Intel monitoring

Big Bird and the Big Mother

It’s not easy pinpointing exactly when the race to the Moon was won. Many historians claim it was when Apollo 8 circled the Moon in December 1968. Certainly it was over by July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin put their bootprints in the lunar dirt. But even after the race was over, the Soviets continued working on their plans to send men to the Moon, and the US intelligence community kept a careful watch on their activities.

Throughout the 1960s, American CORONA and GAMBIT reconnaissance satellites had overflown the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which the CIA referred to as Tyura-Tam, and photographed the development of what National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC, or “enpic”) experts had labeled “Complex J,” the massive launch pad facility where the Soviets launched their N-1 rockets. In 1969, several American intelligence systems had detected a massive explosion of the rocket that CIA analysts had initially called “the big mother” and later formally designated the “J vehicle.” The rocket had barely cleared its tower when it malfunctioned, fell back onto the pad, and blew itself to kingdom come. The explosion had been devastating, causing major damage to the pad.