soviet space flight

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to make it so that the Soviet Union lands on the moon after the United States in 1969, and to explain the ramifications of them doing so.

Let us suppose that the Soviet Union, for a POD of your preference (Sergei Korolev does not die? Vasily Mishin is not chosen as his successor? The URSS take the Space race more seriously from the beginning? Choose the one you like more) manages to beat the United States to the moon, forever...

I recently came across the, in my opinion, lost potential of the Soviet N1F-L3M program. http://www.astronautix.com/l/l3m-1972.html http://www.astronautix.com/n/n1f-l3m.html The value of the L3M, from my casual reading, seems immense. Imagine if the United States, having let Saturn-Apollo...

In February 1962 Nikita Khrushchev organized a meeting of the USSR’s Defense Council with the main missile designers in the Soviet Union. In attendance were Chelomei, Korolev and, courtesy of Glushko's maneuverings, Mikhail Yangel. At stake was who would get to design the USSR's heavy lift...

So, I've been reading my way through this discussion on what would happen if NASA had kept flying the Saturn 1B. Most of the thread is filled with creative ways in which the Saturn 1B might have been upgraded. Now, the Soviets actually kept flying their equivalent to the Saturn 1B - indeed...