:amerikkka: :pathetic:
I love that no matter what happens, the first person in space was a peasant boy from a socialist state. His mother was a dairy farmer and his father was a carpenter. He wasn't some son from a rich family like all of the American astronauts inevitably were. I look up at space at night and that simple fact has brought me to tears more than a few times.
That's not entirely true. I have a relative who flew Gemini and Apollo missions, and, while he wasn't poor, his parents were definitely working class. They didn't have enough money to send him to college so he took a year off after high school and worked in a factory to save money and did his first two years of university at a community college.
I hope you're lying that you're related because otherwise this is very doxxing.
Not really, he is a distant relative, I've never met him. I only know his story because I wrote a paper about him when I was a kid.
Yeah, the first several "generations" of US astronauts were mostly Air Force test pilots. It is a very dangerous job with a low life expectancy, and rich people usually aren't career military people to begin with. So, while the test pilots weren't poor due to the job paying at least decently, a lot were not from very wealthy or privileged, beyond being white men, background.
first satellite, first animal, first man, first woman, first lunar probe, first space station, first to Venus too even. not to discount the moonlanding,it's still cool humans went to the moon, but the Soviets very much smashed the yanks in the space race
Anyone in the LA area should check out the "Museum of Jurassic Technology". It is kind of fun parodying early museums when they were personal collections of European lords and had no "fact checking" but there is a cool room with a portrait of every dog sent into space.
That's not what happened. Laika overheated and died in pain hours into the flight. It was pure animal cruelty. But hey, that's why they used a dog instead of a human!
:Laika:
:fidel-salute: :kim-salute: :chavez-salute: :deng-salute: :sankara-salute:
https://i.ibb.co/dtcmbn9/winner-of-the-space-race.jpg
also reminder that it was not capitalist innovation but huge amounts of public funding and international research that drove the American space race
also reminder that it was not capitalist innovation but huge amounts of public funding and international research that drove the American space race
Which is why SpaceX is so pathetic in comparison. They have all that legacy to build on, and what have they done? A crumb of what the space race produced. Privatisation of space will only lead to failures because there will always be incentive to cut corners and make irrational risks to suit the market.
space X's failure is even worse than that... in addition to building on the foundations laid by NASA in the postwar period, Space X has received billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies. So they're largely publicly funded, built on the accumulated knowledge of previous generations, privately backed, and still suck.
Despite all the hype by bazinga brains, space exploration is one field that capitalism is inherently terrible at because of how atrociously unprofitable it is. The upfront cost is, the labor cost, the maintenance cost, well everything one need to actually do shit in space are very expensive. And in return for what?
All the traditional avenues of capitalism doesn't work in space. Space manufacturing is unprofitable because terrestrial manufacturing would always be cheaper, the space is way too resource rich that it would be the interest of space capitalists to halt exploitation of space to maintain scarcity, and of course there's no preexisting foreign economy for capitalists to plunder and turn into a periphery. And before you say "commercial satellite", isn't. Despite the image of internet being beamed from space, in reality the internet is largely run through undersea cables. The satellites running around in space are usually communication satellites subsidized to provide potential military communication capability, or scientific satellites which obviously are funded by the public.
That's why pretty much all the current space capitalists, despite of their marketing campaign about colonizing Mars and building Earth 2.0 in practice put hedge their bets on space tourism. Except that various companies have tried going into that ventures for decades already with little to show. Like before SpaceX or Blue Origin came into picture we already have Virgin Galactic burning money for years with little to show.
And honestly once you get past the marketing nonsense, space tourism sucks ass. Literally all the hype around space tourism is in the pure novelty of going to space, but once you're up there what there is to do? It's like the early days of flying where you have aviators giving paid tours for people curious about the miracle of flight (or in the Soviet Unions, atheists showing peasants that there's no heaven up in the clouds), but that novelty wore off in just a decade. Oh, maybe they'll built some kind of space theme park or resort or something, right?
