Template:Are You Sure/July 3

... that the Soviet N1 rocket was a super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to deliver payloads beyond low Earth orbit; that the project was underfunded and rushed, and badly derailed by the death of its chief designer Sergei Korolev in 1966; that each of the four attempts to launch an N1 failed; that during the second launch attempt the N1 rocket crashed back onto its launch pad shortly after liftoff and exploded, resulting in one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in human history; and that the N1 was kept secret almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, with information about the N1 first being published in 1989?