/sci/ - Science & Math

We all know the soviet never had a shot of landing on the moon first (at least after 1962), but it always amazed me that they had a genuine shot at being the first to send a crew in cislunar space. People often forget they were the first to send animals around the moon in Zond 5.

Like pretty much 2 of any of the following would have given them an opportunity to send a crewed Proton-Zond before a type C'/F Apollo mission
>1967/early 68 proton has just more pure luck and launch success rate is higher
>They stand down the proton for several months for safety in 1967 instead of 1970
>Apollo 6 fails as it almost did.
>NASA is overly cautious and decides to keep Apollo 8 on a High Earth orbit as originally planned
>The soviets decide to launch a crew at the first opportunity after a succesful demonstration of Zond-Lunar Flyby

Of course Zond/7K-L1 was a dead end, a fucking death trap that was more likely to kill its crew than not, and it was so much at the edge of the Proton's capabilities they would probably have to send the crew in soyuz separately (picrel), but it would have stolen Apollo 8's achievement in the public eye (noone cares about the differenc between a lunar orbit and fly-by), and it really almost was down to the stars aligning for the soviets and a few decisions.

Of course they'd still get mogged to the lunar surface, and probably it would convince the american to do more of the planned Apollo missions, so they'd get mogged even harder without it improving N1's success odds.

>>12210037
if you have enough faith in your spacecrafts' station-keeping to not bump into each other, sure. but there isn't really any need for it today now that we've mastered docking large spacecraft to stations. when that was drawn there were serious concerns about the difficulty of it.

there were rumors the soviets had something similar planned for their manned lunar program where they would launch their flyby/landing craft on a proton/n1 and then use a regular soyuz to dock with it after it had successfully launched.