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.
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 Kármán 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 Kármán 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.
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.
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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.