How the Soviets Lost the Race to Mars

I am perpetually impressed by how frequently you can put out content like this.

Some notes:

* the R-7 wasn't a V-2 derivative. Earlier rockets like R-1 and R-2 were, but R-7 was a clean sheet design, much larger than a V-2 and using very different engines and propellant
* Object D was not Sputnik 1, it was Sputnik 3. It wasn't ready when the rocket was so Sputnik 1 was constructed as a simpler stand in.
* At 22:30 you show an image of a Proton but its not carrying a Mars probe, its carrying a prototype manned lunar flyby craft (confusingly also called "Zond")

42 mins. Let's blast. 🚀

7:21 Nedelin was not a missile's designer. He was the head of Strategic Rocket Forces. He was a military, not an engineer.

Please do more discussion on space topics! Your narrative was excellent, would love to see more.

Nedelin, Chief Marshal of Artillery, under whose jurisdiction fell the budding Soviet missile program, flew in to address the delays with the ill-fated rocket seemingly with no end in sight. It wasn't a matter of lack of people or materiel or funds - there were a lot of kinks with the new rocket, and fixing one uncovered yet another & another. Nedelin at that point decided not to berate anyone or have meetings - he let everyone do their job, however, requesting a chair be placed for him by the launch pad, in everyone's sight, where he calmly planted himself, telegraphing a sense of urgency: the Chief Marshal wasn't leaving till the job was done, and obviously the pad monkeys knew neither were they.

Office politics being what they are, there was soon a small constellation of chairs of Nedelin's staffers sitting next to their Marshal.

That added a fair bit of tension for the already fatigued and dismayed pad crew. A member of the launch control team read the next step in his procedure: ensure the manual stage igniter lever was in the initial position. It wasn't - it was at the other end. The lever's positions between initial and final activated backup manual ignitions in turn of the missile's respective stages. The guy returned the lever to its prescribed position as per the letter of his instructions. As it was being reversed to its prescribed initial position, the lever activated the upper stage (being fueled) firing into the top of the already fully fueled first stage within the whole missile's stationery stack being firmly held together by own weight and launchpad hardware. The rest is history.

The young Brezhnev (years before his ascend to General Secretary of USSR) was assigned to lead the investigation. His report concluded that no disciplinary action was in order, as the event itself was lesson & punishment enough for all involved who hadn't perished.

To bastardize an idiom, Soviets come from Venus, Americans come from mars.

Dude how do you make so many bangers this fast, don't burn yourself out please.

Nedelin was the "cause" of the disaster , the whole debacle is described in a book based from old sovjet material. Brezhnev's comment on Nedleins behaviour causing the explosion is telling.

Well researched high quality Videos frequently with a long duration, this is the channel we needed🔥

"Rapid, unscheduled disassembly" is now my favorite phrase for an explosion.

It is important to note that Martian winds / storms do not matter in any sense of force. The air pressure is so low that no matter the wind speed, it would not exert any significant force on a lander or a rover.
It only matters for visibility and solar energy generation, since martian storms are usually very dusty.

If I recall one Soviet Satellite was sent on a worldwide tour. And while it was in the United States, the CIA was able to get a chance to get their hands on it. And so during one night they had the truck driver deliver the satellite to another location and they then meticulously took it apart and studied every single component it had, but then they ran into problems as to putting it back together turned into a race against time as some of the parts wouldn’t go back together or they had to replace some of the components with US Made equivalents, and they also installed American Made screws. And when the Satellite made it back to the Soviet Union, the engineers had discovered that it had been tampered with when some of their tools didn’t work on some of the screws.

This video is very, very good -- but even with all the work that went into it, it is still not easy for one person to do justice to such a complicated subject. Decision making in the USSR was done in great secrecy, among the big bosses of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and it is seldom known why a particular course of action was or was not taken, or why a particular person was promoted. Even when some information is available, it may not always be translated from Russian, or may only be published in some obscure conference proceedings for professional historians.

In particular, even though there are many fantastic stories told about this, it is not really known why exactly Korolev was promoted from prison to the leadership of the space program. But we do know that Stalin had very little to do with this. Korolev was picked personally by Lev Mikhalovich Gaidukov, on authority of Dmitry Ustinov, the young People's Commissar of Armaments of the USSR. This did not start as a well thought out strategic plan. Rather, Gaidukov noticed how well a group of Soviet engineers led by Boris Chertok were working in occupied Germany on reconstituting the Nazi V2 program. This large work on V2 was more or less a grassroots project, not specifically authorized by the higher authority, beyond the general mandate to recover from Germany all equipment that could be useful. The progress that the engineers were making in Germany greatly impressed Gaidukov, who was doing an on-site inspection. The report went to Ustinov, who at that time had an enormous clout due to his very successful leadership during the war, and who then authorized a large scale missile program. It started with assimilation of German missile research and technology. Ustinov placed Gaidukov in charge of the overall project. Gaidukov then found and reassigned several recent prisoners such as Korolev and Glushko to lead different parts of project, based on their past work. Then Korolev met Ustinov and was somehow given the authority to serve as the chief technical coordinator of this large and diverse organization. The details of that are rather obscure.

Regarding the Sputnik. It was launched not because Korolev could on a whim choose peaceful space exploration, but because there was an unintentional pause in the weapons program. Nuclear warheads burned up on reentry during the previous test launch. While the warheads were being reworked, there was nothing else to launch on the next missile, already being prepared for the test. Thus Sputnik was reluctantly announced as the Soviet contribution to the International Geophysical Year. Many countries had high profile experiments as a part of this loose international collaboration, and Sputnik was one of such projects. Only after the Sputnik caused an international sensation, Soviet leadership took notice, and authorized a larger scale space program which was not 100% weapons related.

This is a fantastic video. All things Soviet-history interests me. Thank you for doing an incredible amount of research and making such an enjoyable video!!

Loved the longer and very detailed video. Definitely one of your best ones to date and I’ve seen the majority. Keep it up, you are a great history buff and my small circle of friends loves your content

Wonderfully done! To even mention the "Race to Mars" is all but unique, and yet wasn't it the race that mattered most? As grande as the Lunar landings were, I can still recall the unspeakable elation that I had when the Viking landers set down on the plains of Mars.

-To the Moon! To Mars!
-Safety? Redundant, duplicate security systems? What’s that?

This is the one that finally made me sign up to your Patreon, but I should have done it long ago. Your takes on geopolitics, chips, and space are always fascinating and funny. Looking forward to more.

1:58 from my knowledge, Sputnik is not Object D, but rather a stopgap satellite to make the USSR the first nation to launch a satellite in the International Geophysical Year, since object D was too complicated. Eventually Object D was launched as Sputnik 3.

Please correct me if I am wrong.