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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
01/18/09
01/18/09
Pretty much the entire Soviet space "program" has made every problem NASA has had over the years seem fairly benign. Yes, even the loss of two crewed Space Shuttles. In Russia, they had an ICBM set up for a test launch when the second stage rocket fired, causing the whole thing to explode, with an official death toll of 90 (though it is believed to be higher). They sent Laika the dog up in the world's first Suicide Booth (it actually had a lethal-injection system built in because they couldn't be bothered to consider how they might get her back down before deciding to send her up in the first place). They were fueling a Vostok rocket booster when it blew up, killing 48 people. They had a Kosmos-3M rocket blow up on the pad, killing nine people. The Soyuz-1 reentry chute failed to open, giving that cosmonaut a very quick ride to a very short death. They had a manned rocket blow up on the pad, and the cosmonauts were only saved because a launch abort system kicked in...but they almost ended up in China (who they were not on friendly terms with at the time).
And possibly contributing to a lot of those problems, they had four rival space agencies competing (but not cooperating) with each other instead of one organization. They also tied their space-race planning to the 5-year political agendas so any major problems that popped up during the first year or two of a new plan would have to wait a few years before it could be addressed in the next plan.
01/18/09
01/18/09
01/18/09
01/18/09
01/18/09
Thank you, thank you...
*bow*