The real moon hoax

Studying declassified Corona spy satellite photographs, Vick is able to show that there was substantial unexplained activity at the Baikonur cosmodrome during December 1968. Although no photographs exist during the 8-12 December launch window, images made during a pass on 15 December show a Soyuz spacecraft - booster combination mounted on its pad and the Proton pad gantry in position, although no booster is mounted. A week later, the Soyuz booster is being removed from its pad, but now a Proton - L1 combination is on the Proton pad. This seems to clearly indicate that attempts were being made, right up to and beyond the day Apollo 8 was launched, to beat the Americans to the moon. The authors theorise that an attempt at a manned launch to the moon using the two-launch podsadka scenario was attempted, but that some serious spacecraft problem must have resulted in the Proton launch being scrubbed.

So all these years the Ruskies said "No, no, comrade, we never planed to go to the moon, I swear on Lenin's tomb!", and they were almost there to go to the moon BEFORE the Yankees.

Interestingly, they had not one manned moon flight program, no, they had TWO manned moon flight programs. One was run by Korolev (and then after his death by Mishin) using Soyuz-spacecraft and N1 rockets, the other was run by Chelomei using a Soyuz variant and Proton rockets. Both ran into problems with, both with their spacecraft, both with their rockets. The Soyuz capsules were too heavy for a N1 single-shot-mission (and anyway delayed), the N1-rocket was not reliable, Soyuz-1 failed killing its Kosmonaut, the Proton looked promising (and is one of the backbones of Russia's space industry today) but ran into reliability problems. So Korolev's team aimed for a "bastard" version, using Proton and Soyuz/R7s for a two-launch mission with prior docking in LEO. Well, it didn't work – the rest, you know.