If the Soviets had eventually landed on the moon after the US, would anything have really changed?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Let’s pretend that somehow the Soviets are able to power through their problems with the N1 lunar rocket and manages to get a crew together for expected launch in 1971 (the earliest I believe they could have done it with all their N1 problems). When NASA lands on the moon in July 1969 they decided to continue with the launch and have a successful launch of the N1 with crew sometime in 1971. They land on the moon, plant a red flag, say some words, then take off and never go back again, all just to be able to say they were on the moon too.

Ultimately, would our timeline have changed? I know there’s plenty of alternative histories where a Soviet moon landing first causes the Space Race to go on, but if simply the Soviets get there second after us and never go back, would the timeline as we know it have changed at all? Would the United States even really react? After 1971 only 2 more Apollo missions were completed, would the Soviets landing have caused the cancelled last 3 Apollo missions to actually land on the moon? How would that change things?

2

I think if we kept the competition going, as in building a moon base. It would have been good for both parties involved and possibly the world.

I’m probably being naive.

3

The issue with a Lunar base is that it probably would not have been sustainable even if it had been possible with the technology of the time. Apollo was on the bleeding edge of what was feasible in the J-class ‘extended duration’ missions (16 through 18) and even those lasted less than two weeks. There was essentially no recycling of consumables (air was ‘scrubbed’ of CO2 with the use of expendable lithium hydroxide filters, liquid wastes were ejected into space with no effort to reclaim water, food was all prepackaged), and all power was generated by fuel cells and stored in batteries of around 1.2 kWh capacity. Every place on the Lunar surface is in shadow for at least two weeks at a time, so even if compact lightweight solar panels were available they wouldn’t have been adequate to sustain an occupied habitat without sending a shit-ton of batteries, and I’m sure children of the era recall just how poorly ‘rechargeable’ batteries of the era fared with repeated deep cycling. There were small nuclear fission reactors and radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) available but not adequately reliable enough and/or insufficient output to sustain even a small crew.

There were, of course, problems with the fine, abrasive, electrostatically-charged dust of the Lunar regolith, problems with long duration thermal management (more in rejecting waste heat rather than staying warm), and the still-unresolved issues with astronaut health with a long-duration mission in significantly reduced gravity which may pose a fundamental restriction for habitation on the Moon (or Mars). And while there is water ice on the Lunar surface it is literally rock-hard and mixed with lunar dust to form a concrete-like substance which isn’t easily extracted or filtered. There was essentially no in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) at the time and even now such technologies are really in a very technically immature state, so relying on extracted water or other materials would not have been viable, necessitating a regular supply of consumables and all necessary hardware from Earth to the habitat, which is a logistical nightmare.

Crewed space habitation beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) will require extensive automation which is only possible by modern computing and autonomous control systems, and will require the maturation of ISRU technologies to a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 8 or better. I question that it even makes sense to establish bases on a planetary surface versus solar orbiting habitats where spin-simulated gravity can produce adequate acceleration for long term physiological health and other environmental conditions can be controlled, but that also requires access to massive quantities of space resources (presumably from Near Earth Asteroids versus hauling up material out of a gravity field) and the ability to process them into usable materials, products, and consumables.

As for the o.p., no, I don’t think a successful Soviet post-Apollo 11 Lunar crewed mission would have made that much difference. After ‘losing’ the ‘race’ to put people on the Moon, the Soviets reframed to focus on LEO space habitation and advanced that capability while the United States took a nearly decade-long hiatus from crewed space exploration (save for the all too short Skylab program and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program flight) but made enormous strides toward uncrewed exploration of other planets including Viking to the surface of Mars and the Voyager probes to the outer planets. The expanding US involvement in the Viet Nam conflict took massive budgetary expansion and aerospace resources, and the energy crises of the ‘Seventies curtailed government spending while the always-moribund Soviet economy constrained the ability of the USSR to engage in a program beyond LEO with no real strategic or military benefit. Note, to, that it wasn’t just the issues with the development of the N-1 rocket but also the lack of a spacecraft capable of the duration of a Lunar mission and reentry from a Lunar trajectory that prevented the Soviets from sending cosmonauts to the Moon.

