This is assuming the Cold War ever did "really" end. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Indeed, hence my comment about the Soviets 'losing'. Given the recent upset about the USA placing ABMs in Poland, I think it's far from over.
I think its a combination of the populace's rebellion against communism, the spending on the military, and the economy that killed the Soviets. I remember reading somewhere that at the height of the Cold War the Soviets had more tanks then they had crew to man them. The riots in the Soviet Union also weakend the governments power. Though it would have been interesting had it survived into the 21st century, as it would likely have become very reminiscent of "1984" by George Orwell, at least in terms of monitoring the populace and correcting the media.
I'm seeing a touch of 1984 right here in the good ole US of A. This war on Terror seems to require some pretty nifty monitoring and tracking technology to be added to tv's and cell phones.
I go along with joepistole's post. I think he summed things up pretty well. I would just add a word about the SPACE RACE -- which I think was more influential than people imagine. The Soviets did pour big money into technological education, and the leadership probably genuinely believed that they enjoyed a superiority when the first satellite ("sputnik") was launched. Success in space was a major theme in the internal propaganda which sold the population the idea of the superiority of their own system. The ultimate abandonment of the Soviet moon programme, coupled with the success of the US Apollo programme, had an extraordinary impact on the psychology of Soviet citizenry. Things would never be the same again! The superiority of Communism was exposed as a falsehood. Nor could the regime hide from its people the growing affluence that was enjoyed by ordinary workers in the West. The rot set in a long time before the roof collapsed.
What a load of uninformed crap. The soviets won the space race; First artificial satellite. First man in orbit. First space walk. First woman in space. First to land an object on the Moon. First controlled landing on the Moon. First to photograph the dark side of the Moon. First Lunar rover. The ONLY nation capable of making a space station that recycles air and water (The ISS uses MIR technoogy, and NASA have nothing that compares to the unit supplied by the Russians) Soviet success in space was a HUGE problem for the USA, and that is why the USA had to aim for the Moon. They had already lost the race, in so many stages, but scored one victory, so what? Who said it ended there? With the USA placing ABM in Poland, the cold war is far from over, either.
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After the USA got to the Moon, the race ended, did it? No, so the Soviet Union invested elsewhere, and came up with MIR. The air and recylcing plant inside the ISS is MIR technology. NASA doesn't not have this technology. NASA could not therefore, send humans to Mars without such technology, and only the Russians can facilitate that. Even then, Mars would not be the end of the race, just another leg. It's just typical American revisionism to say they won the 'Space Race', when they lost every single contest leading up to landing on the Moon!
Err...maybe Russia simply changed...for some reason I doubt they are any less powerful then some would claim, they possess amazing knowledge, they are rather quiet...my intuition tells me they didn't lose anything...
...and how do we know for sure there really IS a war...? Perhaps the whole thing is a set up...? After all, competition breeds ingenuity...
Obviously I like Russia a lot...!!! I plan on learning to speak Russian so that when I visit I can be courteous enough to speak the Language of the land...my only problem is that freaking rolling R sound...rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....I can't make it with my tongue...I'll have to practice!!! It sounds sexy!!!
At the cost of how many lives? There are more than a few space coffins with CCCP markings in orbit. In 1971, the three crewmembers of the Soyuz 11 mission, G.T. Dobrovolskii, V.I. Patsaev, and V.N. Volkov, died when their reentry capsule depressurized shortly after undocking from the space station Salyut 1. Their deaths were not discovered until after until the capsule had landed on automatic pilot. All four cosmonauts involved in these tragedies were near-deified in public by the Soviet hierarchy. Some tragedies in space the Soviets could not cover up. The first public casualty of the cosmonaut program was V.M. Komarov, who died in 1967 after the parachute on his Soyuz 1 spacecraft failed to deploy during final descent. Another Disatrous Explosion On March 18, 1980, 48 technicians died at Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome when a Vostok booster exploded while being fueled. An investigation later revealed that the substitution of lead-based for tin-based solder in hydrogen peroxide filters had resulted in the breakdown of the hydrogen peroxide and the resulting explosion. The incident was reported to the general public only in 1989, almost ten years later, in the era of glasnost'.
Nasa's lost a couple shuttles full of astronauts and one of the Apollo missions lost astronauts too. Space exploration is a risky business at best.
But we still have a Shuttle Program, and it was the U.S. who saved the Russian Space station, and we admitted when we lost those lives, Russia admitted nothing. How many launches did it take for the Russians to launch a successful Sputnik, they never revealed that, if you launch enough times one is going to work, just as if your launch enough times something is going to fail. The failures of the Shuttles didn't have to happen, the cause of the problem was a shift to a hard foam insulation for the main tank, all in the name of environmentalism, before that we used a soft foam that if it shed didn't do damage to the heat tiles.
As has been pointed out, the USA has lost people too, and as the USA got Werner von Braun after WWII, you should really factor all the deaths research into the V2 cost, and you won't like that number. Rocketry is a risky business, and on non-fatal failures, well, both sides had many, so your line about Sputnik rather pointless. Both sides tried, the USSR succeeded first. They got a string of firsts. The USA got to the Moon first. We'll see who gets to Mars first, my bet is a joint mission, as no single nation has the resources or technology to go it alone. (ie, the USA has the cash, and Russia has the technology) On, 'and it was the U.S. who saved the Russian Space station' Eh? The US got involved with Mir as a precursor to the joint venture that is the ISS, to give the US experience in docking and supplying, as they had very little. Ironically, the counter of what you claim is true, during all the time the US Shuttle has spent out of service after the Columbia disaster, it's Russian rockets that have serviced the ISS and kept it viable!
