Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The Soviet Moonshot (with Asif Siddiqi)

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

The U.S. won the space race in July of 1969 with the success of Apollo 11. But was the Soviet Union even racing? How close were they to beating the United States to the Moon? Soviet space historian Dr. Asif Siddiqi discusses the other side of the space race as we kick off our multi-part series of interviews celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing.  Planetary Society Chief of Washington Operations, Brendan Curry, also joins the show to catch up on the latest news about the White House proposal to return to the Moon by 2024. More resources about this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-38.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Welcome back to this monthly program that we bring you from the heart of Washington, D.C., which is also the heart of space exploration in the United States and therefore largely around the world. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Very happy to be back with my colleague, Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. Welcome, Casey.

Hey, Matt. And before we even go further, I want to say happy third anniversary of the show. We started three years ago, roughly this month, around this time. Exactly right. Yes. Congratulations to you, to all of us, and to all the policy wonks out there who've been enjoying this program with us now for all of that time. To help us celebrate, we have your close colleague, Brendan Curry, the Chief of Washington Operations for the Planetary Society. Brendan, welcome back. It's great to be back, Matt, and always good to be working with you and Casey.

Casey, a little tease up front here. We have another outstanding interview, one that also will help us lead into this 50th anniversary season for Apollo, specifically Apollo 11, which as we speak now is barely a month and a half away, the anniversary of the first moon landing. We'll get back to that in a moment, but we also want to deliver our usual message up front, which is that if you're listening to this, if you've come back into the Space Policy Edition

because you can't get enough of space or the policy decisions that drive it in Washington, D.C. and around the world. Well, first of all, we're glad that you found us. But second, we hope that you will actually join us and help support this program. And the best way to do that is to become a member of the Planetary Society, which is bringing you this program. Thank goodness for all of us, right? You can do that by going to planetary.org slash membership and join the tens of thousands of space enthusiasts,

not just in the U.S., but around the world, who make this program possible and make possible all of the other great work that is underway by the Planetary Society. And I will drop in here, that includes LightSail 2. I know it's a little far afield from the space policy discussions that we have every month here on SPE, but you can understand that we're a bit excited about this. We are still set for our launch on June 22nd. Some of you, I bet, will be joining us down at the Cape

for this exciting launch and all the great events that we will have underway down there. You can check it out at planetary.org. Of course, it's right there on the homepage. And while you're there, come and join us as an organization of people who believe that if we're going to keep expansion across the solar system and exploration of the solar system

as part of what it means to be human, the best way we know of to do that is to join the society. Okay. Well, that's this week's plug, unless Casey, you have anything to add. No, you always nail it, Matt. I can't ever beat you. I have to do it first or something. I tell you, it comes from the heart. Tell us what comes out of Washington. We're still dealing with budget stuff, right? And how we're going to get to the moon by 2024, which is a sure thing, right, Casey? Yeah, that whole thing.

So it has been one month since our last episode. And what a crazy month it has actually been in terms of policy and budget. We are in a very strange situation. And I just want to emphasize that this is not normal process that we not only have the original president's budget request for fiscal year 2020, this next fiscal year coming up for NASA. But we also have now a supplemental request that was released a couple weeks ago, in response to the president's directive that NASA return humans to the moon by 2024, this accelerated timeline. So we had a period of a few weeks, more than a month, actually, of kind of rumors and ideas and what's NASA going to ask for, how much political support is going to come out. And, you know, maybe the White House is really serious about it this time. We're going to put a lot of money into making this

happen. The supplemental was released in mid-May. I wrote about this in a blog piece on Planetary Society's website, and it was really modest. It was way less than I was expecting. Not that I was expecting tens and tens of billions of dollars, but they asked for 1.6 in additional money for NASA. That's roughly a 5% increase compared to last year's budget. If you combine the two NASA budgets requests together, the final request that the president puts out, it's about $22.6 billion for 2022, excuse me, for 2020. And that's not really enough for a moon program, frankly. It's not a good sign.

And so it kind of landed with a thud. And then, of course, I would say in relative political malpractice, the pay for, the way that this had to be paid for by the White House is that they're going to take money from a Pell Grant reserve fund that usually funds low-income students to go to college and put that towards NASA. Now, there's a variety of nuances to that, and it is unlikely to happen, but it set up this really unfortunate political dynamic where NASA and a moon program or the President Trump's moon program is taking money from poor college kids to pursue this moon program. So they couldn't have chosen really a worse, maybe if they had taken out from like the puppy reserve fund and paid it into NASA instead. But we have a really kind of abysmal political confrontation set up from that. So we can go into the details of it,

but that's roughly where we are in terms of what has been going on. So it's weird. It's a step forward in a sense. If you just look at the proposal from NASA, it's not bad, but it's definitely not encouraging, or it at least doesn't give me high hopes that we're going to get to the moon by 2024. Now on this program, just a couple of weeks ago, the NASA administrator, Bridenstine, said it's a bell curve, and that's why it's starting out so small. That certainly implies that in the middle of that bell curve, there's going to be a lot more money needed to pull off this program, which is exactly what you're saying. And certainly, I don't think anybody would argue with that. Regarding the Pell Grants, they did say that this is money which is not,

it's sort of unused money, right? Because people aren't applying for these Pell Grants, but that doesn't seem to have mollified Congress very much. Yeah. And this is what I keep saying. It's a political construct. It's a political problem that they've created. It is a reserve fund. I don't know the details enough whether to say it's good or bad. The whole reason it has a reserve fund is because during the last recession, the funds were depleted very quickly. And so it was purposely built to have this. It's also coming from two completely different accounts in Congress. The Department of Education has a different subcommittee in Congress, ultimately, that would choose to fund these or not. The White House had to balance their books due to a variety of legal commitments that they have from their budget office. But again, it doesn't matter in a sense that there's an old saying in

politics, right? If you're explaining, you're losing. And so if you're kind of on the defensive saying, no, no, no, no, it's only extra money that these poor kids weren't going to get anyway. No, the political dynamic that's been constructed is NASA versus Pell Grants. And you see this already being repeated by a number of news outlets and opinion pieces. We saw one just the other day in the USA Today editorial saying, don't raid Pell Grants for Trump's moonshot. And USA Today is not exactly a big partisan newspaper, right? And so the point is, this is politics. People are going to misread a situation, but it's also, you know, you had to think about it in a larger context. What's this foot forward you're going

to put out there with NASA going to the moon? And by creating this dynamic, by creating this tension between these two things, or really creating this trade off mentality, you've kind of kneecapped this effort from the very beginning in terms of the politics of it, which I think is really unfortunate for NASA and for this whole endeavor. Brendan, does this jibe with your understanding of the current state of this supplemental budget to get us to the moon? I think I said last time we were together, we're in uncharted waters. I staked my professional reputation with you guys last time when we were on this, that the supplemental was supposed to arrive no later than April 15. April 15 came and went.

May 1st was the next date, came and went. And it was only, I think, and Casey, please feel free to disagree, it was only the forcing function of Chairwoman Nita Lowey, who's the Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, trying to get a ton of the appropriations bills at a committee before the Memorial Day recess. That was a forcing function for OMB in the White House to cough up whatever they were going to cough up. Give a little history. Casey's done a very artful job of talking about the optics of the Pell Grant situation. For decades, NASA, in the appropriations process, was always pitted against veterans affairs and housing for poor people. This is nothing new in terms of NASA having a mission or a goal or

something like that and being pitted against something that's incredibly politically sympathetic versus something as esoteric as sending something to Europa or something like that. agencies, NASA, which was one. So they would get an allocation from the congressional appropriations leadership. And then you had a pot of money, you had to move around to fund NASA, veterans, HUD stuff. But this is different in the sense that this is coming from the White House, that the White House itself has proposed a one-to-one transfer. And so that's what I think in terms of the, it's always, once it gets down to the subcommittee level, it's always going to be a series of trade-offs once you have your allocation. But the politics were defined by the proposing entity, the executive branch in this sense. And also by doing this as a supplemental, as opposed to doing this through the regular budget process, when the president's budget request came out, it decreased a lot of federal

agencies' budgets and increased others. And so there was no real, you can't draw like a one-to-one cut there, went into NASA or cut there, went into the DOD. There was a bunch of things went down and a bunch of things went up. But by doing this supplemental, there was only like five things. And so it's really easy to draw where did those five extra bonuses come from? They all came from this one source. And so by doing this separately as a supplemental, it made it extremely easy to take a look at it as a one for one pay for from Pell Grants. And so this all may be pointless. I don't think there's any chance at this point that Pell Grants are going to get cut. No, no, no. But but by presenting this dynamic, I think the White

House really misstepped. And again, this is not NASA proposing this. I want to emphasize NASA didn't get to control where this money came from. This is at the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, ultimately approved by the executive branch in the White House. This is why I said NASA is kind of kneecapped and put in a very tough situation here. And how people are talking about this is all wrapped up in this Pell Grants versus NASA. And that precisely speaks to the point where the space policy community here in Washington who cares about NASA being put in this kind of awkward situation. There were a couple of years where, you know, it was NASA funding versus cops on the street grants. It's nothing,

for those of us who care about space policy and space funding, to be put in this kind of, this type of situation. We've all kind of been there before and it's no fun. And it's something we as a community and our listeners and our supporters are just going to need to be ready to grapple with. And I don't think at the end of the day, Pell Grants are going to be hurt. I think at the end of the day, the Senate is going to call the shots in the end, and they're going to work something through. The deputy administrator of NASA, Jim Morehard, is a longtime Senate hand and has worked a lot with the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby. And I think at the end of the day, something will come up. I think to her credit, Chairwoman Lowy, I mean, and Casey, you've seen the legislation as well. I mean, the House appropriators almost, I don't want to say willingly, but they

don't even speak to this amended budget, which actually was a good bill, I think. If this was a nine-inning ballgame, we're at the bottom of the third, top of the fourth. Let's talk for a second about what the supplemental actually proposed first, and then we can talk about what the House didn't do in support of that. I mean, just like broad outlines, the supplemental, it asked for an extra $1.6 billion for NASA. So it's an augmentation, you know, considering just for NASA. And of that money, it was going to also kind of cut internally their original proposal to start funding the Gateway, this orbiting space station around the moon. They basically cut that funding in half

for 2020. And they redirected some of those original proposed funds with this extra money. So we're talking about probably closer to $2 billion, $1.8 to $2 billion in money being pushed towards an accelerated 2024 landing. So of that, about a billion dollars is proposed to be spent on starting development of critically the lunar landing element of this, right? Probably the most important. If you want to land on the moon, helps to have a lunar lander. And the poor Canadians got their arm ripped off, literally. And so you have, you need a lunar lander. So that's a billion dollars to begin development or, you know, kind of reaching out to industry to develop a lunar lander. You have some extra money. And then I guess kind of ironically, considering what we talked about a few months ago, with all the consternation and critiques of the SLS and its role and its ability to keep schedule, this budget after originally, just want to emphasize the original president's budget request proposed to cut funding for the SLS and defer the block 1B, this, you know, the heavier lift version of it into the indefinite future.

