Why didn't the Soviet Union land a man on the moon?

For years and years the Soviet Union has been used as a stick or lever to get the American People on the bandwagon. Used/misused to get funding.

The Soviets were way behind on just about every technological development you can think of but in the media and government they were built up to be a big superpower. You have to go to school and be educated to get this dumb...but our leaders here in America managed to do it to us.

It was our government ..the American Government using and misusing the Soviets to frighten and intimidate the American public in the direction they needed the public to go for supporting what ever program was necessary in those days.

The very Un superpowerness of the Soviets became clear when the Iron Curtain fell. Their store shelves were mostly empty.

I was told that back before the 1980 Olympics that the United States would never come to the Moscow Olympics. And that is precisely how history played out. There was a special test group allowed to come to Russia in those days..a very inexpensive tour rate through Pan Am Airlines. This was the test group to go/travel through Russia to see what could be seen. Could Americans travel through Russia and see how un superpower it really was.

Tanks, rifles, missiles, bullets et al..do not make a super power. You must have all the other goods and have them in surplus sufficient for export. Russia had none of this. They did not even have fruit in the stores for most of the year. You could not travel to granny's without checking through one check point after another. You sign out with your Soviet...then travel to Granny''s area..check in with the Soviet in Granny's area first...then you go see Granny. The reverse to get home. En route your papers are constantly checked at different way points.
Under such an system of controls it is impossible to get fruit to the stores before much of it spoils. Economics at a profit is impossible under such an system. So how do you make rockets for space exploration?? Not just rockets but all the other high tech stuff needed for space exploration.
No one in politics nor the media were ever want to tell the public this information's.
Just go to any store in your town or city and find any goods made in Russia...even today...particularly high tech goods. What you find in abundance here in this town is Russian rifles and ammunition. These are not high tech goods.

Why did their space shuttle look like ours but never go into service?? Why did the Russians have a bomber which looked very much like a B1 swing wing bomber??

Why did Soviet Russia have a truck factory built at Kama River with western know how...International Harvester, Brown and Root and other western companies..including bank financing. This factory was to turn out trucks which were used to ship supplies down the Ho Chi Min trail during the Vietnam War...and kill our soldiers.

Why is Soviet Russia..a super power..going to the Germans to get help in building a natural gas pipeline??
A natural gas pipeline???? Is this high tech???

Where are the Russian laptops, I pods, automobiles...et al??

Whatever they were doing for a space program ...it took the whole production of their economy to do it...there were no surpluses.

The degree of difficulty of going to the moon and back...then landing in a manned operation was to much for their system.

Today the Russians have been replaced in fear tactics with Radical Islam...and in like manner ...Radical Islam must be supported from the West as was Communism. We are once again building our own enemies...as we are so doing today with Communist China.

When I worked on the 688 Class Submarine program I spoke with some engineers who came on the boat one day they told me that during the Apollo Missions there was a space docking done with Russian Astronauts. Our Engineers heard this story when at meetings with NASA Engineers. Shop talk.

During this space docking the Russians would visit our space craft and our guys would visit the Russian space craft.
Our guys were shocked to see what kind of equipment the Soviets were using to send their people up into space. Very few back up system which our people took for granted..it did not exist and their primary systems were very olde technology.
For political reasons this was kept from the knowledge of most of the American Public while maintaining the Super Power status of the Soviets.

To me this is one of the reasons the Soviets did not go to the moon. They simply could not do it. It would have taken to much out of their economy...political/economic system.

Thanks,
Orangetom

Originally posted by marsend
Man on the moon,

I cannot truly say if this did or did not happen, but I do know that the bigger the lie the easier to believe.

...only for the gullible or those who don't understand the details.

What I have found odd is the following, perhaps someone could explain.

1) Why has no other country been there also, none what so ever, this is odd.

Not when you consider the enormous expense. The politicians who controlled the funding for this (as opposed to the scientists & engineers who made it happen) did it not for science or exploration, but for the prestige of being FIRST.

