Imagine claiming victory after being eight years late lmao. Typical US.
Compare this to what the US is doing with space now. Sending wealthy entrepreneurs to go on pointless little space tours. Gone is the quest for human knowledge and searching for our place in the universe, slowly being replaced with a tourism business.
slowly being replaced with a tourism business.
Don't forget the Internet business that doesn't work as well as traditional satellite Internet does while simultaneously making things harder for all ground based space observatories.
Reminder that Gagarin's life as a boy during WW2 is harrowing and inspiring. He so perfectly embodies the Soviet people
Strapped into a small compartment on the tiny spacecraft Sputnik 2, Laika died during her fourth orbit when her capsule overheated.
The Americans responded with the same panic that met the launch of the first Sputnik. Eisenhower ordered the Naval Research Laboratory---which had been working separately for years on launching an artificial satellite into space---to immediately prepare a manned spaceflight. In January 1958, America finally responded to the Soviets’ scientific aggression by launching a Vanguard rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida containing two stray dogs.
These dogs died an icy death within an hour of leaving the atmosphere when their cabin depressurized. They were hailed as national heroes, and became a massive propaganda coup for NATO. Behind the iron curtain, VOA broadcasts let anyone with a radio know that capitalists were more efficient at killing dogs in space than communists.
Khrushchev was livid. He ordered his scientists to embark on what became known as the Luna program. On the second day of 1959, Luna 1 was launched towards the moon with 17 dogs from the streets of Vienna aboard, three of which were pregnant. The dogs all perished by the time the craft reached the Van Allen belt.
NASA, which had been created the previous summer, embarked on Project Mercury, which blasted a succession of angry cats into deep space with their tails tied together. The Soviets responded with the Vostok program, which sent horses into orbit strapped into medical devices that would periodically revive them so that a single horse could be killed, theoretically, dozens of times.
In the 1960s the space race turned to a new goal: to be the first nation to kill a dog on the moon.
The Americans suffered a massive setback in 1967 when a test of the Apollo 1 capsule resulted in three dogs dying in an electrical fire on Earth, not in space. But in 1969 the lunar module of Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon. Before a global audience of nearly 1 billion people, the door of the Eagle opened and the three dogs perished within minutes.
The Soviets had been bested, but in 1971 they achieved another scientific breakthrough when they established the Salyut 1 space station, which embodied man’s ultimate ambition of creating a self-contained environment in space where generations of dogs could be bred and killed.
After the fall of the USSR, a team of scientists from Russia, the US, and other countries---led by the American dog-killing wunderkind Pete Buttigieg---worked together to build the International Space Station. This year is the 22nd anniversary of the launch of the ISS, which to this day remains functioning in orbit---with a fully staffed kill shelter that only services pit bulls---as a monument not only to the science of space exploration, but to harmony among men on Earth.
I don't want to admit how many paragraphs of this I read before I realized it was a joke
Lol they're making a movie about fighting the ruskies on the iss
"sure the soviets were first to a bunch of milestones but it was only because they didn't value human life or safety!"i've seriously heard this fucking argument which is absurd. americans have gotten way more astronauts killed and this list doesn't even count the apollo fire!
Same cope argument they have when told that the USSR won WWII. "Only because they saw their soldiers as expendable!"
No proof, of course. All vibes-based.
people still bringing up the stalingrad human wave attacks and giving assault divisions no rifles and heavy machinegun support units only existing to gun down soviet soldiers doing tactical retreats like it's fucking gospel and it makes me want to pull my hair out
I used to like Enemy at the Gates and only learned years later that it was all stupid propaganda and lies. Backing units were real - their job was to defend the rear area against infiltrators, round up lost soviet soldiers and send them to assembly areas where they'd be sent back to their squads, and since they were veterans who had proven themselves, they were used as a mobile reserve to reinforce the line when there was need.
sounds reasonable and practical
the second time i watched that movie i was actually screaming at the screen like "why aren't you guys providing supporting fire you have heavy MGs i guess you don't want to win" and this was before i was a filthy commie it just seemed so fucking illogical
but nah the movie said they just existed to waste what was obviously precious and rare ammo to murder their own forces because evil stalin
Word. And the 2 men 1 rifle thing, afaik, is bs too. The supply situation was very, very bad in Stalingrad, but never so bad that they didn't have enough Mosins for everyone.
so i'm guessing it was more like "rifle for everyone but here's like a few magazines you'll have to scavenge what you can"?
which was absolutely a situation the western allies encountered as well especially the airborne units
People are fighting to the death rather than surrender because their country is getting genocided? Must be brainwashed.
actually 500 soviet astronauts were stranded in space and either shot themselves or poisoned themselves. the USSR never revealed this because it would've been a major blow to communismBased on my experience in kerbal space program, where there are several hundred rescue ships of rescue ships of rescue ships carreening around in kerbin orbit, this checks out.
People say Americans won the space race, so they did. That's how a propaganda battle works?
Propaganda is the only thing the USA is good at, so this checks out
In school I was taught that all the first POC astronauts were Americans. Surprise surprise, I later learned that several of the first Asian astronauts in space were aligned with the Soviets, and the first black and hispanic astronaut is a Cuban
Yeah. I had just listened to the proles' pod episode on the space race in 2019 when I encountered a similar meme that I wanted to recreate and improve upon. So I took my stimulant medication and made this in GIMP overnight. I submitted it to r/CTH and it was cross-posted to r/HistoryMemes and blew up. I still see it pop up on social media every now and then. The old sub had a really wide reach; I'm convinced that's why they shut us down.