Which leads to something that bazinga brains always forgot: space is hostile to human biology. Going to space is fucking hard, that's why literally every astronauts are hotties by default, because you have to build a olympian body to just withstand the bullshit of space. Imagine if every rich fuckboy who lands on idk the Maldives or something have to do jumping jacks and pushups for 3 hour a day for every day they are staying or else they bone turns into jelly, I very much doubt the place would receive many visitors. Which brings us to the hilarious irony when you consider that the demographic screaming about Mars colonization are :so-true: who lets be honest here, are not only physically unfit but also held the idea of physical activity in disdain, whether it be denigrating "unskilled" laborers or "sportsball" activities.
And as have been mentioned, capitalist's usual method to increase profitability would just lead to instant death in space. Of course it also leads to deaths everytime on earth to, but not as instantaneous as the SpaceX Reddit Hotel imploding. They can at least salvage the Bhopal chemical plant while in the latter porkies have to deal with the possibility of the debris falling into the western world and damaging their capital.
be denigrating “sportsball” activities.
But lots of people do this...
sportsball is uber-stupid and the people who make it their lives are stupiderer
People are allowed to enjoy things. "Sportsball" might be infested with chuds and under heavy gentrification but at its core it is an authentic proletarian culture that transcends national borders.
It is fine not to be interested in it but as leftists we should embrace "sportsball" rather than dismiss it scornfully. The latter only makes you look like a contrarian redditor. Don't be that guy.
I think you need to actually meet sports fans and sports bros before spouting off like that. They will shatter your illusions. Let's just say they're not the sharpest pencils in the drawer. In fact they're more like the blunt ones that you get in the box of pencils.
Also remember that Jeff Bezos, the oligarch who owns a third of all modern computing power, managed to do something far less impressive than what the Soviets did 60 years ago using mechanical computers.
It was the Nazi rocket scientists. You know, the ones who bombarded London with V-2s.
"Vonce ze rockets go up
who cares where zey come down
zat's not my dee-pahtment
says Wehrner von Braun"
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.
It always comes across to me as maximum cope when Americans brag about "winning the space race". I mean, even if it was true, the US's economy was massively wealthier than the USSR's. This "race" was literally between the wealthiest country on earth and a very poor country. Even at the height of the USSR, its GDP was only about half that of the US's.
It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources. It's a sign of weakness to actually even be in a "race" with a developing country to begin with, which suggests they are actually competitive and have a chance of winning.
That's really what the whole "space race" shows. It does not matter who "won", the very fact a poor developing nation could compete with the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth in the first place demonstrates the extraordinary weakness of the capitalist system.
The US only placed a man on the moon because of NASA, which they founded as a direct response to the Soviets launching Sputnik. Meaning, the US literally only implemented this space program as a response to the Soviets, they were not a natural outgrowth of the US's system and would not have happened without the Soviets (as we have seen NASA massively defunded ever since). The fact the US even got on the moon in the first place only happened because of the USSR.
That was back in 1969, and we're now in 2022 yet, funnily enough, the capitalist private sector has not got a man that far yet.
by u/aimixin
Really it isn't the crewed spaceflight to the moon that's the point, it's the things we invent in order to send a crew to the moon. People talk a lot about velcro and tang, but the most significant outgrowth of the space program was the massive advancements in portable/durable computing that it pioneered.
In the case of a moon base, I think the most significant breakthrough still on the table is in-situ resource usage. The moon itself can hypothetically be turned into rocket fuel, greatly decreasing the cost to get there and come back, and mining the moon is a significant step to mining an asteroid.
The US has already lost the technical know-how to build the F-1 rocket engine
How? Did NASA's dog eat their blueprints? And then eat the scientists who created the blueprints?
Oh fuck why is a white guy wearing the Chinese Chinese Communist Party helmet while SpaceX thrusters launche into the æther
I may be missing the joke here, but CCCP stands for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик or, in English, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The white guy in the helmet is Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and the rocket is a Vostok, an old Soviet model.
No, cccp stands for Chinese Chinese Commie Party, that rocket is clearly from kerbal space program, and that white guy is very clearly joe biden
The soviets were the first to land a craft on Mars too!