There is precident for this: A hundred years ago, there was a race to put a man on the South Pole. There was nothing intrinsically valuable about the pole; it was about national prestige. The Norwegian team got there first. The British team made it a month later, but died on the return trek. After that, no one set foot on the South Pole for almost 45 years. Similarly, men have only visited the deepest part of the ocean, in the Marianas Trench once, on January 23, 1960. Nobody has been back in more than 51 years. It's not that there isn't valuable science to be learned there, or at the pole, or on the Moon, it's just that it is difficult, dangerous, and requires expensive purpose-built equipment.

We landed men on the Moon for the first time 42 years ago, and for the last time 38 years ago. By the time the final missions flew, public support for continued missions was virtually non-existant. You can peruse magazine articles at the time to get a feel for the national mood. (Time Magazine archives). Once that political goal was acheived, for the Americans there was no need to go on, and for the Soviets there was no desire to be seen coming in second, so they secretly cancelled their manned lunar program and claimed they never intended to go (which was a lie).

2) One would think man having a nature to colonize and destroy everything we get our hands, and there is still no MacMoon, where we can holiday and eat burgers, our nature is to colonize and destroy.

There's no McDonalds on the Moon for precisely the the same reason why there isn't one at the South Pole, or the bottom of the Marianas Trench, or the top of the Himalayas, or anywhere else that's difficult and dangerous to get to.

[rant] Although I don't want to hijack this thread, [thread-jack!] I disagree in the strongest terms that human-kind is hell-bent on destruction. This is hippy-hypocracy at its worst. So some developer bulldozes a forest: What goes in its place? A housing development? Apartments? Is this "bad"? Why is the house or apartment you live in not just as bad? What was there (and destroyed) before your home was built? What about paving the fields for a new mall? That's bad, but the stores that you shop in are OK, right? What about your place of work? What about the power-plant that provides your electricity? Or the factory that built your computer on which you are reading this? What about the homes of the workers who run the stores and the power plants and the factories? Are they not as entitled to homes as you are? Al Gore worries about over-population - but he's got four kids.

If mankind was inherently destructive, then we would not have a civilization, let alone communities. Instead, our driving purpose has been to change our surroundings to make ourselves safer and more comfortable. Judging from the life-expectancy in the developed world as opposed to places where people still live in mud huts, I'd say we are succeeding.

HOWEVER, I want to make it clear that civilization - governments, corporations, communities and individuals - have a responsibility to minimize its waste-products. Whether it is gaseous exhaust, chemical waste or household trash, we must be eternally vigilant and conscientious of controlling excess and disposing of it properly. I say this not out of altruism, but because, as a human being who wants to be safer and more comfortable (selfish me!), I want my electricity, but I want clean air. I want my computer, but I don't want chemical waste damaging my health. I want my nice neigborhood, and I want trees in it to give me shade.
[/rant][/thread-jack!]

See the first line in my signature (below).

3) Why do so many not believe that it is real.

See the second line in my signature (below)

4) Did we really have the technologies for such, I heard the computing power was equivalent to a simple desktop calculator, and human error.

Ballistics equations have been around a lot longer than computers. A desktop calculator is adequate to the task. Here is an example of rocket technology from nine years before Apollo landed on the Moon. Note that (at 0:57) the missile emerges from the water at a 45-degree angle, but is able to correct and fly a nominal trajectory.

5) Has there ever been unequivocal proof provided.

Now we get to the crux of the matter. What IS "unequivocal proof"? Hoax-Believers want to claim that anything can be faked (they're wrong) therefore all evidence of the Moon landing was faked (but they can't provide any solid evidence). If someone walked up to you and asked you for "unequivocal proof" of your identity, could you provide it?

6) Were the Astronauts sworn to secrecy.

No. Many of them have published memoirs. Several of them still make public appearances and are not shy about talking about their experiences and how their travels changed them.

7) Has any other country every verified that America actually did landed on the moon?

