movies

I am sorry if I have come across as trying to argue, be assured that I wasn’t.

I am also not saying that the Soviet space program was “sooo much better than the Americans”. I was trying to make the point that to make an alt-history show, you cannot just reverse the achievements/failures of the US and the USSR for an alt-history show. That’s just being lazy. Both sides had fundamentally different philosophies in approaching the space program, and as such they will have different successes and challenges along the way that simply cannot be transposed from our real world history.

For example, if the Soviets had landed on the moon first, it must mean that the N-1 rocket had worked. The N-1 worked differently than the Apollo’s Saturn rocket. The Saturn was powered by a few very powerful but less efficient F-1 gas generator engines. The Soviet N-1 was powered by 30 small but highly efficient closed cycle staged combustion engines. The N-1 had a lot of trouble (in the real world) because the computer systems at the time were not able to cope with the complex operations of controlling several dozens of engines simultaneously.

The Americans thought closed cycle liquid propellent engines were too difficult and they gave up very early in the race. The Soviets, on the other hand, even after the failure of the moon landing, continued to work on and master the construction of these very efficient and powerful engines. After the collapse of the USSR, the NASA bought wholesale a lot of these engines (RD-180s) for cheap and used them on the Atlas rockets, because they were so much better than the American rocket engines.

Today, SpaceX’s Starship follows the same concept as the N-1, using 33 small Raptor engines to power its rocket. This is actually a vindication of the Soviet rocket engine approach. The Americans are only starting to catch up with what the Soviets did decades ago.

So, if the USSR had won the moon landing, it would only further bolster the success of its rocket engine designs, not regressing to do what the US did with solid rocket boosters.

In the context of the show (I looked up a bit of the details), the Soviets copied the entirety of the Space Shuttle design, down to the O-ring fault of the solid boosters, which is absurd considering that:

1. The USSR did not have a strong industrial base for solid fuel rockets, because they already had a much better, way more efficient liquid propellent engines for that, so they could not have “downgraded” their own version of the Space Shuttle to go for a worse system, just like in the real world
2. The US chose the solid rocket boosters because they wanted to contract the construction out to private defense companies (Thiokol) which made the ICBMs for the American government (also solid rockets, so it’s something that the company can manufacture)
3. The US did not have a strong foundation for closed cycle liquid propellent rocket engines, as I said they gave up long ago, so the solid rocket boosters made sense, but was also critically flawed in its design that did end up killing the crew of the Challenger
4. Since the Soviet rockets had a fundamentally different design, this could not have happened to them.
5. The Soviets would have encountered a different set of challenges instead, which is what an alt-history show should strive to explore

Hope this clarifies my points here.