Why didn't the USSR ever land a man on the moon?

Question

Even just to be the second to do so.

Answer 1

No one has ever been to the moon...

Answer 2

Becuase in the end we had the Better Space program.

Answer 3

Cause their rockets suck.

Answer 4

Well, there really wasn't much point...

- The American lunar mission came back with kilos of moon rocks for geological study, there was nothing new to learn from them by the USSR.

- Going to the moon is hugely expensive, the money would have been used in developing new weaponry, nuclear deterrents etc.  rather than wasted on lunar missions

- Coming second to America would have been political suicide, first counted for so much more, both for the pride of the people, the communist regime and as a useful propaganda tool.

- Setting up vast mining operations or habitats would be hugely expensive, and any useful resources from the moon would take years to pay off.

Answer 5

At the start of the 1960's the USSR was clearly ahead in the space race.  In order to catch up Kennedy made it a stated policy to land a man on the moon.  Russia always officially denied that they were planning manned moon missions and concentrated on unmanned probes and remote controlled explorers.  It has since been revealed that they did indeed have plans for a lunar landing but after Apollo 11 landed these were shut down.  This made it possible to avoid the huge cost and also the potential loss of face if a mission failed.

In 1970 the USSR successfully returned moon rock samples using an unmanned probe.

Answer 6

The Soviets were first in almost everything to do with space until the late 60's when the Apollo porgram put the US ahead for good. Their main rocketeer, Sergey Korolyov, died in 1966 basically putting an end to their dreams of reaching the moon. The reason the Soviets never sent men to the moon is because they lacked a reliable rocket system.  The one they built to send men to the moon kept exploding during test launches. They had too many engines and not enough stages to be a reliable spacecraft.  The Soviets simply lacked the technology to go to the moon. Even most of their unmanned lunar landers they sent to the moon failed after crash landing. It simply was too risky for them to try to send a man to the moon. Their chance of failure far outweighed any chance of success.

Answer 7

You almost answered the question your self....

the cost was enormous and not worth it for second place

after all the only purpose of landing on the moon at that time was political and to show the world America was superior to the Russians

Answer 8

In a nutshell, they couldn't get their moonrocket to work, and after the USA were there, they claimed they didn't want to go to the moon... sour grapes...

As for our self taught scientists, he is writing BS as usual, just a few examples

1. A lot of the achievements he lists are simply obsolete, if you want to put a man on the moon, there is no need for a robotic rover.

2. Others are pointless, i.e. technically there is no real difference between having a man or a woman in space.

3. If the soviets were so advanced, how could the US fool them. Or were they bribed with wheat?

4. If the soviets knew a landing was impossible, why did th y develop their own LM?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_Lander

Answer 9

There are, indeed, several reasons.  Being in second place was not politically acceptable for the former Soviets, so they claimed the moon never was their goal.  Then they developed the extemely successful Soyuz and upgrades, and the Salyut and Mir space stations.  In addition, their moon rocket (I think it was called the M-1) failed on each test launch, so there wasn't any easy way for them to get to the moon ("easy", meaning without several rocket launches).

They did have hardware to get to the moon (the Zond series were lunar travel prototypes based on the Soyuz), but if they were well along into lunar lander development that fact has been well hidden.

Do not think the Russian space program uses faulty or old-fashioned hardware.  It is top notch, very reliable, and very safe.  They don't use as much high-technology as the Americans do, so there isn't as much risk of a simple software glitch causing a big problem in flight.  It's simply a different approach between the Americans and the Russians, not a technology gap at all.

Answer 10

Some many reasons:

1. No full dedication to the project: Korolovs letter actually opposed flying a manned mission to the moon, as long as unmanned probes can do that more economic.

2. The USSR afforded itself not one space program, but actually two rivaling. Lunar program and space station program fought for resources. The space station program until Mir cost the USSR as much as the Apollo program did cost the US.

3. No serious cooperation between the two rivals: When both had been tasked to fly to the moon, both had their weaknesses to deal with: One group was unable to build large rocket engines, the other group was unable to build manned spacecraft. This led to both programs failing.

4. Late start into the lunar landing program - after the Americans landed, the desire to do it dropped on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

5. Economic breakdown in the USSR - after the disposal of Khrushchev, the USSR quickly dropped back to Stalinist economy politics.

6. And many smaller factors

Answer 11

Because they considered the safety of their crew members.Russian scientists(astronomers) had a zenith discussion on this particular issue.They came to a conclusion that,no one can survive those deadly radiations, that are emitted from moon.Even they had superb technology than NASA(at that time),they just gave up the thought of 'going to moon'.

Answer 12

The Soviet space program pioneered many aspects of space exploration:

    * 1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7 Semyorka

    * 1957: First satellite, Sputnik 1

    * 1957: First animal to enter Earth orbit, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2

    * 1959: First firing of a rocket in Earth orbit, first man-made object to escape Earth's orbit, Luna 1

    * 1959: First data communications, or telemetry, to and from outer space, Luna 1.

    * 1959: First man-made object to pass near the Moon, first man-made object in Solar orbit, Luna 1

    * 1959: First probe to impact the moon, Luna 2

    * 1959: First images of the moon's far side, Luna 3

    * 1960: First animals to safely return from Earth orbit, the dogs Belka and Strelka on Sputnik 5.

    * 1960: First probe launched to Mars, Marsnik 1

    * 1961: First probe launched to Venus, Venera 1

    * 1961: First person in space (International definition) and in Earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, Vostok programme

    * 1961: First person to spend over a day in space Gherman Titov, Vostok 2 (also first person to sleep in space).

    * 1962: First dual manned spaceflight and approach, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4.

