Would the space race have escalated, and to what extent? Or would it make little difference -- the Soviet Union was bound to fall in two decades' time anyway. Here's what the Soviet lander looked like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_Lander
Depends on when and how it happened. If the divergence is that Korolev died early and Chelomei's modular rockets became the mode, the Russians might have been competitive. If the divergence is that the Soviets get up a manned circumlunar in late '68 or early '69, not much changes. As soon as the Americans get boots on the moon, the Soviets will scrap their projects and pretend they were never in the race. For the Soviets to really be competitive, the American landing has to be delayed long enough got the Soviet N1 to come on-line (1971 perhaps). Or you need a radically different Soviet space program. Maybe Korolev not dying on the operating table in 1966 might speed up development of the N1, but who knows? The thing was an engineering nightmare.
As in dying before he came up the design for the N-1? That would then beg the question whether the Russians could design and build a rocket with equivalent power to the Saturn V. While the Proton is a very good design (has to be if still in use 50 years later) could if of been scaled up to the power of the Saturn-V? Maybe Korolev might of gotten the N-1 working order but something tells me that it would never of been built well enough to fly successfully (having to put the thing together on the launch pad was a recipe disaster. Btw has anyone seen the 3 part series "Space Race" - a documentary/re-cration of the early days on the race into space with a great deal of time looking at Korolev's work.
Well, the N-1 design existed since the early 60s. But if Korolev dies early, during the Brezhnev turnover, OKB-1 might lose its support. The UR-500 (Proton) could heft 20 tons into orbit, about a fourth of the N1. So once could launch circumlunars and even minimal lunar landings given enough boosters. Chelomei also intended to build the UR-700 which would have incorporated a cluster of Proton first stages and lofted twice as much as the N-1. It's definitely true that the N-1 never worked very well. The first stage had 24 engines to coordinate! Still, given money and will and better leadership, who knows? But Chelomei (or even Yangel) was probably a better bet in some ways.
And all it took was for 1 to fail to bring an entire N1 stack down. WHEW! I can't say it wouldn't have been fun to have Alexei Leonov be the first on the moon. He's just too jovial and social to have been the veritible recluse Armstrong has been.
It's an impossible question to answer, really. In order for the Russians to have landed first the entire history of the space race would have needed to be different. The Russian space program somewhere during those early years would have had to move beyond simply being able to pull off an interesting stunt every once in a while. As it was, the USA built the ground work needed to successfully go to the moon while the Russians simply didn't have the capabilites to do so. In other words, this wasn't a close race that the Americans just happened to win. In the end it wasn't even a contest.
Well, one thing's for sure - Teddy Kennedy would probably still be in jail right now if the Russians had beaten us to the moon. Other than that, the most significant difference would have been a political black eye for America in the 60's. It probably would have additionally forced us to step up plans to be the first to colonize the moon, or be the first to set foot on Mars.
Those silly Russkies. They don't have a single original bone in their collective bodies do they? Here's the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran, which began construction back in 1976 to counter our SS program. Detect a pattern?
I dunno, launching the first satellite into orbit; man in space; first spacewalk; and first spacestation seemed pretty original to me.
^Not to mention taking the first pictures of the far side of the moon. That's why the features on it have Russian names. Robert
I seem to recall a movie back in the 60's that portrayed the space race to the moon. Wish I could remember the name. Both the US and USSR were neck and neck in the movie. The Soviets launched first and looked to be the "winners." A lone American astronaut lands (but in the wrong place) and has to moonwalk to a "shelter" that landed earlier. Along the way, he discovers the Soviet craft, crash-landed on the moon, the cosmonauts all dead. He gets the Soviet flag and plants it along with the US flag before continuing his search for the shelter as his air supply diminishes. (I won't tell you how it ends!) Does ANYONE remember that movie and its name???
Thanks to watermelony2k I'm learning things here. Went to Wikipedia to see a list of all the Soviet human spaceflights in the 60s. Quite a few more Russian firsts I didn't know about. First to have more than one person on a spacecraft. In fact it was THREE, not just two in 1964. Although the next one, with Leonov walking in space was a two-man flight beating the first American two-man flight of Gemini 3. Later the Russians did the first crew transfer between two spacecrafts. The Americans still seemed to be accomplising more with the Gemini program but the Soviets weren't exactly sitting still. But it still looks like even if the first two N-1s hadn't blown up, America would've beaten them to the moon. Robert
Form follows function. On the shuttle, both the US and the USSR had numerous variant shuttle designs which looked very different, but the design we got was set by the size and weight of the maximum payload (dictating payload bay size and positioning), and the cross range capacity wanted (big delta wings), both of which were set by the DoD as a condition for supporting the programme and agreeing to abandon expendable boosters. And of course, the Soviet military reckoned that they had to have a match for any capability the US military thought worth having, hence the Buran lookalike.
The Shuttle was a brilliant piece of unintentional misdirection (unlike SDI which was intentional misdirection). The Russians figured we couldn't be wasting all that money for nothing so they bled cash to develop a space shuttle which was very similar to ours. And then they never used it. As for originality, it is suspected that the Russians copied their Soyuz design from the General Electric Apollo proposal. I say good for them. Apollo was a gold plated, overpriced affair which hasn't flown since 1975 (though it's about to enjoy a revival). Soyuz has flown since 1967 and is a much more useful, functional spacecraft.