Was The Race To The Moon Real?; June 1994; Scientific American Magazine; by Logsdon, Dupas; 8 Page(s)

Twenty-five years ago, on July 20, 1969, Neil A. Armstrong took the first footsteps on the surface of the moon. That event marked a political and technological victory for the U.S. in its cold war rivalry with the U.S.S.R. In the years that followed, the Soviet government insisted that the Soviet Union had never planned a lunar landing. Hence, it argued, the contest to send humans to the moon was a onesided exercise. The reality is otherwise; recently declassified information from that era and testimony of key participants in the Soviet space program under Khrushchev and Brezhnev prove that the moon race was indeed real.

New evidence reveals that personal rivalries, shifting political alliances and bureaucratic inefficiencies bred failure and delays within the Soviet lunar-landing program. In contrast, the American effort received consistently strong political and public support. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its contractor teams also benefited from a pool of skilled and highly motivated workers and managers. Despite an early Soviet lead in human space exploration, these factors, along with more generous and effective allocation of resources, enabled the U.S. to win the competition to be first to the moon.