This supplemental puts all of that money back and then some. So it basically now has doubled down on the SLS despite those critiques and puts about an extra 600 some million dollars to the SLS and the Orion crew capsule to try to accelerate those programs. Not even accelerate them, but just to keep them on schedule in order to launch, hopefully in 2020, the first uncrewed launch and then two other launches with a third launch. Again, think about the speed of this. The third launch of the SLS would be the lunar landing launch. Which was supposed to be Europa Clipper. Right. Yeah. And that's a whole other issue we should devote an episode to. Which sadly looks like it is going, the launch of the Clipper will be delayed. Now, not all of that is because of SLS. They're having a little bit of trouble

developing some of the instruments for the spacecraft. But yeah, clearly this is going to affect other parts of our exploration program. And we also heard, if you're ready for this, late last week, Bill Gerstenmaier, the guy at NASA who's going to have to deal with this most directly, the associate administrator for human exploration and ops, a big surprise. He said that Artemis, this program to get us to the moon, is probably going to have to dip into, or as they put it, look for some efficiencies and make cuts internal to the agency, he warned. So the assurances from Administrator Breitenstein that we wouldn't see cuts to other parts of the NASA budget, that may have already gone away.

Yeah, I thought that was astonishing. I think we're at a point where clarification is really needed at this point. This is the associate administrator of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier speaking, not the NASA administrator. Jim Bridenstine has said this over and over, and I think correctly understands the politics of the situation, that if NASA does propose significant cuts to other programs, particularly in science, they will not succeed with this Artemis program, with the moon landing program. And the other thing is, is that Casey and I have been monitoring the fact that you had

the former head of Sierra Nevada, Mark Serangelo, come in to the agency for a brief stint. And his designator was, you know was Moon Mars czar, essentially. And then he hit the bricks. I mean, there are some weird optics going on within the agency. And you have a lot of people in the DC space policy community kind of scratching their head or wondering what's going on. It is fascinating to see this much tumult at NASA headquarters. Again, this doesn't bode well for 2024. And Serangelo was supposed to lead a directorate, the background of that. They're supposed to rejigger all of the internal organization of NASA to focus on this Moon to Mars directorate. Congress basically said that

that's not going to happen. And without a directorate to lead or control of any money, Mark Serangelo basically didn't have any direct power or control over anything. And so he seemed to just kind of pick up and leave in response to that. Well, I hope that these are just first baby steps that might be going a bit awry, steps that might be going a bit awry because, of course, we all wish that NASA is able to do all of the things that it wants to do, including getting us back to the moon. What do you guys see in store? I mean, can you cast those tea leaves? It doesn't seem like it's going to be an easy job to predict the future. But what is it?

Job security for Casey and I, first of all. Yeah, let me say, I'm sure glad that both of you are there to defend our interests. Let's talk about the House budget. We saw a sign of things to come. Yeah, with the House appropriators kicked out and is headed to the floor under what's called normal order or regular order, Speaker Pelosi and Chairwoman Lowy are doing their honest level best to get the House back to that. And they should be given credit. And we are an apolitical, nonpartisan organization. So let me get that out of the way. They're institutionalists. They are taking their job seriously.

Congress's first and foremost job, especially the House, is to fund the government. OK, so they're doing their best to get it out on a timeline, kick those bills over to the Senate. The Senate, the old joke is there are three political parties in Washington, Republicans, Democrats, and to the Senate. The Senate, the old joke is there are three political parties in Washington, Republicans, Democrats, and then the Senate. So they're breaking their necks to get these things squared away. I think the House Appropriations Bill with respect to NASA is pretty good. DART and NEOCAM are taken care of. They dinged the Space Council a little bit, which I thought was interesting. But it's going to have to all go over to the Senate.

And I think Chairman Shelby is going to take his time. Not only is he chairman of the full Senate Appropriations Committee, he, as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, He, as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he's made it his prerogative to retain control of what's called the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee, which is an even bigger budget. Just to give you and our listeners an idea of how much influence this gentleman has. I think we're going to see a lot of activity. There was a lot of activity running up to Memorial Day recess. The next big push is to get a lot of stuff done before the 4th of July. Just next week, we're going to have what's called a minibus kicked out of the House floor. It's going to have labor, health, and human services, appropriations, education spending, House defense spending bill, State Department,

Department of Energy, various few other things. It will not include the bill that we care about, which is called CJS, that includes NASA. The House will probably deal with that after the 4th of July recess, possibly. I think you're going to see a flurry of activity. And oh, by the way, Casey and I have been talking about the appropriation stuff. There's still something else called an authorization bill. The Senate is going to drop their NASA authorization bill possibly this month. On the House side, it may not be until later. That will have a lot more policy. The authorization bills have a lot more. They get much more into the weeds of policy stuff. They address spending issues, but it's really the appropriators that cut the checks, essentially. But

the authorization bills talk about spacecraft in detail, things like that. Casey, remind us, CJS, that's Commerce, Justice, and Science. Did I get that right? Yeah. And again, just to go back to what the House has done, when the House released their appropriations, if the House had basically control over NASA's budget exclusively, this is what it would look like next year. basically control over NASA's budget exclusively. This is what it would look like next year. They basically didn't respond at all to the supplemental request about accelerating the 2024 moon landings. Now, you can read that in two ways. The first way would be saying, oh, they just completely say, no, absolutely not. We hate this. We're not going to do what you want because we

want to just reject the president's proposal or we don't believe it's happening. The other way, which I think is probably more pragmatic, is that they had done most of their work by the time that the supplemental had come out and they didn't have time to react to it. And what we see in the House budget, again, Brennan mentioned it's actually quite good. It is. It has a big jump up into the science portfolio.

It restores WFIRST, the follow-on space telescope to James Webb, which has been proposed to be canceled for two years now. It includes half a billion dollars for that mission. It also bumps up Earth science to its highest level ever, to about $2 billion. It includes all these priorities for planetary science that Brendan mentioned. And it does bump up exploration SLS funding, but basically doesn't address any of the details about the Gateway or lunar landers. So that's left a little bit ambiguous. It also, I should say, restores the STEM engagement education

program within NASA. So it was proposed to be canceled. They're proposing $123 million for that. So it's rejecting a lot of the original cuts provided to NASA in the original president's budget request. The Senate will take that as kind of a starting point, as Brennan said, do their own thing. Maybe the Senate will release a budget over the rest of the summer. Maybe it'll pass it. They will take their time. And then we have this as a reminder, October 1st is the new fiscal year.

Either we have a budget or the government shuts down and we need to have either a CR, continuing resolution and so forth. So there's a lot more things to work through. And then there's also bigger issues about there's not yet an agreement on overall spending levels that they have to work with. That could come up as an issue. So there's a lot of politics yet to happen. And of course, with every day that's progressing right now, we're getting closer and closer to the presidential election next year. And so every

day is turning more into a presidential election cycle, which always undermines some of the more practical aspects of political dealmaking in the country. The entire House will be up for re-election in a third of the Senate. And Matt, our listeners will probably think Casey and I are trying to make this sound like a cliffhanger episode that they're going to have to keep tuning in. Well, they do. It's always a cliffhanger in Washington. So stay tuned. And of course, we'll continue to report on this during these

monthly space policy additions, but here and there with conversations on the weekly show as well. Brendan, I'll pose this to you as a longtime participant and observer of this space policy area. Does this program even make sense? We didn't really touch on that. The proposal as provided, is that a reasonable way to get to the moon and sustain a presence there? Or is this folly, pure and simple? And as we approach the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, which is a momentous moment in humankind, momentous moment in humankind in every sense of the term the line is well that was it was flags and footsteps it was not just because you hear a lot of people say why can't we do Apollo again well it wasn't sustainable okay so we're supposedly smarter now right we're whatever we're going to do we're going to make it sustainable. Okay, fine. What's being proposed right now, I was born the day after 17 lifted off 39, pad 39.

So technically, I was alive during the Apollo era. Of course, I don't remember it. Actually, my first real space memory was watching Skylab fall in kindergarten. And that was horrifically depressing. I hear all these baby boomers talk about what they saw, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. I have no memory of that. I have two children, two daughters, a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old. Do I want to take them down to the Cape and see them watch some monstrous rocket blast off taking men and women to the moon and elsewhere? Of course I do. I want this to work. The romantic in me wants this to work, but I worry. I worry that there's

a lot of attention and direction to what we're doing right now. And it's great. But I have to be a little NASA awarded contracts to three small companies to get small payloads to the moon. And so it looks like the commercial side of this is moving forward. Yeah, the great experiment will begin now. Yeah, the great experiment will begin now. This is going to be trying to take the lessons of the commercial payload services for the International Space Station and say, will it work to deliver payload to the lunar surface? They chose three companies, two of which I'd actually never heard of before. Not that I followed it that closely. You and me both.

That's right yeah so they may have been a little stealthy and they are getting about i think a couple hundred million all told the three of them to jumpstart their development of these small lunar landers nasa science mission will be providing instrumentation they actually have a decent budget augmentation to to build new instrumentation for this and they'll they'll try it so they're competing against each other and they're competing in a fixed price. So NASA is buying this as a service. It's not paying everything. The idea is, again, that by stepping back a little from a regulatory perspective, NASA can achieve some cost savings through efficiencies at the private sector level that they're able to just make decisions, move

fast without having like this huge ladder of approvals going up and down NASA bureaucracy. The question to me is, and this is what's going to be fascinating to watch, is that the whole idea of doing this in low Earth orbit was predicated on the idea that NASA would not be the only customer, right? You would invest in companies like SpaceX, Orbital Sciences at the time, and you would build up, you know, NASA would be one of many. So you would help the US space industry be competitive globally, right? Other people want to go into low Earth orbit, and we see that with SpaceX all the time. They launch private satellites into orbit, communication satellites, and so forth. So that helps build a business case. But at the moon, there's right now, there's no other buyer except for NASA. So we're in a monopsony, a single buyer market, where even though you have companies

competing for NASA's services, there's no one else to provide services to yet, right? The whole idea is that some market will show up at the moon. So a fundamental tenet, basically, of why it worked at low Earth orbit does not exist at the moon. It's barely working in low Earth orbit. Well, SpaceX was the only one to pull it off. Orbital science as well. Now, Northrop never really bothered to go after other customers for their Antares rocket that NASA helped fund to provide services to the station. And the launch market itself is notoriously competitive and difficult to compete in. I mean, SpaceX had to sue its way into competing for launches for

the Air Force. There's a lot of other competitive international launch services that will only use their own launch capabilities in China and Europeans and so forth. At the moon, you have even harder situations, even fewer people to provide services. And so, again, this is why I say it's an experiment. I'm going to be really interested. And again, I think, Matt, you've covered this really well with the Beresheet landing. Landing on the moon is really hard. It's important to remember that. It's not an easy thing. Many, many, many things can go wrong. go wrong. We have these, I think a little bit of rose colored glasses looking back at Apollo. And we forget that every single landing of Apollo onto the surface of the moon had problems, right? They required a pilot intervention to help them land safely. And not to mention all the other failed moon landings from the Soviet Union back in the time, or even the US originally with Ranger. It's tough. And so, but I think it's the right thing to experiment. We can answer this question right now.

Are there better ways to do it? We're about to find out. Well, probably needless to say, we wish them luck. Casey, let's get into that interview because you've taken us back to Apollo and that's a good place to be for this. It is. I'm excited for this interview.

It's the first of what will be the next, I think, four episodes of the Space Policy Edition. We're doing a series of interviews looking at the political history of Apollo. And this is our little contribution to the whole Apollo 50th anniversary celebrations and looking back. And we're going to be taking a look at Apollo from a variety of different perspectives that I really don't think we see much in this day and age. So we're going to look at the politics of how Apollo came to be. We're going to look at the domestic opposition to Apollo during the 1960s, why Apollo stopped happening at the end of the 60s and early 70s.

