This is John Bachelor speaking with AnatoleZAC who keeps the Russian Space Web.com.

I highly recommend it to follow Roscosmos.

About Russian Soviet moon history. After Apollo 11 in the summer of 1969, the race to the

moon was understood to be over. The Soviets had lost and yet The landing on the moon. What they did afterwards, having lost the attention of Moscow, they still

had equipment and know-how and cosmonauts, and they were ready to go. Quite spectacularly ready to go, not just a moon landing, not just a few hours or a few days

on the moon, but a colony.

Here's Anatoly to help us understand how far along the Soviets were and how close they

were to winning the Moon Race and their ambitions in 1969, ambitions that are yet to be realized.

Antillesac, Russian SpaceWeb.com, much more of this later.

So this is extremely kind of interesting page in space history, which is not very well read by even historians, let alone by general public.

So L3M was kind of successor to the failed L3 project, which as we know was an attempt

to by the Soviet Union to put Kacvanath ahead of the Apollo astronauts on the surface of the moon.

And of course that failed because Apollo 11 managed to get there first.

And then of course the Russian engineers were seeking for kind of to find a way how to

continue their lunar program because the political foundation of this whole project kind of disappeared with NASA doing it first.

And they came up with the idea essentially which was kind of formulated even before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

They said, how about we will do lunar expedition, which is much more impressive,

than what Apollo 11 and subsequent missions did.

So essentially the idea was to outshine

kind of outperform Apollo big time.

For example, to put astronauts not for three or four days on the surface of the moon,

but actually be on the moon for a week, months,

...