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- KOROLYOV, Russia (Reuters)
- When sending a rocket ship to the moon first became possible, Soviet
scientists proposed setting off a nuclear blast there to show the world
its scientific prowess.
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- "In 1958 there was a plan to send an atomic bomb
to the moon, so that astronomers across the world could photograph its
explosion on film," said Boris Chertok, 87, a leading rocket scientist
from the earliest days of the Soviet space program.
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- "That way no one would have doubted that the Soviet
Union was capable of landing on the surface of the moon," he said
in an interview. "But the idea was rejected as physicists decided
the flash would be so short lived because of the lack of an atmosphere
on the moon that it might not register on film."
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- The Soviet leadership eventually set its sights on sending
a man to the moon, setting off on a decade-long race with the United
States that ended with an American taking the first step 30 years ago
this month on July 20, 1969.
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- For engineers and cosmonauts involved in the Soviet effort,
the anniversary revives often-bitter memories of a high-profile loss
and contradictory explanations of what went wrong.
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- An unfair race to the moon?
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- Vasily Mishin, 82, who headed the Soviet moon program
from 1966 to 1974, now says the race was an unfair contest, pitting the
vast financial resources of the United States against a far weaker Soviet
Union.
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- "It was not a fair race," he told Reuters.
"First of all, America was richer than we were, especially then,
and Russia was weakened by the fight against German fascism and weakened
by the costs of the arms race."
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- "As soon as America began the moon race, we understood
we could not win," he said.
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- Despite these disadvantages, the Soviets achieved impressive
results in putting their mark on the moon.
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- They were the first to hit the moon with a probe in 1959
and to land an unmanned spacecraft in 1966. The unmanned Soviet Luna
10 first orbited the moon later that year, broadcasting the "Internationale"
to the Communist Party Congress in Moscow.
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- In 1968, the Soviet Union sent the first space ship to
orbit the moon with life aboard, returning turtles back to Earth.
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- The U.S. space agency NASA took the Soviet challenge
very seriously, and in 1968 sped up its program as a result.
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- The giant leap
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- When the day came that Neil Armstrong was ready to step
out of the lunar module Eagle and make his historic walk on the moon,
top Soviet scientists and cosmonauts gathered to view the event via a
bootleg cable hook-up from Europe.
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- "We were delighted as engineers as they had done
wonderful work," said Chertok, deputy for 20 years to Sergei Korolyov,
the father of the Soviet rocket program. "But on the other hand we
felt disappointment. Why them and not us? It was bitter."
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- Soviet television did not broadcast live images of Armstrong
on the moon on what was already July 21, 1969, in Moscow.
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- The Soviet daily Pravda provided a small mention of the
historic walk on the front page. Inside, after extensive coverage of
25 years of Polish socialism, the paper offered another article and a
fuzzy photo taken from a television image of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
on the moon.
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- Soviet authorities explained they were not first to the
moon by denying they had even been trying to get there. The secrecy surrounding
the moon effort at the time was such that Mishin was often airbrushed
out of photos. The official line also said America took needless risks
to put a man on the moon.
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- Mishin, who is now finishing an updated memoir, says
he no longer remembers the day the Americans landed on the moon, but
still feels the blow of losing.
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- "Of course it pains me," said Mishin. "We
made mistakes."
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- After the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, deep secrets of the moon quest began to emerge, including
the atomic blast idea Chertok described in an interview this month.
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- Rocket scientists ponder why
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- Those involved in the Soviet moon program still disagree
-- often strongly -- about what went wrong.
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- The rocket scientists say they were not close to landing
a man on the moon as they lagged in devising a way of getting a cosmonaut
from the moon's orbit to the surface and back.
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- However, they were close to flying a man around the moon,
but lost that race to Apollo in December 1968.
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- Alexei Leonov, the cosmonaut who might have been the
first human on the moon if Mishin's efforts had succeeded, is still bitter
three decades later about the program's failures.
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- "Some people today say there wasn't enough money.
Nothing of the kind. We had the money, but we only needed to spend it
properly," Leonov told Reuters.
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- "Mishin says the Defense Ministry didn't give us
money. This is not true," he said. "We did not properly analyze
things and do not move further. That was his mistake. Bad organization."
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- Mishin's response? "Leonov is a mouse. He doesn't
understand anything," he said.
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- In addition to money woes, Mishin says he lost time with
rocket design mistakes and said the Soviet leadership wasted resources
by running competing space programs. Soviet rocket scientists, unlike
their NASA counterparts, also had the burden of building nuclear missiles
as well as space rockets.
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- Leonov and others say the Soviet moon effort never recovered
from the death of Korolyov in 1966.
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- "We had everything to fly around the moon. We had
the rockets, the space ship, the crew was ready, but we didn't have Korolyov,"
said Leonov, who keeps small framed U.S. and Soviet flags flown on Apollo
11 on his office wall.
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- "But even with Korolyov, we would not have beaten
the Americans to be the first on the moon."
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- The men who took over from Korolyov still lives in his
shadow. Mishin has a home in a town near Moscow named after the scientist,
and Chertok lives on a Moscow street honoring him.
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- For the cosmonauts who trained for moon missions, the
Soviet failure could not erase their longing to take a closer look.
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- "Sometimes I take out binoculars and look at the
moon," said Vitaly Sevastyanov, who trained to make a trip around
the moon. "And of course the thought arises: could it have happened
that I would have flown close by?
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- "I don't allow myself to say perhaps I could have
landed on the moon," said the former cosmonaut, who is now a member
of parliament. "That couldn't have happened, but perhaps I could
have flown around the moon, but it didn't work out. Of course there is
a certain regret."
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