Yes. Among many examples, The Australians downlinked the video and data from Apollo lunar missions.
www.honeysucklecreek.net...

Also, the Soviet Union tracked the flights:
www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru...

Not only did nations track the missions, but individuals did as well:
legacy.jefferson.kctcs.edu...

The Japanese Kaguya probe identified the disturbed soil in the exact locations of Apollo landings. Also, its digital mapper was able to reproduce Google Earth-style terrain maps that precisely match photos taken on the surface.

Could it have been possible to commit a mass fraud at the time,

Not then and not now. Nixon couldn't cover-up a third-rate burglary, and Clinton couldn't hide a simple assignation. For the number of people involved, it would have been easier and safer to just go to the Moon (I am not being sarcastic, here).

Starwars was not to far around the corner and that was very convincing.

Now that's interesting: The reason why Star Wars' special effects looked so good was because they used a computer-controlled camera that could reproduce movements precisely to optical tolerances, yet a few lines up you were wondering if NASA computers could do precise calculations...

Could it have been possible to shoot the moon landing on earth and then replay that back to earth while sitting out in space the whole time.

No, for many reasons. Among them, the signals were (as stated above) were tracked to the surface of the Moon. Conversations between ground and the astronauts discussed current events, such as sports scores, which could not have been scripted in advance.

In my mind, the most obvious evidence against fakery is the video record. Hour after hour shows the astronauts casually kicking dust. It doesn't billow at all as it would in an atmosphere, and it flies too far to be produced in one-gravity by the small foot movements of the explorers. Such behavior is ONLY possible in vacuum and lunar gravity. it CANNOT be faked.

You have to wonder why did it have to stop at 'the first man on the moon' why not first moon base etc etc

Originally posted by mysteriousdan
You have to wonder why did it have to stop at 'the first man on the moon' why not first moon base etc etc

lack of public interest, thus lack of public interest in funding it. The 1970s was a decade of the public demanding "lets fix what's wrong on Earth before we spend money on space".

The Apollo programs took a H U G E chunk of the budget (compared to today). This decrease in the % of the budget that funds NASA is in direct response to the fact that the general public in the 1970s did not want a lot of money to go to NASA.

Therefore, NASA stopped the very expensive Moon program.

reply to post by Saint Exupery


But nothing you posted proves they were MEN on the moon.

reply to post by masterp


If it wasn't men on the moon it would have required robotic technology beyond what we have today to fake human movements in 1/6th earth gravity, as well as all of the mechanical and geological phenomena observed in how rocket thrust works in a vacuum and as mentioned the pure ballistic trajectories of dust in zero atmosphere and the best one of all, the hammer and feather drop.

Originally posted by masterp
reply to post by Saint Exupery

 

But nothing you posted proves they were MEN on the moon.

My last paragraph explicitly did just that (unless you want to argue that the people in the suits were women).

Again, what is "proof"? Using the same standards that you hold for Apollo, can you "prove" your own identity?

reply to post by ZeroKnowledge


Well than why should the U.S. continue to go? Wouldn't the Russians be suspicious of why the U.S. would return? Maybe they would think the U.S. benefited from returning?

Well than why should the U.S. continue to go?

Aside from ripping off their taxpayers, the USA needed a continuous bogus distraction from a highly unpopular war (Vietnam). Nothing like fake national pride to get people's mind off a long and unjustified war. Sound familiar?

The reason the Soviets did not fake any moon landings is because they were not involved in any unpopular wars at the time and did not need any bogus distractions for their people. In addition, it is highly unlikely the Soviet people would have bought into such a scam, since they are nowhere near as naive and gullible as their American counterparts.

reply to post by Illustronic


All the acts you mention were performed by humans in a studio.

reply to post by Saint Exupery


Video trickery.

How do you know the dust on Earth cannot be kicked like that? the dust material in the studio could be extra light.

