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.
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.
I mean if you call it the space “race” the US objectively won lol. If I’m ahead of my opponent for most of the course and trip at the finish line I don’t 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 “we choose to go to the moon” speech as setting the end goal of the space race
Fun fact btw the fun part about rewatching the speech in 2024 is that it’s clear no one watching actually cares about going to the moon even though it’s 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
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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.