must mean it was their design of a lunar lander, not that it was an actual craft they had intended to send to the moon. “I said, ‘What is that thing that sort of looks like our lunar insertion module?’” The Soviets replied that it was their own lunar lander. “It was in the course of going through that hall that Ed Crawley and I saw this spacecraft,” Young says. ![]() During the meeting, the Soviets took the Americans on a tour of a large hall filled with older spacecrafts that they used as a teaching laboratory. This was during the waning days of the Soviet Union and the period of glasnost, or “openness,” when the country was sharing more information with the U.S. The MIT delegation had traveled to the Moscow Aviation Institute to discuss possible joint educational programs between the universities. Even then, the revelation was kind of an accident, says Laurence Young, who was one of the engineers on the trip and is now the Apollo program professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. The fact that the Soviets had built a lunar-landing craft intended for the moon remained a secret until 1989, when American aerospace engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a tour of the student engineering laboratory at the Moscow Aviation Institute. “But by 1972, they realized that they just couldn’t build the rockets or the spacecraft reliable enough to do that.” Though they did build a lunar lander intended for cosmonauts to use on the moon, they couldn’t reliably send it there. “If the Americans had a setback and quit or just got tired and stopped, then could move in and outdo American lunar flight,” he says. government insane enough to spend absolutely crazy amounts of money to do this.” Still, the Soviets continued their lunar-landing program into the early ‘70s because they didn’t know if the U.S. When Apollo 11 really did land there in 1969, just eight years after JFK’s announcement of the country’s intentions, Oberg says the Soviets “slowly came to realize they’d woken the sleeping giant that they had driven the U.S. BUZZ RACE INTO SPACE ACCIDENT MESSAGES PLUShas a timetable of ‘1969 plus X,’ but our timetable is ‘1969 plus X minus one’!”-i.e., the Soviets would make it the moon a year before the Americans. “I can positively state that the Soviet Union will not be beaten by the United States in the race for a human being to go to the moon,” said cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in 1966, a year before his tragic death during reentry. READ MORE: The 5 Deadliest Disasters of the Space Race In 1979, he wrote an article for Reason Magazine arguing, “Many of the same elements that characterized preparations for the Apollo moon landings also showed up in the Soviet program.” He also noted that Soviet cosmonauts during the 1960s spoke as though they were in a race with the U.S. One of these Americans was James Oberg, a NASA space engineer from 1975 to 1997 who speaks Russian and has written multiple books about the U.S. In broadcasts to Latin America, Africa and Asia, Radio Moscow framed Apollo 11 as “the fanatical squandering of wealth looted from the oppressed peoples of the developing world.”įor many Americans who worked in and reported on aerospace research, this denial was never believable. ![]() Soviet spokesmen also said the country was more interested in creating satellites and sending robotic probes to the moon than manned missions that risked human life. ![]()
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