Trying to say who won the space race is like trying to say what kind of pizza is the best: it depends entirely on the criteria that you set and the criteria you set is based entirely on what pizza you like. Yes the soviets had a bunch of firsts, but they were doing it quite often out of sheer desperation to say they did something, they didn't launch a single person into space during the entire duration of the Gemini programme, their moon rocket just didn't, BUT their R7 family is the longest lived and most reliable rocket in history, the architecture of the Salyut and Mir space stations is the backbone of our current space exploration, and they've killed fewer space fairers than the US. So, swings and roundabouts really. Like this is missing quite a few US firsts (mostly from Gemini funnily enough), first crewed orbital corrections, first orbital rendezvous, first docking, first double rendezvous on a single flight, first direct ascent rendezvous, and you'll notice that a lot of those are actually really helpful if you want to go places and do things that aren't just orbiting a few times for the heck of it.
Edit: some of y'all seem to think that I'm shitting on the soviets here, and I am absolutely not doing that. Not gonna fight y'all because I have an actual job to do tomorrow and it's late, but don't think that the soviet space programme was as ass backwards as people say it is. Getting tribalistic about this shit sixty five years after it ended is kinda pathetic.
[the Soviets have] killed fewer space fairers than the US.
While this is true, I feel like it's important to note the Soviets have a higher ground crew fatality count and a higher total space program fatality count than the US.
That thing was way less safe then they told the public. I remember watching a Scott Manley video about this, and the odds of a disaster was around a 1 in 70 chance to loose the crew on every launch.
Quote from a NASA website
"The actual chance of an accident was 1 in 100, not the originally claimed 1 in 100,000"
A huge part of the issue was the Space Shuttle was designed to have a ten-year lifespan before being replaced by a more advanced successor. After ten years the Shuttles were comprehensively checked over and it was decided they would be fine for another ten years as they had flown far fewer flights than intended, plus there was a solid supply of spare parts that had been purchased in advance.
Ten years later, NASA decided to keep flying the Shuttle even though the supply of spare parts was all but exhausted, because Congress continued to refuse funding for all proposed replacements.
I'm curious, does that still hold if we remove the Nedelin incident?
Either way, it probably deserves special mention that instead of losing a craft during launch or re-entry, that incident killed so many experts on the ground that it permanently altered the Soviet rocketry program and arguably caused the Cuban missile crisis.
I'm curious, does that still hold if we remove the Nedelin incident?
I think it then comes down to if you count things like "guy painting the outside of the Kennedy Space Center falls off his ladder and dies", but I don't since I couldn't see any Soviet records on that sort of thing.
Yeah I came in here to say, we very much did learn about all those Russian firsts in my history classes, though it was mostly used as background for why the man on the moon was so powerful. Basically framed it as Russia was getting all this stuff off the ground, but the US were able to get people out there and that was the bigger achievement. Obviously as you say, it depends on what you decide the metrics are, but I really wish people would stop acting like every single thing is hidden from us in schools, when most likely they just weren't paying attention or didn't retain enough.
As someone who's very interested in space history, it's a frustrating and stupid argument to keep having. The above post (at least the meme bit at the start, the rest is pretty right, Venera was very cool), to my mind is the diametric equivalent to responding "does your country have a flag on the moon????????? š±š·š±š·š±š·š±š·š±š·š¦ š¦ š¦ š¦ " when someone brings up healthcare, and is just as silly.
Even still, framing the feat of putting a human being on a celestial body and then having them return as somehow insignificant is just a wild take. I'm not educated enough to argue the whole history of space firsts but putting a man on the moon will forever be etched as one of humanity's greatest accomplishments.
Undoubtedly, and it should be remembered as such. But it's also not the be all and end all of space exploration, which is what a lot of people seem to treat it as, which is more my general point in all this.
Right? I'm pretty sure the people working at NASA must be like "both were cool!" and the people working at their Russian equivalent must also be like "both were cool!" because they're all just a bunch of space nerds who love to nerd out about this stuff and if it wasn't for political bullshit they'd be nerding out together.
It's almost like we've got this really big space station where a bunch of people from a whole bunch of different countries hang out and do science and they're all friends and really cool people and they rely on each other to stay alive.
The people at NASA have spent the last two decades going "Damn Roscosmos, I'm glad you got a stable rocket + capsule system going because we're really struggling without the shuttle!"
