Curse those running dog Capitalists and their reliable technology!
The BBC's Pallab Ghosh cries in his beer about how if the Soviets had got to the Mon first, we'd have (Red) moonbases and cheap (Red) flights to Mars by now. Why? Because,
Had the Soviets got to the Moon first it is unlikely that they would have abandoned it as swiftly as the Americans. Not being a democracy may have enabled the USSR to spend money and marshal the talents of their population in a way that America could not.Yes, because that whole command economy thing worked out so well!. If you believe that, I've got a secondhand ZAZ to sell you. Moonbases? Odds are that if the Communists had got to the Moon first, they'd have spent most of their effort on jamming radio transmissions so the Free World wouldn't hear the poor stranded bastard on the floor of Mare Imbrium using his last remaining breaths of air to curse the swine back home for sending him on a suicide mission. Not that I'm surprised at such a Red nostalgia conclusion from this puff piece. It's wrong on most major points and doesn't even bother to mention Dr Wernher Von Braun.
Oh, and it has this little gem as well:
Of course, we have not been back since. Instead, human exploration of space has been confined to low-Earth orbit.Eh? What alternate universe has Mr Ghosh been living in for the past forty years? We've sent several probes to Moon–not to mention all the planets and an assortment of asteroids and comets. I'd say we've been a very busy little race and... Oh, I see, he means manned exploration!
The BBC really has to do something about their copy editing.
12 comments:
Humph! I do recall that for quite awhile the "conventional wisdom" was that the Soviets were too clever to waste resources on a moon landing . . .
Pesky things like a free presss and governments who are accountable to an electorate, make it difficult to pretend that when you lose the race you weren't actually in it!
It would be very poor form not to acknowledge the Soviet acheivements in space, and it is sad that we haven't been back to moon (yet) but it doesn't make me, unlike some people, nostalgic for a Communist dictatorship in the slightest.
Speaking as an Englishman and I know it would really only have been possible within the realms of 1950's sci-fi, but it would have been nice if the first flag on the moon had been the Union Jack. :-)
The Soviets were as hot to put a man on the Moon as we were, but they had a small problem. Namely, that their manned lunar mission launch vehicle always tested out perfectly; every time they tried to launch it, it cleverly blew up on the pad. (Now that is consistent performance!)
As for their unmanned lunar lander, it and the Apollo 11 lander had something in common. When Armstrong & Aldrin were coming into final approach, they noticed that the computer-controlled landing autopilot was steering them to the precise point that Mission Control wanted them to land on. Which, unfortunately, happened to be on the edge of a small crater, which would have left them with two landing legs about five or six feet in the "air" on contact. This not being good, they sensibly shut off the autopilot, moved about twenty yards sideways, and landed on a flat.
The Soviet robot lander, with the robot rover, had the same problem. Being a robot, it landed as programmed, on the edge of a crater. And somersaulted gracelessly into same, creaming its rover in the process.
James Oberg opined that the Soviets' tech base failed them. So they then came up with the fictions that, (1) they never intended to do a manned Moon mission, and then (2) they weren't interested in Luna, period.
I think it's even more basic than that. A command-and-control society just doesn't do science very well. Either that, or some people just can't catch a break.
cheers
eon
Not sure, eon. Way I heard it, if you were extremely clever in the USSR, you got sent to a closed city in Siberia. (This is different from if you were a smart-ass, and got sent to Siberia on other terms.) There, you built rockets. You did not invent new cooking pots (they stole some domestic inventions from the West), or new children's toys (this month, Toy Factory No. 24 will be making its Plan's worth of little plastic tractors), but things that were essential to the State. Story from the dad. He once obtained a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It sounded awful. He then got his hands on some military grade transistors, and soldered them in, and it sounded great! If you worked on rockets, you can be certain that you got the good transistors.
