To expand:
This game is
insanely hard. Playing on the same difficulty as the computer, it's not surprising to see a successful
Russian lunar landing by 1965 (or even earlier). The computer
cheats, and it cheats mercilessly - while
you are punished for unsuccessful launches, and your budget cut, no such thing happens to the computer; in fact, it often gets budget
boosts.
Not that the hardware you have is particularly reliable in any case. An 80% 'success rating' for, say, the Mercury capsule, whose maximum (through research) is 84% -
really means 80% at each
failure check - which, in a manned orbital EVA, results in a roughly 80% chance of
failure.
Aside from the inevitable (and I
do mean inevitable) hardware failures, your astronauts often lead very short lives as astronauts. Not in the sense that they die off like flies - though with the
Mercury capsule, they tend to - but that they quit for a multitude of reasons. Not getting along with their fellow mission crew, for example. Deciding to go into business. Quitting for
personal reasons.
You get the point.
Not that the game doesn't have its own quirky charms. You can go to the Moon in ways dismissed by
NASA as too impractical - a reusable reentry vehicle, a direct ascent lunar landing... you can even go there on a Voskhod and a kicker, if you want - somewhat insane, historically speaking, but...
The game's rights have reverted back to the original owner, and the game is now free to download. If you intend to give it a try, I suggest hunting down the CD version - the difficulty is ratcheted down from
fyita to merely
difficult.