What If America Had Beaten the Soviets Into Space? 255
MarkWhittington writes "April 12 is the 50th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first space flight. Coming less than four years after Sputnik, Gagarin's orbital space voyage galvanized the United States and led to President Kennedy announcing the race to the Moon six weeks later. The question arises: what if America had beaten the Soviet Union into space instead?"
Ballistic missile program (Score:4, Interesting)
That would imply that American ballistic missile program would have also went ahead of Soviet one. Which, I suspect, would mean some glowing rubble in place of Moscow and some other major Soviet cities.
Re:Ballistic missile program (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap#Fact_vs_Fiction [wikipedia.org]
It is known today that even the CIA's estimate was too high; the actual number of ICBMs, even including interim-use prototypes, was 4.
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Does it matter? If your enemy has zero, and you have any number greater than zero, you have a significant advantage - bombers could be intercepted, but ICBMs (then) could not. All that's needed is the will to strike.
Re:Ballistic missile program (Score:5, Insightful)
If your enemy has zero, and you have any number greater than zero, you have a significant advantage
Unless you believe the enemy has way more than you. Then it doesn't matter how much they really have.
Four missiles is enough (Score:3)
It is known today that even the CIA's estimate was too high; the actual number of ICBMs, even including interim-use prototypes, was 4.
So, let's see: Washington, New York, Chicago, Detroit? Or would they put San Francisco on that list? Los Angeles?
I don't think any leader in the world would risk losing his main four cities like that.
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Would that be enough? Lets just look at 1 city...Detroit, since I am familiar with it (living in the general area). Would 1 ICBM be enough to devastate and cripple the area? I don't know. The manufacturing basis here is over such a large area. For instance, I know that at least some of the tank manufacturing was done in Warren, which is about 12 miles north of downtown.
So the question is...what is the size of the area of effect of the warheads carried by ICBMs at that time? I honestly don't know. I know bo
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New York lost, before the exchanges were electronic? Good luck cleaning up the economy after that.
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Not to mention trying to reboot the manufacturing base after losing Detroit.
Re:Four missiles is enough (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed. Detroit might be a slice of third-world wasteland today, but it used to be the economic engine of America.
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I wouldn't be surprised to find places like Cleveland or Pittsburgh on priority target lists in that era, as well. We used to actually have a manufacturing base in the USA, and that's how we managed to spool up so quickly for WW2..
Re:Four missiles is enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. What the U.S. accomplished in those 4 years constantly amazes me, especially since we couldn't do a tenth of that today from lack of manufacturing capabilities, lack of national will and a spirit of sacrifice, not having leaders who are actually capable of leading and host of other declines of the past half century.
It seems to me today we couldn't get that kind of effort _started_ in 4 years.
Re:Ballistic missile program (Score:5, Insightful)
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And here, I have a rock that protects from tigers...
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Please post your mail address, I'm kinda wary to hand that kind of information out publicly.
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Oh, and don't forget to include a shipping address, after all you want that rock!
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if only the taliban had a space program... (Score:2)
we would be on Mars by now instead of getting groped by TSA guards.
Re:if only the taliban had a space program... (Score:5, Funny)
Fixed it for you
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i lol'd
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Al-Qaeda building secret base on Mars! (Score:3)
(Decora, you are truly a genius, why didn't we do think of this long ago?!)
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So... What you're saying is that it's a good thing the Soviets were there to keep the Americans in check?
Frankly, I think you're right, and I add that it's also good that the Americans were here to keep the Soviets in check. Things have really gone to Hell since the Cold War ended, and why shouldn't they: th
Re:Ballistic missile program (Score:5, Insightful)
A war begins with a nuclear strike, but does not end with it. Soviets were always inferior to the West in military might, and - unlike the West - actually knew it. If you look at Soviet military policies and doctrines, they were mainly centered around a major defensive war, and an occasional "pacification" or low-scale direct intervention in a proxy war. This was furthermore compounded by the Marxist doctrine, according to which proletarian revolutions in capitalist states were only a matter of time, so all that is needed is to survive until such time they happen, and fund various subversive movements (all kinds - from anti-war protesters to black supremacists to communists proper) to bring the date closer.
If I had to bet on who would use a nuclear weapon first given the opportunity, between US and USSR, I'd definitely pick US (heck, they actually did that before!).
Re:Ballistic missile program (Score:4, Interesting)
A war begins with a nuclear strike, but does not end with it.
