The truthful answer?
The Soviets lost the race to the Moon long before it ever started. They lost the race all the way back in 1938, when Sergei Korolev was denounced to the NKVD by professional rival Valentin Glushko and sent to the labor camps for the next six years. He spent over a year of that time in the gold mines of the Kolyma area in Siberia, where his health was ruined due to scurvy.
Korolev was fortunately able to clear his name, and as you probably know if you’re asking this question, he went on to become the foremost genius of the early Space Age, the reason why the Soviets had the lead on the Americans and all of their German scientists for several years. He had a heart attack in 1960, and things only got worse from there. Korolev had a plan for sending a cosmonaut to the Moon and was working on making it happen, but he died on 8 January 1966 from complications from what would have been a routine surgery for a reasonably healthy 59 year-old.
Without Korolev, the Soviets didn’t have anyone who could have brought the plans to fruition in time.
Korolev was so valuable to the Soviets that they wouldn’t even allow his name to be spoken while he was alive, fearing that foreign agents would try to assassinate him. He was simply known as the “Chief Designer.” His name, and the pile of honors that he won (2x Hero of Socialist Labor, 3x Order of Lenin, the Lenin Prize, and a few others) wasn’t revealed until after his death.
Had he lived, he might have done it, even with the technological and manufacturing disadvantages that the Soviets had.
Today, the city that hosts Russia’s Mission Control bears his name:
No comments:
Post a Comment