I think that might have been what did in the Soviet Moon effort. Notice that the plan for making transistors was, make them somehow with drunk, half-educated labor; test them; separate them into batches of consumer- and military grade. Plan with assault rifles: make 'em with half-inch tolerances; make enough of 'em cheaply enough; bunch of guys named Ivan all shooting in the same general direction are bound to hit something. Plan for space exploration... if one out of 20 cosmonauts dies horribly, that's acceptable yield rate; improve the process later. In a way, it worked---compare Soyuz-1 with its current (still flying!) descendants.
But there are too many things that can fail in a Moon shot. So if you accept an initial yield rate of 95% for each step, you are not going to be first.
Also, of course, we got von Braun in our goody bag of second-hand Nazis. Not that there weren't good engineers in America (or the USSR). But Dr. vB was a first-rate engineer. If slightly amoral.
Mr. Ghosh will get his wish when the Chinese get there.
Gagarin wasn't the first man to leave our atmosphere. He was the first one to survive the trip.
USSR had been sending people in to space since 1957. One woman was fried alive on reentry, and one man drifted away from Earth. The transmissions were caught by an Italian radio enthusiast. You can find evidence on the web.
Anonymous - The astute Mr Oberg has written on this: http://www.igs.net/~hwt/oberg/deadcosm.htm and also on the Italian amatuers who allegedly tracked these disasters: http://www.jamesoberg.com/judica-cordiglia.pdf
While I do love stories of the little amatuer triumphing over the big professional, I do find it incredible that while transmissions from Gagarin, Tereshkova et al were heard by Joderell Bank and similiar stations all over the world, only two Italian radio hams picked on these Soviet disasters.
While the Soviets did shroud their space programme in secrecy so as to present it as a seemless progression from triumph to triumph, when the reality was far from the case, I think that the "Lost Cosmonauts" stories belong in the category of Urban Myth.
Sergej,
Calling Von Braun "a little" amoral is a bit of an understatement. First, he made a deal with devil (Hitler) to build weapons, then he makes a deal with one of the nations that bombed his country into submission. His only real saving grace is that in his deal with the devil, he got the better end of the deal. Hitler ate a 9mm bullet in the bunker, Von Braun has a school in Huntsville named after him. :)
So, having worked for Hitler, he had no problem
working for Walt Disney or Nixon?
Chris Lopes: I believe that Hitler used his PPK to blow out his syphilitic brains. PPKs don't come any bigger than .380. Thus demonstrating that even an underpowered caliber can do some good in the world.
As for Dr. von Braun, Tom Lehrer put it best: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun". Agreed, he was too clearly much too smart to have any excuses.
Wernher von Braun was the real life model to Ian Fleming for Hugo Drax. The similarities are striking. Likewise, Otto Skorzeny was the real life Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Sergej, thank you for the correction. As you said, it was the best aimed shot from such a weapon ever made. :)
Ironmistress;
Skorzeny as Blofeld? I hadn't heard that one. I'd always rather suspected that Fleming based Blofeld and SPECTRE on SS General Hans Kammler and his Kammlerstab organization, since they were the "hi-tech" brain trust in the Nazi hierarchy. SPECTRE-like plots would have been very much in their line of thinking.
That said, Skorzeny would certainly be my choice to run an outfit with a name like the SPecial Executive for Counterespionage, Terror, Revenge, and Extortion. The "mission statement" in that name pretty much calls for someone experienced in "direct action". (Although I never did quite figure out what "counter" espionage had to do with the rest, as it is a defensive function, and the rest are pretty offensive, in both meanings of the word.)
Blofeld always struck me as more of a schemer and Machiavelli wannabee. Or maybe closer to Richelieu; either way, not the sort to get his hands bloody personally if he could help it. Skorzeny had no problem with doing the IA himself; Kammler was definitely the "delegating" type.
What Skorzeny and Kammler had in common, of course, was that both firmly believed in (a) going with the winner and (b) working for whoever paid the most.
cheers
eon
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