I think the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that this statement is not always true, in fact, the only real example of nukes in a war are of nukes ending a war. Despite seven decades of nuclear weapons and numerous wars, one hasn't been used in war since.
I don't think we know how the next big war will begin, but many wars in the past have actually begun from small incidents escalating. The big strike may be the most dramatic, but there is often a chain of events before that. I don't think any major power is just going to sling a nuke without serious provocation.
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I think the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that this statement is not always true, in fact, the only real example of nukes in a war are of nukes ending a war.
The problem is, that example is virtually useless in understanding how a war between nuclear powers would play out.
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Next time it will probably take a
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I disagree with you. The Soviets might have been crude in their developments, but as World War 2 proved, even the crude T-34 beated sophisticated German tank designs. Plus they kept expanding their capabilities after World War 2 while most of the Allies started selling surplus stuff. There is also the question of fighting spirit. The Soviets were determined to wipe whoever tried to do the same things the Germans did to them, out of an instinct of survival, Kruschev was in fact hardwired into that kind of th
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Soviet Union suffered over 20 million casualties in World War II. I'm pretty sure that anyone who caused that kind of death toll would be declared public enemy number one anywhere.
Also, I can't help but notice that Russians didn't, in fact, "wipe" the areas of Germany they con
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True, and as I like to further point out in those sorts of conversations, Hiroshima and Nagasaki unquestionably saved many more lives than even the most hardcore US apologists have argued.
Why? Because those two bombs were about one percent as destructive as the ones that would've eventually been used in Korea, or somewhere else, if we hadn't seen
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these things are to be used only if someone else uses them first. I think we had to use them on real people to understand that.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima only proved that it's most effective to use nukes against a country incapable of responding in kind. The US did use them first, and they won the war, hardly a lesson in restraint.
Re:Ballistic missile program (Score:4, Interesting)
FWIW, I'm Russian. My education is in fact half Soviet (school).
And, yes, after WW2, USSR was militarily inferior to West (and specifically US). This is the inevitable consequence of engaging in a total, all-out warfare on your own soil for 5 years, 4 out of which take place on your own territory. Heck, forget about industry (which was still demolished compared to pre-war Soviet years), look at population alone - USSR lost over 20 million in the war, most of them civilians (that's your workers and child bearers!), compared to America's less than 500k, almost all soldiers.
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Obviously the cuban missile crisis never happened, or that the soviets was willing to use horizontal nukes to break through the blockade. And it was the decision of the soviet military that nuking US ships was the preferred doctrine.
Hypotheticals... (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose I might as well start the game by saying nothing would have been much different. Getting first to the moon would still have been a matter of prestige, so why wouldn't that contest have happened? And would it change who got there first? IIRC the soviets weren't that close, having some issues with the willingness to back the project, and one of the main designers passing away. Here's a link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Moonshot [wikipedia.org]
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I would argue against big advantage of Americans in Moon race. Similarly, if some events happened another way, the outcome could be very different.
Interestingly enough, Alan Shepard flew to suborbital trajectory a few days after Gagarin flew to orbit. Soviets were really close to fly around the Moon in a Zond, but after Apollo-8 did not just that, but also made some 10 circles around the Moon, Soviet bosses decided there is no point to fly on just a fly-by trajectory. I guess, Soviets were about that much b
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Huh? (That translates as "what have you been smoking?)
In Dec 1968:
Facts, weights and interpretations (Score:2)
No, not smoking at all :) and I hope you'll agree.
Remember, what I'm trying to say is "Yuri Gagarin's flight in April 1961 was approximately as far ahead of Alan Shepard's flight in May 1961 technologically and timewise, as Apollo-8 Moon orbital mission in December 1968 was ahead of - cancelled - Zond mission soon afterwards".
I don't think that's too far from the truth. Let's review your objections and see.
In Dec 1968... Soviets were considering a flyby because they couldn't go into lunar orbit. (And the manned flyby was delayed multiple times because of safety problems with the spacecraft.)
True, I agree - but similarly in April 1961 Americans were considering a suborbital flight because the
Re:Hypotheticals... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, we can all blame Mao. There's no glory in being #2, but people will still try their best to avoid ending up as #3. Thanks to the mess Mao created with "the Great Leap Forward" (which stopped China in its tracks for an entire generation), the Soviet Union had no real incentive to get to the moon once it was obvious that the US would beat them to it, and the US had no real incentive to keep going to the moon once it was obvious that the Soviet Union wasn't even going to waste its time or money bothering.
The (mainly US-influenced) doctrine that "nobody" can "own the moon" (or even legitimately own a small, well-defined and populated part of it) is part of the problem, too. Had the US staked a claim to a 100km area surrounding each landing site, and pledged to respect similar claims from other nations, the late 70s and 80s would have seen a mad international space race to plant flags on the moon -- a race that would have almost certainly included countries like Britain (most likely forming its own Commonwealth Space Agency that included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries), France (probably being the dominant member of what ended up being the European Space Agency, but without Britain), India, Pakistan (possibly as a part of Britain's CSA), China, and everyone else.
The point when things started getting ugly would have been the late 80s/90s, when there were thousands of flags planted, but the main defenders of those claims were lawyers rather than armed soldiers on the moon. The US, Soviet Union, Britain/CSA, and France/ESA would have probably never challenged each other's claims in public, but you can bet there would have been lots of screaming and angry speeches at the UN if someone like Indonesia staked a claim for 100 square miles of land claimed by one of them in the late 70s, then never looked at again once the claim formalities were taken care of.At that point, the UN would have probably settled on a policy that required demonstration of active settlement and use to challenge adverse possession, and automatically allowed intruders to keep a small chunk of any claim that was undefended when they arrived.
Would it have been a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. But there would almost certainly have been a lot more people living and working on the moon than there are today (zero).
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I dunno... If we hadn't been repeatedly beaten in the space race, would we have been willing to pour so much time/effort/money into a moon landing?
It'd probably still make a nice goal... And I assume the Soviets would have been aiming for it...
But would the "we do these things because they're hard" speech, with the aggressive deadline, have ever happened?
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You obviously didn't pour enough in. I mean the shadows are all wrong, and what's with the fluttering flag...
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Because the Soviets didn't really start trying until they were already behind. Khrushchev didn't take Kennedy's speech serious at first, considering it propaganda drivel and an attempt to make the Soviets divert funds away from the military missile program so the US can catch up, it was not until late in the "space race" that the USSR realized the US were dead serious with their "moon lunacy" and tried, and half-hearted at that, to catch up.
The Soviets failed to see any "sensible" reason to go to the moon.
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Soviets cancel space program.
Moscow, August 20 1958.
Politburo decides to put money from cancelled space and reduced missile program program into domestic development.
Washington May 5 1961,
Alan Shepard, an American is the first man in space.
Belgrade, September 14 1987.
Soviet leaders hail the 23rd straight year of growth for the great Soviet Union.
Washington, September 7 2007
US government takes control of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.
Moscow, September 8 2007,
So
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Groom Lake, August 4 2012,
Skynet goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defence. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
One day, I will learn to proof read what I copy and paste.
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You forgot to mention the 66th Amendment that would have allowed Schwarzenegger to be President. I'd go into more detail, but I've got a reservation at Taco Bell, and I don't want to be late for a nice place like that.
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I agree - I don't think it would have made all that much difference. Both countries developed lots of space tech over the years. Like most things that seem critically important at the time, a few decades down the road they often don't seem nearly as important. What was important was that that mankind spent a lot of money on technology. That pushed society forward in many ways. What's kind of pitiful is that we only seem willing to devote those kind of resources to technological progress in wartime (hot or c
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Harry Turtledove [sfsite.com] has several alternate histories based on this. Some going back to "what if the Civil War had been fought to a draw, and then continued into WWI times."
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I love alternate history stories, but Turtledove books always seem have obvious anachronisms in the artwork on their covers (i.e., modern weapons in the Civil War era) the idea of which always turned me off.
Newt Gingrich, being a history teacher of some reknown, coauthored a novel called 1945 [wikipedia.org] that posited an alternate timeline where, IIRC, Hitler got sick for a short period at some key moment and failed to make some particularly bad decision he made in real life, which ended up changing the war significantl
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I love alternate history stories, but Turtledove books always seem have obvious anachronisms in the artwork on their covers (i.e., modern weapons in the Civil War era) the idea of which always turned me off.
That's really only one particular Turtledove book you're thinking of, The Guns of the South, which was in fact inspired when someone asked at a convention panel, "What if Robert E. Lee had AK-47's?" Turtledove took the question and ran with it, and produced a very enjoyable time-travel story. If that's not your cup of tea, fine, but you should be aware that most of his alternate history works are straightforward "what if X had happened at this particular time instead of Y" stories, without any other MacGu
No faked moon landing (Score:2, Funny)
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http://www.google.com/moon/ [google.com] Derp. Also telescope.
