Shadowing Practice: Apollo 11 Wasn't Alone on the Moon... - Learn English Speaking with Video
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You might think you know the full story of NASA's first moon landing with Apollo 11,
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but what most people don't know is that Neil and Buzz were not alone up there.
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The Soviet Union had their own moon landing on that same fateful day in 1969.
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You just never heard about it.
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You see, the truth is that the Soviets arrived on the moon long before NASA,
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and they continued exploring the lunar surface long after the Americans had taken their final victory lap and gone home.
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This incredible story is almost always overshadowed by the legend of Apollo.
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But when you see what the Soviet Union left behind on the moon, you'll never look at the space race the same way again.
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October 1957, the first ever satellite is launched into Earth orbit.
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Sputnik marks the beginning of a transition point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union,
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moving from a nuclear arms race to a technological rivalry that will extend far beyond the Earth and into the solar system.
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The Americans are quick to answer with their own satellite launch, Explorer 1, which lifts off just a few months later
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and putting objects into Earth orbit quickly becomes a regular occurrence on both sides.
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But this kind of stalemate would never last long.
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Someone had to pull ahead, and shooting for the Moon quickly became the next logical step.
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Now, at this point in the space race, there was only one side that possessed the technology required to reach the Moon, and that side was the Soviet Union.
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The reason why came down to this monster, the R-7 rocket.
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It had originally begun life as the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, but fortunately for human civilization,
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it was only ever put to use as an orbital rocket booster.
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You see, the Soviets had a pair of genius engineers on their side, Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko.
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Korolev had an incredible mind for large-scale design projects, while Glushko was an engine guy.
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The two actually had a bitter rivalry that began as young men and would eventually tear the Soviet space program apart.
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But for now, they were chill enough to share the spotlight.
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And when you put two overachievers on the same project, you end up with something that was way overbuilt for its original purpose as a nuclear missile.
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You get one of the most legendary space rockets of all time.
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With five powerful engines at its base, the R7 could provide the massive amount of energy required to break free of Earth's gravity
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and launch a man-made object toward the moon for the first time.
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The Luna 1 and Luna 2 probes were built in the same beach ball-sized shell as Sputnik,
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and both were designed to achieve one key objective, impact the lunar surface.
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This mission was about as simple as it gets.
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No attempts at landing or orbiting, just try and hit the moon like a cannonball.
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If successful, they would become the first object made by humans to reach another world beyond the Earth, which at the time was a pretty incredible thing to achieve.
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But it wouldn't come easy.
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Luna 1 lifted off on January 2nd, 1959.
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Korolev and Glushko had designed an upper stage for the R-7 rocket
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that would ignite in space and push the impactor toward the moon using an automated guidance system, which was also incredible for the time.
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Given the sheer number of historical firsts involved in Luna 1, it's not surprising that the launch didn't quite work out as intended.
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They missed the target by about 5,000 kilometers, and the probe would sail clean past the moon.
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But that's why they made two.
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In September 1959, the second Luna mission took flight, and this time, their aim was true.
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The probe itself weighed in at around 150 kilograms and had six scientific instruments on board to investigate the moon.
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It also brought along these two exploding metal soccer balls, and we'll get to that in a minute.
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All of these instruments were run by a small internal computer, and the whole thing was powered with a mercury-zinc battery, which is what we still use today in hearing aids
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because they offer a very long runtime with stable voltage in a small package.
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This simple probe was able to make two important discoveries.
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For one, it proved that the Moon has no magnetic field, and two, it confirmed the existence of a solar wind,
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which is the stream of charged particles flowing out from the sun.
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Then, Luna 2 triumphantly smashed itself into the moon, impacting a region known as the Sea of Rains.
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And when it got there, the probe left behind more than just a crater.
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These two metal soccer balls, or footballs if you will, were between 8 and 13 centimeters in diameter.
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The outside is made of these little Soviet plaques stamped into titanium metal, while the inside is a bomb.
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So when they hit the moon, they exploded and scattered the Soviet emblem all over the surface.
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This ensured that no matter what happened next, there would be permanent evidence that humans had reached the moon.
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The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, actually gifted a replica of one of these balls to U.S.
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President Eisenhower, which is a legendary flex, and it probably infuriated the Americans,
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but there was nothing they could do about it because NASA still lacked a rocket that could match the R-7's capability,
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and they hadn't seen anything yet because the Soviets already had Luna 3 prepped for launch, and this one would really open the eyes of the world.
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The next mission would launch just one month later in October 1959, and this probe was a much bigger object with an even more historic objective.