And today, we're going to learn about the Soviet side of the equation. Were we even racing to get to the moon? Was there a race at all? I interviewed Dr. Asif Siddiqui. He is, I'd say literally the world's expert on the Soviet space program at this time. And he has a wonderful book that he had put together, unlocking all these mysteries about the program, what they were trying to do, all of which wasn't released until after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And so we try to really answer that question. What were the Soviet Union space program doing?

Why did they not end up going to the moon? And were they ever actually racing us? So it's a great interview. I really enjoy it. And it's going to kick off, again, this series of new interviews. We're going to put these all together online. You can look for them in the future. But everyone on listening to Space Policy Edition will hear them through this. And I hope that the audience, our listeners, will enjoy this as much as I did.

There are multiple revelations in here, at least there were for me. We will come back to say goodbye after this conversation that Casey had recently with Asif Siddiqui. Let's go ahead and roll that. Dr. Siddiqui, I want to thank you so much for joining us on the Space Policy Edition today. It's my pleasure. space program, particularly for those of us who were born maybe after the end of the Cold War, just to give us the sense of where this is coming from. Can you help our listeners understand what was the Soviet Union like, or what state was the Soviet Union in after World War II? And what were some of its immediate post-war goals, particularly in terms of the United States? Obviously, the bigger context here is the Cold War right after World War II and the U.S. possession of the atomic bomb. So I think in that sense, the bomb looms large over what the Soviets were thinking about

in terms of a post-war response. But also, of course, there's a massive process of reconstruction after World War II. But also, of course, there's a massive process of reconstruction after World War II. The Soviet Union was essentially devastated, as many as 1,700, if I remember well. 1,700 cities were destroyed. Lots of infrastructure had to be rebuilt. So there's a kind of rebuilding that happens. But there's also kind of an urgency to match what America is doing at that point, particularly in terms of the nuclear weapons development program.

And so in the 40s, as you probably know, the Soviet Union puts a lot of effort into building an atomic bomb, which they exploded in 1949. And then the other sort of big event in the 50s is, of course, the death of Stalin in 1953, which opens up, in sort of in quotes, I guess, opens up the Soviet Union a little bit, where things become a little less tightened in terms of its totalitarian nature. And so we come up to the end of the 50s, really, where the Soviet Union is in a relatively stronger position in terms of weapons and things like that. It's economically a bit better off than obviously the end of World War II. And there's a slight bit of optimism, if you might call it, among the Soviet population

that the war is behind us and we're perhaps going to achieve something greater. So that's what's happening. But of course, in terms of the bipolar situation, the Soviet Union looms very large, you know, it's sort of a communist nation, which is positioned in direct opposition to democratic capitalism and that sort of thing. But I think internally, if you could pull somebody in the Soviet Union, there's a modicum of optimism and an expectation of growth in the country at the time. One of the issues, I guess, after World War II was that after the Soviet armies had moved into Eastern Europe to fight back the German invasion, they basically stayed, right? Or you created a series of vassal states. You created this expansion of the Soviet Union.

And was that the core of creating this post-war tension between, for lack of a better term, the West and the East in this sense? Yeah, I think you zoned in on a very important point, which is that the creation of these essentially satellite nations, a kind of buffer, if you will, across Eastern Europe, with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and so on and so forth. And from the Soviet side, the reason for all this is essentially a kind of creating a buffer

to preclude the kind of invasion that had happened in 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. But of course, from the American side, this is an expansion of communism into Europe. So it's seen very differently by the two sides. And of course, that is the heart of the Cold War and the division of Germany itself into East Germany and West Germany. And communist rule essentially settles on all of Eastern Europe. And so that's essentially the setting for the Cold War in Europe. I know this is a kind of a loaded term, particularly for a historian, but do you think this was an inevitability, the idea of this

growing Cold War between particularly the US and the Soviet Union based on this post-war condition? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say what's inevitable, but I think I will say that for sure that it was a marriage of convenience in World War II. As you know, of course, the allies were the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, which was on the side of the allies. But because the Nazis were everybody's sort of common enemy, the relationship was rather friendly during World War II between the Soviet Union and the US. But it really collapses very quickly in 1945-46 for a variety of reasons, including, as you mentioned, the really incredible division of Europe. But it's also about the spoils of war, who gets what. And it's an ideological division, too, in terms of communism and capitalism. There's a lot going on.

And so I think because it's hard to imagine a different way things could have gone than these two sides really arrayed against each other. It's very clear what sides each were insights sort of came down on. You already brought up the fact that the Soviet Union developed the atomic bomb, you know, in response to the deployment of the atomic bomb by the United States at the end of World War II. Let's bring in the idea of the intercontinental ballistic missile. You had the birth of the rocket technology, you know, under the Germans towards the end of World War II. How did that play into this and how did that start to work its way into Soviet, particularly military policy during this antebellum period between the Cold War or between the space age and the end of the World War II? Right. You know, the Germans had developed what is, you know, historians essentially consider the world's first long-range ballistic missile, the V-2. In 1945, Germany was in devastation, and the U.S. and the French and the Brits and the Soviets really scampered into Germany to find what was left. And of course, one of the goals was to get as much high-tech stuff as possible.

And the V-2 fell under that category. There was an understanding that this was the jewel of the crown, so to speak. For the most part, the United States got all the goods. They got the best engineers and most of the material from the V-2 factories. But the Soviets got a bunch of stuff too. They got some mid-level engineers and they got a bunch of factories but the Soviets got a bunch of stuff too they got some mid-level engineers and they got a bunch of disassembled rockets so you know each side takes that back to their respective countries the narrative in the Soviet context is a little bit complicated because it's it's not a clear-cut case that they just sort of landed the Germans into labs and they just let them work they were essentially isolated their Germans in and they worked let them work. They were essentially isolated, their Germans, and they worked isolated from Soviet teams. But there was an understanding that the missile would be the future of war,

and certainly Soviet military strategists were talking in these terms. When the Soviets explored their atomic bomb in 1949, the delivery weapon for this was basically a long-range bomber, as it was in the United States, the B-52s. But the Soviets really didn't have the kind of technology, aeronautical technology, to develop bombers that could drop a bomb in the U.S. and come back. So they were looking for alternative solutions, and the alternative solution is, of course, a missile.

And there's a lot of discussion of what kind of a missile. You could have a cruise missile, you know, one with wings. You could have ballistic missiles that fly into the upper atmosphere. This set of problems was explored in great depth in the early 1950s. And around 1954, they decide to essentially develop a whole set of long-range

missiles, some cruise, some intercontinental ballistic ones. And they use some of the German technology, which had been developed in a remote area outside of Moscow by the Germans. But by and large, I would say it was mostly homegrown because they had really good engineers, really good abilities to organize teams. And they had a lot of resources, which they devoted to this problem. They were able to very rapidly build a very good missile called the R-7 by about 1957. The goal of the R-7 is essentially to deliver a hydrogen bomb to the United States.

And so its specs were essentially designed based from that point backwards on how heavy is a hydrogen bomb, and this is how much we need to deliver and so on and so forth. So, but yeah, the road to that all starts in 1945 in Germany. Was the decision to invest in these types of missiles, was that also kind of just looking on paper? Was that the obvious solution? Or was it in reaction to steps taken by the United States at the same thing? I feel like a lot of history in this point is the US and the Soviet Union kind of seemingly reacting to what they think the other is doing. Would that be accurate in this case? Or was this just kind of its own obvious investment in terms of military strategy? Yeah, again, I don't think this is entirely obvious. I think one part of the story is the action reaction dynamic,

for sure. And it's not just that one side is doing X and the other needs to match it. It's really a perception of what they think what the other side is doing. Often it's a mistaken perception. And so these kinds of things, you see there's lots of examples in the Cold War where the Soviets think the U.S. is doing something

and they try to replicate it, but instead of actually looking at what the U.S. is really doing. But in this case, the Air Force here in the U.S. is really doing. But in this case, the Air Force here in the U.S. had, people in the Air Force had been talking about ICBMs since about 1946, 47. But the ICBM project was essentially put on the back burner for a while until about 1953, 54. There was a long period of investments in cruise missiles and other things. And similarly, in the Soviet Union, people were talking about this kind of stuff. They knew what the Americans were talking about. But putting the ICBM on the absolute forefront doesn't happen until 1954. And somewhat coincidentally, within the exact same year, both countries decide to invest massive amounts in

their ICBM. In the US, it was the Atlas, and in the USSR, it was the R7. But this decision is very, very close to each other in 1954 on both sides, which is kind of an interesting synergy, I think. But I think part of it is that the technology had been perceived by experts on both sides that it's now the right time to do this. Part of it was a perception of what the other side was doing. And part of it was inherent sort of a domestic capacity to reproduce or to design these things. Do we have the expertise? Do we have the factories? That sort of thing. So there's a lot of pieces that have to be fulfilled. But coincidentally, this happens in the same year, in 1954.

I recall, I believe it was Walter McDougall's book, making the argument that this investment in ICBMs, well, first in atomic weapons, ICBMs, particularly on the US side under Eisenhower, was more of a practical consideration in terms of maintaining a relatively lower cost investment for national security compared to a massive ground army. Do you agree with that analysis? And was there a similar type of cost benefit analysis for investing in technology as the solution towards national security in the USSR at this point? Yeah, I think there is a little bit of that. And later on, this becomes much more evident when you get to the late 50s and early 60s when under Nikita Khrushchev they

basically reorient their entire strategic force away from like conventional weapons. In terms of technology the issue becomes really apparent by the late 1950s and early 60s in the Soviet Union when the Soviets essentially reoriented their entire strategic force to develop missiles and more advanced strategic weapons than the conventional ones, such as airplanes and ships and these kinds of things. And at that point, technology, you might say, becomes a driver of things. But I think early on, there is a kind of calculation over what is an optimal investment of national resources, much like in the U.S.,

it's not that missiles are going to be less expensive. In fact, there's no idea how, you know, nobody really knows how expensive or not they're going to be. It's more that they seem to be a solution to a set of problems that is coming up. As you know, air defense becomes much better in the 1950s. So their ability to shoot down, for example, a B-52, the Soviets essentially developed this massive air defense system. And in the U.S., there's similar air defense. So you can't really use airplanes to drop atomic bombs or long-range bombers. So how do you get these bombs to the other side? Well, maybe use a missile. There's no way we can shoot a missile down, which of course becomes untrue later on. But at that point, that possibility is very

remote. So the missiles become essentially a solution to overcoming the defensive system of the other side. I think cost, to the extent that it's thought about, is more about, well, we don't know. And later on, I think this becomes more embedded in policy where by about 1960, Khrushchev is really thinking about cost and thinking, let's just stop making like thousands of tanks. Let's build missiles, which in terms of economies of scale become cheaper at some level. This decision to begin developing the R-7, did that come to market? Was that deployed first before any U.S. ICBMs? Was that the first intercontinental ballistic missile? Oh, yeah. The R-7 was the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. It wasn't a very good intercontinental ballistic missile, but it was the first.

It was declared operational early 1960, if I'm not wrong. So it had a long test series between 57 and 60. But it was fully flying what might be considered intercontinental distances by 1958. And again, this whole capability, it was driven by the Soviet Union had hydrogen bomb of a certain mass. Yes, yes. So that's what drove the lift capability of this ICBM by developing that,

hey, this could also just take other things up into space, correct? That's basically how this capability was developed. Is that accurate way to say it? Yeah, that's basically accurate. I mean, this is a story, which is an interesting story, because the Soviets were not very good at microelectronics and these kinds of miniaturizations. So their bombs were generally larger. And so if you had a larger, let's say, close to orbital velocity. So that made the rocket essentially bigger. But of course, simultaneously, you start to imagine that this is the same thing that could be used to, if you added a little bit of extra velocity, you could reach orbital velocity. Now, it's not like they suddenly realized, oh, by the way, this rocket could also launch a satellite.