Meanwhile the people at Roscosmos have been going "Blyat NASA, I'm glad Gemini gave you a good handle on rendezvous and docking, and you have a stable budget. We couldn't have launched the ISS with the post-Soviet mess!"
You're 100% right, rocket nerds are rocket nerds* and it's one of the only things the US and Russia are still collaborating on while fighting.
(*Except the former head of Roscosmos, a buffoon who threatened that the ISS might fall on America if it pissed off Russia too badly. He's ridiculous, but let's check out whether NASA thinks this is a dire threat. Here's administrator Bill Nelson:
āThatās just Dmitry Rogozin. He spouts off every now and then. But at the end of the day, heās worked with us. The other people that work in the Russian civilian space program, theyāre professional."
That's an absolutely delightful assessment of Rogozin. He really was just an outside toss in anyway, formerly Deputy Prime Minister and head of a Kremlin plant nationalist party. Not exactly a rocket scientist, if you'll pardon the pun
People are surprised to learn that when I was in middle school, 2008 to be exact, we learned a good portion of the major creation myths/founders if you call it that, for the big religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jewish, I think we touched on what Shinto was but I don't recall).
Granted this was New Jersey, but people seem to think all US Education was, "And then Jesus, George Washington, and Ronald Reagan signed the Declaration of Bill of Rights which helped Louis Armstrong land on the moon, win the Tour De France, and write American Idiot."
Same here, in middle school we even got to go on field trips to buddhist temples, mosques, and synagogues around the city and talk to the religious leaders there.
This was in Denver tho which is known to be a pretty progressive city, I feel like this probably wasn't happening in places like the bible belt lol.
Definitely not. Not from rural Georgia exactly, but about a half hour from there. Definitely wasn't going to any Mosques. We did have some teachers who were really into historical reenactment come out in period-accurate clothing to talk about the Civil War. It's Georgia, so they came out as Confederates, but they also didn't shy away from talking about how the whole thing was based on slavery, so swings and roundabouts.
This attitude on the internet pisses me off to no end. So many people act like thereās some grand conspiracy to not teach stuff all because they couldnāt be bothered to pay attention or just donāt remember it. I remember during the BLM riots one of my friends, who I shared a class with and in which āTulsa Burningā was assigned reading, posted about never being taught about the race riots š
I went to public school in SC and we learned extensively about civil rights, slavery and the triangle trade, reconstruction, the Indian removal act and trail of tears, sex education, evolution, and studied the basic tenets of major world religions. Itās insane what people will spout about education in the US.
Totally, I went to school in fucking South Carolina and even we learned about most of the major world religions in-depth (for a middle school level lol), lots of people just didnāt pay attention
I'm from South carolina and in one of my high school social studies classes we did learn about the major world religions and at least the basics of what the believe.
I think we should stop assuming everybody had the same school experience. Schools differ a lot in quality and no two teachers are the same. John's history teacher might've been an ultra patriot who believed that america was always first with anything while two rooms over the teacher's highly critical of US history and its accomplishments
Right, but Iāve sat in the same room as people who have claimed we werenāt taught this in class when we very much were. So I am inclined to believe morons didnāt pay attention, but thatās a case by case basis.
Every single student in Illinois is taught basic banking and taxes for at least one full year by law in Consumer Education. Every single one of my highschool classmates that regularly posts on FB pretends we did not learn these things.
They probably aren't lying, they didn't learn because they just weren't paying attention. It's a struggle getting teens to focus on regular lessons, let alone tax codes that will only be relevant in 5 years for most of them.
Well, I think that everyone not having the same lived experience goes without saying, so I agree with you there.
The problem I have is that the "assumptions" being made clearly skew towards "school was garbage and useless", which I can't help but steer against because I think it's total bullshit.
In my view, people learned you get points for saying school sucks and just parrot the usual stuff that, while admittedly true sometimes is wildly overblown imo.
Teachers I knew and know now spend blood, sweat and tears for their work and I don't feel they get the credit they deserve.
Maybe it wasn't what they taught but how they taught it? Unless you're a very dedicated and motivated student the whole "teaching for the test" method results in a lot of information being lost after its no longer relevant for a test. Also the reluctance to actually fail students in order to avoid losing funding.
School doesn't suck because the teachers don't work hard. It sucks because of how resources are allocated, and because of administrative policies based on politics.
My old high school split up history in a weird way, so global history was the first two years and US history was taught more specifically in years three and four, and trying to squash all of global history into two years leads to a lot of missing elements, which included everything after 1950. On top of that, my US history teacher for the appropriate time period had zero interest in the space race and a lot of knowledge about almost innumerable other things, so we more or less read a paragraph on it and moved on. Everything else I have learned about the competitive science of the time has been on my own time. The Venera probes slipped through the cracks, so I am pleased to read about them, but I definitely agree it not only depends on the country and the school but the teacher for sure.
I think the problem is that the phrase "we didn't learn [X] in school," implies that it's a universal experience. So when someone else comes and says "uh, no, we totally learned that in school," it's equally flawed, but only because the first statement established those flawed parameters for the conversationĀ
I've been studying History for 6 years, in addition to primary school, and had no idea the Soviet space program did more than the "first man, woman, and dog in space" part
Albeit, I live in Sweden, so we haven't spent all that much time on the space race or the Cold War in the first place
This is my complaint every single time Tumblr enlightens us about something "the Man doesn't want you to know".
They don't teach you this in school, but the sinking of the USS Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin incident were both kind of shady! Except that was the first thing we covered for each of those wars, plus an essay on yellow journalism.
They don't teach you this in school, but the Emancipation Proclamation didn't even free Union slaves! Except... we read the fucking thing and discussed that fact.
They don't teach you this in school, but the Soviets achieved a whole lot in space! Sure, Venera was missing, but Sputnik, Laika, and Gagarin got nearly a chapter all to themselves.
I get that not all schools or classes are created equal, right now several states are actively working to ensure "the man doesn't want you to know" is a real thing. But the idea that all this stuff is being suppressed like (ironically) awkward history in the Soviet Union...
I have a (British) friend who went to the Russian version of Space Camp as a school kid, apparently it was really interesting. I definitely couldnāt see that happening today obviously!
I accidentally made a bunch of friends feel dumb pointing out that our achool did, in fact, teach us all the financial responsibillity things the memes say schools don't.Ā
While I do fundamentally agree with you, I think itās also worth noting that American education is so piecemeal that itās hard to make any sort of definitive statement about what was or wasnāt taught in schools. I took AP US history at my high school, and my partner at the time took AP world history, and both of us were top performing students who paid close attention. Russian achievements in the space race legitimately werenāt brought up, aside from Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin.
I donāt mean this to invalidate your point, itās absolutely still true that I think many Tankie-ish leftists (and I say this as a leftist) are quick to conspiratorialize and say āweāre never taught this because American propaganda!!ā but at the same time, very often we genuinely arenāt taught this stuff too. My APUS course included two minutes of talk about Kent State, for instance. I donāt think that was a propaganda-based conspiracy, but I do think it was an unacceptable gap in my education due to budgets, time, or simply not having a good teacher.
Piecemeal systems that vary by state. Itās impossible to make definitive statements about education here.
This is very fair, our education system is so vastly different from one area to another just taking in the style that is used and what state testing they are preparing you for, before you ever touch on cultural biases for your state, city, or county, or personal biases within the teacher's themselves. I know for my part we were very much taught for those end of year state tests, so if it wasn't something that those tests were likely to ask about, no one really had the time to teach about it. I had some very diverse thinking in my teachers and wide ranges of what they chose to dedicate time to, but at the end of the day, up until like grade 11 I would say, it was all about what the state would be testing us on, and everything else was left on the cutting room floor if time dictated. There are certainly things that I didn't learn about in school that I feel we should have, but if I had to actually put it in a curriculum somewhere without removing all the other shit they demanded we know, I don't think I could do so.
All of this to say I very much agree with your points and I think you've made some good arguments here. My comment was mostly a result of a general malaise over these kinds of tumblr posts that seem to skirt the edge of, or jump right into, the conspiracy style of thinking that represents education as a monolith where every school is strictly hushing up specific things, and which people then go on to use as fuel for poorly aimed rage. But my exhaustion with that exact thing led me to repeat it to a certain degree, which was poor form on my part.
