How the Apollo 11 astronauts raced an erratic Soviet spite-robot to the moon

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In the most poetic moment of the space race, the Americans celebrated their greatest triumph as the Soviets chalked up another lunar explosion

It was probably the single most poetic moment of the entire U.S. space program: On July 21, 1969, just as a triumphant Apollo 11 celebrated their victory in the race to the moon, a slapped-together Soviet probe sped over their heads, plummeted to the lunar surface and exploded less than 800 kilometres away.

The propaganda value was obvious: Why bother picking up your moon rocks with a stupid manned mission when you could just send a robot?Georigy Ivanovich Petrov, director of Moscow’s Institute of Cosmic Research, said as much when he praised the U.S. for their “outstanding achievement” of a moon landing, but noted that they would have gotten much more bang for their buck if they’d stuck to unmanned probes.

The Soviets had made some early overtures towards a moon landing, sure, but it was only to fool the imperialist enemy into launching their own Quixotic lunar conquest. The N1, by contrast, was essentially a bundle of kerosene rockets strapped together and souped up just enough to be able to push a bare-bones spacecraft into lunar orbit.The most dramatic had occurred on July 3, 1969, less than two weeks before the launch of Apollo 11.

“The Russians will steal a lot of our thunder if they get moon samples back before we do,” is how one NASA official at the time described the Luna 15 mission racing Apollo 11 to the moon.

 

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Those pics look very real 😂

The moon landing is a hoax just like climate change, gravity, osmosis, gasification and other elitist lies

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