It's that the guys who were designing the rocket right from the beginning knew this. It wasn't on paper. They never told anybody. But they designed the rocket because these guys were essentially space enthusiasts. They were going to design a rocket for the military to deliver a hydrogen bomb. And, oh, yeah, by the way, we're not going to mention it, but this rocket can also reach orbital velocity. So I think that's part of the incredible story of this project is that this was a kind of stealth space program from the beginning by a bunch of guys who just wanted to go to space. It's not that they didn't want to do the weapon stuff too, because that was their

bread and butter, but they were doing both. And by 1955, it becomes pretty obvious that this is going to be successful, and they start proposing these satellite projects to the top-level political guys. This is maybe a good time to bring up Korolev. Yeah. And forgive my pronunciation of all of the Russian names that will be coming here. I'm just going to mangle them. But Sergei Korolev, I mean, he, again, compared often to the Wernher von Braun, who thought, made the same calculation working

for the Germans and then for the US, right? He was designed, he wanted to go into space. The only way you can get government investment would be to build missiles for more of a practical use of that technology. What was Korolyov's kind of quick background here? Because this is who essentially you're talking about, right? Who had dreamed of space for a long, long time, early rocket enthusiasts. These were the first, I think, I heard in the script, was the first like space nerds, right? Going way back into the day. Yeah, yeah. You could say that. I mean, Korolev's biography is incredibly fascinating, I mean, Karlyov's biography is incredibly fascinating, and it still pays dividends when you start reading it.

But I think the basic idea is that he's born in 1907, and he grows up in the 20s. At that time, he's actually very much interested in aeronautics. He's not really interested in space. He wants to build gliders, and he has this idea that he's going to build a rocket plane. This was his dream when he was in his 20s. But he's an incredible organizer. He's incredibly inspirational as a person. He's very hard-headed.

He's like one of a kind, that kind of person in a group who's both incredibly smart, a good organizer, and an inspiration. So a very rare character, I think, in that sense. But, yeah, he gets interested in space, but it's a misnomer to suggest that that's all he wanted to do. I think unlike von Braun, who I think his biographer, like, for example, Mike Neufeld, would say that von Braun was essentially a space nerd from day one. And that's what he wanted to do. Karlyov was a little bit different. I think he had a more practical bent in him. He was also going to do a bunch of other stuff. He was really, as I said, interested in aeronautics. He was interested in rocket airplanes and all sorts of other things. But he is interested in space, but he's also a very hard-headed realist in that sense. He knows what he has

to do in order to get there. And yeah, so he's the one in charge in the 1950s of a giant organization called OKB1, which is still around. It's outside of Moscow. And he had essentially founded this organization. He's presiding over thousands of engineers. He had a very rough life, which I can get into. But he essentially gets through all of that stuff.

And he's now heading this project. It's not just him. There's a bunch of people, like-minded people around him. Glushko, Tikhonrabov, et cetera., who are also really angling for the space thing. They're not just looking for the military solution to this. They're sort lucky because they have Karlyov to head it because he knows how to work the system. He knows how to talk the talk, etc. He knows how to get things done because he's not just a complete space nerd. He's not with his head in the clouds. He knows exactly what to do. As I said, a very hard-headed realist. He also knows that we can't dream too far ahead. We have to really be realistic on what we can achieve.

And it's telling that the very first proposal that he essentially allows his underlings and his associates to send up to the government on space is in May 1954, at the exact moment when he knows the ICBM is going to happen. Literally the week or the month he sends up this proposal. But not before. He doesn't, like, pester anybody. He doesn't do anything. But the moment the ICBM gets approved, immediately the first letter goes up to the pilot bureau. Hey, guys, we have a proposal for a satellite.

He pushes that until August of 1955 when the pilot bureau essentially approves this idea. And the way he casts it is very intelligent. He says, look, we're building this weapon. It's going to be a great ICBM. We're going to do what we said it's going to do, which is deliver a hydrogen bomb. But if we just add a little bit of extra velocity,

we can also put a satellite into space. And guess what? It won't disrupt our ICBM program. I guarantee you. We just want a couple of rockets. And even those rockets will test stuff that we need for the ICBM. This is going to be for the ICBM program. And secondly, he sends a bunch of, which is very smart,

he attaches a folder of cutouts from the American press saying how the Americans are preparing to launch a satellite. This is all just hearsay from all sorts of different magazines. But he puts it in a very clever way and says, look, the Americans are going to launch a satellite. This is all just hearsay from all sorts of different magazines. But he puts it in a very clever way and says, look, the Americans are going to do this. We can do it in very little effort. So you see in the very early days already an example of how he's very clever and playing the system to get what he wants. He waits for the right time. He says the right thing.

He attaches the right rationale to it. So it's very, I think, quite a brilliant move on his part. How were resources allocated in the Soviet Union? And even maybe more fundamentally, you know, we talk about it being a communist country with a command economy, but how did money work? Like literally, how did money work in that system? work in that system? Yeah. Well, I mean, the best way to think about it is essentially, it's the most obvious thing you can imagine. The state essentially allocates all resources. And there was actually an agency called Ghost Plan, which is sort of the responsible party for allocating all resources. Since there's no market economy, essentially, you don't work along lines of supply and demand. Although there is some variation or some sort of manner of that working, I think for the purposes of the space program,

for example, especially as you get into the 60s, it becomes a lot more complicated. The space program essentially works as a kind of, you know, there's money allocated to the space program, but essentially the customer, if you will, is essentially the military because the military is the one that's essentially operating the space program. And a little side part of that is essentially all the civilian stuff because the military operates so many different things, the civilian stuff, meaning like the human space flight program and so on and so forth, because the military has a lot of things that they do in space that is not civilian, so to speak. But essentially, money gets allocated, and then it gets dispersed to particular organizations.

They have goals and targets to meet, and their goal is to meet them. And so they have essentially one-year plans, two-year plans, five-year plans, essentially. But there are things built into the system that we might recognize in terms of, let's say, encouraging innovation in the sense that, for example, if you do meet your targets or if you exceed your targets, the people working in that enterprise will get bonuses. So bonuses are a way to incentivize engineers, for example, or holiday bonuses, whatever. So there's a kind of system built in. You also benefit from promotions. You benefit from the perks. Let's say you get a better apartment. There are things that you can get from working, let's say, better than your competitor. And when I say competitor, there is a kind of built-in competition. A bunch of scholars have been looking at the Soviet economy now since the collapse in the

Cold War, and we recognize that there's actually kind of a built-in competition, especially in the defense economy. The Soviet space program was a kind of little competition between a number of different organizations who were all trying to build the same thing. In the U.S., of course, you have a phase where people propose things, the request for proposals phase. Let's say you want to build a better tank or something. A number of big corporations propose their design for the tank. There's a review. The best tank gets picked.

The other guys say bye, and they move on. In the Soviet Union, there was a kind of similar system in the space program, which is that, okay, we want to build a better next generation spaceship. So a bunch of design bureaus, which are the corporations, essentially propose proposals. There's a review and one gets picked. But often what happens, that selection is very fraught with all sorts of other factors, because each of these organizations is directed by a very, very influential person. Sometimes they don't want to accept the decision. Sometimes they take

a rejection personally. They take it up to the top and so on and so forth. It's extremely fraught. And that's what essentially one of the problems in the Soviet space program in the 1960s is this kind of a very bad version of a competitive market where they really didn't figure out the way the market works in terms of a competitive economy. It's kind of a mixture of state socialism and small-scale market competition. And this is a very bad combination in that particular context.

Amy, you kind of insinuated this, but based on personal relationships a lot of the times, right? I think you had a phrase about this, like kind of who you knew or who you could have unusual ways to incentivize or, you know, how well you were connected or if your son worked for the premier or something like that, right? Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, you know, we shouldn't minimize that these things probably happen in the U.S. too, who you know, we shouldn't minimize that these things probably happen in the U.S. too, who you know, etc. But there was a particular way in which authority was really embedded in actual leaders of enterprises. A very superficial parallel might be like Elon Musk's and the Jeff Bezos of today. But I think in that time in the 60s and 50s when you had Karlyov and Glushko and Chelemen, all these sort of giants of the Soviet aerospace industry, their ability to play the system was very much predicated on it's really all about themselves and not really anybody else. And I think that's a kind of feature of the system. It's really built around individual fiefdoms, not so much the greater good, so to speak. Right. And that was ultimately also its weakness, as we'll get to with Korolev. One other point that I wanted to bring up was in addition to this issue of Korolev being this kind of master at working this system that we just talked about,

you highlighted something in the book that I never really thought about before, but that Korolev wrote this letter in 54 proposing a satellite to the Politburo. And this was the beginning of a trend, right? You point out that it was the chief designers of these bureaus that proposed missions to the political leadership and not the other way around. This was all kind of bottom-up motivations for the Soviet space efforts. Is that true, basically, for the next 15 years? Was that effectively the case? Yes, absolutely. I think that's a feature that you identified really well, that it's all coming from the bottom up to the top.

There was a perception, I think, in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s when people studied the Soviet space program, because we sort of had this understanding of the totalitarian, monolithic Soviet communist government, that everything was coming from the top. You know, Khrushchev would call in his designers and say, you got to do this next month. Well, it turns out that actually all of this stuff came from the bottom up, and people like Karlyov and Glushko and Chalame and other guys were just like sending a plethora of proposals up. Often it was, they were in competition not with America,'s say Khrushchev or Brezhnev, weren't involved. For example, after the first Sputnik, Korolev essentially, this is a rare case in which the top leadership were kind of involved. Because Khrushchev said, can you do something very quickly again? Khrushchev tells Korolev this, and Korolev goes back to his design bureau, and what can we do within a month? We can put a dog up in space.

And so it's a kind of dynamic that works very well for a while, where the leadership is responsive to the proposals or often encourages it. But this kind of dynamic is unsustainable because there's no kind of national level space policy in the Soviet Union until very late in the game in the 70s really. There's a kind of cobbled together space policy that happens because of these spurts of proposals from down below. Well we got to do this, we got to do that, we got to do this, we got there's no kind of sustained ideology of space exploration until very late in the game and part of that is a manifestation of this fiefdom mentality where

every person essentially is working for their own organization, trying to outmaneuver some other organization. So you have a kind of chaotic system in the 1960s, especially. That's what I found so fascinating reading through your book, because from the the u.s perspective at this time all of that complexity disappears and they just see the outcomes they're seeing it through this u.s lens of this totalitarian state control and so everything must have a reason to happen but in reality i mean you identified three names i want to actually talk about uh coral we mentioned he runs okb1 but then the other two glushko and uh and you have to help me on the pronunciation of uh chelome yeah chelome or and chelome actually i'd never heard about until i read your book they each have their own design bureaus right yes yes and at the

risk of going too too into numbers here but glushko is basically building engines is that fair to say and then chelome kind of comes out of nowhere and tries to make a play for Korolev's whole space thing, right? Completely. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting, this is why I think somebody somewhere could make a great like 10 episode miniseries on HBO or something, because I think each of them individually have an amazing life and their personal lives, which very few people have talked about, are kind of crazy, but their interpersonal relations are also crazy. So as many have talked about, Korolev and Glushko headed different organizations. Korolev essentially headed the ICBM design organization. Glushko had a very large organization that developed engines for Korolev. So he supplied the rocket engines, highly efficient, really wonderful engines.

