Wasn’t the point of the “space race” at the time the ability to deliver nuclear weapons from orbit to anywhere on the globe?
I thought they took a seat out of Vostok, not life support.
Can you wear space suits and still fit three guys into Soyuz, or was that also Vostok?
Well I’ll third Zenster’s and RickJay’s view on the future of the human race.
I will say that the Soviets won the race to space. The race to the moon was won by the Americans and the race for space is still being figured out.
Voskhod: removal of ejection seat, and no spacesuits in 3-man configuration (2-man config had aftermarket bolt-on airlock, for spacewalk). It also meant you were looking at the instruments sideways since the seats had to be mounted at right angles.
Soyuz was designed in several different configurations; the one that flew during the 60s and 70s (7K class), carried 2 with suits, 3 without, depending on mission. After initial tests it was made std. procedure (intil S-11) to fly shirtsleeves anyway, no matter the complement, for weight/space considerations. BTW Apollo command modules ALSO re-entered in non-spacesuit configuration though not necesarily always, so a casual attitude re: pressure suits seemed pretty much SOP for both programs in the early 70s. After the Soyuz 11 incident flights were 2-man with suits until T-series, which was already under development since '67 and was made for 3 suited crew, came on line.
The so-called “space race” wasan example of how the people of the world were fooled by:
(1) the intense secrecy of the former Soviet Union
(2) the propagandizinf of space by NASA and the american media
The Russians only released selective info on their space program, so in the west, people were constantly wondering what was next. As others pointedout, the Russian space program was a vast exercise in delusion…at no point were the russians ever in a position to send a cosmonaut to the moon.However, the russians DID manage to do a lot with some very basic technology…they didn’t have:
(1) reliable computers
(2)miniature electronics
(3) good communications
I also believe that sevarl russian missions were faked…like Leonov’s space walk (probably filmedin a studio), although the space walk actually took place.
Even my 1960’s era copy of “Those Godless Communists” states that the Soviets won the space race.
How much of a space program in the US was there prior to Sputnik? Was it a case of there being two programs, with the USSR’s getting to space first, or did the USSR launch a satellite, and the US said “hey, we should have one of those, too”, and went out and built one?
scr4
Do you mean it’s the only operating manned spacecraft?
Inser between “hey,” and “we”
“you could put a thermonuclear warhead on that,”
The Soviets weren’t too far behind in the race to the moon. They had a rocket technically capable of reaching the moon, although without the bugs ironed out. The reason for the failures on the launchpad was that they rushed it right near the end. Then once they realised they couldn’t get a man to the moon quicker than the US, they tried to send an unmanned moon mission to go to the moon and prove that there was nothing worthwhile there (and upstaging the americans when they were to land afterwards and also find pretty much nothing). This failed too.
Imo the overall cold war space race was won by the Soviets simply because they kept going, albeit not as spectacularly as earlier. The US essentially jumped out of space after it got to the moon with a far less funded equivalent and didn’t do anything near what the Soviets did from then on.
The USSR won the SPACE race, because they were the first to go into SPACE. Now as for the moon…
Neither the USSR nor the USA won the space race: humanity did.
The next step is to find a colonisable planet and settle there.
Humanity hasn’t won anything yet. We’re barely even still in the race.
If we declare it over now, I’d have to say Russia won… or whoever they call themselves. They got up there first, and they’re still there. We aren’t. We let a piece of foam stop us. They blow up 4 rockets and consider the 5th one a success.
They win… at one heck of a cost.
Actually, with the 1957-59 IGY activities it was expected that the first artificial satellites would be launched.
There were parallel efforts, but the US did not have a comprehensively organized “space program”. The various military services were running their own rocketry programs, the various defense contractors were each independently developing missiles to sell to those services, and NACA or whatever the civilian aerospace agency was back then was a smallish, unimportant research-coordination outfit.
Add to that how we knew we had the better high-technology and believed we had the better rocketmen, so many here figured that if we weren’t ready, they must be nowhere near it. By mid-1957 the Von Braun team was technically ready to propose a satellite launch but the government was not really interested for various reasons, such as that this was an Army team, that they really wanted a custom-made ground-up space vehicle, and the rather unsavory earlier associations of the team leader. The choice was to have the first US satellite be an ostensibly civilian project, Vanguard. It wasn’t ready in time for Sputnik, and it blew up on national TV when they tried to launch. When they finally cleared Von Braun to launch, they made him rename the rocket booster (from Jupiter-C to Juno-1) so it would not be a launch on an “Army missile”.
