Suppose something goes wrong with Yuri Gagarin's flight (eg., the service module's failure to separate properly causes his reentry module to fail and he burns up during reentry) and consequently the Russians keep the entire affair secret while trying to discover and fix what went wrong. Thus, Alan Shepard is the first man in space on Freedom 7. With the US seeming to have clinched an early victory, what happens to the space race? Is there an equivalent to the Rice speech, and if not (as I think likely), what happens to the US and Soviet space programs? Might we see something more similar to the pre-speech plans, which only contemplated circumlunar flights topping off the decade (that is, something like the Zond or Apollo 8 flights), with landing being a goal for the '70s?