Back in 1971 the race for the moon had already been won by the U.S. due to the fact that the Soviet Union did not have an operational heavy lift booster capable of putting the necessary tonnage into low earth orbit from which a mission to the moon could be attempted.

The monster N1 rocket depicted here actually bested the total thrust of the American Saturn V rocket but still could not match the American moon rocket for getting tonnage into orbit. I suspect it probably had to do with the weight of the booster itself.

The rocket I attempted to draw here was known as the N1 and was designed by Sergei Korolev. It had a total first stage thrust of 4500 tons and a liftoff mass of 2850 tons. It should have been able to place 86 tons into low earth orbit. Unfortunately for the Russians all four launch attempts of this monster ended in failure. The reasons are obvious: The U.S. Saturn rocket used 5 Rocketdyne F-1 engines in the first stage which generated about 3750 tons of thrust while the Soviet N-1 used a total of 30 smaller engines clustered in the first stage to attain the necessary thrust for a moon mission. It doesn't take a "rocket scientist" to realize the complexity of this arrangement and the increased likelihood of something going wrong and ending in disaster. The N-1 that I drew here was the third launch attempt variant that was purposely destroyed 50.1 seconds into it's flight due to the six gimbaled engines at the center of the first stage cluster being unable to correct an off-axis tilt of the booster that occurred immediately after lift-off. One more launch attempt of an N-1 was to be made before the Russians threw in the towel on developing their moon rocket.