Conspiracy Encyclopedia

At the time of Apollo, the Soviet Union had five times more manned hours in space than the US. They had achieved:

1. First manmade satellite in orbit (October 1957, Sputnik 1).
2. First living creature to enter orbit, a female dog named Laika, (November 1957, Sputnik 2).
3. First to safely return living creature from orbit, two dogs Belka and Strelka, 40 mice, 2 rats (August 1960, Sputnik 5).
4. First man in space, Yuri Gagarin, also the first man to orbit the Earth (April 1961, Vostok 1).
5. First to have two spacecraft in orbit at the same time (though it was not a space rendezvous, as frequently described) (August 1962, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4).
6. First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova (June 1963, Vostok 6, as part of a second dual-spacecraft flight including Vostok 5).
7. First crew of three cosmonauts on board one spacecraft (October 1964, Voskhod 1).
8. First spacewalk (EVA) (March 1965, Voskhod 2).

On January 27, 1967, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 1 died in a fire on the launch pad during training. The fire was triggered by a spark in the oxygen-rich atmosphere used in the spacecraft test, and fueled by a significant quantity of combustible material within the spacecraft. Two years later all of the problems were declared fixed. Bart Sibrel believes that the accident led NASA to conclude that the only way to ‘win’ the moon race was to fake the landings. In any case, the first manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, occurred in October, 1968, 21 months after the fire.

1. NASA and others say that these achievements by the Soviets are not as impressive as the simple list implies; that a number of these ‘firsts’ were mere stunts that did not advance the technology significantly, or at all (e.g. the first woman in space).
2. A close examination of the many flight missions reveal many problems, risks, and near-catastrophes for both the Soviet and American programs. A negative ‘first’ for the Soviets was the first in-flight fatality, in April 1967, three months after the Apollo I fire, as Soyuz 1 crash-landed. Despite that disaster, the Soyuz program continued, after a lengthy interval to solve design problems, as with the Apollo program.
3. Before the first Earth-orbiting Apollo flight, the USSR had accumulated 534 hours of manned spaceflight whereas the US had accumulated over 1,992 hours of manned spaceflight. By the time of Apollo 11, the US’s lead was much wider than that (see List of human spaceflights, 1960s.)
4. Most of the firsts above were done by the US within a year afterwards (sometimes within weeks). In 1965 the US started to achieve many firsts which were important steps in a mission to the Moon. See List of Space Exploration Milestones, 1957-1969 for a more complete list of achievements by both the US and USSR. The USSR never developed a successful rocket capable of a Moon landing mission — their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts. They never tested a lunar lander on a manned mission.