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What are people's thoughts on the likely outcome should the Soviet Union land someone on the moon JUST before Apollo 11 without making any other particularly big changes. By this I mean a Soviet space program that is recognizably the same as ours, with more or less the same spacecraft facing off against OTL's NASA... It will take more resources to accelerate the program but my idea is to keep that to a minimum and get the Soviets there more though luck and risk taking than putting them much ahead of where they were OTL.

While I grant it's stretching credulity to actually beat NASA I could certainly see it being less than an ASB scenario. POD could be something along the lines of a quick and aggressive Soviet response to Kennedy's timeline leading to N1 (with its eventual lunar oriented configuration) and the LOK/LK etc. being prioritized two or three years earlier than OTL. Zond probably still runs into problems surrounding the Proton, and I suspect the re-entry troubles they had aren't going to disappear, but lets say that Zond ends up being a testbed for deep space re-entry; while the hope had been to fly a manned circumlunar (free return) before Apollo got flying again after the fire the reliability is nothing like acceptable before LOK and N1 become available.

N1 didn't fly until February 69 OTL, and thats just not soon enough, but with more development time and some optimism lets say that the first unmanned flight goes up (more or less successfully, though given that rocket's history probably barely) in early 68. A second unmanned flight goes smoothly (sooner after the first than OTL without the first mission being a total loss) in, lets say, April 68. Soyuz 3 flies as OTL in October, but uses the LOK, orbital Soyuz having been placed on hold in favour of the lunar program after the Soyuz 1 crash. Soyuz 4 and 5 (in January 1969) are replaced with a single LOK and an LK docking in earth orbit (no N1 involved, both are launched on R7s (LK might take a Proton actually, but doesn't need a crew)) being both the first Soviet manned docking and a flight test of the lander. Depending on how generous you're feeling there might be a second Soyuz/LOK on hand with a single crew member to retrieve the LK pilot should things go badly and film the test if they don't (I like the idea, but suspect in the end it would go along the lines of this mission being ready to go, and either not launching in time or failing to rendezvous, film or otherwise carry out its purpose if the attempt is made). February sees the first crewed N1 take an LOK and LK stack to lunar orbit, and May 1969 (around the time of OTL Apollo 10) has the second full manned lunar stack (and fourth N1 flown) land a single Cosmonaut on the moon for a few hours on what is officially still a test mission.

At this point Apollo 10 could conceivably become a landing mission to at least put the first American landing within days of the Soviet, but I somewhat doubt that NASA's ethos at the time would allow it. In any case, Apollo 11 goes off as OTL. I could well imagine the Soviets placing a hold on the landings after the first mission TTL between the obviously high risk and the intention they always had to involve backup LKs and Lunokhod rovers to help alleviate the shortcomings of the rather tiny single man lander. That said, a second mission in November is very possible, and I am sorely tempted to say that they try to fly another in 69 but lose the crew one way or another, leading to the full Soviet moon program amounting to only two or three more landings that don't happen until around 1971 and 72 with the full 2 LKs and Lunokhod as a ground target mission profile. Either way, Apollo isn't going to be much affected as far as I can tell, and the Soviets are not likely to land on the moon more than 3-5 times total themselves (and I would think are VERY likely to get some people killed along the way).

What really interests me is what would happen next with something like this. Anyone can see that the Soviet capabilities are clearly inferior to American at this point, but there is certainly not the clear American victory in the so called Moon race we had OTL. Meanwhile the Soviets are still going to be able to beat the American into orbit with a space station, and N1 working out better means Salyut may be quit a bit more capable (or at least bigger, I could certainly see even the early stations having two or three crews on board at once, and I think a small lunar orbiting platform would be a serious possibility). Beyond that the Soviet program is quite likely to peter out into the same kind of 70s they had OTL, with very poor success rates, crew losses and all in all not much being done; what I really wonder is what people think this will do to NASA?

Is this enough to keep the pressure on for a continued highly aggressive program? Will it be feasible at this point to either call the moon race an outright victory (between technical superiority and still meeting Kennedy's deadline)? Could we see the American's use OTL's Soviet claim that there never WAS a race (saying that Kennedy only said by the end of the decade, not necessarily first)? Could the shuttle emerge with more money and an ramped up timeline as a technological display? How about earliest possible Mars landing with Apollo derived hardware, with a reduced but bigger than OTL budget? Certainly a lot of possibilities, but I'm really looking for thoughts on what's likely. I can't see Nixon being any more a space fan than OTL, but it seems to me this scenario makes him even less able to defund the program than OTL.

PS: forgot to mention that my other big assumption (though it comes out of the frankly crazy risks they are already taking) is that the Soviets would be willing to start flying crews on the nearly completely automatic LK almost as soon as vehicles are ready. You might be able to cram a single unmanned test into the TL, but its tight, and I like the idea of one of the compromises the accelerated timeline makes is that the LK is considerably more manual than OTL. Whatever happens, when the LK did eventually fly unmanned from what I know it actually worked pretty well, and was probably one of the least problematic bits of the whole plan.
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