# 1963: First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6

# 1964: First multi-man crew (3), Voskhod 1

# 1965: First EVA, by Aleksei Leonov, Voskhod 2

# 1965: First probe to hit another planet (Venus), Venera 3

# 1966: First probe to make a soft landing on and transmit from the surface of the moon, Luna 9

# 1966: First probe in lunar orbit, Luna 10

# 1967: First unmanned rendezvous and docking, Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188. (Until 2006, this had remained the only major space achievement that the US had not duplicated.)

# 1969: First docking between two manned craft in Earth orbit and exchange of crews, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5

# 1970: First samples automatically returned to Earth from another body, Luna 16

# 1970: First robotic space rover, Lunokhod 1

# 1970: First data received from the surface of another planet (Venus), Venera 7

# 1971: First space station, Salyut 1

# 1971: First probe to orbit another planet (Mars), first probe to reach surface of Mars, Mars 2

# 1975: First probe to orbit Venus, first photos from surface of Venus, Venera 9

# 1984: First woman to walk in space, Svetlana Savitskaya (Salyut 7 space station)

# 1986: First crew to visit two separate space stations (Mir and Salyut 7)

# 1986: First permanently manned space station, Mir, which orbited the Earth from 1986 until 2001

# 1987: First crew to spend over one year in space, Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov on board of TM-4 - Mir

Clearly if landing on the moon were possible the USSR would have been the first or at the very least the second to do so.

Americans like to think that russia's space program was weak, that is just the propaganda that gov't spread .

USSR had many firsts in space. Landing a man on the moon and safely returning him isnt possible to this day nevermind 40 years ago. radiation and solar flares are a big hurdle for humans.

Answer 13

The main reaosn is that they never actually had a coherent space program like NASA.

The manned flights of Vostok were only sanctioned on the basis that the design of spacecraft could also be used for unmanned satllites. They flew them on an ad hoc basis, with huge gaps between flights while they worked out what to do next. The Voskhod 1 flight got the first multi-man crew into space at the cost of almost every safety feature (it was a modified Vostok spacecraft with the ejector seat pulled out and three couches crammed in, and was so cramped the crew could not wear spacesuits, nor did they have any means of getting out if something went wrong at launch). Soyuz 1 was rushed into flight before it was ready and the result was a dead cosmonaut.

Every Russian first was equalled or surpassed by the US weeks or months later, so their lead was hardly fantastic.

When it came to the development of the manned lunar program they had two rival programs competing for funds. One was based on the UR-700 rocket, which never even got off the drawing board despite sucking funds away from the other, the N-1, that was in production. The lack of funds left them unable to properly test the N-1 and so they tested it by flying it. Unfortunately, the first one blew up in flight, and the second fell back seconds after launch and blew up the launchpad. Two more test launches in later years ended in similar disasters.

They never got men to the Moon because they never dedicated the resources to a sensible, stepwise program, instead gearing their whole effort to scoring firsts at the expense of logical progression and evelopment. Personal feuds and government laxity also played their part.

NASA managed it because the nation got behind them and poured money into their progressive program.

Answer 14

The Soviets' early firsts in space were just that:  firsts.  The early Soviet space program was built largely around setting records just to get into the books.  Hence the heavily padded lists padded with technologically irrelevant claims such as "first woman in space."  The first Soviet "rendezvous" in space, for example, was really just another launch into a coincident orbital plane.  Yuri Gagarin still holds the record for the first manned flight, but his spacecraft had no Earth-landing capability; he had to bail out.  The American counterpart, the Mercury capsule, could land on Earth and flew just a few weeks later.  It was technologically superior to the Vostok capsule, and not very far behind it.  Similarly the Gemini capsule was superior technologically to the first Soviet two-man capsule (which was simply the one-man capsule with an extra seat crammed in).

The Soviets' emphasis for style over substance was simply not sustainable for very long.  Their publicity-oriented flights got more and more reckless at Khrushchev's insistence, and finally largely ceased with his ouster.  The Soviet space program then got a little more sane, but by then it was too late to win the Moon race.  They had been trying to set records so vigorously

Other setbacks included the failure of the N-1 rocket, requiring the Soviets to rethink the entire mission plan.  Ironically the way we plan to return to the Moon, using at least two Earth launches per mission, is the way the Soviets contemplated it back in the 1960s.  And Sergei Korolev, their head rocket scientist, died unexpectedly of medical complications.

By about 1967 the United States had logged more than three times the number of man-hours in space as the Soviets.  This is largely because NASA operated an entire program (Gemini) that was aimed at nothing more than practicing and testing the techniques that would be used to go to the Moon, such as duration, orbital rendezvous, EVA.  The Soviets had little like it: publicity-seeking didn't really prepare them to fly in space for real.

However in the wake of the early recklessness, the Soviet space program did an about-face in terms of safety.  They required all their new spacecraft to be fully automated, if necessary.  No human pilot would fly a mission that hadn't first been flown remotely or automatically by the unmanned version of his craft.  This raised the bar considerably for Soviet engineers trying to build Moon-capable spacecraft.  The Apollo spacecraft succeeded partly because they required a human crew of skilled pilots.

By Apollo 8 it was clear that the U.S. was going to beat the Soviets to the Moon.  Since there are no points for second place, and their Moon program was costing the Soviet economy dearly, the program continued for a bit into 1969 and then was quietly shelved.  When I first worked with ex-Soviet engineers in 1988, few of them were even aware that the program ever existed.

After giving up on the Moon race, the Soviets turned their attention to space stations, which in the long run is probably a better pursuit.  For many years afterwards the Soviets were the world's experts in how the human body functioned over long periods in space.

Answer 15

Cost.  I'll bet they were happy that we got there first.  It saved them countless billions of rubles they simply did not have.