How Close Did the Soviets Get to Putting a Man on the Moon?

In the first episode of the AppleTV series For All Mankind, the people of the world gather around their television sets in the summer of 1969 and watch in awe as the first human being sets foot on the moon. But in this reality, that human being is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, and his first words from the lunar surface are not “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, but “I take this step for my country, for my people, and for the Marxist-Leninist way of life, knowing that today is but one small step on a journey that will someday take us all to the stars.” From this shocking left turn in the historical timeline, the series diverges into alternative, supercharged version of the Space Race where neither side backed down or cut its space exploration budget, leading to the establishment of a permanent moon base in the 1970s, an orbiting space hotel in the 1990s, and a manned mission to Mars by the end of the century. Given the astounding success and cultural impact of the Apollo lunar landing missions, it is easy to forget that the Space Race was, well, a race. But is the alternative timeline of For All Mankind realistic? Could the Soviets really have won the race to the moon? As was often the case throughout the space race, the Soviet approach to landing on the moon was in many ways very similar to NASA’s, but in others very different and sometimes even superior. But a combination of factors including lack of resources, political meddling, unfortunate design decisions, bad luck, and the untimely loss of a key technical figure ultimately conspired to cripple the Soviet lunar programme, allowing NASA to pull ahead and win the race to the moon. Here now is the largely forgotten story of the doomed Soviet moonshot. This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout