Reasons for Failure

Military Involvement

A Soviet military parade displaying rockets and missiles

The Soviet space program was very much a branch of the defense industry. The rockets that took Sputnik and cosmonauts to space were not designed for civilian purposes, they were designed to put spy satellites into orbit and carry nuclear weapons to targets around the globe. While this is also true of the early American space program, which also relied heavily upon repurposed ballistic missiles, the Soviet space program never became an independent entity the way the American space program did with NASA. OKB-1, the Soviet Design Bureau run by Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program, was responsible for early space race successes such as Sputnik, yet its primary purpose was to serve the Strategic Missile Forces, who were ultimately the primary clientele and financiers of the Design Bureaus and their space programs. Hence, it was difficult to convince the military to fund what at the time would have seemed like an outlandish goal of sending men to the Moon.

 

Competing Design Bureaus

Yuri Gagarin meets with Sergei Korolev, regarded as the father of the Soviet space program, and the chief of the OKB-1 Design Bureau

On top of depending on the military for funding, the Design Bureaus themselves were split, competing for contracts and funding. This was not the case in the United States, where NASA operated as a single entity with specific goals for space. The OKB-1 Design Bureau was the undoubted leader of the early Soviet space program, however, it became challenged as early as 1961 by two other Bureaus. These bureaus had different ideas on how best to achieve a lunar landing, and these fractured opinions prevented any unified attempt at racing Apollo to the Moon.

 

Lack of Political Investment

Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader during early space race successes, meets with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who committed the U.S. to reaching the Moon by the end of the 1960s

The Soviet failure to reach the Moon may also stem in part due to lack of clear leadership among the Communist party itself. According to Logsdon and Dupas

Kennedy’s lunar landing announcement caugh the Soviet Union by surprise… (they) had not anticipated that the U.S. might actually try to compete in that areana.

While the U.S. began racing with the goal of surpassing the Soviet Union in space, it seems that Soviet leadership was not interested in the race, or perhaps unwilling to devote the resources necessary to achieve such an objective. Logsdon and Dupas go on to say that

Three years of political debate dragged on before the Kremlin decided, and then only tentatively, that the Soviet Union should have a lunar-landing program.