why did the Americans beat the Russians to the moon?

Answer 1

The US had Werner von Braun while the russians had two main designers in charge of building their moon rocket. Like Scientia mentioned there was alot of rivalry between them. And the russians went with a very bad design for their lunar rocket. While von Brauns rocket was fairly simple in design with "only" 5 engines in the first stage the russian rocket had something like 20. Is was incredibly complex and the russians never got it to work. When one rocket exploded on the pad killing over 100 technicians while the US succesfully landed the russians called it quits.

Answer 2

Earl D's answer above is wrong. The Russians did have a lunar program. I'll post some links below so that you can read about it.

There are risks inherent in any large engineering endeavor. Often, you have to make a decision between two seemingly equally risky alternatives. For example, when building a very large rocket, one choice that you have to make is, do we use a few very large, very powerful engines, or do we use many smaller engines. Either choice has risks. There's no right or wrong answer.

The Americans chose to try and build a very powerful engine, so they would use fewer of them. The engine they built, the Rocketdyne F-1, is (still is today) by far the most powerful rocket motor ever made. The Saturn V used five of them.

The Russians chose to design a rocket that would use a lot of less powerful engines. Their N1 rocket used **30** engines! There's nothing inherently wrong with this idea. The Russians weren't stupid.

Both ideas had risks. For the Americans, there were quite a lot of very tough engineering challenges to making the F-1 - for example, heat dissipation was a huge problem. If they had failed to solve all of those, then they wouldn't have gone to the moon either. For the Russians, the biggest problem they faced was quality control. They couldn't get 30 perfect, working engines from the factory all at the same time.

It wasn't luck. It was more like fate. The Russians made a decision early on that backed them into a corner and they couldn't recover. This sort of thing happens all the time, by the way. A modern example is the Venture Star, a launch vehicle intended to replace the shuttle. Early on, they made the decision to use a particular shape, that meant they had to fit composite fuel tanks into the body. They could never make it work. The program was eventually canceled. These things happen.

Answer 3

To be frank the Russians never had an overt Lunar adjenda.

That was created by Kennedy's press people as a rally point.

It was done to make up for being behind them.

The Russians don't even have a Mars adjenda, so don't be surprised if India or France or Brazil or China gets there first!

What Russians have had is a yearly up and down presence in space since 1961.

It's America that's been grounded on and off!

Answer 4

The American space system was centralised under NASA. The Russian program was not. Once NASA was committed to going to the Moon and given the necessary funding they embarked on a steady progression from one-man orbital flight through two-man flight, long duration flight, space rendezvous, docking, navigation, spacewalks, flight computer development, rocket development, all the way up to regular lunar landing missions.

By contrast, various agencies in Russia had their own plans for lunar programs, and all of them were permitted to work on them, while personal rivalries among the chief designers held things up even more. Thanks to lack of proper funding and focus, one type of rocket was developed and it failed every time. The program also suffered a heavy setback in the mid-60s in the shape of the Voskhod program, which diverted resources for no purpose other than to upstage the American Gemini program by putting multi-man crews into space first and performing the first spacewalk. After that, the US Gemini program completed a highly successful 2-year flight plan, during which not one Russian cosmonaut flew in space. When they did resume manned flight it was a disaster and led to the death of a cosmonaut.

In short, the American space program was highly organised, while the Russian one was not.

Answer 5

The soviet union had many successful firsts in their space program including the first satellite in orbit, the first man in orbit, and the first woman in space.

It began as a close race to be the first to land a man on the Moon. But the soviet space program ran into internal troubles which slowed their program.

Personal rivalries, shifting political alliances and bureaucratic inefficiencies bred failure and delays within the moon program. There was strong competition between research teams and laboratories.

This internal competition and the low budget for manned exploration of the Moon explains the failure of Soviet technology against the successful American Apollo program.

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DrAnders is correct. Following the Apollo 11 landing, the Soviets decided not to even try to land a craft on the Moon since any type of failure would have proven devastating to the Soviet space program and a social and political embarrassment.

Answer 6

Americans were smarter than the Russians back then. Once the Americans heard that they reached space, the Americans worked hard to beat them to the moon.

Answer 7

I dont think it was a race for the moon but a race for either country to get some one into outer space first. Uri Gagarin was their hero.

Answer 8

the Russians had TERRIBLE luck.

a few flips of a coin the other way and they might have managed it.

Answer 9

because we were stupid enough to believe that we had to go there first, to show them whos better.
It was a question of honor

today we should be smarter, but ...oh well...some smarties elected the republicans

Answer 10

America has better technology and a stronger economy because we have more freedom.