The idea of an extended competition in the Lunar domain or beyond between ‘Great Powers’ is romantic and has inspired a lot of alt-history fictioneering but isn’t really very plausible without enormous technological leaps in computing, propulsion, space habitation, and ISRU that simply didn’t occur and (except for computing) would make such an effort only marginally viable today.

Stranger

4

If NASA already had additional Moon missions planned after the Soviets succeeded (which the OP assumes by his choice of dates), those missions would certainly have gone on. The US, in its slightly better, more comfortable, position would not have wanted to allow the Soviets to “have the last word” by making the last human landing.

So now the next move belongs to the Soviets. If they elect (as assumed in the OP) to do nothing more on the Moon, the future un that scenario unfolds about as it really did for all the reasons Stranger explained so well.

But what if instead the Soviets had decided to take another heave at the Moon at/after the end of the Apollo program and successfully landed their second crew?

The two powers may have continued their dick-measuring contest for a couple more missions. The planned Apollos that really never flew (18-20) were cancelled while their hardware was only partly built, so perhaps they could have been completed and launched.

After that the tech was at a dead end, and the long lead time (and ferocious expense) to build another mission from scratch would have pretty well forced a hiatus on both sides.

After which things would have unfolded much as they did, with both sides refocusing on LEO space stations and unmanned planetary exploration. But after each had spent a LOT more money on the last chapter of the Moon competition. Which expense may well have crippled the later efforts budgetarily on both sides, or even destabilized the Soviets economically a decade before they really did come unglued.

IOW, today we might be well behind where we really are space-wise if the two sides had played tit-for-tat at the Moon for another 5 years.

5

The Soviets could’ve attempted a more challenging mission like a Far Side landing. I’m certain they would’ve put a female cosmonaut for the sheer propaganda value of having the first woman on the Moon. Ditto for the first person of color. I’m really curious how they would handle media coverage. It doesn’t seem plausible for them conduct the mission in secrecy until it was successfully concluded. Would they have taken the risk of live coverage? Especially after the US landed first? I mean the entire Soviet lunar program was a state secret and after Apollo 11 the official Party line was that they were never even trying manned landings.

6

One advantage of a planetary body (or even largish asteroid) is that you can either burrow into it or utilize existing holes like ancient lava tubes in which to build habitats that are shielded by rock (or in some cases solid ice) from both radiation and micrometeorites. Whether or not that advantage outweighs the liabilities of such an arrangement I’m not equipped to debate.

7

Upon reading this, I immediately thought of Gary Larson.

8

9

Holy cow. I saw Tech Level 8 and you brought me back to the days when I played GURPS.

10

If the USSR had managed a landing while Apollo was still ongoing I doubt Apollo would have been cancelled, simply because it would have been impolitic to cede a monopoly on lunar operations to the Soviet Union. The USA would probably have continued manufacturing the Saturn V and maintained some variation of the Apollo Applications Program and/or extended lunar missions in the 2-4 week range (but not a permanent base) through the 1970s. If a N-1 class launcher had been available, the USSR would probably have launched a Skylab-analog station into orbit instead of the Salyuts. And probably the Shuttle program would have been based on using the S-1C Saturn stage as an interim booster for a fully-reusable Shuttle as was proposed at one time.

11

By 1971, the American public was, by and large, already bored with the moon and generally appalled by the price tag. By 1973, the US was willing to abandon Vietnam to the Soviet sphere. Was there really the will to double down on another expensive competition Americans had already actually won? There was no real national security need to continue the Space Race and the public was already hip to the fact that manned space flight was more about global prestige than Science. Unless it could be used as a distraction from Watergate, the Nixon administration had little use for it in an era when lines at gas stations were of far more concern to voters than who was stomping around on a ball of dirt a quarter million miles away.

12

The real question IMO is what else the Soviets would have been able to do with a working heavy lift rocket - a non-explody N1/L2. Assuming of course that they didn’t eventually abandon it for more cost effective but less capable launch platforms like we did with the Saturn V.

13

Giant Space Laser