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#1 2004-06-22 18:34:05
- BWhite
- Member
- From: Chicago, Illinois
- Registered: 2004-06-16
- Posts: 2,635
Re: Was Apollo closer than we thought? - Fascinating articel
http://www.astronautix.com/articles/theghoax.htm]Read this about the USA & USSR race to the Moon.
If there were cosmonauts to be launched in July 1969, who were they? Kamanin has a June 18, 1969 diary entry indicating lunar landing cosmonaut candidates as Leonov, Bykovsky, Voronov, Khrunov, Yeliseyev, Makarov, Rukavishnikov, and Patsayev. Vick and Pesavento attempt to account for the whereabouts of the cosmonauts at this time (there is good information on this since American astronaut Frank Borman was visiting Russia and touring space facilities in the Moscow area in the week prior to the launch attempt). They conclude that Gorbatko, Bykovsky, and Khrunov are the most likely cosmonauts, and also place Leonov, Makarov, and Kuklin at the cosmodrome. (Leonov may be considered unlikely, since he was on a tour to Japan just the month before - where he got in trouble by not following the moon hoax party line and told reporters 'both manned and unmanned lunar spacecraft are in preparation and that lunar rocks will be returned by Soviet spacecraft by March 1970!').
Khrunov reportedly told Vick that he was at the launch and 'that he had wept soon afterward, realising the race was over.' Would this be the reaction to a launch of an unmanned test vehicle? In any event, the explosion meant any launch of a crew to man the lunar spacecraft in low earth orbit was cancelled.
However the Luna robot soil return spacecraft was launched a ten days later, and almost succeeded in its mission. After eight days of controlled flight and lunar orbit manoeuvres, it crashed into the lunar surface as the Apollo 11 astronauts rested after their historic moonwalk. So the moon race was played out to the very last moments after all…
Officially, the Soviets pressed forward with the prepared line: They had never been in the moon race. They had no program to land men on the moon. They would never risk the lives of Soviet citizens in such a dangerous exercise when robots could do the job just as well. This was swallowed by the Western media. Walter Cronkite gravely informed the American people in the 1970's that the money spent on Apollo was wasted, since the 'Russians had never been in the race after all'.
A few voices, notably that of Charles Vick, analysed scraps of information that were inadvertently released by the Soviet censors and tried to make the case that there was an enormous, hidden, Soviet moon landing program. It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union that part of the real truth finally came out. They were in the race. And they had lost. But only now have Vick and Pesavento shown how truly close they came to winning.
True?
Heck, I dunno. But waaay cool.
:;):
Give someone a sufficient [b][i]why[/i][/b] and they can endure just about any [b][i]how[/i][/b]
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#2 2004-06-22 19:07:48
- Shaun Barrett
- Member
- From: Cairns, Queensland, Australia
- Registered: 2001-12-28
- Posts: 2,843
Re: Was Apollo closer than we thought? - Fascinating articel
Hi Bill.
The Soviets were working on a giant booster, the N-1, during the 60s and conducted four disastrous launch attempts of that booster from 1969 to 1972.
I think this is evidence enough that the Soviet Union was indeed involved in the Moon race.
I don't know of any hard evidence that cosmonauts were killed during any of these launches but it seems quite possible that they were when you consider the urgency of the competition by the beginning of 1969. Soviet pride was on the line and their boosters had always been so reliable up to that point. Maybe they took a few risks(?).
???
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#3 2004-06-28 07:26:10
- bolbuyk
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- From: Utrecht, Netherlands
- Registered: 2004-04-07
- Posts: 178
Re: Was Apollo closer than we thought? - Fascinating articel
I don't think anybody died at one of the 4 n-1-disasters. The first Russian who had to land on the Moon was Leonov, while Makarov would have a function like Collins.
The plans for Moonlanding are these days become clear. Look on http://www.astronautix.com]www.astronautix.com.
The docking of Soyuz 4 with Soyuz 5 (first plan was to do it with S1 and S2 but S2 fired its launch-escape-system when standing on the pad without any detectable reason, Soyuz 1 became the unhappy flight of Komarov) was done to exercise the transfer of a cosmonaut in space between to space-ships. It's not, as was in the West many times suggested, that something went wrong with S4-S5: The objective wwas to transfer with an EVA.
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