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The space race seems weird to me. Russia won most of it (first satellite, first peraon in space etc). Then the US rushed to catch up, but Russia had basically s

The space race seems weird to me. Russia won most of it (first satellite, first peraon in space etc). Then the US rushed to catch up, but Russia had basically stopped competing already. They had no interest in the moon and did a bunch of science based missions instead. Its like having an Olympics where Russia won half the events and went home early and the US arrived late and won other events. But they didn't really compete directly ever...

benmller313 5y ago
That isn't quite how I understood this to have gone. It seems like the Russians very much did want to go to the moon, and would have beaten the American's there if they had succeeded in getting their version of the Saturn V off the ground in one piece.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Oh, the N1 rocket is an interesting story. Originally a design by Korolev, it had to be built by another team because Korolev died. It was so big that it needed over 160 railway wagons to be transported to Baikonur in piecemeal fashion (Baikonur is inland - no water transport available). It had an ungodly number of engines for its age, but a very subpar computer system (KORD) for monitoring them, which was a recipe for disaster. The budgets were so tight that the assembled first stage was never statically fired (the engines were ablatively cooled, so a static fire would probably require a separate set of engines). And yet the engineers tried their best.
  - avmich 5y ago
    No, engines weren't ablatively cooled. N1 had engines with quite high Isp - the problem for them, NK-15 engines, was that they were single use engines and couldn't be tested beforehand on a stand. They, however, were state of the art, high pressure and regenerative cooling, with oxygen rich staged combustion. However, Nikolai Kuznetsov had relatively little experience with rocket engines, so NK-15 is generally regarded as a failure, and NK-33 didn't have a chance to fly on N1 before the project was closed.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Russia seems to be stuck even today. Roskosmos still launches Soyuzes, but their technological progress has stalled. The newer Angara vehicle only launched three times since 2014. They lost almost their entire share of the private satellite launch market, which used to be formidable mere 15 years ago. And the new Vostochny cosmodrome seems to be a black hole for shoveling money in.

benmller313 5y ago

That isn't quite how I understood this to have gone. It seems like the Russians very much did want to go to the moon, and would have beaten the American's there if they had succeeded in getting their version of the Saturn V off the ground in one piece.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Oh, the N1 rocket is an interesting story. Originally a design by Korolev, it had to be built by another team because Korolev died. It was so big that it needed over 160 railway wagons to be transported to Baikonur in piecemeal fashion (Baikonur is inland - no water transport available). It had an ungodly number of engines for its age, but a very subpar computer system (KORD) for monitoring them, which was a recipe for disaster. The budgets were so tight that the assembled first stage was never statically fired (the engines were ablatively cooled, so a static fire would probably require a separate set of engines). And yet the engineers tried their best.
- avmich 5y ago
  No, engines weren't ablatively cooled. N1 had engines with quite high Isp - the problem for them, NK-15 engines, was that they were single use engines and couldn't be tested beforehand on a stand. They, however, were state of the art, high pressure and regenerative cooling, with oxygen rich staged combustion. However, Nikolai Kuznetsov had relatively little experience with rocket engines, so NK-15 is generally regarded as a failure, and NK-33 didn't have a chance to fly on N1 before the project was closed.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Russia seems to be stuck even today. Roskosmos still launches Soyuzes, but their technological progress has stalled. The newer Angara vehicle only launched three times since 2014. They lost almost their entire share of the private satellite launch market, which used to be formidable mere 15 years ago. And the new Vostochny cosmodrome seems to be a black hole for shoveling money in.