[RS]

“My point is, in the mid to late 1990s, Russians in technological fields seemed to be very far behind the times.”

You DO recall that they did beat us into space, right ?

It’s the Russians political system telling them how things should be done that keeps them behind in many areas.

[El Gato]

You DO recall that they did beat us into space, right ?

Yep

It’s the Russians political system telling them how things should be done that keeps them behind in many areas.

And it was the US political system telling us how to do things that allowed them to beat us into space. Rather than use those nasty militaristic Army employed Germans,like von Braun, who actually had some experience with big rockets, we gave the job to NASA's predecessor, NACA with funding via the National Science Foundation.

Project Vanguard, the NACA/NSF program, was a disaster. Five days after getting the go ahead to use an Army missile instead, Explorer one went into orbit on a Jupiter C, a version of the Redstone, both products of the von Braun group.

Vanguard 1. (Video Here

Explorer 1 Launch on Jupiter C.

:)

[El Gato]

You DO recall that they did beat us into space, right ?

The major reason for this is because they couldn't build small H bombs. We could. So we build relatively small IRBMs and ICBMS. They could not, so they had to build huge ones. Even then they couldn't build a big motor, so they clustered many smaller ones. Essentially copied from captured V-2s.

[John Leland 1789]

This we understand well. The engineering bi-products of our aeronautical ventures in the USA, including those from our space research and development, make their way down the chain into civilian use probably as fast as they can.

In Russia, R&D is kept in the state vaults, probably even now.

When we lived near Vladivostok in 1996 and 1997, very few single-family dwellings in the nearby town of Ussuriysk (1996 pop. 225,000)had indoor toilets. Being first in space didn’t help the common Russian much.