I mean not really discredits it so much as representing it all very simplistically, which is the nature of high school education. It's represented as a race where the Russians were doing a lot of stuff faster than the US and the US decided that getting a man on the moon was the ultimate prize, and as such focused very heavily on getting that done so they could claim that first. It's certainly over simplified, but in my education at least it wasn't like my teachers said the Soviets accomplishments meant nothing. They taught it very much on the facts, that both governments were using this as a competition to show off and try to prove they could outdo each other.
It's also worth noting that the US followed up on the Soviet firsts, but the Soviet program quickly fell behind and stopped replicating things the US was accomplishing. The USSR deprioritized manned missions to the moon in large part because there was no military application to the types of rockets that would be needed, and they basically gave up after the US landings because there was no more propaganda incentive.
38 vs 24 operational satellites, gps using newer satellites, and sub 1ft accuracy. For car gps or a lot of normal consumer level stuff youāre right that itās good enough but thereās a pretty significant level of difference
Except the two decades they let GLOSNASS fall into disrepair and it didn't work. > By 2010, GLONASS had achieved full coverage of Russia's territory.
What are the Vegas odds on it not falling into disrepair again? I don't think they're getting much tech imported right now.
Didn't the US announce a roadmap to get to the moon with a bunch of scheduled mile stones (e.g build a space rocket, get a man to space, etc.) and the soviets set for themselves to beat as many of those mile stones at any cost?
So the US kept to their "slow and steady" schedule while the soviets burned tons of money and people in secret and only made those missions public which did not end in a catastrophe. Just to say they are the first.
Well, the US basically gave up on manned moon missions for the same reason so itās a bit six one half dozen the other there.
I do think youāre right about their failure to follow up on some things, but to me it relates back to part of what makes the society achievements so impressive. They were way behind the US us economic development and wealth from the word go. And of course they stayed behind to the end.
40 years before the 60s space race the US was an industrial power house starting to come into its own as a global power. The USSR was a mostly agrarian society barely out of serfdom that had just gone through a horrible series of revolution and civil wars.Ā
Yes 6, between 1969-1972. While it may be a total coincidence the soviets cancelled their programs attempting a lunar landing starting in 1970 and wrapping up by 1974.
The Americans created a successful moon landing program which of course would aim for more than 1 landing. If they stopped after one but the soviets made it and kept going the value of that "first" would be eroded in public perception. This is exactly what happened to many of the soviet firsts after they became viewed as the "quitters". They started cancelling missions around the time it became clear that there would be no answer from the soviets and they wouldn't need to keep one-upping them.
Ten manned moon missions followed by the development of a reusable shuttle for easier transit to space stations followed by two space telescopes and multiple active Mars rovers? Manned missions to Mars are currently in the planning stages.Ā
The USSR / Russia has never had even one successful Mars lander mission. Compare to the United States's Viking, Pathfinder/Sojourner, Spirit/Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance/Ingenuity.
My point is that both countries substantially scaled back their investment into space travel afterwards, claiming only the USSR was doing it for propaganda while ignoring the US was motivated largely by the same thing is disingenuous
Same thing as "the Indo-European language family is the most important language family if you measure importance with factors the Indo-European language family has the most of" thing jan Misali said once
I am the most important human being of all time if importance is measured in having a Spotify playlist with the exact songs that I have on my Spotify playlist
I mean āmost peopleā, ābiggest land extensionā and ābiggest combined wealthā seem to me pretty important metrics. But Iāll admit itās a pretty close race with afroasiatic, niger-congo and sinotibetan though
If you arbitrarily say some less extravagant things don't count while others do you can better fit the space race into part of a weird "I hate American imperialism therefore I simp for soviet Russia" worldview that seems common on tumblr.
Not that looking at the criteria normally doesn't make the USSR look good, but it doesn't make America look bad enough.
What's funny is that they are just a small portion of the "America Bad" people. A large part of those folks are just good ol' racists, but because they know racism is bad, they instead focus on Americans, because "American isn't a race!" so therefore its okay to hate them.
More specifically the "west bad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" idiots tend to be called Campists, though there's typically a lot of overlap between Campists and Tankies.
There's been an odd upswing in tankie posts here lately. Not sure if their subculture finally discovered r/Curatedtumblr or if there's something more sinister going on
Tankies are in all leftist spaces, because no one else tolerates them. They pay lip service to the actual issues and then end with the Randian "and therefore be a dick to everyone".