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Luna 3 was equipped with the same instruments from the first probes, but most important of all, this probe now had cameras on board.
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The first camera launched into deep space.
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The Soviets actually had a lot of trouble working out what type of photographic film would work the best in outer space.
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They knew that there would be incredible variations in temperature and radiation exposure to deal with, so getting a clear image would require just the right chemistry.
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Now this part is crazy, but lucky for them, an American spy balloon happened to crash land over Soviet territory,
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and they knew that these things were taking photos from an altitude that was basically outer space.
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So they took the camera out of the spy balloon rig and put it into their Luna 3 probe.
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Then the Soviet engineers designed an automated photo developing system that would process the film in space to make a negative.
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Then they scan the film using the same light tube from an old CRT television, but essentially working in reverse,
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then use the equivalent of a fax machine to convert the light into radio signals and transmit it back down to Moscow.
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All of this was powered by an array of solar panels that wrapped around the entire probe,
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and cooling was handled by these mechanical vents that closed when the probe was cold and opened when it was hot.
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But the primary objective for the Luna 3 probe was to fly around the moon
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and take a photo of its mysterious far side, often called the dark side.
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Even though it actually gets plenty of sunlight, we just can't see it
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because only one side of the moon is ever facing the Earth for reasons
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that we don't need to get into right now.
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But the important thing for the time was that no one had ever seen the far side of the moon before, and the Soviets were about to change that.
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The big trick of this mission was that the probe would have to go behind the moon to get its photo, completely out of sight from the Earth,
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and then come around and start heading back in our direction to actually transmit the images.
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This required Luna 3 to fly on a very specific path that would use the moon's gravity as a steering device.
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To figure this out, the Soviets had to use one of the world's first supercomputers, which was actually made in Russia,
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and they called it Strela-1, which means aero.
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This thing covered about 3,200 square feet, used over 6,000 vacuum tubes,
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and was able to calculate the math required for Luna 3's gravity assist around the moon.
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The probe also used compressed gas thrusters to keep itself stable during photography exposures.
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All in, it was a stunning piece of engineering for the time, and the probe was able to return these images of the Moon's far side taken from space.
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This was a pretty significant escalation of the space race, and the entire world was beginning to take note.
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NASA was losing, badly, and the Soviets were not about to slow down.
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Going into the 1960s, both sides began developing a plan to send the first people to the surface of the Moon.
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Now, most of us are pretty familiar with what the American program looked like, but the Soviets were also working on some incredible stuff.
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A lot of it was actually much more ambitious than anything NASA had in mind.
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The Soviet's plan had three main branches.
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The human landing system was the biggest, literally.
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It involved Korolev building an absolutely humongous rocket called the N1, but to support that key mission, there were two smaller operations taking place.
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One was to build an automated rover vehicle to explore the surface of the moon,
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and the second was a robotic lander that could investigate the lunar soil up close and personal.
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You see, as excited as everyone was to land people on the moon, no one actually knew what the surface of the moon was like, and there were theories at the time
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that ranged from it being made of solid bedrock to being covered in loose dust
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that would act like quicksand and completely swallow anything that touched down.
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Obviously, the second outcome would be a problem, so it was a good idea to solve that mystery before anyone tried to set foot up there.
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The race was on to be the first nation that could achieve a soft touchdown, but this wasn't going to come easy.
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Luna 4 would be the Soviet's first attempt in 1963.
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It actually missed the moon entirely due to a navigation failure.
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Luna 5 was on target, but a failure with the landing engines led to a crash.
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Then, similar problems occurred on Lunas 6, 7, and 8, but the Soviets were not deterred.
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Luna 9 took off in January 1966 onboard a modified R-7 rocket.
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The spacecraft itself weighed in at over 1,500 kilograms and measured about two and a half meters long.
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This contained all of the power and propulsion systems necessary to reach lunar orbit and then descend down to the surface.
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But the lander itself was another beach ball-sized metal sphere, although this one was much more than just another Sputnik clone.
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At 75 kilometers above the lunar surface, the spacecraft inflated two protective airbags around the lander,
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then fired up a braking engine to slow its velocity down to near zero.
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As Luna 9 fell toward the moon, it used two small side engines to control its descent.
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Then, at an altitude of just 5 meters, a contact rod triggered those engines to shut down, and the metal sphere was ejected.
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It impacts the moon at a velocity of about 6 meters per second inside the airbag.
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It bounces several times across the surface, and then rolls to a stop.
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The airbags deflate, and four petals unfold to right the probe and expose its scientific instruments.
