Alternate history: what if the Soviets had landed on the Moon first and won the Space Race?

• On the podcast | Dr Thomas Ellis responds to listener questions on the great Cold War rivalry that saw the US and the Soviet Union battle for dominance in space

By cementing their superiority in space – having taken the lead with Sputnik 1 and never losing it on their way to the Moon – the Soviet Union would have secured a decisive blow in the political economic battle against US capitalism. “Sputniks 1 and 2 in 1957, and the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961, were held up as proof that Soviet claims of communism being the wave of the future weren’t entirely empty,” says Dr Ellis.

The continuing ‘firsts’ in space demonstrated Russia’s transformation from a “technologically backwards medieval despotism to a Space Age socialist society”. For a successful Moonshot, though, they needed to improve administration of their space programme.

While the US efficiently focused efforts towards a single project, Apollo, the Soviets contended with multiple bodies competing for funding and resources. “It was a byzantine system beset by internal rivalry, nepotistic patronage and wasteful duplication,” says Dr Ellis. Such disorganisation had to be resolved and significant investment made to the longer-term prize of a Moon landing rather than the short-term prestige of collecting ‘firsts’.

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In essence, says Dr Ellis, the Soviets’ programme had to behave “like the American image of it” – centrally directed, well-funded and with the full backing of the Communist Party.

This may have been more attainable had Sergei Korolev lived. As ‘Glavny Konstruktor’ (Chief Designer), Korolev had built the rocket that put Sputnik and Gagarin into orbit and was of such importance to the space programme that his name was only made public after his death in 1966. Had he lived longer, Korolev would have continued to be a crucial cog in the machine to achieve crewed space flight and in developing the N1 rocket (the Soviet version of the Saturn V).

Soviet Neil Armstrong

The US Apollo project used a three-man crew, weight restrictions meant the Soviet lander could accommodate only one cosmonaut. So who would have been destined to be the Soviet Neil Armstrong? Alexei Leonov, who in 1965 became the first person to conduct a spacewalk, is widely believed to have been the likely candidate for the solo trip to the Moon’s surface.

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Dr Ellis says, “In 1966, he was assigned to lead a group of cosmonauts to train for lunar landing flights,” among them Vostok 4 cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, potentially the second crew member. Their Moon landing would have been a “huge, much-needed prestige boost for the Soviet Union both at home and abroad”, and been immediately accompanied with a propaganda drive as Leonov and Popovich received the ticker-tape parades and adulation.

Alexei Leonov, who in 1965 became the first person to conduct a spacewalk, is widely believed to have been the likely candidate for the solo trip to the Moon’s surface

“Like the Apollo astronauts, these lunar cosmonauts would have followed a hero’s welcome in the homeland with a victory lap tour around the world. Within a year, they’d grow sick of banquets where they had to explain ‘what it felt like’ to be on the Moon to presidents, monarchs and celebrities,” says Dr Ellis. As the Soviets revelled in the acclaim, a sober, downtrodden and defeated mood would likely have pervaded the US.

“Publicly, there would be gracious congratulations and invites to the White House. Privately, President Richard Nixon would have been seething,” says Dr Ellis. And in NASA itself, the atmosphere was likely to be one of “misery and frustration”. The politicians already calling for a reduction in NASA’s budget might have greeted a Soviet Moon landing with a “sour grapes response that disparaged space racing as the sort of propagandistic spectacle best left to the communists”.

Across the US, there may have been a surge of righteous anger at the colossal amounts being spent on space exploration – and for nought if they kept coming behind the Soviets – especially in the face of Americans of colour living with discrimination and poverty. Dr Ellis says: “Defeat in the race to the Moon combined with the more serious crises of legitimacy prompted by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal would have made the 1970s an even gloomier decade.”

Endless one-upmanship

The US could have either backed down and accepted defeat, which would have been unthinkable to many given the Cold War implications, or redoubled its commitment to catch up, resulting in an endless cycle of one-upmanship.

“The Soviets would undoubtedly have continued exploring space,” says Dr Ellis, and would have likely still spent the 1970s focusing on developing their space station programme. There may have been pressure for even more impressive missions, including an eventual circumnavigation of Mars.

But the more they worked to maintain their superiority in space, the more pressure would build on the Soviet economy. “A successful Moonshot might well have provided a new potent diplomatic and propaganda tool, and led to an uptick in membership for Third World communist parties,” says Dr Ellis. “Prestige is powerful, but it wouldn’t have invalidated the economic and political weaknesses.”

In fact, a Soviet Moon landing may have ended up underlining the Soviet economy’s deep-rooted structural problems. Dr Ellis concludes, “It is difficult to imagine a Moonshot preventing the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.”

This article was first published in the January 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed