[benmller313]

That isn't quite how I understood this to have gone. It seems like the Russians very much did want to go to the moon, and would have beaten the American's there if they had succeeded in getting their version of the Saturn V off the ground in one piece.

[inglor_cz]

Oh, the N1 rocket is an interesting story.

Originally a design by Korolev, it had to be built by another team because Korolev died. It was so big that it needed over 160 railway wagons to be transported to Baikonur in piecemeal fashion (Baikonur is inland - no water transport available). It had an ungodly number of engines for its age, but a very subpar computer system (KORD) for monitoring them, which was a recipe for disaster. The budgets were so tight that the assembled first stage was never statically fired (the engines were ablatively cooled, so a static fire would probably require a separate set of engines).

And yet the engineers tried their best.

[avmich]

No, engines weren't ablatively cooled.

N1 had engines with quite high Isp - the problem for them, NK-15 engines, was that they were single use engines and couldn't be tested beforehand on a stand. They, however, were state of the art, high pressure and regenerative cooling, with oxygen rich staged combustion. However, Nikolai Kuznetsov had relatively little experience with rocket engines, so NK-15 is generally regarded as a failure, and NK-33 didn't have a chance to fly on N1 before the project was closed.