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This was the first ever spacecraft to make a soft landing on the surface of the Moon, or any other world beyond the Earth.
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Luna 9 touched down in a region known as the Sea of Storms, and as you probably already guessed, it did not sink into the ground like quicksand.
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As the sun rises over the lunar horizon, Luna 9 extends its most important payload, a television camera, and begins to look around.
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As with all things in the Cold War, the Soviets kept what they were doing as secret as possible.
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Although the Americans were able to detect a rocket launch fairly easily and track the vehicle through Earth's atmosphere, once it got into space,
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it was hard to tell what exactly it was up to.
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But a radio observatory in England just
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so happened to be doing some astronomical observations at the time
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and started picking up a strange radio signal coming from the moon.
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They knew enough about radio broadcasts to know that this signal contained pictures.
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It was actually the same radio frequency that newspapers used to transmit photographs around the world.
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So they called up a paper in London
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and had them bring out their fax machine to try and decode the message into a picture.
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Now, the problem was that no one knew what kind of photo the Soviets were trying to make.
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These radio signals transmitted the image one line at a time, but there was no way to see where one line ended and the next one began.
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So they made their best guess and printed out the result.
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What they ended up with was an image of the moon that looked like a jagged field of shattered rocks.
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And then the London newspapers immediately began spreading this photograph all across the world.
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So the Soviets kind of got scooped on that one.
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They missed out on the glory of releasing the first ever photo from the surface of the moon themselves, except the London press didn't have the actual photo.
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Theirs was a distortion of the moon's true surface.
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They'd come pretty close to getting it right, but when the Soviets published the real image from Luna 9, the moon was not rough and jagged.
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It was actually smooth and flat with very few remarkable features to be seen,
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just some craters in the distance and a few very ordinary-looking rocks scattered around the landing site.
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This was great news for both sides because it meant
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that the surface was going to be safe enough for their crewed landers to touch down in the future.
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So the race was on to go plant the first flag on the lunar surface, and this is where both sides were forced to either go big or stay home.
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The reason that it's so hard to land people on the moon always comes down to mass.
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Your average human being isn't particularly heavy, but all of the stuff that they need to bring with them in order to stay alive in outer space
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and make it all the way back home safely adds up to a really large amount of mass.
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And in order to move it all from the Earth into space, you need a really humongous rocket.
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So that's what both the Soviets and Americans were working on through the mid-1960s.
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These really huge rockets.
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NASA called theirs the Saturn V, and it was designed mostly by this really smart guy named Wernher von Braun, who used to be a Nazi rocket scientist, but then came to America
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and promised that he'd help them go to space if they ignored all the war crime stuff that he had done previously, and America thought that was a pretty good deal.
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Meanwhile, the Soviets were working on their own giant rocket called the N-1, and it was supposed to be another collaboration project between Korolev and Glushko.
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But instead, they got into a big argument over what type of engine to use, and Glushko quit.
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So they had to hire a new guy who wasn't as good at making rocket engines.
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Then, to top it all off, Korolev died suddenly during a routine surgery.
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All of this left the remaining Soviet engineers to try and figure out how to finish the N1 on their own.
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Needless to say, they didn't do such a great job, and when the rocket launched for the first time in February 1969,
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it only flew for about a minute before catching fire, blowing up, and plummeting back down to Earth.
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Meanwhile, over at NASA, their development of the Apollo program was going a bit more smoothly.
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I mean, they did burn three men alive in an electric fire inside the Apollo capsule, which is horrible, but the Saturn V rocket itself worked flawlessly
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and NASA was able to complete several practice runs between the Earth and the Moon.
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So by the summer of 69, everyone knew that the Americans were going to launch the first people to the Moon, and they were probably going to succeed.
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But the Soviet Union was not ready to give up just yet.
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They had one Hail Mary play remaining to try and preserve some of their former glory.
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They couldn't land a man on the moon, but they had a pretty good shot at landing a robot on the moon,
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using it to collect a small amount of lunar soil and then return that sample to Earth before NASA's astronauts.
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In that case, technically, the Soviet Union would still be the first to bring something back from the moon.
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Now, it's not much, but it would steal a little bit of NASA's thunder, so unknown to the general public at the time, the Soviets launched Luna 15 on July 13th,
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just three days ahead of Apollo 11.
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Of course, the Americans saw that launch, and by this point they could track the spacecraft on its course to the moon, but they kept all this quiet.
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They didn't even tell Mission Commander Neil Armstrong until his crew was already on their way.
