CRASHING a LUNAR landing

HOW THE APOLLO 11 ASTRONAUTS RACED AN ERRATIC SOVIET SPITE-ROBOT TO THE MOON

It was probably the single most poetic moment of the entire U.S. space program: On July 21, 1969, just as a triumphant Apollo 11 celebrated their victory in the race to the moon, a slapped-together Soviet probe sped over their heads, plummeted to the lunar surface and exploded less than 800 kilometres away.

Known as Luna 15, the probe had been quickly assembled in a last-minute attempt to steal the glory from NASA’s finest hour.

The plan was to have the spacecraft touch down, scoop up a shovelful of moon dust, and then make a beeline back to earth ahead of the Apollo astronauts.

Thus, while the United States could claim to have landed the first men on the moon, the Soviets would still hold the record for being the first to bring back moon rocks.

The propaganda value was obvious: Why bother picking up your moon rocks with a manned mission when you could just send a robot?

Georigy Ivanovich Petrov, director of Moscow’s Institute of Cosmic Research, said as much when he praised the Americans for their “outstanding achievement” of a moon landing, but noted that they would have gotten much more bang for their buck if they’d stuck to unmanned probes.

This was a surprisingly popular view in the United States, where a majority of Americans in 1969 did indeed see the Apollo program as a waste of money.

For the rest of its existence, the Soviet Union would always be a little coy about the U.S. moon landings.

Soviet officials graciously congratulated their U.S. counterparts and the statecontrolled press gave it a few kind mentions — but it was otherwise treated as a U.S. pet project.

The Soviets had made some early overtures towards a moon landing, sure, but it was only to fool the imperialist enemy into launching their own Quixotic lunar conquest.

In reality, it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that the world would learn that the Soviet Union had actually tried extremely hard to beat the U.S. to the moon — only to fail in the most epic way imaginable.

Although the Soviets were the first to get a probe on the moon, they had pegged their manned program to the N1, a ludicrous mega-rocket that could not stop exploding.

The Americans had powered their moonshots with the Saturn V rocket, an elegant from-scratch design built for the sole task of smoothly executing a manned moon mission.

The N1, by contrast, was essentially a bundle of kerosene rockets strapped together and souped up just enough to be able to push a bare-bones spacecraft into lunar orbit.

Four N1s were launched, and all of them exploded.

The most dramatic had occurred on July 3, 1969, less than two weeks before the launch of Apollo 11.

An N1 reached an altitude of only 100 metres before it exploded, obliterating much of the launch complex and sending observers scrambling for their lives. It remains one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in history.

“I saw without exaggeration the end of the world, and not in a nightmare but while fully awake and standing right next to it,” was one witness account.

The July 13 launch of Luna 15, therefore would have been carried out with the smell of exploded moon rocket still fresh in the air at Baikonur Cosmodrome.

“The Russians will steal a lot of our thunder if they get moon samples back before we do,” is how one NASA official at the time described the Luna 15 mission racing Apollo 11 to the moon.

The image of a spacesuited American frolicking in the lunar dust obviously had more prestige, but “a number of scientists are actually more interested in obtaining surface samples.”

Luna 15 was ultimately destroyed by the same thing that had almost killed the occupants of Apollo 11.

As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had approached their planned landing site on July 19, they found it to be packed with spacecraft shredding boulders.

Armstrong had been forced to pilot the lander to an adlibbed secondary site, ultimately setting it down with only seconds to spare.

But with no pilot aboard, Luna 15 began picking up confusing and erratic readings from the jagged lunar surface. Unable to square the perplexing data, it simply fritzed out and crashed.

In its final moments, Luna 15 reportedly arced directly over the Apollo 11 landing site — violating a Soviet promise to stay out of the Americans’ way.

Soviet propaganda was soon saying that plowing into the moon had been the plan all along.

Citizens in the USSR were told that Luna 15 was just an orbiter, and had successfully completed its reconnaissance mission of the lunar surface. “It represented an important advance on earlier moon-probes,” read an optimistic Soviet account.

But the staff of Britain’s Jodrell Bank Observatory knew better.

On July 21, the British observatory, then home to the world’s largest steerable radio telescope, had been conducting a play-by-play viewing of what remains the busiest day in moon exploration history.

As they heard the giddy voices of Apollo 11 astronauts conferring with Houston, they simultaneously picked up the electronic last gasps of Luna 15.

Just before it disappeared, the spacecraft was tracked as travelling nearly 500 km/h, leaving little doubt that its ultimate fate had been to become a debris field of twisted metal.

It was two rival superpowers squaring off more than 350,000 km from earth.

One basking in its greatest triumph.

The other racking up just one more explosion to cap off its disastrous bid to capture lunar glory.

“I say, this has really been drama of the highest order,” one Brit can be heard saying in a since-recovered tape recording of the day.

IT WAS TWO RIVAL SUPERPOWERS SQUARING OFF.