Was The Race To The Moon Real?; June 1994; Scientific American
Magazine; by Logsdon, Dupas; 8 Page(s) Twenty-five years ago, on
July 20, 1969, Neil A. Armstrong took the first footsteps on the
surface of the moon. That event marked a political and
technological victory for the U.S. in its cold war rivalry with
the U.S.S.R. In the years that followed, the Soviet government
insisted that the Soviet Union had never planned a lunar
landing. Hence, it argued, the contest to send humans to the
moon was a onesided exercise. The reality is otherwise; recently
declassified information from that era and testimony of key
participants in the Soviet space program under Khrushchev and
Brezhnev prove that the moon race was indeed real. New evidence
reveals that personal rivalries, shifting political alliances
and bureaucratic inefficiencies bred failure and delays within
the Soviet lunar-landing program. In contrast, the American
effort received consistently strong political and public
support. The National Aeronautics and