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Even today, I'm sure that most people wouldn't know there were two spacecraft at the moon during Apollo 11, and that one of them was a Soviet robot.
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But that's exactly what happened, and there's a reason we never heard about this.
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So, even though Luna 15 arrived at the moon first, the Soviet ground controllers were having a hard time settling on an ideal landing site.
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They left the spacecraft to just hang out in orbit around the moon for days.
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It took so long that Neil and Buzz actually landed while Luna 15 was still in orbit, and that started to cause a little panic back in Moscow.
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If they didn't get down there now, then they'd never beat NASA back to Earth with the sample.
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So finally, the decision was made to touchdown in a region known as the Sea of Crisis, which should have been a pretty obvious bad omen.
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At this point, Neil and Buzz have already wrapped up their moonwalk
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and were preparing to ascend back to the Apollo capsule when Luna 15 begins its landing procedure.
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On the way down, one of the spacecraft's landing engines cuts off early and fails to achieve the correct angle of descent, so instead of going down,
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Luna 15 is moving sideways across the surface at nearly 500 kilometers per hour.
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At some point, it's believed
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that the spacecraft slammed into the side of a mountain just
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about 560 kilometers away from where the Apollo 11 lander was sitting.
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Now here is where most people believe that the story ends.
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The Americans win and the Soviets lose, but the truth is never so black and white.
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So what follows is actually the Soviet Union's greatest era of lunar exploration that remains largely unknown to this day.
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Following NASA's moon landing, the engineers back in Moscow still had one of their original three technological branches remaining, the automated lunar rover named Lunokhot,
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which in Russian means moonwalker.
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Development of this vehicle had begun in the early 60s under Korolev, and it continued after his death.
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This was a major project.
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The Soviets actually built a full-scale, simulated moon-testing ground in the desert that they called Lunodrome.
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Here, they ran through multiple prototype designs
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that were using everything from legs to skis to tank treads and wheels to navigate the terrain.
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There were teams of engineers working on this project 24-7
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and sleeping in the lab to try and accelerate their rover ahead of the Americans.
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What they eventually settled on was a design that kind of looked like a bathtub on wheels.
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It was 2 meters long and 1.5 meters wide, with eight metal wheels that were each individually powered by small electric motors.
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It had a lid on top
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that would open up to reveal a solar panel array
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and close down to insulate the vehicle and protect it during the lunar night.
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Which tells us that this machine was built to last for a long time,
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because the moon experiences 14 days of continuous sunlight followed by another 14 days of darkness.
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and Lunacod was designed to last for three of these day-night cycles
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using a piece of decaying radioactive material to stay warm over the long nights and prevent the entire system from freezing.
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Onboard the rover were four television cameras, a robotic device for digging up lunar soil, a cosmic ray detector, X-ray telescope,
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X-ray spectrometer, and a laser reflector device for measuring the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon.
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It was yet another impressive machine for the time, and yet again, the Soviets had a good shot at making a historic breakthrough with the first Lunokhod rover,
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which was actually launched in February 1969, five months ahead of Apollo 11.
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But again, most people probably don't know about that either, because the rocket carrying the vehicle exploded in mid-air, and the Soviets would rather pretend like it never happened than admit failure.
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But as you've probably guessed by now, they were never deterred.
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So in November 1970, they tried again, and this time Lunokhod made it all the way to the surface of the moon
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and touched down on the Sea of Rains.
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The way this worked was by putting the rover on top of a rocket-powered landing platform.
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So once it had touched down, a ramp extended out and the vehicle could be driven onto the surface.
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This marked the first ever robotic vehicle to operate on the moon.
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Control of Lunakhod was taken care of by a team of
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five engineers in Moscow who used a joystick to maneuver it around the lunar terrain,
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which was made difficult by a 30-second delay between a command on Earth and the execution on the moon.
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But they weren't moving very fast.
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The rover had two speed settings, either 1 km per hour or 2 km per hour.
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Even at that slow pace, Lunakhod 1 was able to cover 11 km on the moon and lasted for a total of 11 lunar days, which is almost one year.
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During that time, it returned about 20,000 pictures and conducted 500 lunar soil tests.
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Of course, this achievement was again largely overshadowed by what NASA was doing at the time with their Apollo landings,
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and the Soviets weren't really able to find anything with their rover that the Americans hadn't already done in person.
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But that shouldn't take away from just how impressive it was
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to be operating a remote-controlled vehicle on the moon in the year 1970.
