In article ,
Danny Dot wrote:
objective was to beat us -- and they did. If their "big ass booster" had
worked I think they would have put a man on the moon before us...

No, even if the N1 had worked well, they were far enough behind that their
only real chance was for Apollo to stumble and be delayed a bit. Which
was not a totally unrealistic hope, but in the end it didn't happen. See,
in particular, Siddiqi's "Challenge to Apollo" for the details (which are
much better understood now than they were 15 years ago).

P.S. Apollo 8 was actually a stunt for us to send men around the moon. Not
well known is the Russians were very close to having a Soyuz send a man
around the moon (it was called Zond).

You need to read some more-recent books, like the Siddiqi one. The US
*thought* the Soviets were very close to doing a manned Zond, but in
fact they weren't.

The Soviet criteria for manned flights were actually more rigorous than
the US ones -- they wanted to see two full successes of unmanned flights
before going manned. (Manning Apollo 8 at all, after the Apollo 6 mess,
was a very bold step indeed.) And the Zond tests were not nearly as
successful as they looked from outside; in particular, the Soviets made
much of the photographs taken by Zond 6, without mentioning that the
film was salvaged, with great difficulty and some danger, from the
smashed wreckage of the Zond capsule. Zond 7, which flew three weeks
after Apollo 11, was the first fully successful Zond... by which time,
nobody cared.

At the last minute we changed Apollo 8
from Low Earth Orbit to around the moon because we knew they were close to
sending a man to the moon (around the moon) before us.

It wasn't "last minute" -- preparation for it was underway in mid-August,
but the change was tentative and highly confidential until after Apollo 7
flew successfully in October. But yes, fears of a manned Zond figured
into that decision.
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