Yes, I can prove I exist for the simple reason that I can see me, unlike Apollo, which we can only see white pixels of.

reply to post by Saint Exupery


I'd also like to add that the Japanese probe proves there are no man made objects on the moon, because the terrain data they have produced do not contain any Apollo objects.

Originally posted by masterp
reply to post by Saint Exupery

 

Video trickery.

How do you know the dust on Earth cannot be kicked like that? the dust material in the studio could be extra light.

If the dust in a studio was light it would not land the same speed as a hammer. You're not very good at this stuff are you.

reply to post by masterp


Quite the contrary, the JAXA KAGUYA SELENE probe proved in fact that images from Apollo 15 had to be taken on the moon. It's the 3d mapping they did that can place your eye level at any point, including the point in space an astronaut was standing, by perfectly matching up the background terrane. Yes indeed, you are not very good at this.

Originally posted by masterp
reply to post by Saint Exupery

 

I'd also like to add that the Japanese probe proves there are no man made objects on the moon, because the terrain data they have produced do not contain any Apollo objects.

10 meters per pixel will not image any spacecraft hardware on the moon. Please just give up, that's strike 3 in just 2 posts.

I realize this is an old thread but felt compelled to reply after reading some of the... arrogance? in some of the replies. All that really needs to be said is that nothing posted here proves in any way, shape or form that MAN ever set foot on the moon. The US may have landed modules on the surface of the moon, but as far as man stepping on the moon it most certainly ALL could have been faked. Anything can be faked in this day and age, and the US government is well rehearsed in that practice. Until another country lands on the moon and verifies that Neil Armstrong did in fact land on the moon in 1969, there is no proof that exists today to verify it actually did happen.

Ever wonder why Neil Armstrong became such a recluse after "returning" from the moon landing? Perhaps the lies he had to tell conflicted so greatly with his integrity that he could not mentally deal with it. Just a thought.

Originally posted by spacemoon
The US may have landed modules on the surface of the moon, but as far as man stepping on the moon it most certainly ALL could have been faked.

Why do you feel that it's possible for unmanned probes to land on the Moon but not manned ones?

Anything can be faked in this day and age...

Emphasis mine.

Movies that are made today can't even pull off a convincing Lunar scene, let alone back in the 60's.

Until another country lands on the moon and verifies that Neil Armstrong did in fact land on the moon in 1969, there is no proof that exists today to verify it actually did happen.

There may be no 100% undeniable proof, but their is tons of evidence that support that the landings happened.

Ever wonder why Neil Armstrong became such a recluse after "returning" from the moon landing?

He was never one for the limelight, even before the Apollo missions.

reply to post by spacemoon


So, let me see if I understand you correctly:

You have complete faith in the government's ability to perpetuate a fantastically complex hoax, and that the people who would be sneaky and dishonest enough to produce this lie would nonetheless have such sterling integrity that they would not blow the lid on it for fame, notoriety or money...

... but you don't believe that a bunch of trained & motivated engineers can apply ingenuity and perseverance to solve a difficult, but basically straight-forward engineering problem.

Furthermore:

You do not require any evidence whatsoever of a hoax to believe in it...

... but the historical record of the most thoroughly-documented project in human history is not good enough for you.

Do I understand you correctly?

Please re-read this post from further up the page.

Originally posted by Nohup
Are we absolutely sure they didn't? I wouldn't put it past them Commies to have landed a couple of guys on it, only to have them die there and not tell anybody.

Back in the day there were rumours that up to five cosmonaughts had died in orbit or during re-entry, only rumours, but no smoke without fire, anyway, perhaps that discouraged the Soviets from going to the moon?

All the semantics of being first or second on the Moon aside, there's the simple fact that the USSR failed to get their N-1 rocket (their counterpart to the Saturn V rocket) safely into Earth orbit. There were 4 failed launch attempts, after which the program was suspended and eventually cancelled. en.wikipedia.org...

To put it bluntly, the USSR simply didn't have the technology, and didn't want to invest time and money into this. Especially since they would only be the second superpower on the Moon.

www.youtube.com...