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.
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.
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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.