And Glushko was really a space nerd from day one. He was a kid growing up on Jules Verne, much like Werner Von Braun. He just, that was his ultimate goal. He was not like a hard-headed realist like Korolev. So Glushko, but they sort of got together in the 30s when they were very young, in their early 20s really, and they became friends or colleagues and some, but of course the Stalinist purges hit and they were both arrested for on false charges, thrown into prison. They were both forced to essentially denounce each

other and all sorts of sort of toxic things happen in their relationship. They managed to get out of it into the 50s, and they maintained essentially cordial relations until it collapsed around 1959, 1960, and they essentially couldn't even be in the same room with each other. They couldn't stand each other. But they had to work together because Glushko provides the engines for Karlev's rockets. But Glushko also had aspirations to essentially escape the shadow of Karlev. I think he was just jealous that this guy is taking up... You know, I was the true space nerd, you know, and he wanted to essentially create his own empire. When Karlev dies in 1966, about 10 years...

I mean, 1974, Glushko is appointed head of Karliev's organization. The sort of ironic triumphant peak of his career, Glushko. And if you look at Soviet official state books from the 70s and 80s, if you can read Russian, the history books on their Soviet space program then slowly put Glushko as the first because he's now in charge and he restates the history itself. And Chalame is an interesting character. Chalamet was the only one who had a scientific background.

He had a PhD. He studied the vibrations of liquids. And he was a very consummate scientist and gets into this business because he's deeply ambitious. And he wants recognition in this field. He originally builds cruise missiles. wants recognition in this field. He originally builds cruise missiles. But out of the blue, in 1958, Khrushchev's son essentially joins his organization. At that point,

it's not just for that reason. I think Chalamet essentially leverages that connection and becomes a giant. And he essentially starts to challenge the dominance of the other two guys. And essentially, by 1964, he has a giant network of organizations working for him. And he wants to build space planes and space stations and incredibly ambitious plans to go to Mars and so on and so forth. So these three guys are jockeying for positions in the 1960s in a way that I think if we had known at all in the 1960s, we would have been shocked because from the outside, it looks like one monolithic program going lockstep by step by step into space. And the discovery of these guys has really sort of illuminated the steep complexity of the program.

And ultimately a weakness in a sense because they're competing and kind of dividing the resources and the energy and the focus because of these internal turf battles between these design chiefs. At some level here, there's such a deep irony. Everything about the moon program, I feel like, looking particularly from the U.S. side, in that you see, you know, the classic John F. Kennedy kind of panicky memo the week after Gagarin, which is, you know, is there anything we can do to beat the Soviets? Because at this point in 19, you know, it's just kind of jump forward and not to gloss over this a whole other episode, Sputnik and Gagarin, but the, and Sputnik 2 and all the lead up to that. By this point, Kennedy had taken over,

had come in as this youthful president saying he's going to do anything it takes to stand up against communism. And then he had the kind of the one-two punch of Bay of Pigs and then Gagarin's flight or vice versa. From the U.S. perspective, and you know, you had this whole political motivation to kind of puff up the Soviet Union's space capabilities, right? By the insinuation of being able to place these large things in orbit, they have bigger rockets than us, and they're able to launch these offensive weapons against us, you know, better than we are. But really, they're just looking at the surface level. The Soviet space program, for what it was, didn't even really have a clear long-term goal or direction in 1961. Large lift rockets, but there wasn't any goal internally, right? All of these feats that you were seeing were almost kind of like the peacock feathers of these guys trying to impress the

political leadership to gain favoritism to focus on their program. I think that's an accurate way to describe it. We're seeing in the 60s, at least, if you pick up the New York Times or the Washington Post, and the history of Soviet space achievements, we are seeing the very tip of the iceberg. And as you say, maybe the sort of really the surface level stuff, the Vostok missions and cosmonauts in space and the Voskhod and so on and so forth, Alexei Leonov's spacewalk. achievement. I don't mean to diminish them, but what you're seeing is essentially a very ad hoc program that's almost stumbling forward from thing to thing to thing without any clear-cut plan. On the surface, of course, it seems like amazing, like moving forward. I think that's why there is so much panic. And part of that is related to secrecy. We didn't, for example, know in 1964 when the Soviets launched the Vostkhod. It was actually just the earlier Vostok, just retrofitted to cram

three guys into it. Because we didn't see it, it seemed like an incredible achievement and a step forward. But internally, of course, once you get down into the weeds, you see Korolev, Glushko, Cheleme, Yangel, lots of these guys just like trying to articulate their own position and what they saw as a very, not only the next frontier, but also a lucrative contract. They wanted contracts, they wanted to expand their organizations. And where best to do that than to push ahead into space. There was a plan in June of 1960, which was put together by Korolev and his engineers for a long-term exploration of space. I've looked at this document. There's a lot of things in the plan, including ultimately missions to Mars, which was going to happen, let's say, in the late 60s, early 70s.

But that plan is essentially scrapped very soon because of all sorts of other things. People can't agree. Even though it was a plan approved by the Politburo, it's essentially scrapped very soon after. So they did try to do that. But again, the personality conflicts were too much. And I can get into some other reasons why these plans never worked out. But one of them was essentially personality conflicts. There's one really important aspect, which is the heavy lift rockets that come out of this for the N1 and at the time, the N2. You have this long-term goal, but what type of heft did that kind of statement really carry? The comparison being JFK makes his big statement, we're going to go to the moon,

return by the end of the decade, and then all these resources start to flow into this effort. But that's not what happened in 1960, right? There was never a huge investment. I mean, that was the only thing that was fascinating, that the Soviet space program, and maybe even debatable whether you can even call it a program, space programs, seemed perennially underfunded in the Soviet Union, even though they didn't look like it. So why didn't a statement from the Politburo behind Korolev

have that kind of impact the way that Kennedy's declaration and subsequent congressional action did? Yeah, that's a good question. And that's a question I've been grappling with a little bit. I think part of that had to do with, well, first of all, there was this big document in June of 1960. We're going to build these heavy lift rockets, N1, N2, et cetera. We're going to develop all this high tech stuff.

We're going to build infrastructure. We're going to have long term goals his sort of advisors start to think about, look, really the highest priority in the Soviet Union in terms of any kind of allocation of resources should be strategic parity. The coffers, the funds are coming from the military for all this, by the way, because the structure of the program is built so that essentially the military is the primary customer and they're paying for it. I think that worked against the Soviet space program because the military is essentially funding this entire enterprise. And the military is really not interested in space. They want better ICBMs. Their ICBMs don't work that well. So they want better ICBMs. And so in

1961, there's a kind of revision decision saying that, look, we need to curb back some of this space stuff, and we need to build ICBMs, better ones. And in 1962, 63, there's a whole bunch of these new decisions, building these very high performance ICBMs. And in those days, the space program essentially gets cut back, at least the space program, the civilian space program. And only in roughly 1964, and there's a lot of reasons why, but basically Karloff and his advisors start to notice that NASA is launching these Saturn I rockets. And one of them is launched in early 1964 with a boilerplate Apollo spacecraft. And I think that, to use a casual term, freaks him out because Because I think he is, it's one thing for Kennedy to talk about the moon

and these kinds of things in 1961. But it's another thing to see an actual Apollo spacecraft launched into orbit. And he meets with Khrushchev sometime in June. And he takes a bunch of his advisors and says, look, they're really going to the moon. This is not some fantasy. We kind of, you know, we're hanging around for a while. They are going to the moon. This is not some fantasy. We're hanging around for a while. They are going to the moon. We tried to propose this project in 1960, the N1, etc. It's gotten

some funding. We've made some headway. But we need a national commitment on a space project, and that project has to be a moon landing. And that's when Khrushchev essentially signs off on it in August of 1964. And it's been three years since Kennedy, by the way. And in that time, there's been a lot of other stuff going on. The ICBM project needs to be prioritized. There's been infighting between Karlov and Glushko over the N1, which is another epic thing, which is they can't agree on what the N1 should even look like. And then there's been other sort of these kinds of Vostok and other space spectaculars being implemented by Kerala's organizations. So he's been very busy and not being able to prioritize the longer term things. But I think you're right that these kinds of decisions in the U.S. are made and everybody sticks to it.

The May 61 decision and all the contractors line up. The LOR decision is made. All the NASA centers are allocated funding. Webb steps in, Jim Webb, and he sort of takes command. In the USSR, the 1960 decision is essentially overturned next year, and there's a whole chaotic phase for a couple of years, and finally in 1964, they get their act together. And that is when essentially, that is their May moment and that but happened three years too late yeah i i want

to dwell on this a little bit because this is kind of the crux of the the motivation of this of this particular episode is is is were the soviet was there actually a space race basically and and that's a very simplistic way to put this, but 61, Kennedy makes the famous announcement in speech. Why doesn't the USSR take this seriously? The U.S. was reacting again to this perception that the Soviet program was moving on this clear pathway, right? And what can we do to beat them in space? And the moon landing was the only thing they felt confident they could beat them in. Why didn't Khrushchev say, all right, we're going to do this too, or this is a great way to clarify what we're doing.

We're going to focus this on one design bureau. Did they just dismiss it? What happened there? That is a very good question. And I've spent many years trying to find the answer to this. And I've talked to a number of Russian veterans, a number of Russian historians about this, because normally we would expect a kind of national decision like this to be watched and at least discussed in the Soviet Union,

as there were many other cases, by the way. When, for example, in 1955, the Eisenhower administration says we're going to launch a satellite. It's discussed at the very high levels of the Soviet government. But here we are, Kennedy makes this amazing speech at Congress. It's reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post, it's reported everywhere. What is the Soviet response? And my take on this is it's not that it wasn't reported or discussed, but there's two mitigating things I think we have to be clear on. One is that the Soviet self-confidence in their space program was at a peak at the time. You had done so many firsts, and you can list them down from Sputnik to Gagarin. And of course, the

crowning achievement, the coup de grace, was the launch of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. And for many in the Soviet decision-making apparatus, that was the win. That was the space race. We had just won the space race. So you had peak hubris that we were in charge. We're in the driver's seat. These sort of American little piddly suborbital flights are just, you know, nothing to us. So there's a kind of hubris that plays into a non-reaction. But there's a second aspect of it, which is that I don't think they took Kennedy

very seriously. Yes, he goes out and makes a speech. And yes, things are probably going to happen. But they really underestimated the effect to which Congress would respond to Kennedy. And I think even Kennedy did to some degree, because I think Logsdon talks about how on his limo ride back from Congress, he was very anxious and insecure about what he had just said, and would Congress take him seriously? But I think in the Soviet Union, they're just like, well, this is just words. Are people going to line up behind Kennedy? No.

One particular historian I talked about, Georgi Stepanovich Vyatrov, who was a very respected historian who worked with the archives, he looked at this problem. What happened in May and June of 1961? He says, well, you know, it was sort of discussed, but kind of dismissed. And that was it.