Re:No faked moon landing (Score:4, Informative)
Gosh, what if, huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Would it really matter? I guess it helped us fuel other areas of advancement, but as far as space itself? All we've accomplished in the 42 years since we landed on the moon is sending out a bunch of probes and fancy RC cars. No doubt, the photographs from these endeavors are amazing and we're still acquiring knowledge. It's just too bad we've reached a point where we aren't willing to do anything that might put a person at risk of so much as chipping a fingernail, we've exhausted our shuttle program and are currently having to rely on transport from other nations, and are put off by spending any money on space at all, because we've got to save all that precious monopoly money to bail out corporations and foreign banks at a number that dwarfs the entire space program.
Don't get me wrong - I know that a lot of our advancements are being off-loaded to privacy industry and that we are making enough advances in other areas of technology and science so that whenever we really do make another massive push into space, we will be doing so from a more capable point (kind of like you might have been able to start a computer at the task of decrypting some data in 1980 and that same computer would still be trying to decode it in 2011, while a computer you got last month and set to the task of decrypting the same data would have finished by now).
However, can you really imagine people's responses in the last half of 1969 if you had told them "revel in this, because mankind won't touch the moon or any other soil or make it beyond our low orbit for the next fifty years"? They would have said you were a fucking lunatic.
I'm thrilled that the space race brought us the home computer and memory foam, but my mom was a little girl when we landed on the moon and I would love more than just about anything for us to have another world-stopping-all-eyes-on-television space-moment like that during my life time. I suspect I'll be long dead before that happens.
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Wasn't it Sputnik (Score:2, Insightful)
It is before my time but I seem to recall being told that the big wake-up call was sputnik. The first men in space was big as well but easily diminished because it was essentially a ballistic shot not a real space trip. Sputnik was up there a long time, beeping all the way, undeniable.
Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked. Still American history teaches that german te
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Which would make it a ballistic shot. The world you're looking for is "suborbital".
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Re:Wasn't it Sputnik (Score:4, Interesting)
The first men in space was big as well but easily diminished because it was essentially a ballistic shot not a real space trip.
Vostok_1 flew a full orbit with a re-entry burn [wikipedia.org]. Without that burn it would have flown many more orbits. Freedom_7 flew a simple ballistic trajectory [wikipedia.org].
If the US had been first to fly an astronaut I suspect the USSR would have been slightly more likely to make the first landing on the moon. They would have been more motivated, but their integration ability was (and is) pretty poor.I would argue that this is a reflection of top-down architecture in their politics and engineering culture. They are more likely to say we will build a single system to do X where the US would say we will build systems to do A, B and C; then we will put them together to accomplish X.
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Russian technology is the epitome of the KISS principle. But that's also its weakness (and the weakness of our developments lately): It will work to spec, and ONLY to spec. There is no "hey, let's add $simple_thing, that could make $next_step a lot easier" thinking. Vostok could put a man into space, but only that. No enhancement possible. Voskhod exposed this flaw, it was an attempt to build on the Vostok example and it was allegedly a horrible experience for the cosmonauts using it. So they had to pretty
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Yes, Apollo could probably also do that job, but it would be HEAPS more expensive. Also, the Soyuz was not quite ready for lunar flight when the mission description was changed, which actually was pretty close to "get people and supplies into orbit" at that time, and I guess the Soviets learned something from the early blunders concerning the reuse of designs.
Re:Wasn't it Sputnik (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked.
German tech [wikipedia.org] did not suck ,they had rocket and jet propelled aircraft, radio guided bombs the V1 and V2, the finest tanks in the field etc.
What sucked was there procurement process. Unlike the allies each service had their own committees R&D and proving grounds and the secret of success was not to make a better mouse trap but get the ear of ah high ranking official (preferably Hitler) and keep pulling strings.
To quote the American investigators after the war:"Very defiantly we believe there were no other German proximity fuse is worth following up - there were more crackpot notions getting political support that we could have imagined" and "The device was made by a set of irresponsible inventors with no manufacturing connections. They would have been shut down without their political connections".
Their problem (aside from massive waste and duplication of effort and that Hitler cancelled and disbanded most of the German weapons research in 1940) was that their tech was too good but not appropriate to their situation Germany simply did not have the resources to make enough of it to win the war
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Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked. Still American history teaches that german tech led to space conquest...
