Which is another weird thing. US declared the space race "won" when they got to the moon, despite being behind in all other milestones like sattelite and manned space flight.
If SU got to the moon first US would've ignored it too and said Mars was the real target...
No, the battle was an economic one, never a science one. Let’s face it: both the US and Soviet Union had extremely capable scientists.
But the entire Cold War was about which economic system was the “best” and in the end, the Soviet Union frankly ran out of money and could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash.
>>could not even test their Buran spacecraft before launching it to see it crash.
Wait, what? Buran did launch for a test flight, in a fully remote-controlled flight(something that the US Shuttle couldn't do at the time), and landed successfully. It never crashed.
The Brian shuttle orbited the Earth twice in 206 minutes of flight, travelling 83,707 kilometres (52,013 mi) in 3 hours and 25 minutes (0.14 flight days). On its return, it performed an automated landing on the shuttle runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Buran never went through an equivalent of the shuttle approach and landing tests because the An-225 wasn't ready. It was never certain it would fly back successfully on reentry.
When is anything ever certain? The first shuttle flights flew with only two people who had ejection seats, clearly NASA wasn't certain of success.
I've been watching MIT 16.885J recently, it's a lecture series from 2005 about the space shuttle with lectures given about numerous shuttle subsystems by people who actually worked on them, administrators and lead engineers. Several of them have expressed reservations about the systems in the shuttles. Fear that the hydraulic system was a ticking timebomb that should be replaced with electromechanic systems, recounting an early fear that the Colombia breakup had been caused by a landing gear explosion, etc. These guys weren't certain of much, everybody knew it was a risky project.
> Running out of money is how you lose this battle.
True, but I honestly find it hard to conceptualise how that relates to military spending.
You think the Soviet population would be better fed if MIC scientists had paid more attention to food production? Unlikely, it seems if anything in the Soviet Union that has a negative correlation. And the factories are, famously, dual use in capitalist or communist systems, so without the military demand, it seems more likely their population wouldn't have engineered products at all.
By design, they lacked a middle class. I think it's worth stating: any system that can produce a > Mach 2 fighter is incredibly advanced, that that society was serfs < 100 years prior also incredible. But the products - military or civil - were consistently less rounded, more slapdash, than US fare. We could therefore infer - again, since the factories and talent are dual-use - the middle class drove product quality in both the civil market, and ultimately the military one.
They also, of course, didn't trade much with the richest economy in the world - unlike, say, recent China. It certainly seems to be a famous nail in the Soviet coffin that people did know regular civilian life in the West was better, and they couldn't get a slice of that pie.
The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion roubles—roughly US $68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation.[3]
$68 billion is a lot, but it also only three Big Digs ($22 billion). If Chernobyl killed the Soviet economy it was because it was in already terrible shape.
Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well.
And in the USSRs case, it was from an ecomony that had just had gotten into large scale industrial production, after having been way behind under the Czars, and after a major war, a revolution, and several years of civil war.
If anything, they did better than expected. Even more so given that they had an inexperienced government, external pressure from unfriendly western countries, and had to prepare for future wars that were already breeding (and luckily the did it just in time for WWII).
> Only way back, when the US had the "Great Depression" and millions of starving people as well.
The US had millions of hungry people. At the peak of the Great Depression, deaths from starvation peaked at a (still terrible) ~110k. Under Soviet rule, an order of magnitude more, actually millions, perished unnecessarily from hunger just in Ukraine.
Honestly, it would have had them either way. You can't change the shitshow that was Imperial Russia that easily, and tsarist legacy was hamstringing any reform (for example in the decision to continue the systems of secret police and prison camps - neither was Communist invention)
However they did fuckup in many areas in the economy, something that was recognised internally at least by some - as seen by multiple attempts at reforms.
Also, one can't discount the unbelievably favourable position of the USA at the end of WW2 when analysing this (in comparison, Soviets started with a worse position than many would believe, because Imperial Russia really wasn't well off)
A lot of people forget that the reason there even was an uprising was because the country was so poor and the upper class was seen as decadent and out of touch.
Honestly they also seemed to have gotten really unlucky with their last tsar. Makes you wonder how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II.
> how things would have played out if they got someone exceptionally good instead of Nicholas II.
It's not just the man or woman at the top who make the country work. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great tried to modernize. But the nobility put up a lot of resistance or simply didn't turn up for committee meetings.
The pre-soviet famines were of natural causes - crop failures due to droughts etc. After soviets took over the country, these were still ocurring, but were dwarfed by man-made famines, caused by idiotic economic policies (mainly by forced collectivization, which decimated productivity).
That certainly sounds like bs. The pre-soviet famines' causes were directly the repressive, backward, exploitative and simply evil system that existed and forced the peasants to starve so the nobility and select bourgeois upper class members co-opted into the system could live lives of decadence.
Everything is man made when it’s “them” (communists). And just part of society and natural when things happen in America’s capitalism. The US doesn’t even have universal health care. I don’t know the exact death figures, but it’s not pretty. All deaths that could be prevented from some basic collectivist attitude. Instead of forced individualism.
the US and a lot of the capitalist world had the Great Depression and more. Are those “natural”? The country is forcing a recession now and causing poorer people to get squeezed dry.
Season 2 captured so much of my 1980s kid "this is the space future I was promised". At the time my uncle even worked on projects at Nasa and would describe some of the ideals of the space shuttle program in a way that For All Mankind Season 2 captured that boring reality never quite did, especially after the Challenger disaster.
(Plus, spoilers: Project Orion in that season! Which is one of the things that I can point to where FAM's timeline is maybe worse than ours, as it is fun to bring up every time people suggest they can't watch FAM because it is too "utopian". Project Orion was in part cancelled because of advances in cancer research, especially with respect to radiation. The FAM timeline seems to be spending so much on aerospace at the expense of cancer research among other things, and things like the 80s and 90s fights against tobacco seem almost non-existent in that timeline. People are still smoking nearly as much in that timeline's 80s as they did in the 50s. There are no signs of the near ubiquitous anti-tobacco PSAs of our timeline's 80s and 90s. I don't know how much the writers are intentionally working in such trade-offs, versus just trying to maintain storylines and aesthetics across its decade jumps, but it makes a ton of sense that there would be such trade-offs. Similarly, there are signs that civil rights are still generally worse in that timeline than ours, especially gay rights and feminism.)
If SU got to the moon first US would've ignored it too and said Mars was the real target...