Everything that happened after that, it's really around 1963 that Korolev, you see the murmurs of, notice already in the fall of 1963 when Korolev's internal decision makers start to track what's happening with Apollo. And they start to get panicked. What is actually, are they really doing this? And that is when he puts together this program called L3, which is to get a Soviet cosmonaut on the moon, but it takes a year to get it approved. And by that time, Apollo is way ahead of the game. And to get to your other question, was there a space race? I do, yes, absolutely. Was there a moon race? Yes. Even in

August of 1964, when they put this plan together, they want to be first. They're not just doing it to be second. It's clear in the documents that they're going to try and land somebody. Their goal was the end of 1968, because that was their insurance policy. We're going to get a guy on the moon before 1968 ends, and that way we'll be first. And so they really believed they were in a race. Yeah. There's two things I want to just touch on from what you said. One is this idea of the hubris of the Soviet program at this point, well earned, frankly, in 1961. But also, you make this point that I found really interesting in the book that, you know, in terms of what was the value of the space program to the Soviet Union, in a sense, Why was it so politically useful or propagandistically useful? And you say something along the lines that there was this perception that the Soviet Union was a country of farmers and factory workers.

By going into space, that is probably the easiest and most obvious visual counterfactual to that impression, right? Just by going into space. You didn't need to land on the moon to win that perception game. Yeah. I think that's also a good point. I think space was for many, and many people today, it is a kind of an avatar, an arbiter of all things high tech. And it certainly was in the 1950s and 60s. And for

the Soviet Union, I mean, I think most Americans considered the Soviet Union as a nation of, you know, collective farms and tractors and things like that. So they suddenly were number one, and they were number one repeatedly. And for a domestic audience, this was a moment of great inspiration, that our country, which defeated the Nazis, was destroyed. We paid a great sacrifice for it, unlike the U.S. Came out number one in where it matters in science and technology in the space race. We were number one. We got the first satellite into space. We got Eureka Garden into space. That's two that they will always have. For them, it's true. The future was ahead. But I think the moon loomed large in some sense because the U.S. had essentially moved the goalpost. I tell this

joke sometimes when I'm talking about this topic, which is for the Soviets and the Russians, if you go to Russia nowadays, who won the space race? Well, we won the space race, meaning the Russians. And you ask them, what do you mean? Well, we got Gagarin into space. Did you? And so it's for them, it's like, well, we won it. But at some point in the mid-60s, it was clear that the U.S. had moved the goalpost. The space race was now the moon.

And at that point, I think there's a kind of machinery of response that sort of activated itself that we can't be second. We've been first for too long. We can't be second to get to the moon. And I think that there's a kind of what some historians call technological inertia. It's like technological momentum that sets in, and that momentum is to get you to be first again. And I think that was part of the deal. 64 rolls around, we have, I don't know exactly what you call these, a decree from the Central Committee saying that this is going to be the goal. We're going to land on the moon and we're going to do it faster than the Americans. To do that, we're going to use this new rocket that has been under development and been under, you know, redesign, redesign, redesign, the N1.

So can we just briefly touch on the N1 program? Because it plays such a prominent role and it's kind of the linchpin of this whole program. It's a really fascinating story in itself. You know, the N1 was proposed around 1960 by Karlyov and his team. It was essentially approved by 1962 as a kind of all-purpose heavy lift rocket. It's a super giant rocket, basically,

but the whole development of it is fraught because they can't agree on essentially what it should look like or what kind of propellants it should use. And there's a long and interesting story about why they can't agree on that. Essentially, Karlev wanted high-performance cryogenic propellants like liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, etc. And Glushko, who is the primary engine designer, wants to use storable propellants, which are hypergolic. They ignite on contact. Their engines are simpler, and so on and so forth. And there's all sorts of pros and cons. You can parse it out why one is better than the other. But essentially, they can't agree. And the winner is Karalev. He says, no, we got to use cryogenics. Glushko refuses to work on it. So he has to hire

somebody else, Karalev. I'm simplifying a very complicated story. But essentially, he hires somebody from Samara, which is a town famous for building aircraft. And this guy who they hire, Kuznetsov, has only built jet engines. So he's not an expert on rocket engine. But he's up for the task, and he's going to build it. So that's who they hired the contract to build the engines. It's a monster rocket. The rocket has 30 engines on the first stage. And the problem becomes essentially, and why you have 30 engines when you can have 5? Well, because if you have 5, they have to be extremely high-thrust engines

like the F-1s for the Saturn V. And Kuznetsov, who had just stepped into this job, was not able to do that. He said he was also offering to build a particular type of engine, which was a stage combustion engine, which is an extremely high-performance design. So he also wanted to do a cutting edge rocket engine. So because these were extremely high performance engines, he wanted to make smaller ones, about 150 tons a piece. And if you have these small ones, you have to put 30 of them on the first stage. And that's what they did. But when you put 30 engines on a first stage,

there's all sorts of other problems. You have toize their firing what if one fails you know all sorts of other massive problems of control and so this bogs the program down in all sorts of other technical cul-de-sacs and also Carl if takes a decision while he's early on that they're not gonna static test the entire first stage of the rocket which is a catastrophe. Because it's like, you know, well, we're just going to test this thing in flight. Why does he take this decision? Because he thinks it would be too expensive to build a ground test stand in too long. And by the way, the essential testing facility which might have built this has essentially been

occupied by Glushko's engines. And this is a deliberate policy from Glushko to essentially sabotage the project. The linchpin of the entire lunar effort, the N1, in a fantastically complex rocket, but also being actively undermined by a very powerful design bureau chief, Glushko, because of their mutual disdainolev and glushko so this was and he knew this was the priority i mean it's not like he was unaware of the central

committee's decree on this right he was of course he was so there was just never did was there just never i mean you always see apollo is kind of like everyone kind of rolled their sleeves of okay we got to beat the soviets or something right and and like there's kind of this their sleeves of, okay, we got to beat the Soviets, right? And there's kind of this unity, at least that's how it's presented now, this idea that it was a national effort. It sounds like from this type of behavior that there was never the same sense of national importance that you would put aside personal grievances. Yeah, I agree. And it's startling, actually, because I don't claim to understand it, but the personal animosities

between these two people were incredibly intense and quite vicious. I think more from Glushko than from Karliev, but really from both, because Karliev actually invited Glushko to participate at some points. Nevertheless, the two men were at loggerheads and at some point in 1965-66 Glushko actually goes to Chalame and says, look, I've been shut out of the Moon program. Do you want to propose something? And what they do is they propose an entire alternative rocket called the UR-700 and they get it approved by the minister in charge of the space program and And they start building it like a little plan B for the moon project. It's only scuttled a year later when people come to their senses and

say, what are we doing? But that's how much he really wanted to bring down the N1. I think he just thought, both for personal reasons, but also for technical reasons, I think he just thought that this was a bad idea. So I think there were all sorts of things arrayed against him. And the other thing was Karloff dies in January of 1966. Another story in itself. But anyway, his successor, whose name is Vasily Mishin, Glushko didn't like Karloff. Glushko detested Mishin. Like they just, I mean, you still hear their families today arguing. That's how bad it is. So Glushko did everything in his power to undermine mission and eventually got him fired eight years later.

So I think there's just a lot of personal story embedded in the N1. So I think the fact that they even got this thing ready to fly in 1969 is amazing. But they did. They got it ready. I was going to say the N1 heavy lift, it still didn't match the Saturn V in capability, though. That was another critical thing, because that was part of the problems, ultimately. Using the N1, already a very complex rocket, the N1-L3 system that they put together for landing on the moon was incredibly complex. Can we just briefly summarize what that initial plan was from Core 11 in mid-'60s?

It's quite a complicated process. And part of the architecture of the project was designed essentially to ensure, because they had such low confidence in their electronics, that they needed to build a very robust architecture that had a lot of backups. The idea was essentially to land a backup lunar lander on the moon first, a rover on the moon, like an automated lunar car type rover near each other.

And then you had to have a couple of lunar satellites for communications. Then you have the actual sort of architecture of the landing, which is a lunar orbit rendezvous, which was similar to Apollo, which you basically have a mothership in lunar orbit and an actual lander. But they managed to squeeze in only one person in the lander, not two, like in the Apollo LM. And this one guy would essentially leave the mothership, which was a kind of a souped-up Soyuz in lunar orbit, climb into the lander through an EVA because they didn't have an internal docking system,

which was, and I could get into that why. But anyway, he gets into the lander. He lands the thing. The idea is that what if the takeoff from the moon isn't successful? He can then go walk over to that, remember that rover? He can get into that rover and drive himself to the backup lunar lander and then take off in the backup lunar lander. So they had these built-in redundancies of the project, which is highly complicated. And there's all sorts of other weak points in the program.

How many launches did this take? I mean, that was the other thing, right? Didn't it take like three launches of the N1 to get everything into low Earth orbit first? Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you had the backup lander, certainly you needed at least two, and then maybe a third for redundancy. But yeah, you needed multiple launches, even though it was technically achievable with one and one because you had a lunar orbit.

But in case of sort of failures, you needed all these backup things happening. You needed a couple of protons. So you need lots of things going on. When I started to list this out in my book, The Actual Architecture, even I was kind of flabbergasted. When I wrote that paragraph, I was like, oh my God, that's a lot of stuff. But that's how they sort of did the plan, which was essentially redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. We can't do redundancy through electronics, but we can do extra stuff on the

ground, on the moon. So if our lander fails to take off, the guy can get in the Luna card, drive to the other lander and take off. But it's essentially a very complicated project. And I think it's just a fantasy, I mean, at some point that this is going to happen. But to their credit, you know, there's all sorts of little parts of the story that are kind of interesting. One is that they actually tested the lunar lander engine in Earth orbit three times. It was very highly successful, performed wonderfully in terms of its automated mission. And these engines of the N1, which were so problematic at the time, turned out to be very high performance stage combustion engines. So there's like these little aspects of it that are kind of interesting. They tried to develop this incredibly sophisticated algorithm,

for example, for the base of the rocket to control the 30 engines. And like, for example, if one of the engines failed after takeoff, this algorithm would automatically shut off the exact opposite engine on the other side of the rocket automatically, immediately. And so they developed all these systems to account for the shortcomings of technology, really. So they're struggling through this design process. The economy was not great in the Soviet Union in the mid-60s. Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's worse much later in the 70s and 80s. I think it peaks in the early 60s. But there are lots of problems. But as I said, the main problem is funding. And the way I

calculated it, because, you know, it's apples and oranges, but rubles and dollars. But the main thing was that the majority of funding that was dispersed by the military was not for space. And as I said, the military was not for space. And as I said, the military is the primary funder of the space program. So in order to run a space program, you have to convince the military that it's useful. I found these amazing quotes from military guys like top Soviet generals who were like, we don't need the moon program. Why are we doing this?

They were sort of cobbling together this program. But my guess is roughly, we say 1960s dollars, about 25 billion for Apollo. My guess is about one third of that is what the Soviets were spending on the N1, L3 project. So not that much, if you think about it. Maybe a half, but no more than half. Yeah. I noted this one that you said, like they they were trying to get a test for recovery efforts of uh of the lunar return capsule in the ocean it was like in the indian ocean the military had they said they needed like 9 000 like personnel and millions of rubles to like do this test yeah and they said like absolutely i mean i can give you i forget the exact quote but there would be i'm not going to give you anything for this. This is ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah. Again, that just shows you, I mean, this is after there was a second decree, right, in 1967. That's right. You're committing to this effort to try to loosen these dollars. But you had this disconnect between the very top political leadership and then the actual people who controlled the resources never seemed to buy into it. Yeah, I think you identified something. The other problem, it wasn't just the problem of, you know, Karloff fighting Glushko fighting Chalamet.

