How was the Moon landing presented in the Eastern Bloc?

Thande

Donor
I guess there's no point to deny any more that my broken English and some knowledge of USSR has common cause of me being raised (very skeptical) Soviet citizen :)
Don't worry; 95% of the members on the board who post from Canada seem to be Soviet exiles ( :confused: ) you're not alone...

Although I have no personal recollection of the events, generally I remember that it was both downplayed (certainly, is it natural to trumpet achievements of your adversary?) and recognized as great technological achievment. Soviets both claimed (loudly) that their program of unmanned probes (culminated with Lunokhod program) yielded far more results per man-hour invested and admitted (in hush-hush tone) that moon landing is far greater propaganda achievement. I guess they were right on both counts.
Probably. I always thought that the Soviet programme was at least as impressive as the American, given it was the 1960s - the way they built purely robotic rovers and even a sample-return robotic craft. But it's the image of man walking on the moon that people remember.
 
It is irony that in free, liberal capitalistic America NASA united all major manned spaceflight programs (MOL and Dynosour were last remnants of military space program, both never leaving ground, dont know if any flight hardware for either got built), while in Soviet Union dozens of design bureaus fought for attention of party and military leadership, running a number of independnt programs, and total budged of entire Soviet moon program was around 4x less than Apollo.

N1 (Soviet big moon rocket, the Saturn V equiv) development started late, it never got good engines due to history of bad blood between Korolev and Glushko (though at the time Glushko didn't have good enough engine in any way, it was in the 70es when he designed Vulkan/Energia/Zenith engines, now used by DOD in Atlas V, the best MFing rocket engines ever built (SSME cost way, way to much to take the claim))

Than Korolev died under surgery, Gagarin died in a plane crash, and Soviet civilian space program lost a lot of support the names of those two carried. They kept toying with N1 for years, ending in early 70es every flight had been a failure with a rocket explosion and they finally cut the program and gave up on the Moon for time being.
 
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