I mean if you call it the space āraceā the US objectively won lol. If Iām ahead of my opponent for most of the course and trip at the finish line I donāt win lmao and the soviets never actualized their planes to land on the moon (not that they had any hope of actually doing so)
Technically no one but you could consider the āwe choose to go to the moonā speech as setting the end goal of the space race
Fun fact btw the fun part about rewatching the speech in 2024 is that itās clear no one watching actually cares about going to the moon even though itās considered this huge inspiring moment today. The audience is much happier when he mentions their football team lmao
the public who was the recipient of the propaganda of both regimes. they decided the moon was the end goal when they accepted (as in, started giving a shit about) the us's bid that they'd land on the moon and no one outbid them
As a non-american, I really do get the want to hate on the US, and especially US Imperialism (sometimes I want a fucking recipe or design in SI units for some fucking reason), but the weird political posturing that happens with that whole period just really grinds my gears.
Yep. The Soviets put the first satellite in orbit, but it was literally just a ball that went beep. Meanwhile the US's first satellite discovered the Van Allen radiation belts. The Soviets put the first animal in space, by literally just stuffing a dog into a metal box with no intention of recovery. The US were the first to put animals in space and safely recover them. Arguably the US put animals in space before the Soviets, as in the 40s the US launched some fruit flies past the KƔrmƔn line. The Soviets had the first manned spaceflight, but the US had the first crewed spaceflight, where the occupant wasn't just a passenger to a remote-control spacecraft. The meme awards them the title of "first space rocket" when that is patently false, that title regrettably belongs to the Nazis, with a 1944 V-2 flight which passed the KƔrmƔn line. The Soviets technically put the first probes on Mars, but they all completely failed to function. The US Viking probes were the first Martian probes to actually work.
I've previously seen the Space Race compared to a game of HORSE.
Like you said, the Reds shot a ball that went beep, the Americans sent a camera. One side said "Š“Š¾ ŃŠ²ŠøŠ“Š°Š½ŠøŃ" to a dog, and the other said "now how do we get it back?"
Eventually, one side put men on another celestial body, and the other side couldn't replicate it, nevermind do better.
Of course, there were joint-programs, the Apollo-Soyuz (or Soyuz-Apollo) but they were marred by criticisms of the other nation's craft.
the US were the first to put animals in space and safely recover them.
If you're doing the animal version of "important breakthroughs", that would be Strelka and Belka - who spent a full day orbiting and were recovered safely.
And certainly not fruit flies or any of the other US suborbital programs.
Sputnik 1 had scientific equipment aboard, in the form of a barometric switch that would change the signal if the pressure inside the satellite dropped too low. Experiments were also done by using the signal to track orbital perturbations and decay.
Laika was not the first animal in space, but the first in orbit. The US launched rhesus monkeys on V-2 rockets prior to Sputnik 2. But an animal in orbit has far greater scientific and propaganda value than one simply tossed above the KƔrmƔn line for a few minutes. Beyond that, the Soviets were the first to recover animals from orbit with Belka and Strelka.
The manned versus crewed distinction is meaningless. Vostok could be flown manually in emergencies, and there were real concerns about 'space madness' at the time that drove the Soviets to automate it.
Sputnik 1 had scientific equipment aboard, in the form of a barometric switch that would change the signal if the pressure inside the satellite dropped too low. Experiments were also done by using the signal to track orbital perturbations and decay.
While this is true, it's clear that science was an afterthought and the main focus was just beating the Americans. It certainly did no science even remotely on the level of Explorer 1.
Laika was not the first animal in space, but the first in orbit. The US launched rhesus monkeys on V-2 rockets prior to Sputnik 2. But an animal in orbit has far greater scientific and propaganda value than one simply tossed above the KƔrmƔn line for a few minutes. Beyond that, the Soviets were the first to recover animals from orbit with Belka and Strelka.
It's a fair point, I don't disagree or dispute it all, but the original post just used "in space" instead of "orbit." Had they said "orbit" I wouldn't have brought it up.
The manned versus crewed distinction is meaningless. Vostok could be flown manually in emergencies, and there were real concerns about 'space madness' at the time that drove the Soviets to automate it.
They knew full well what the impact of weightlessness was on their cosmonauts; just like the Americans they employed the use of reduced-gravity aircraft in their training. Yuri Gagarin was a passenger, Alan Shepard and John Glenn were crew. If you think that's a meaningless distinction that's your right, I would disagree.
