Hazegrayart: alt history - Soviet Moon landing

[FutureSpaceTourist]

[Oersted]

Beautiful! A bit weird to have a lander already on the surface though. And I would have loved to se the full mission profile...

[Zed_Noir]

Beautiful! A bit weird to have a lander already on the surface though. And I would have loved to se the full mission profile...

Pre-position supply lander. Launch the crewed lander stack only after successful landing of the supply lander as operational test, AIUI.

[Blackstar]

Beautiful! A bit weird to have a lander already on the surface though. And I would have loved to se the full mission profile...

Pre-position supply lander. Launch the crewed lander stack only after successful landing of the supply lander as operational test, AIUI.

It's more complex than that, and I think it changed over time. Asif Siddiqi described it in a podcast and it was really hard to understand. One of the primary reasons was that the Soviets had little confidence in their systems, so they added backup vehicles, like a rover to take a cosmonaut on the Moon to a second lander vehicle in case the first one failed. That's a weird way to add redundancy, since the American approach is to add backup systems and increase the reliability of the vehicle, not add more vehicles.