While I agree about the impressiveness of the Soviet Space Program and its discoveries, I do think that there's room for critique.
Unlike the Apollo Program, which was able to keep NASA's designers on a unified vision, the Soviet Space program was marred by infighting between the military and the chief rocket designers (Korolev, Chelomi, Glushko) that hobbled the Soviet moon program and prevented the development of a super-heavy rocket that would facilitate larger stations or human exploration beyond earth orbit. The Buran-Energia program was another failure. The Buran was an impressive feat, and certainly a more rational design than the US shuttle, but its development was induced by spurious demands from the military, and was never going to be particularly useful for the Soviet Union.
At least the Soviets came to the correct conclusion after flying the Buran once. "This thing is extremely expensive, dangerous, and doesn't do anything cheaper rockets couldn't do better." America stuck with the Space Shuttle for thirty years, and would have been far better off putting that money into building on Apollo tech instead.
But yeah the infighting wasn't great and occasionally lead to disaster as the different branches tried to one-up each other. And the fact that Soviet engineers had to sell their rockets to the higher-ups by playing up their military applications is an unfortunate echo of the ties between NASA and the American military-industrial complex.
While I agree about the impressiveness of the Soviet Space Program and its discoveries, I do think that there's room for critique.
Unlike the Apollo Program, which was able to keep NASA's designers on a unified vision, the Soviet Space program was marred by infighting between the military and the chief rocket designers (Korolev, Chelomi, Glushko) that hobbled the Soviet moon program and prevented the development of a super-heavy rocket that would facilitate larger stations or human exploration beyond earth orbit. The Buran-Energia program was another failure. The Buran was an impressive feat, and certainly a more rational design than the US shuttle, but its development was induced by spurious demands from the military, and was never going to be particularly useful for the Soviet Union.
At least the Soviets came to the correct conclusion after flying the Buran once. "This thing is extremely expensive, dangerous, and doesn't do anything cheaper rockets couldn't do better." America stuck with the Space Shuttle for thirty years, and would have been far better off putting that money into building on Apollo tech instead.
But yeah the infighting wasn't great and occasionally lead to disaster as the different branches tried to one-up each other. And the fact that Soviet engineers had to sell their rockets to the higher-ups by playing up their military applications is an unfortunate echo of the ties between NASA and the American military-industrial complex.