Not seeing how building a rocket to compete with Saturn V means they were also racing to the moon
From the references of the wiki article on the N1 rocket
https://web.archive.org/web/20161031200800/http://www.starbase1.co.uk/pages/n1-project-history.html
Salyut and Mir prove the Soviet’s focus was on manned missions in low earth orbit and not the moon, and considering nobody has gone back to the moon since they’ve made the right call
You don’t need anything that powerful for earth orbit. Salut and Mir launched on much less ambitious rockets. They became the focus after the moon race was decided.
The N1-L3 version was designed to compete with the United States Apollo program to land a person on the Moon, using a similar lunar orbit rendezvous method. The basic N1 launch vehicle had three stages, which were to carry the L3 lunar payload into low Earth orbit with two cosmonauts. The L3 contained one stage for trans-lunar injection; another stage used for mid-course corrections, lunar orbit insertion, and the first part of the descent to the lunar surface; a single-pilot LK Lander spacecraft; and a two-pilot Soyuz 7K-LOK lunar orbital spacecraft for return to Earth.
You build an N1 or Saturn V to go to the moon.
Had the N1 launched without incident, the Soviets were on target to get a man on the moon first. When the Soviet Union fell all the details of the program became available.
So if they were racing the US to the moon why didn’t they also publicly proclaim their intent to go to the moon? They rejected the race, tried to make a Saturn V, didn’t work, moved on. Hardly seems like a race to me
From the references in that same wikipedia article you’re referencing, the one I linked in my comment:
"On June 23, 1960 the USSR gave the go ahead to the N-1 project via a decree: "On the Development of Powerful Launch vehicles, Satellites, Spacecraft, and Space Exploration 1960-1967". This was Sergei Korolev’s design for a family of launchers, the key one being the largest, the N-1.
This initial design while a powerful heavy lift rocket, had a planned payload capacity of 75 tonnes - a lot less than that for a lunar landing mission. Korolev was thinking flyby missions of Mars, which require a much lighter payload."
Why is it so hard to accept the moon landing was just pompous Americanism?
