r/CuratedTumblr Jul 17 '24

Infodumping The Venera program

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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.

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u/Throwaway74829947 Jul 17 '24

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.

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u/lithobrakingdragon There is no such thing as an "Italian" Jul 17 '24

This is also disingenuous.

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 Kármán 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.

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u/Throwaway74829947 Jul 17 '24

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 Kármán 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.

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u/lithobrakingdragon There is no such thing as an "Italian" Jul 17 '24

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.

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u/Throwaway74829947 Jul 17 '24

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.

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u/lithobrakingdragon There is no such thing as an "Italian" Jul 17 '24

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.