hst 183 4

During the 1960s, the Soviets had successes with their Vostok and Luna programs, being the first to orbit the Earth and sending the first woman to space. They also achieved significant milestones with the Moon, such as impacting it and taking photographs of its far side. It seemed like the Soviets were ahead in the race to the Moon, but their failures in recognizing safety hazards and leadership issues led to setbacks. Ultimately, these failures allowed the United States to beat them in 1969. Now I'm going to speak on some of the Soviets' failures and also a couple of successes during the time while the United States was working on the Mercury missions and the Apollo missions. First as previously mentioned, during the early 1960s, the Soviets did seem to be always a step ahead of the United States. And this can be seen through the Vostok program, which made the Soviets have the first human to orbit the Earth. Also Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963. The Luna program also once again had many successful missions. As previously mentioned, Luna 2 became the first one, the object to impact the Moon. The Luna 3 was the first one to take a far side of the Moon photograph. The Luna 9 successfully had a soft landing to the Moon. The Luna 10, which launched in March 1966, became the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon. So during this time, with all these successful missions, it did seem as if the Soviets were going to be the first ones to put a man on the Moon. They just seemed to always, once again, be a step ahead of the United States or even a couple of steps ahead. However, during the mid-1960s, various failures would catch up and hurt the Soviets' progress. The failure to recognize potential safety hazards would lead to many setbacks in their missions. Many failures, failure to recognize potential issues which could kill people in these space missions set them back. Also, they had leadership and organizational issues going on, especially as highlighted here after the passing of, excuse me if I butcher this name here, of Sergei Korolev in 1966 led to compromised mission outcomes. So without a good leader in place, the Soviets kind of started to lose their ground. Such failures would assist the United States beating out the Soviets in 1969.