The Soviets didn't use captured Germans or their technology? That's not what I heard. Wikipedia's article on the father of the Soviet missile program [wikipedia.org] says
Along with other experts, [Korolyov] flew to Germany to recover the technology of the German V-2 rocket. The Soviets placed a priority on reproducing lost documentation on the V-2, and studying the various parts and captured manufacturing facilities. That work continued in Germany until late 1946, when the Soviet experts and some 150 German scientists an
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Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked.
Holy poop. Are you actually serious?!
The Germans lost the war because they went into a fight with the Soviets, where they had over 5 (five) MILLION men killed (more than the size of their entire army on the western front!!!), as well as tens of thousands pieces of expensive and advanced military equipment.
That's why they lost. To think otherwise just means you've been watching too many movies about saving private Ryan. What Germany lost on the eastern front is an order of magnitude greater than the losses o
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Maybe. I'm not at all certain of that, actually. Germany was and is the strongest nation in Europe, and it had conquered most of Europe before going after Russians. Had it not had the Eastern Front, it could well have concentrated enough troops to win the D-Day, and had it not allied with Japan it might have avoided it entirely. And even when it did go after Russians, it still could had won the war if not for Hi
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Hey mods, not insightful. As others pointed out, and the article states, Gagarin was in orbit. Shepherd, the American follow on, wasn't.
Also, take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:S-IC_engines_and_Von_Braun.jpg [wikipedia.org]
Those are F1 rockets, forming the first stage of a Saturn V. See the guy standing in front of them? That's Werner von Braun, the famous Nazi rocket designer, who played a key role in designing those rockets. Wikipedia says he was their "creator."
Regardless of how you feel about t
We Wanted Space Planes Instead (Score:2)
Frist, the USSR wasn't 3rd world, they were 2nd world. They are the definition of 2nd world. 3rd world were countries that
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American tech was great (A-bomb, radar, penicillin, cryptography/computers)
A-bomb (American), radar (British), penicillin (British/Australian), cryptography/computers (British). Well, one out of four isn't bad...
You do know that the world's first working Aeroplane and Telephone were manufactured in America right? You could have actually mentioned some ACTUAL American tech.
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You're right of course, I should've said allies rather than just america. I hope you'll agree though that America was at least partly responsible for making these technologies more than just laboratory curiosities*. (Also, as you pointed out America was responsible for a whole host of other significant inventions).
In any case, my point was that Germany was no slouch when it came to basic science/industrial application of technology either. However, judging from the tone of the parent post it seems he has
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Indeed it does, and IMHO this warrants a study into why America excels in this.
To start with, the reason I wouldn't even try starting a business of my own is that if said business fails (as most do), I'll be in debt slavery the rest of my life. Is this different in America?
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Consider that while Robert Goddard was playing with his (relatively) puny liquid fueled rockets (which looked like flying pieces of plumbing!) Werner Von Braun developed ballistic missiles capable of reliably delivering 1 ton "payloads" (ok warheads) hundreds of miles away on an industrial scale.
Von Braun had a different take on the matter:
Don't you know about your own rocket pioneer? Dr. Goddard was ahead of us all.
--Wernher von Braun, when asked about Goddard's work following World War II
Von Braun definitely had a lot more resources available to him, and there's no doubt that his designs were more advanced than Goddard's, but I don't think Goddard should be dismissed so callously. Your main point that German tech did not suck is valid, of course, as anyone with an awareness of history should know.
The commies did it first, the west is still sore (Score:5, Insightful)
It was 50 years ago, get over it.
The hang-wringing in the western press about this seems to me to be largely due to an inability to fit the event into the triumphalist narrative that has endured in government and media since the end of the cold war. The idea that capitalism, specifically our version of capitalism is best always, everywhere and forever.
Its disquieting to such dogmatists to be reminded of even a single success from an alternative way of doing things. Even if that way of doing things ultimately imploded on itself decades later, it makes a rational person question the absolutism of the narrative, and thus the narrators must try and dissect and blunt the impact of the threatening event.