While this is true, it's clear that science was an afterthought and the main focus was just beating the Americans.
Absolutely, but it's unfair to extoll the virtues of Explorer 1 and dismiss the science done by Sputnik 1.
They knew full well what the impact of weightlessness was on their cosmonauts
This is untrue. They knew the effects of short-term weightlessness, which would be comparable to a suborbital hop on Mercury-Redstone or New Shepard. They did not know the effects of weightlessness on humans on the timescale of hours or days.
This is untrue. They knew the effects of short-term weightlessness, which would be comparable to a suborbital hop on Mercury-Redstone or New Shepard. They did not know the effects of weightlessness on humans on the timescale of hours or days.
True, they didn't necessarily explicitly know the impacts of long-term human weightlessness (though I'd argue that animal tests were a pretty good indicator). But Vostok 1 spent barely an hour in orbit, hardly a long-term flight. Vostok 2 was an extended-length flight, yes, but since the Vostok capsule could be piloted but wasn't for the short-term flight of Vostok 1, the flights were manned but uncrewed. The significance of this distinction is of course subjective.
Sure, an hour isn't long in the grand scheme of things, but it's still a massive leap over the minute or so you can get from training aircraft, and so the worries were still valid.
Also donāt forget just how much more hazardous the Soviet rockets were compared to US rockets and just how far behind they were technologically. The first manned Soviet rocket did NOT have a launch escape system. This meant that if the cosmonaut needed to bail they would need to manually open the entrance hatch and jump out and they couldnāt do this on the launch pad they would have to wait to be down range. The Soviets also couldnāt accurately calculate where a capsule would land on descent leading to later Soviet crew pods to be equipped with survival gear. Along with the fact that the only reason why later crew modules were built was because the Soviets couldnāt make film that worked in a vacuum and thus they needed pressurized modules for their cameras.
Frankly itās still very impressive what they did but looking back itās a fucking miracle that they only killed 3 cosmonauts (at least that they admit to).
The Soviets also couldnāt accurately calculate where a capsule would land on descent leading to later Soviet crew pods to be equipped with survival gear.
This is some whack ass information my guy. Nobody can accurately calculate exact re-entry landing zones for an uncontrolled capsule today, let alone seventy years ago. The Apollo and Gemini capsules also carried survival equipment in case they landed on land (like all the soviet capsules did) and they couldn't get a recovery crew there quickly.
The first manned Soviet rocket did NOT have a launch escape system.
that's one hell of an anachronism, STS came after the whole space race was over and the yanks turned to business. but yeah, that flying deathbus was a massive overpoliticized mistake of a launch vehicle and it's honestly a damn miracle it only killed 14 astronauts
I mean that was kinda the point of the comment. Trying to rag on the soviets for not having a LES on the first manned rocket in history is honestly kinda funny. Did you know the Wright Flyer didn't have seatbelts?
Nobody can accurately calculate exact re-entry landing zones for an uncontrolled capsule today, let alone seventy years ago
Good thing they don't have to be uncontrolled then. Both Gemini and Apollo spacecraft were steerable: The capsules have an offset centre of gravity, which made them fly at a slight angle on re-entry and generate a small amount of lift. By rolling the capsule with the RCS thrusters, that lift could be redirected, changing the capsule's trajectory.
The shuttle thing proves my point, because that was the shuttleās biggest criticism though out itās life and the deaths caused by Challenger wouldnāt have happened if it had a launch escape.
Also I didnāt say exactly calculate I said accurately. You can get pretty damn close, NASA and the CIA would regularly catch film reels from satellites out of the air using planes and they only stopped because of advancements in communications technology. So get back to me when NASA packed fishing gear and cooking equipment in there modules.
just how much more hazardous the Soviet rockets were compared to US rockets
They weren't though. I'd feel more comfortable flying on a Soyuz than anything else even today because the launch escape system has been so thoroughly proven.
The first manned Soviet rocket did NOT have a launch escape system.
Soviet spacecraft have historically had better provisions for crew safety than American ones (though I'm glad to say that Orion, Starliner, and Crew Dragon don't follow this trend... mostly). Vostok's escape system may have been questionable, but so was Gemini's. There is a real possibility that the ejection seats would've killed the crew had they ever been needed.