BUT THE TOO WURLD WORS!!! (that we joined 2-3 years after every other major power was already in it from the safety of the other side of a big ass ocean)
Hey USSR, congratulations on beating the USA in the space race, how's it going now?
Hot take: First animal shouldn't be celebrated. Laika didn't ask to be launched into space to die alone.
Was hoping someone would say this. Laika makes me so fucking sad, man.
honestly i think this meme is a cope. The US won the propaganda campaign. Not even Russia gives a shit about the USSR's achievements in space anymore. Besides, people are just more impressed by the "personal scale." The USSR or even China could be the first one to make contact with aliens 50 light years away using signals and satellites. All of that becomes irrelevant in culture if some American shakes the hand of an alien and it's broadcasted live on TV. Chalk it up to western individualism, but the truth is that no one gives a shit about some machines, and they're definitely not going to give a shit someone being the first of anything if you can't sell it.
It's why Apple is so successful despite being years, even a decade, behind and failing to implement shit that Android and iOS jailbreak devs have released long ago. Those devs don't get the credit, and Apple reaps the benefits of other people's work thanks to their marketing team. Really, it reminds me of democrats crying about Biden's achievements lol. Let's pretend they do matter - what are they doing to fix people's perceptions that he's doing squat? Nothing. They're just banking on his "achievements" speaking for themselves instead of doing any EFFECTIVE propaganda to showcase their success.
I care less about the propaganda and more about reality. The reality is that the USSR got to space first. That's all. I don't see how correcting a misconception is cope.
Samsies. Apollo was the USA's only real "win". Dude's walking around on the moon is cool, it really is, but then sometimes i also look at the images from Venus, taken in 100 atmos of pressure, at 500 degrees, in a seething atmosphere of 300 km/h acid winds.
Idk if it's true, but i believe the soviets went to space to see what was up there, and the americans went to space because they saw sputnik overhead and felt terror in their hearts.
As Amber said, the USSR kept us honest. We went to space because we faced an actual nation building project with aspirations and dreams
This meme is an effective piece of propaganda however. As you say perceptions were shaped to believe the us won, they can be changed.
This meme did a lot to radicalise teenage me, exactly because it highlighted how the only victory the us had, was the propaganda victory.This meme is an effective piece of propaganda however
it is until you go somewhere else and look at a list of space race accomplishments that isn't curated so heavily
Let's pretend they do matter - what are they doing to fix people's perceptions that he's doing squat? Nothing. They're just banking on his "achievements" speaking for themselves instead of doing any EFFECTIVE propaganda to showcase their success.
Fuck Biden and his NON-achievments which can all be shown to be half measures at best or sheer bullshit lies at worst, unlike the many real and genuinely spectacular achievements of the USSR during the space race that they objectively won. The big difference in this rhetorical comparison is that the USSR isn't around anymore to even attempt a restoration or recognition of the epitome of real material human technological accomplishment they made. No one is "banking on their achievements" like they are for Biden's lies and no one except shitposters on a niche leftist site are doing "effective propaganda to showcase" the USSR's success. Only well researched history will do that now.
What a dogshit and misleading comparison.
Not even Russia gives a shit about the USSR's achievements in space
It's not entirely true. The US had a bunch of victories as well which aren't on here.
If I was being fair I would add first orbital rendezvous and first manned lunar orbit to America's column, as well as first Lunar rover to the Soviet's.
They did try, but the N1 moon rocket was way too ahead of its time. It was powered by 30 small but more efficient NK-15 rocket engines, and the computer controller at the time was not efficient enough to respond to that many rocket engines at the same time, and had led to disastrous consequences.
The Americans simply built the Saturn rocket with 5 very powerful but less efficient gas generator F-1 engines, and got lucky. Technically it was impressive, but conceptually it didn’t break new grounds. There is a reason why there hasn’t been any manned mission to the moon in 50 years since 1972, because this kind of rocket is already out-dated and no engineers can or know how to reproduce these old designs anymore.
To add insult to injury, SpaceX’s Starship (probably the only one in America making significant progress on space rockets these days) based its design on the Soviet N1 moon rocket, powered by 33 small but efficient Raptor engines, which vindicates the Soviet design. Even 55 years later, SpaceX with all its modern technology and computers are still having trouble getting the Starship to fire up properly. They’ll probably succeed soon but for now, nobody has been able to get the concept working.
Show
On the left, the Soviet N1. On the right, SpaceX Super Heavy
I dunno, probably didn't see the point. They were busy making probes to send to mars and Venus.
They tried with the N1 program, but it was cancelled after the 4th N1 blew up (unmanned test). Which is a shame because apparently they had solved the large majority of the problems from the experience of the 4 failures.
Another thing: when the N1 program flopped the Soviets still didn't have a moon lander, a bunch of space rendezvous experience, et cetera. The American moon landing was really accomplished by two programs - Gemini and Apollo - while the Soviets tried to do everything at once and the result was the largest non-nuclear explosion of all time.
So they decided to just focus on what they had an advantage in: automation and precision, which left the moon program on the wayside.
I think this was made by a r/cth user a while back and a little time after that they made an updated version with even more soviet achievements. Does anyone have that version?
No, I never added more achievements, but I did quickly make an updated version that fixed a couple tiny errors as they were pointed out to me:
Show
He might be thinking about this progenitor meme (which I didn't create):
Show
Imagine caring so much about what the US thinks about itself that you go to the trouble of making this meme lmao.
"Look what they did to my boy"
