Posted on 10/11/2019 7:08:02 AM PDT by Borges
Apollo program was fascinating. Viking is a great achievement too. Apart from that I believe the Soviets were still ahead. US manned program also was much less extensive and produced much more fatalities among crews. SS is a death trap comparing to any Russian ship. In terms of safety it is Ford T vs Volvo.
Ya gotra admit it took a lot of cojones to ride axRussian space rocket.
... Which is statistically how many thousand times less likely to kill a crew than Space Shuttle?
Statistically speaking, Space Shuttle was a disaster. A technological marvel, but statistically a killer.
Four cosmonauts in space. Scores of scientists and others in two launch-site explosions, one in Baikonur in 1960 and another in 1980 in Plesetsk.
https://www.rbth.com/science-and-tech/327410-dark-side-of-space-program
And, basically no new Soviet/Russian spacecraft designs since then. Just revising the existing ones. Which is not a bad thing.
We had several launch pad explosions, especially in the early days, and AFAIK no casualties from them. We do a better ground game than the Russians.
We did have the Apollo 1 fire. And some crashes flying T38 training planes.
Apollo 8 ended the Space Race. Apollo 11 further confirmed that win.
If we knew the true number of Russian Cosmonauts who died we could make that comparison.
Rest in peace General Leonov! Wow! I just checked and found your friend, General Stafford is 89 and still alive.
Why? Soviets had soft landing on another planet in 1970. First radio transmissions from the surface of Venus in 1970 and Mars in 1971. They took color pictures from the surface on Venus (470C temperature and 90 bar pressure there) in 1982. Modular space stations and the list goes on.
RIP.
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