Episode 2 - The Soviet Moonshot (with Asif Siddiqi)

**Casey Dreier** (0:00)
This is A Political History of Apollo, a limited series podcast from The Planetary Society, exploring the reasons why the United States decided to send humans to the moon, and why the nation pulled back after landing only six times. I'm Casey Dreier, The Planetary Society's chief advocate and senior space policy advisor. I'm going to be joined by some of the world's leading experts in space policy and history in interviews originally broadcast as part of our monthly show, Planetary Radio, Space Policy Edition. We grouped these interviews together in an attempt to tell a fuller story about Project Apollo, to get beyond the flags and footprints we so often see, and look at the deeper issues like the political prehistory of the space age, the Cold War, the political opposition and cultural impacts to the nation, and even look at the Soviet side of the space race to the moon. The show is a production of The Planetary Society, a non-profit dedicated to space science and exploration. So if you like what you hear, please consider joining or donating at planetary.org/membership.
Dobrý den, majore Gagarine. This is episode two, The Soviet Moonshot.
On the morning of April 12th, 1961, the day that the Soviet Union announced that a cosmonaut, Jurek Gagarin, had become the first man to orbit the Earth, radio listeners in the Eastern Bloc country of Czechoslovakia heard a new song across their airwaves. The song was celebratory and swinging and very timely. In fact, it was written, recorded and broadcast in just a few hours after the announcement of Gagarin's flight. This makes Gustav Brom and his orchestra the first cultural response to this epic achievement in human history. Their lyrics include, Hello, Major Gagarin, the world looked up.
The Soviet space program launched the first artificial satellite, the first man, and the first woman into space. Soviet cosmonauts performed the first spacewalk and piloted the first two-person spacecraft. They even launched a pair of turtles around the moon in 1968, safely returning them and thus beating the United States in the race to send the first vertebrates into deep space. But this is the story of Apollo and how the United States ultimately placed the first humans on the lunar surface. The Soviet space program never achieved that. So what happened? And maybe more to the point, was there ever actually a moon race to begin with?
The official answer to this question for decades was no. The Soviet Union did not race the United States to the moon. But the Soviet space program was opaque, protected as an official state secret. Failures were covered up, and histories rewritten to serve propaganda purposes. It was this intense secrecy, in fact, that initially enhanced but eventually undermined the Soviet space effort, particularly their lunar program. You see from the outside, the Soviet Union's space program appeared to be a focused and aggressive effort that hit achievement after achievement, particularly in the early part of the 1960s. But this surface level representation masked significant problems, including internal fiefdoms in its industrial base, profound personality conflicts, and a Soviet leadership uncertain of what to do with this new capability. In fact, if President Kennedy had known the true chaotic state of the Soviet space program in 1961, it is possible that he would have never committed the nation to Project Apollo. But he didn't, and so he did.
The Soviet Union didn't approve their own human lunar program until 1964, at which point they were hopelessly behind the better-funded and more advanced Project Apollo. The success of the US at the moon, combined with multiple failures of the heavy-lift rocket the N1, caused the Soviet Union to pull the plug on their lunar program in the early 1970s and attempt to erase it from history. It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 80s, early 1990s that historians were finally able to examine records of this period and piece together the story of the Soviet Moonshot that ultimately ended in catastrophe and failure.
Dr. Asif Siddiqi, Professor of History at Fordham University in New York, pioneered the study of the Soviet space program in his book, Challenge to Apollo, the Soviet Union and the Space Race. He joins us today to take us through this story. Dr. Siddiqi, I want to thank you so much for joining us on the Space Policy Edition today.

**Asif Siddiqi** (5:42)
It's my pleasure.

**Casey Dreier** (5:43)
I want to start with some context about the Soviet Union space program, particularly for those of us who were born maybe after the end of the Cold War, just to give us the sense of where this is coming from. Can you help our listeners understand what was the Soviet Union like, or what state was the Soviet Union in after World War II, and what were some of its immediate post-war goals, particularly in terms of the United States?