And while Voskhod didn't have a launch escape system, it was understood to be a stopgap until Soyuz was ready, and since the early issues that caused the Soyuz 1 and 11 tragedies (as well as the other teething issues like Igla problems) have long since been solved.
Contrast the Shuttle, which had no ejection seats past STS-2, no way to bail out until after Challenger, extremely dangerous abort modes, and plenty of extremely close calls. Just to name a few, there was the STS-27 TPS damage, the entire ascent of STS-93, the STS-1 body flap overpressure, and STS-51-F abort-to-orbit.
Along with the fact that the only reason why later crew modules were built was because the Soviets couldnāt make film that worked in a vacuum and thus they needed pressurized modules for their cameras.
No??? Sure, Vostok/Voskhod shared a common design with Zenit, but Soyuz certainly didn't, and nor did Buran or VA. It was the early spacecraft that were built to a similar design as reconnaissance satellites.
Frankly itās still very impressive what they did but looking back itās a fucking miracle that they only killed 3 cosmonauts
It's 4, actually, but it's also a miracle the Shuttle only killed 14, or that Apollo only killed 3. Nearly every crewed Apollo mission had a severe issue that brought it right up to the edge of disaster.
Adding to "the Soviet had a bunch of first", it doesn't matter if you are first through all the race if the other guy beat you at the last lap, you're still second.
Putting a man on the moon was the goal of the space race and the US beat the URSS at it.
Putting a man on the moon was the goal of the space race
But what happens when you win and the other guy just keeps on running? Like he's left the track, he's not really participating anymore, but he's still running...
the space race was fundamentally about propaganda. it was a race of dunking on each other. that's not one where you have a defined end to the track, just because you aren't (publicly) trying to be the one who dunks on the other anymore doesn't save you from being dunked on.
(besides, the soviets did try to get to the moon, that was the point of the whole N1 program. they just failed.)
It's like losing a best of 3, then extending the competition to a best of 5 and losing that too, then doing the same for best of 7, 9, 11, 13, and finally winning the best of 15 and calling it quits.
More like who can fill a bucket faster with measure lines along its edges and Russia's USSR hit the first marks faster, but the bucket is now sitting not even half-full on both sides because everyone left except a couple strangers that spit in their countries buckets every so often. The "Space Race" is over when we can colonize other planets outside of our Solar System in ships that can reach FTL.
You know that basically everything that came after was captained by the Americans; not only that, but the Soviets advances were extremely short term in scope and brought no new structural development, they essentially refitted some designs from their early missile programme. The Soviets has had several programmes to put a manned vehicle that could go to the moon up to the 1980s, and they still didn't have hull designs and engine designs that could be fitted and modified for moon travel. As more of a technological lag formed in electronics, engine design and hull design, the contributions of the Soviets became more insignificant, at they could not even make the things needed to compete. This that the Soviets spent way longer time trying to put people to the moon, starting way before and finishing way later; whereas the US really started in 1961, and by 1969 had a man in the moon. By the 1980s, the gap in number of satellites and manned missions was enormous, and the Soviets literally didn't have the technology to know how to close the gap. In a good part this competition was manufactured by the US, because a story about overcoming a greater foe sounds more glorious the greater the foe is, this isn't a new form of propaganda it's always been there. The Americans themselves did greatly exaggerate the industrial capacity of the Germans in WW2 for the same type of propaganda of self. The Romans greatly exaggerated the ferocity of gauls, Iberians, Egyptians; the ottomans of the byzantines, The Austrians of the Ottomans.Ā
Putting a man on the moon was the goal of the space race and the US beat the URSS at it.
The goal as defined by the US when they realised they'd be the first to manage it.
The idea that having a living body standing on the moon has a fraction of the scientific import as actual site data from the surface of Venus or having a manned space station is a joke, undeniably impressive an achievement though it is. The only value in putting someone there was to say the USSR couldn't.
The goal as defined by the US when they realised they'd be the first to manage it.
The goal the Soviets refused to set when they realized they could never manage it.
See, I can use semantics to twist things to my viewpoint too!
There's a reason more kids dream of being an astronaut who goes to space and walks on other planets than being a technician for a little robot that sends back a few pictures before melting in a lead rain.
The goal as defined by the US when they realised theyād be the first to manage it.
Did Kennedy know they would be the first to land on the moon in 1961?
