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While the world watched Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” in July 1969, a different, silent drama was unfolding on the other side of the planet. At the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Soviet Union was preparing its final, desperate bid for lunar glory. The vehicle for this attempt was the N1, a colossal rocket that stood as a stark, brutalist counterpoint to the sleek, industrial elegance of the American Saturn V. Its four consecutive catastrophic failures between 1969 and 1972 were not merely technical setbacks; they were the violent, explosive autopsy of the entire Soviet technopolitical system. The N1 program, conducted…