There's also what we call inter-organizational conflict. So the politicians and the Politburo would sign this and say, this is a national commitment we're making. And that's what it said, I think, in the 67 degree. National commitment to beat Apollo. But the guys who controlled the purse strings were the military, were making. And that's what it said, I think, in the 67 Decree. National commitment to beat Apollo. But the guys who controlled the purse strings were the military, and they refused to often even, they would just say, well, we're not going to do it. You know, we'll do X, we'll not Y,

because we need other things. We need to fund our military. And so there's a kind of tripartite division happening between the politicians, the military, the designers, and so on and so forth. That's also very problematic. This 1967 decree, just to acknowledge it again, recommitted to the 60s. I mean, they're going to beat Apollo, but it had these almost insane timeline proposed. Like, we're going to land next year, basically, on the moon. Yeah, it's a fantasy. Almost as if they could snap their fingers and make it so. I think there was a feeling that we've worked really hard and we're going to start seeing the fruits of it very soon i think what they expected was every launch would

be successful that's what they're expecting that's why that decree exists because but of course you know there was a circular project that there was a series of failures and they finally brought the n1 out in may of 1968 to the pad and they they were close to launching, but they found, I don't, it's been a while, but I think they found cracks or something on the first stage. And that completely derailed the whole thing for almost a year. So I think there was an expectation that it might happen, because once you start flying them, maybe it'll be fast. But it's ultimately a fantasy. And I just don't see, even with the 67 decree, it wasn't going to happen. It might have happened in 71-ish, but not in 69, I think.

Putting N1 on the pad in 68, that's what freaked out the U.S. intelligence services, right? They were thinking, oh, man, they're actually really close. Let's actually jump back and say from the U.S. perspective, what publicly, I mean, globally, I guess, was being acknowledged from the Soviet Union at this time? It seemed like there was kind of mixed messages. Were they really racing or not, despite what they were doing internally? Because the N1 was a secret project. The people making the pieces for it didn't even know what they were making pieces for. Yeah, it was extremely, extremely secret. The first time the words N1 was printed anywhere in the Soviet media was in August of 1989. I mean, there was no way that anybody knew it existed. It was a violation of national state law to reveal that it existed.

But of course, the CIA knew it existed. And of course, in the spring of 68, they saw the rocket. Publicly, the Soviets were like, we're not racing anybody. But what happened was, of course, when you send a cosmonaut to a foreign country like Japan or somewhere, the cosmonauts know what's going on. They're too excited. They're too eager to reveal that this is happening. And all these snippets would come out. Oh, yeah, we're going to go to the moon. And when they would call back to Moscow, you're like, well, you shouldn't have said that. But yeah, I think officially, there's no race,

there's no rocket, there's nothing. The idea was that they're going to announce it once they get to the point of launching an N1. People figured it out. And it's not just the CIA. I think other people, amateurs, were beginning to see some weird signs that the Soviet Union was heading for the moon. Maybe you've heard of, obviously, Jim Oberg, James Oberg, who wrote about the Soviet space program quite a bit in the 70s and 80s, by 75 or so, he wrote a very good article saying the Soviet Union had a moon program. So I think people were trying to figure out this stuff just by looking at different signs. But officially, this was a non-event.

And when it comes out in 1989, it's kind of an amazing revelatory moment. The way it came out is also interesting, but basically the official, because it's still Soviet times at that time, the Soviet Izvestia and Pravda published two very lengthy articles on the N1. It's kind of a shock. Late 60s, you know, you have the full momentum behind Apollo. You still don't know exactly what the Soviets are doing.

You're getting these mixed messages. The cosmonauts are saying one thing, the public base is saying another, but the CIA is seeing these giant rockets being put on the pad, lots of construction, right? Building the facilities to launch, you know, these major launch facilities. Can you make the argument that seeing this spy data basically incentivized the U.S. to go for the Apollo 8 mission faster than they were, you know, the circumlunar mission faster than they would have otherwise because they were also watching, there was the Zond program, right?

The Soviets had a circumlunar effort to try to at least one-up the Americans one more time. So what role did that play in driving Apollo 8? But also, let's just acknowledge quickly what they were trying to do with Zond. Right. The Zond program was a separate project just to send a crew around the moon, like a slingshot around the moon and back to Earth. Relatively simple project. It was kind of collaboration between Karlev and Chellamay. Chellamay provided the Proton rocket, and Karlev's organization provided like a stripped-down Soyuz.

And they launched a bunch of stuff. They launched a bunch of test flights, but there was a slim possibility that they could do it by December of 1968 to actually get two guys around the moon. They had the cosmonauts ready. They had the rocket ready. But there were a series of failures in the fall of 1968

that kind of n that dream. And essentially, they don't take the risk of launching cosmonauts in December 68. Of course, from the U.S. perspective, the CIA knows this. They're tracking the Zon program, and they see the test flights. They maybe see some of the failures, but they know that this is going to happen soon, which is correct. It's going to happen soon. How much of this goes up and changes the Apollo 8 decision, which is, you know, Apollo 8 was originally, because the missions were switched around between 8 and 9, and at some point in August of 1968, George Miller, George Lowe, these guys were like, you know, make the decision to, let's just take Apollo 8 all the way to the moon in December of this year,

assuming Apollo 7 is successful. And there's been a lot of debate on how much Soviet intelligence about the Russians essentially feeds into that decision. I don't think there's a particular, like a smoking gun, like, aha, we see the rocket on the pad, we got to change the decision. I don't think it's like that. I think Miller and Lohn, these kinds of guys, they had their own reasons for doing this. They were ambitious. They wanted to push the program. Maybe they also knew that if we didn't do this by December of 68, the moon landing is maybe pushed behind. But I think there's a general feeling because many of these guys had access to intelligence briefings. So they hear this stuff from the CIA. They hear the stuff that the Russians are going to launch something at some point.

I don't think it's like an actual decision or something that's told. I think it's more of a general mood of the times that we have to speed up. So that's my take on it. I don't think it's a specific piece of information. It's just the mood of the times. So they're basically just seeing, all they're seeing is basically there's activity, right? Exactly, right. They're launching stuff. Again, they don't really know what the official goals are or all the

problems that they're having with the N1. They just see the rockets are showing up. They're aware that they're launching these test flights around the moon. And we should maybe acknowledge that the first vertebrates ever to go around the moon, right, were two turtles in Zond 5, right? That is true. And they made it. They survived the trip. They did. They did survive the trip around the moon. But the follow-on ones didn't, notably, which is in Zond 6.

Was that September, October? Zond 5 was in September, and Zond 6 was in November, I think, yeah. And then there was the last opportunity. I thought this was interesting that in the end of 1968, just due to the orbit of the Earth or the orbital mechanics, the Soviets had an opportunity about 10 days earlier to launch a circumlunar mission before Apollo 8 would have happened. So that was, I think, the nail-biter period

for people who just didn't know what the Soviets were able to do or not. And they ended up not because of Zon 6, just didn't... Yeah, I mean, Zon 6 was such a catastrophe. I don't know any manager who would, after that... Two things happened. One, it depressurized at some point. It was a slow depressurization, but a crew without suits, which is what they were going to do, wouldn't have

survived. But secondly, because of the depressurization, it kind of messed up the parachute system. So it just crashed with turning and landed on hard landing and just exploded. You know, these were problems that could have been, they're not like systemic design problems. They were probably manufacturing problems. And I think what happened, because they just weren't tested, they were speeding. These things could have been tested out on the ground. And they would have been under normal circumstances, but they were speeding so fast that they move their launch from December to January, another launch window, which is in mid-January. But in that time, you know, the cosmonauts, the crew of that ship would have been Leonov and Makarov, two cosmonauts. And it is rumored, I've never seen this, that they actually wrote a letter to the Apollo Bureau pleading that they actually wrote a letter to the Politburo pleading that they be launched in early December, about a week ahead of Apollo 8, and that they'd be given the chance.

But the Politburo said, no, we're not going to take this risk. Apollo 8 essentially wins that leg of the race, and that's that. What was the reaction in the Soviet space community after Apollo 8 and as they saw then the subsequent landing? Everybody's disheartened. I mean, we have the diary entries and so forth from many actors at that time. It's really disheartening. I think in the same way that we're kind of happy that Apollo 8 went, but it wasn't us. And I, you know, it's in that sense, from the Russian perspective, that it wasn't our cosmonauts. But I think a general disheartenment. And in January of 69, at the end of January, they had this massive meeting of designers and managers and whatnot to figure, you know, basically figure out what can we do now. And there's all sorts of

problems. And one of them, of course, is the robotic sample return. Can we send one of these robots to the moon, scoop up some soil, and bring it back to Earth? One of the organizations had been working on this for a while. So they put that on the high-speed development. And that's the first time they start also talking about Mars as a kind of, you know, it looks like we're going to lose the moon, but maybe we can win Mars. That argument begins to appear at that time.

And then through the spring of 1969, you see Apollo 9, of course, and Apollo 10. In July, they get their sample return vehicle ready. Actually, they try to launch one, I think, in April, and it blows up. They launch another one in July, right before Apollo 11. That's really sort of getting really close to the end of the race, so to speak. There seem to be a lot of quality control issues. Yeah. I think you had a list of the amount of proton rockets blowing up.

Yeah. This is from Chalamet's bureau. I actually just reread Michael Collins collins's book carrying the fire yeah i love that book yeah as we go into the apollo it's a great book and but he had this interesting phrase or mention in there is saying you know there was something like five million parts in the whole apollo stack and even if you had 99.99 percent reliability in all of your parts that still mean there'd be 500 failures right and so they had to be this extraordinary level of reliability right and was that level of reliability possible in this soviet command economy working in secret they didn't know what

they were building you know we always kind of hear these anecdotal bits and pieces from a you know u.s supplier saying well i knew i was working on the moon mission so we damned if we wouldn't give like the best possible spacecraft or part or whatever and was there a systemic or issue with that was it possible for the soviet system to provide that level of reliability yeah i think it was possible but it wasn't common yeah you're you're right. Secrecy was counterproductive. If somebody knows that their part is going to keep somebody alive, you know, it makes you want to work harder.

Part of the issue here is also that, and I say this all the time, that the engineering designs were quite elegant and I think often quite beautiful, the Soviet designs. People always, you know, joke that they're sort of brute force designs, but I actually disagree. I think some of their design choices are kind of elegant in terms of

how they solve problems or the mission architecture sometimes. But I think when you translate that kind of design to the factory floor, the Soviet Union never developed the kind of industrial, high-performance industrial economy that the U.S. or many Western European nations developed after World War II, which is clean rooms, many quality control protocols, stuff like that. I think it was just, it was still operating in sort of World War II mentality, which is a mass production economy. And so you can't really run a space program like that. So what they did was essentially transfer their testing to flight rather than ground and that was their general mentality like we're going to build these sort of relatively inexpensive things and just test the

heck out of them when we launch them but you can't do that with a moon program their design philosophy was fundamentally inadequate and i think there is a letter I think I quote in the book in the fall of 69. Somebody stated this exact thing out to the powers that be saying, this is the problem with our space program. We can't test things out in space. We have to have a testing culture on the ground that eliminates, you know, have to have a statistical system of fault detection that is robust on the ground. And the Zon program is a classic.

The Proton program is a classic example of that. I mean, dozens of these rockets blowing up one after one after one. So they're essentially testing these things in flight. And finally, they perfected it. But by the time they perfected it, the moon race is over. And I think that's part of the problem here. by the time they perfected it, the moon race is over. And I think that's part of the problem here.

