"I've often thought that they could have made the N-1 work if they had better computers, ...that came along only a few years later.<br /><br />There still may have been other show-stoppers that they never flew far enough to run afoul of, but a couple of the problems that resulted in loss of vehicle could have been avoided."<br /><br />The biggest problem the Soviets faced was lack of funds and bureaucratic interference from the Politbureau, et al! The Soviets were in a race with the U.S., don't forget, and they had too many problems and not enough time to straighten them out. I don't have the exact story in front of me, but at least one of the disasters was due to a Soviet general trying to fix a stuck valve with a wrench, or some such. Whole thing blew up and took the whole launch pad and a bunch of engineers and launch crewmen with it!<br /><br />What would it take if we "gave the Russians the plans for a Saturn V"? More money than we've got to spend, much less what the Russians can afford. There are a couple of stories about whether the plans were destroyed, but much of the tooling was. It could be reverse-engineered from the display vehicles, but what's the point? The launch infrastructure doesn't exist anymore. That would have to be rebuilt. And you'd be dealing with 40 year-old technology.<br /><br />Dispite all the snivling and whining about the configuration of Artemis, etc., and the similarities to Apollo and Shuttle hardware, the new equipment is going to be a sight more up-to-date than Saturn V.<br /><br />Let's look forward, not backward!<br /><br />Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!