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That's something NASA has actually never done to this day, and as a testament to the skilled individuals who built Lunacod,
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they were actually pulled out of retirement in the 1980s to
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help the Soviet government build remote-controlled bulldozers for clearing up nuclear waste in the Chernobyl power plant.
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And just to drive their point home, in 1973, after the final Apollo mission had ended, the Soviets launched another rover,
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with Lunakod II picking up where the first one had left off.
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This wasn't even the end of the Soviet moon landing ambitions.
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They kept going back until 1976 with Luna 24, a sample return mission that would again make an attempt to reach the Sea of Crisis.
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And this time, it was successful.
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The lander drilled deep into the ground and pulled up 170 grams of lunar soil, then loaded it into a return capsule that blasted off from the moon,
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and eventually parachuted down into the desert of Kazakhstan.
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Inside the sample, the Soviets actually found the very first evidence that there was water on the moon.
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This was such a wild discovery at the time that pretty much no one outside of the USSR believed them, and it was always assumed to be contamination from Earth.
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That is until five decades later, and the current superpowers of the day are now racing again
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to claim as much of the moon's known water resources as they can.
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So while NASA has always maintained their claim on the moon,
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and rightfully so, it's also impossible to discount the Soviet contribution to discovering the true nature of Earth's closest neighbor.
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And the Soviet Union actually did the same thing for Venus.
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You can see what they found on the solar system's most violent planet by clicking on the screen right now.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Apollo 11 Wasn't Alone on the Moon..”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: moon, Soviet, Luna, rocket, surface. This video has 245 sentences and 4170 words to shadow. The speech runs for 24:54. The speaker talks at a natural 168 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| lunar adjective | /ˈlunɚ/ | Of, pertaining to, or resembling the Moon (that is, Luna, the Earth's moon). |
| probe noun | /pɹoʊb/ | Any of various medical instruments used to explore wounds, organs, etc. |
| rover noun | /ˈɹoʊvɚ/ | One who roves: a person or animal that travels around, especially over a wide area, without a fixed destination; a nomad, a roamer, a wanderer. |
| spacecraft noun | /ˈspeɪsˌkɹæft/ | A vehicle that travels through space. |
| lander noun | [ˈlændɚ] | One who lands, or who lands something. |
| orbit noun | /ˈɔɹ.bɪt/ | An elliptical movement of an object about a celestial object or Lagrange point, especially a periodic elliptical revolution. |
| meter noun | /ˈmitəɹ/ | A device that measures things. |
| automate verb | /ˈɔ.təˌmeɪt/ | To replace or enhance human labor with machines. |
| robotic adjective | /ɹoʊˈbɑtɪk/ | Of, relating to, or resembling a robot; mechanical, lacking emotion or personality, etc. |
| transmit verb | /tɹænsˈmɪt/ | To send or convey from one person, place or thing to another. |
| capsule noun | /ˈkæps(ə)l/ | A membranous envelope. |
| airbag noun | A protective system in automobiles in which when a crash occurs, a bag containing nitrogen, formed by the explosive decomposition of sodium azide, quickly… | |
| deter verb | /dɪˈtɝ/ | To prevent something from happening. |
| humongous adjective | /ˌhjuːˈmʌŋɡəs/ | Of an extremely large size. |
| jagged adjective | /ˈd͡ʒæɡɪd/ | Unevenly cut; having the texture of something so cut. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| come down to verb | To reach by moving down or reducing. |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
| touch down verb | To land an aircraft or spacecraft. |
| add up to verb | To have a particular effect in combination. |
| blow up verb | To explode or be destroyed by explosion. |
| bring along verb | To escort or carry an item or person to a destination. |
| bring out verb | To elicit, evoke, or emphasize (a particular quality). |
| call up verb | To retrieve from personal or computer memory. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If successful, they would become |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is launched · was only ever put · were built |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | system, which was · battery, which is · Eisenhower, which is |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have already wrapped · you've probably guessed · has actually never done |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 28 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, don't, wasn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: theirs /ðɛɚz/, thunder /ˈθʌndɚ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: overshadow /ˌoʊ.vɚˈʃæd.oʊ/, navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/, variation /ˌvɛəɹiˈeɪʃn̩/, observation /ˌɑbzɚˈveɪʃn̩/, exploration /ˌɛkspləˈɹeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: overshadow /ˌoʊ.vɚˈʃæd.oʊ/, velocity /vəˈlɑsəti/, technological /ˌtɛk.nəˈlɑ.dʒɪ.kəl/, navigation /nævɪˈɡeɪʃən/, capability /ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like lunar, probe, rover.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.