NASA is launching humans again

[Anomalocaris]

The Russians launched with twenty-seven rocket engines because they couldn't build the big ones Saturn V used.

actually, the russian equivalent of Saturn 5 launched with 30 engines on the first stage because through the early 1960s they persistently could not fix the combustion stability issue inside a big combustion chamber, which NASA managed to fix very quickly in the late 1950s

Americans like to brag about the size of F-1 engine and laugh at the alleged soviet technical backwardness in not being able to get large combustion chamber to work, but that’s only half the story.    The other half is the smaller russian engine was not only developed successfully developed in far less times than the F-1,  it was in most respects also far more advanced and efficient than the F-1, or any American engine for that matter for the next 20 years.

what is clear is the russians spent only 10% as much to develop the N-1 as the Americans spent to develop the saturn V, and the russians were given a far tighter schedule in which to do it.    so ultimately the N-1 failed because of shoe string budget and no time to test anything.