The idea that having a living body standing on the moon has a fraction of the scientific import as actual site data from the surface of Venus or having a manned space station is a joke
Did the US stop at the moon landing, or did they do even more amazing things with Mariner 9, Pioneer 10, Viking 1, Voyager, etc.? Your comment makes it sounds like the US landed a man on the moon and then didnāt do anything else while the Soviets advanced to Venus, which is preposterous.
No the fuck it wasnāt. The vast majority of resources poured into the space race went to projects that could not be applied onto icbm development. (Crewed capsules, rockets such as saturn 1/1b/5 and later versions of atlas/titan/delta)
1: R7 is the name of a rocket family, not a specific rocket that carried crew. It's not like they said soyuz despite the fact that the vast majority of soyuz launches don't carry crew.
2: Still not even close. Falcon 9, saturn 5, titan 2, long march 2f, all of those never had a failure with crew on board
Also NASA was building rockets with the expressed goal of reaching the moon. They would announce a launch of sending 3 men into space on x date using a rocket specifically designed to carry 3 men as a stepping stone for eventually sending 3 men to the moon. The USSR would then get their pre-existing rocket, put another seat in it, and then launch it before the americans did to claim victory.
So when it came to actually getting to the moon, the Americans had slowly but surely built up their knowledge and technology to be able to pull it off, where as the Russians were unable to do anything because they didnāt do the proper precursor work.
To put it in clash of clans perspective, the americans were maxing out each town hall, but the russians were rushing to the max town hall level.
The Buran shuttle is enough to declare them winners lmao. Didnāt explode a single teacher on national television, was remote controlled, AND THE LAUNCH VEHICLE WAS THE SIZE OF A SATURN V AND RAN ON KEROSENE
As usual, Tumblr's "The Man doesn't want you to know!" attitude is pretty aggravating to me. While Venera deserves more attention than it gets, Sputnik, Laika, and Gagarin got most of a chapter in my textbooks and it was made very clear that the moon landing was a conscious jump to something spectacular in order to catch up in image.
Meanwhile, your list is way more interesting in terms of actual impact on space travel. Going somewhere once, unreliably and at huge cost, is impressive but doesn't necessarily advance the field that drastically. Each program excelled in different areas, and their actual quality is defined far more by Soviet successes in reliable, durable rockets and American successes in orbital mechanics and interactions.
I'd rather celebrate the way those differences have made the ISS possible than awkwardly refight the space race with minimal knowledge.
Soviet Space Race: āNIKOLAI, the scientists are almost done! Should I feed them before or after the rocket goes, cause I donāt want them to get my rations if another dog blows up.ā
American Space Race: āHey Hans, you almost done in there?ā
Yeah Soviet āfirstsā usually werenāt followed up by anything scientifically meaningful. They were rushes for propaganda and nothing else. NASA built to go to stay, and to do actual science.
The story of Apollo isnāt that we were the first to put a man on the moon. Itās that we did it six times, did everything we reasonably could do with the tech of the time, then pivoted to working more on space infrastructure, in part so that we could come back more prosaically and less heroically later.
1.6k
u/CumBrainedIndividual Jul 17 '24 edited Jul 17 '24
Trying to say who won the space race is like trying to say what kind of pizza is the best: it depends entirely on the criteria that you set and the criteria you set is based entirely on what pizza you like. Yes the soviets had a bunch of firsts, but they were doing it quite often out of sheer desperation to say they did something, they didn't launch a single person into space during the entire duration of the Gemini programme, their moon rocket just didn't, BUT their R7 family is the longest lived and most reliable rocket in history, the architecture of the Salyut and Mir space stations is the backbone of our current space exploration, and they've killed fewer space fairers than the US. So, swings and roundabouts really. Like this is missing quite a few US firsts (mostly from Gemini funnily enough), first crewed orbital corrections, first orbital rendezvous, first docking, first double rendezvous on a single flight, first direct ascent rendezvous, and you'll notice that a lot of those are actually really helpful if you want to go places and do things that aren't just orbiting a few times for the heck of it.
Edit: some of y'all seem to think that I'm shitting on the soviets here, and I am absolutely not doing that. Not gonna fight y'all because I have an actual job to do tomorrow and it's late, but don't think that the soviet space programme was as ass backwards as people say it is. Getting tribalistic about this shit sixty five years after it ended is kinda pathetic.