To some degree, they did develop a kind of quality control system that works into the 1980s, but I think it's falling apart now. But I think they did perfect it at some point, but I think it wasn't around in the 60s. You can't run a moon program like that. The Soviet lunar effort didn't end after Apollo 11, kind of lingered on for a few more years. You know, it kind of correlates with the end of the N1. And you even mentioned in your book that the nadir of the Soviet space program came, it was 1971, I believe you. Yeah. So what started to happen after Apollo with the next few years? I mean, the failure of the N1 was a catastrophe,

and all four launches failed. The last one in, I think, November of 1972. But it was getting closer to success in that sense, if that's a good thing. The failures were getting to the point where you could imagine a success. But there were other failures, too. The most egregious being um the

the death of cosmonauts in the summer of 1971 three guys who had spent about a month in an orbit on a space station when they returned their capsule depressurized and they were killed and there were a bunch of other failures too space stations exploding many launch failures, and so on. So it was kind of a bad moment, I think, 71, 72. I think things start to sort of look up in 73, 74. But by that time, they had a subsequent moon program called the L3M, which is a much more ambitious, and in my book, a much more robust architecture. And they're not in a rush to do it because there's no rush anymore it's a kind of a proto moon base architecture

and they want to work this thing test it slowly and build up to it in the late 70s and it's in play and they're working towards it and the n1 as said, was also by early 74, there's a great degree of, they spent two years testing the heck out of it on the ground. And there's a feeling that this is ready to fly now. Ironically, it's right then in May of 1974, when essentially Glushko engineers a kind of coup and trashes the whole program. He essentially comes in and says, you know, you guys failed, which is true, and you don't get a chance anymore. And so he essentially takes over his former rivals organization.

And one of his first acts is essentially to close down the N1 project, the new L3M proto-moon-based project, and he gets a bunch of people fired, and so on and so forth. So that essentially stops it in its track. I mean, and he didn't just stop there. He literally destroyed the N1s. They were, what, building eight of them, something like that? Yeah, all of them.

Eight of them were in a variety of stages of manufacture. He destroys them. He destroys all of them. And their technical plans too, right? He tried to wipe it out of history. Yeah, basically he destroys everything that he has, the drawings, the remaining hardware. This is part of the problem

of reconstructing the history of this program. So much of the documentation is gone because of Glushko. A lot of the hardware is gone. So it's essentially trying to reconstruct a program through oral history and some documents. Fortunately, a lot of the documents

were stored or made duplicates so historians can get at that stuff. But yeah, I mean, Fortunately, a lot of the documents were stored or made duplicates of. Historians can get at that stuff. But, yeah, I mean, it's out of uncanny the viciousness with which he faced this project in 74. And he comes equipped with a whole set of new plans, which is, I'm going to build my own moon base, which is called Zvezda. And it's a very ostentatious plan. He also comes with plans for a new rocket to replace the N1, which is eventually called Energia,

and he comes with an idea for a space shuttle. So he comes in, you know, sort of in his arms. He's got the drawings for a new set of programs, and that's essentially what the Soviet Union, it goes off in a complete different tangent after that, and the guy in charge, Mishin, is fired, and all this other stuff happens. And I don't want to make out Glushko to And the guy in charge, Mishin, is fired and all this other stuff happens. And I don't want to make out Glushko to be the bad guy also, because it's very easy. And

for sure, I think he was part of the problem. But I think there's all sorts of other issues, because he's not wrong. These guys failed to do what they were set out to do the previous eight years in the 60s and 70s. They didn't beat Apollo. And nobody paid the price for it. This is according to him. And somebody should be fired for it. He's not wrong about that. But the way he went about it was quite vicious.

Yeah, I mean, this was scrapping a rocket at that point that had been in development for 13 years, something like that. And one was almost ready to fly. It was about to be taken to the pad. And you could, I mean, I've interviewed engineers who worked on that. When they remember that rocket, they just break into tears because they're like, you know, we were so excited. We were just about ready to fly. We'd worked, we'd given our entire, half our lives for this stuff. And it not only was suspended, but they went out and destroyed the rocket.

In your book, you talk about this, and I want to just acknowledge, too, that you talk about this tendency from U.S. and Western historians and space fans to look at the Soviet space program mainly as a catalyst for then what the U.S. did. And you emphasize that there's a much richer history. So I want to acknowledge that I'm aware of the irony that I'm talking to you in the context of the Apollo program about this. I'm doing exactly what you're saying about. But I think reading this book, I mean, there's so many other stories that we're not going to touch on. You also talk about the idea of, and I kind of

mentioned this earlier, this idea of this historical linearization of history, looking back to say, oh, well, this was an inevitability that the U.S. would succeed with Apollo and an inevitability that Soviet wouldn't with their moon program. You can kind of identify weaknesses in the system that would have made the Soviet lunar effort much harder. And I would maybe suggest that the fact that you didn't have a clear level of responsibility, you never had a strong political commitment, really, it seemed like, compared to Apollo. The secrecy itself was both the cause of why humans eventually landed on the moon, but also undermined the

ability of the Soviet system to functionally work on it. Does that almost make it like, it's not inevitable, but much harder for the Soviet system to compete at that level? Yeah, I think I was trying to make a point at the end of that book that, as you pointed out, that we tend to see Apollo as a kind of inevitable success of the American system, and anything the Soviets achieved as a kind of contingent, kind of random data point. And I was trying to think about history as I think most historians do, that nothing is inevitable and everything is contingent. For the Soviets,

we should take the Soviet program on its own value than as a kind of response or anything. They were going to do this probably because they have a cultural lineage that dates back centuries in terms of aspiring for space, independent of what Americans were thinking. It's too bad. It's funny because the book is called Challenge to Apollo, which was not my choice at all, but it was sort of imposed in a very Soviet style from the higher ups. I'm just joking. But anyway, but Roger, and Roger was the one who commissioned this book. I needle Roger, Roger Lanius about this, but you know, but kudos to him for actually commissioning this book in the first place. But anyway, I think you're right. Secrecy, in many ways, was a core actor in this

story, if you will, because we didn't know what the Russians were doing, and that enabled and energized Apollo to such a degree. Because if we knew about all this chaos, maybe stuff in the U.S. would be like, yeah, I mean, these guys are totally in chaos. They don't have their act together. I don't know. Maybe it would have affected something. And of course, secrecy worked within the Soviet system as a kind of a force of enervation, like it saps energy out of the program itself. I think there is an alternate history somewhere where the Soviets could have been successful. You change a few small things, and I think the command system could have done it. The question that I ask myself, how is it that the command system, which has its definite faults, can produce a hydrogen bomb in

1953, the first satellite in 1957, the first human being in space in 1961, the first robotic probe to land on the moon in 66, the first mobile platform on the moon in 1970. I mean, so and so. I mean, just how did it do this? If it's just an object of kind of ridicule, it is capable of doing some things. But it's not really capable of doing this thing. And that's the question. Why wasn't it capable of doing this thing? And to me, I think it did the other things because they had the right ideas, they had the engineers,

and they even had, I think, in some sense, a national commitment for some of the other things, but not for this. They really lacked a national commitment. I think if they had a national commitment, we can imagine, perhaps, a more competitive race. I'm still not saying Apollo wouldn't have been first, but it would have been much closer. That's what I think. It's worth considering that the reasons the Soviets lost was a bunch of different reasons that actually had, for the most part, nothing to do with the command system. It's just personal issues, all sorts of other random things that could happen anywhere. I feel like ultimately it's the same reason why Apollo happened and the U.S. hasn't succeeded in the same way since. It kind of comes down to just political commitment. You point out

in your book, the Politburo and the leadership of the Soviet Union was happy to propagandize the successes in spaceflight, but they never drove it. They never saw it as that useful. As soon as Apollo stopped being useful, in that same sense, the funding disappeared. So in a way, it's kind of the same source behind both of them. Yeah, I agree. I agree. That's a good take on it. I think, I mean, I always see Apollo as lightning in a bottle. It's a once in a lifetime thing. It's never going to happen again. And I think we are lucky that it happened at all. And in fact, I think of Apollo as more of a negative in a way. Of course, it's a wonderful, brilliant achievement, but it has cast such a long shadow over everything America has done in the subsequent 40 years because everything is compared to Apollo. But

maybe we shouldn't be comparing it to Apollo because it's an anomaly. A quote-unquote normal space program doesn't look like that. Well, that's a good note to end this discussion looking back on the anniversary of Apollo. Yes, it is. Dr. Asif Siddiqui is the author of many books, but notably of the book Challenge to Apollo, The Soviet Union, and The Space Race, which I highly recommend that everyone read. In fact, you can download it for free online, or you can buy reprints from his website and from the publisher. So, Dr. Siddiqui, I want to thank you for your time and for joining us. I really enjoyed this discussion. Well, thank you, Casey. It was a

pleasure. was as much among the different people trying to achieve success on the moon there who couldn't stand each other as it was with the United States. Yeah, it's amazing how much office politics gets into everything ultimately, particularly communist regimes. Well, it was fascinating and I look forward to the other interviews that are coming up in the coming months. That is, you said before we heard this one, Casey, we're going to be collecting where everybody can hear them all together. It's, I think, going to be an important bit of documentation of what really got us to the moon, which was the policy decisions. Yeah, and those will all be collected with a bunch of other stuff for society members and supporters at planetary.org slash Apollo 50.

Brendan Curry, the chief of Washington operations. It has been great to have you along for the ride with us this month, Brendan. And I hope we'll hear from you again as well. I don't think you've heard it yet, but I bet you will enjoy this conversation that Casey had with Asif. Oh, yeah. Casey gave me a little bit of a preview yesterday.

I'm really looking forward to it. In addition to being a space policy nerd, I am also a history fan and a geopolitics nerd. I'm all in. And the only other thing I would want to say is that it looks like next month there will be another National Space Council meeting after July 4th, but before July 20th. And it may be out in the West Coast. Well, a little local action for those of us who are based out this way. I hope it'll be, when you say West Coast here in Southern California, that would be a fascinating thing to attend. Well, we may be able to talk to you about that, or maybe not quite, since the next Space Policy Edition will be coming your way, if all goes well, on the first Friday in July, which will be the day after Independence Day for all of us in the U.S. That'd be Friday, July 5th, 2019. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us again. I do want to remind our listeners, if you've enjoyed what we're up to here, the best way to provide your thanks is to become a member of the Planetary Society. And at the same time,

you will be ensuring that we're able to continue the Space Policy Edition, Planetary Radio, and Planetary Radio itself, the weekly program that I hope you're also catching up on, everything that's going on across the solar system and beyond, and all of the other great work that is underway by the Planetary Society. You can do that, become one of us, by going to planetary.org slash membership. Check it out. We have all kinds of levels that you can come in at and lots of great benefits for our members. Among them, the special events that we have underway, that we are planning for the launch of LightSail 2 coming up at Cape Canaveral in just, well, less than two weeks now, or barely two weeks as we speak. Hopefully we'll talk about this in the next episode. We'll acknowledge the great success and we'll be looking up to LightSail 2.

I'll knock on my table for that. So that's the most scientific thing I can do right now. We're, we're, we're depending on you, SpaceX, uh, make that mighty Falcon heavy, uh, get us safely up into mid earth orbit,

which is where we can sail on the light of the sun. Gentlemen, again, thank you very much for being part of this. Awesome. That's a Brendan Curry, the chief of Washington operations for the planetary society. And of course,

Casey Dreyer, who has been part of this now over the entire history of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the regular host of the weekly program. Once again, hope you'll join us as we continue that series as well. Thanks for being part of the Space Policy Edition this month.