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They can't get over it, as it is connected to some Western fears. The West and especially the USA are not that important anymore and the Chinese are considered to be commies (even if they are not). So the USA fears to loose against the commies after all. "We are all doomed!" This leads to the problem that the US think they are safe when they can control everything. But this normally piss of others. Now when they are getting closer to bankruptcy they feel other gaining on them. Even if this is just a normali
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The true irony here is that the central idea of capitalism is that competition creates efficiency and lack of competition allows inefficiency. Thus, when capitalism no longer has any competi
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"Yes, the Soviets may have reached the early Space Race milestones before the US did, but the Russians are still using the EXACT SAME launch vehicle, 50 years later, that put up their first satellite. It's like sprinting the first mile of a marathon and dropping out. The US paced itself and finished the race, and as an avid space exploration fan, I feel no need to "blunt the impact." (I kind of enjoy the irony.)"
Well, sort of. You might enjoy the irony even more realizing that the US is currently contracti
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Not quite. The R-7 had several upper stages added over 10 years to become the first Soyuz rocket, and that rocket was then modified to be safer during the Apollo-Soyuz test program. Further modifications were made after the cold war ended and the US bought Russia into the ISS.
The thing is; it works. It puts ~8t into orbit very reliably, very cheaply, and provides human occupants with what is generally a very smooth ride (based on the description of the launch given by an American).
Why change what works so w
No moonshots, but little else changed (Score:2)
Being first actually confers very little commercial advantage (just look at the first web browser - much good it did them, or the first personal computer). So far was geographical firsts goes: unless there's something there which can be exploited, even less benefit. The only reasons the americans went to t
It would still be inconsequential... (Score:2)
You might ask why:
America discovered the Airplane but Europeans are beating us big time with Airbus.
America discovered the transistor but it was not until the Japanese came that we saw its true potential. No wonder all electronics in America are Asian made.
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[Just] because something is MANUFACTURED someplace else doesn't make the place that it was MANUFACTURED imbued with some sort of superiority. I am guessing the design and creation of the chip is more important than the plant it was made in.
Yeah, unless you're interested in this concept called "money", a.k.a."profit", in which case the manufacturing guy has it all over the design and creation guy.
Never forget that design and creation are expenses, expenses that are only recouped by future manufacturing income.
Even as an independent contractor, the price you can get for your design or creation has to be less than the perceived gross profit from manufacturing it, or no one will buy it.
Plus, since the manufacturing guy is typically closer to the
What if Zond had beaten Apollo 8 ? (Score:3)
Apollo 8 was rushed and sent to the Moon (the first manned test of a Saturn V went to lunar orbit, not staying in Earth orbit), specifically to beat a manned Soviet lunar flyby planned with the Zond spacecraft. (I.e., the Apollo 8 and Apollo 9 missions were swapped; the reasons for this were kept secret at the time.) As we beat both Zond and the Soviet lunar landing program (Zond was more or less flight ready, with 2 unmanned test flights, the landing program, not so much) before the Soviets actually flew any people to or around the Moon, the Soviets were able to pretend that they didn't have a manned lunar program, which made it possible for the Nixon administration to kneecap manned space flight a few years later. NASA and the US have never recovered from that, and the USA has (to be blunt) never really done much with manned space flight since.
Arguably, if Apollo 8 had stayed in Earth orbit, Alexei Leonov would have commanded the first mission to circle the Moon, the "space race" would have extended to lunar operations, and humanity would probably have multiple bases on Mars at this moment.
Re:What if Zond had beaten Apollo 8 ? (Score:4, Interesting)
(Sigh.)
When will people actually study space history rather than repeating urban legends?
The Apollo program was killed in the budget battles of 1965-67, when the Apollo Applications program was all but canceled and the Apollo Lunar Landing program was capped at Apollo 20. By the time we landed on the Moon, the production lines were already starting to shut down.
The idea that throwing spacecraft away was a bad one dates from the early 60's - in fact, even earlier there were some in NASA that regarded Mercury as nothing more than a cheap way to get medical information on man in space and a temporary distraction from the Real Thing - reusable space infrastructure. The first contracts for what became the Shuttle were signed on July 18th 1969 (while Apollo 11 was enroute to the moon), and had been budgeted for in 1968 (before Nixon was even elected).
At worst, Nixon gave the orders to pull the plug on a patient on advanced life support and already near death. If anything, the Shuttle program fared as badly as it did because of continued Congressional insistence that it be done on the cheap.