What did happen then was that from the flight profiles of the first few sputniks our intelligence figured that the Soviet booster had superior range and payload capabilities to what we had. Hence the “missile gap” (which, it turns out, was a success of Soviet propaganda: their rockets were bigger than ours, but they did not really have that many more until much later in the game) And thus the government had an epiphany about how we needed a big, government-sponsored Space Program as a technology driver for things such as heavy-lift boosters, accurate guidance systems, manned spaceflight capabilities, etc. , pronto, rather than wait for “the market” to come up with them.
At the time of Sputnik, we weren’t that far behind the Soviets, if at all.
Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957. We launched our first successful satellite in January 1958.
Another reason we’d waited on launching a satellite was that we wanted it to actually have some use and functionality. All Sputnik 1 did was go ‘beep’ as it orbited the earth. Their ‘lead’ at this time was minimal.
They sent Yuri Gagarin into space well before we were ready to send a man up. They were also ahead of us in having two spacecraft aloft simultaneously (Bykovsky and Tereshkova, each in 1-person capsules). (My understanding is that Valentina Tereshkova was also the first person to have a nervous breakdown in space, but the Soviets kept that under wraps at the time.) So with all that (and with longer missions in the early to mid 1960s than we were doing), they were running ahead, or doing a good job of faking it. Meanwhile our unmanned program was firing rockets at the Moon, and missing.
In terms of general flight/mission expertise, we took the lead with the rendezvous and docking of Geminis 6 and 7, and held it until it was clear, after a bunch of Moon landings, that there was no longer a real competition.
Wrong, Kennedy declared the goal was to put a Man on the Moon and the Soviet Union accepted…and failed.
The United States effectively won the Space Race in 1968 when the first Humans ever to see the earth from another Heavenly body, came around from the Far Side of the Moon and saw the Earth Rise for the first time in person.
At this point the Soviet Union became the underdog of the United States, begging to be included in the US’s space program efforts.
They tried to re-unite National pride with Mir but it was uneffective as we began to stay up there as well…we were the dominant partners all the time.
Winning a few pop-shots doesn’t win you the race.
Getting into space wasn’t really a race. Eisenhower and his advisors were dead set against it, and only changed their mind after Sputnik.
We won the race to the moon, and that was a race.
But the real space race is for humanity to expand into space, the way our ancient ancestors populated the world. We’d have self sufficient colonies all over the solar system, and have an economy with space integrated. By that measure, we’ve both lost the space race.
The moon became the target after the US realised that the USSR had beaten them to into space.
If the USSR hadn’t had a man in space first there would not have been the target to get to the moon by the end of the decade.
I don’t think the question is right. It was never a race for anything but prestige. Ands that would have gone on as long as the US and the USSR had active space programs.
All those countries capable of a multi-vehicle accident on Mars please raise your hand. DOH!
National pride aside, I think the premise of the debate is flawed. The race to put a man in orbit and beyond was a combination of national pride, military development and space exploration. To assign absolute victory ignores all the historic accomplishments. Each milestone raised the bar a little higher in a competitive game of one-upmanship.
The “Space Race” specifically was the post-Sputnik competitive efforts by the US and the USSR to demonstrate their rocket capability, using their respective cadres of former Nazi rocket scientists.
Rocket research had received somewhat short shrift in the US until Sputnik, carried out by small groups of researchers without a (comparitively) great deal of government backing. Goddard was rejected, von Karman’s group was ignored, and Werner von Braun had to constantly BEG for money.
The real message of Sputnik was :“We can build a rocket with sufficient power and control to place a satellite in a specific orbit hundreds of miles above the earth, and by extension, we can place a rocket with ANYTHING (bombs, troops, etc.) on it ANYWHERE we want to.”
The Cold War sense of the world was that if the US did not show itself to be a formidable opponent of the USSR, there would be little reason for smaller nations not to allow themselves to succumb to Communist rule.
So the Space Race, which really began only AFTER Sputnik, was about showing what could be done with rockets, as a posturing move to suggest potential military capability, although all launches had benefits to other areas, as well. The USSR placed the first man in space, but the Americans created a string of successful space probes and were the only ones to complete a manned Moon mission (following several unmanned missions from BOTH sides).
After that was over, the two powers diverged in their capabilities, the US having more success with their shuttles and probes, the USSR having more success with their manned space stations.
The combination of these successes was to have been the crowning glory if the ISS, but neither technology has turned out be as advertised: the aging shuttle fleet is falling apart , and the MIR turned out on closer inspection to a rather shoddy construction effort.
Even worse than that. When the Eisenhower administration got wind of von Braun and the Army’s plans to launch a satellite with a Redstone, they were explicitly forbidden to do so in favor of the Navy’s (late) Vanguard project. After Sputnik they got the green light, and launched Explorer 1 very soon afterward, still ahead of Vanguard. We didn’t lose the race to orbit, we got tripped by our own team.