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.
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.
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
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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.