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I was around at the time. Von Braun and all of the original space enthusiasts (German and American) were retired. Most of the Apollo middle tier of engineers and scientists were let go. (I remember PhD's pumping gas in Cocoa Beach near the Cape in '73 or '74.) Nerva was canceled. Manned Venus flyby was canceled. It is true that LBJ was not a space enthusiast, and the Democratic Congress certainly went along with all of this, and even pushed for some of it, but all of this happened on Nixon's watch.
Note that
NASA is buying seats on Russian space shuttles (Score:4, Insightful)
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We could learn a thing or two about capitalism
Capitalism isn't the issue there. The issue is focusing on what you do best. For the russians, (and the europeans, to a lesser extent) their space industry can trace its lineage back to the first manned rockets in the early 60's. Sure, there have been refinements, upgrades and innovation since then - russian rocket engines being a good example. Whereas the american approach seems to be: develop a project for a specific goal, achieve that goal, throw away the technology, go on to start again for the next pro
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We are retiring our fleet and will be hitching rides on Russian shuttles over the next 4 years. While I do think private and commercial space flight will play a major role in future space flight, I think NASA Is a bit optimistic in thinking that we'll have private rockets in place by 2015. I suspect we'll still be riding on Russian shuttles well past 2015.
First, they're not shuttles, they are Soyuz's (one use re-entry vehicles).
Second, there is Space X and its new Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. Unless things blow up (literally), I think that US astronauts will be flying on SpaceX iron by ~ 2015.
50 years and still butthurt (Score:2)
The amount of butthurt USSR did to the USA amazes me. I still have a space encyclopaedia for teens composed by USA authors, which doesn't mention Gagarin or "Mir" space station. Actually, the chapter about space station only mentions some fictional US project to build one (which never came into fruition) , as if it had never been done before. Lulz.
If the commies had been to the Moon first too... (Score:3)
Playing the "What If?" History Game (Score:2)
The question arises: What if ______________________________________?
The question then goes away and stops bothering people.
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The question will sit. The question is correct in sitting.
Acknowledgement (Score:2)
Second to orbit because of better A-bomb (Score:2)
After WWII, the USA put significant effort into creating a light weight A-bomb because the size of the rocket you need to put a bomb on the other side of the earth grows exponentially with payload weight. Stalin, OTOH, pretty much said: "This one's good enough. Now go build a rocket big enough to throw it." The result of this is that the USSR had launch vehicles with a larger throw weight than the USA.
Launching a person into orbit requires a certain minimum throw weight because you need room for the perso
Slashvertisement (Score:2)
Re:Nonsensical question (Score:4, Informative)
This is revisionist crap.
ICBM tests were ballasted to give other groups in the US (not staffed by Nazis) a chance to launch the first US satellite.
Also, the US was fully committed to the space race by the time of Vostok 1, which is the actual event being discussed here.
The idea that early Soviet successes were part of some cunning ploy by Eisenhower is utterly retarded. The public perception of the Soviet threat helped carry Kennedy in the 1960 election, so you are supposing that Eisenhower would deliberately sabotage his own party and his own vice-president. I am calling bullshit on this one.
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Something wonderful about knowing you will go home early if you work extra hard. Or never have to worry about going home again.
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No, you really don't need quantum mechanics or GR to get to space, or even the moon. Newtonian physics is good enough to get you there, and in fact all the calculations done by NASA completely neglected relativistic effects.
Without GR you would be struggling to explain the perihelion advance of Mercury still, and you wouldn't have very accurate GPS devices, but you certainly would be able to hit the moon, or anywhere within our solar system with enough accuracy to get a rocket there.
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i am just wondering, how far modern materials science, lasers, telecommunications, computers, opto-electronics, radio communication, etc, would have gotten without quantum physics, ... ?
Pretty far. I'm not sure if any of these, even today, really use quantum physics. Modern chips are just starting to get to the point where quantum effects matter. Most materials science is pretty empirical/statistical. Dunno if opto-electronics is on a scale where quantum effects matter (though I'd guess not.) Radio, certainly predates quantum mechanics, and is based on Maxwell.
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Actually, transistors are based on quantum mechanics. Perhaps they could be based on just experimental data without any underlaying theory, or perhaps they wouldn't be. We'll never know.
Word. (Score:2)
It's not very often that I'm in such agreement with an AC, but also having lived through the time, well, yeah. What he said. Indeed, imagine what the US might have done with the Bay of Pigs invasion [wikipedia.org] (which took place the week after Gagarin's flight) if it had been, say, John Glenn -- a Marine Corps officer -- on that orbital flight, instead of Gagarin. Intriguing.