Russia still blue over moon landing 40 years later

MOSCOW – When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, it was a first for the Soviet Union – the first time the United States had beaten the USSR in the space race.

Forty years later, the memory of that loss of primacy still seems to sting the Russian soul. When state TV channel Rossiya reported last week on the restoration of video footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the account gave a lot of attention to dubious conspiracy theories that the landing was faked.

“In the United States, more than anywhere else, they are sure of the believability of the steps on the moon,” the report said, adding that Armstrong keeps a very low profile. “This also seems strange to many people.”

For a dozen years before the July 20, 1969, moon landing, Moscow racked up an extraordinary array of superlatives. It was the first to send a craft into orbit, with the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The first human to go into outer space was Russian Yuri Gagarin in 1961. Moscow sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; and Alexei Leonov was the first person to venture outside a spacecraft into the cosmos, in 1965.

Russia even got to the moon first when the unmanned Luna 2 crashed in 1959. But the drama of the first human footprint on an extraterrestrial body eclipsed everything the Soviets had done.

“Beginning with the first flight with a primitive capsule, and then getting to the moon, it was a great achievement for humanity,” Russian astronaut Sergei Krikalev said. “Of course, we would have liked to see the first man on the moon be Soviet, Russian, but that’s life. ... Our own achievements were very many,” he told the Associated Press.