How did the Soviet space program succeed?

[johnfloyd6675]

I get how the Bolsheviks industrialized Russia. I get how they rallied their people to defeat the Germans. It's easy to put a gun to someone's head and tell them to do something. But I don't understand how a communist state could produce the innovative scientists they needed to get Sputnik and that Yuri fellow into space before the States got their act together.

Any thoughts?

[AutoDas]

They spent millions of dollars on the space program while millions in their own country starved to death.

[heavenlyboy34]

Read Pelevin's "Oman Ra". ;):D

[yongrel]

"Invent space flight or we kill your family."

[dirknb@hotmail.com]

Here is a good video called The Best Enemies That Money Can Buy that might give you some insight into that:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5420313553329356036&ei=DONLSdrpIpC8rAK25vXvCw&q=Antony+C.+Sutton

It's just an interview and the picture quality is horrible but it has some great information.

[Matt Collins]

There were some good videos about this that the History Channel put out a while back,

[lucius]

Here is a good video called The Best Enemies That Money Can Buy that might give you some insight into that:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5420313553329356036&ei=DONLSdrpIpC8rAK25vXvCw&q=Antony+C.+Sutton

It's just an interview and the picture quality is horrible but it has some great information.

Good stuff...with much of our US tax dollars/technologies.

[Freedom 4 all]

Tons of blindly patriotic morons who are good at science.

[SeanEdwards]

morons who are good at science.

There's something not right about the above comment.

[Pericles]

The US German rocket scientists were better than the Soviet German rocket scientists.

But seriously - they did it with brains and sliderules. True story. I know someone who after the breakup of the Soviet Union, bought up some of their space program stuff )including the first photo taken from space). He holds up a sliderule and asks if anybody knows what it is. I take the bait and say "its a sliderule". I'm told its not just any sliderule but the one that belonged to some guy I never heard of. That guy was the chief rocket designer for the Soviet space program. Point was - while NASA had computers to make and verify calculations, the Soviets did not. Their accident rate was much higher, but they did it with brains - imagine what they could have done in an economic system that worked.

[johnfloyd6675]

I read somewhere that the Russians had reverse-engineered computers and from that basis came up with most of their computer technology independently (and thus uselessly, post-89/91)

The Russians are a clever folk.

[sailor]

I get how they rallied their people to defeat the Germans. It's easy to put a gun to someone's head and tell them to do something.

You just said somehing incredibly moronic and insulting. It had nothing to do with a gun to the head. It was very easy to rally people against the Germans once it became known how Nazis treated people in occupied territories.

[krazy kaju]

Is it really that difficult? If you failed, you ran the possibility of having you and your family killed. If you succeeded, you reaped huge rewards. The USSR was no egalitarian society.

[tmosley]

Not really, Russia had always had a tradition of doing great science, ever since Peter the Great. Its sort of like asking in the US was a communist country, why we were able to grow so much corn. Corn grows here naturally, and we have (had) an agrarian tradition that wouldn't disappear if commies took over.

Soviet economics were planned, which severely hurt their efficiency, but it doesn't mean that everything they did was doomed to failure. A perfectly planned economy approaches the efficiency of the free market, but with the "advantage" of being able to direct investment into some area according to the whims of those in charge. It functions in a similar way in a free market, except that the investments are divided up and distributed more efficiently. If the party leaders decided that it was wise to invest in science, you could be sure that the sciences would be well funded. Scientific progress doesn't rely so much on economics. If you have smart people, they can often get by just as well with minimal funding as with full coffers (speaking from experience here).

I would imagine that the Russian scientists (like most scientists everywhere) got a lot of fulfillment from their work, so the low pay didn't hurt so much. In fact, being in desperate poverty can often be good, as it drives them to their work (again, speaking from experience).

Other than the time under Stalin, I would imagine that life as a Russian scientist wasn't that bad. Threats to families probably rarely if ever came into play. Of course, that is just a supposition on my part.

[USAFCapt]

I have been in the Air Force for six years. While we have much more leeway to make micro-decisions on our own than the Soviets, the macro-decisions still come from the top down, ie "Design a 5th generation fighter." From there we seek out the smartest people willing to work for that particular project. In the USSR, I suppose they took the smartest people willing AND NOT WILLING to come work for the their particular project. I'm sure the Kremlin's "Job Fair" consisted of combing through high school students records and telling the student to come work for them. So, bottom line is that Russia's best and brightest were coerced into their space program which gave them great results yet other areas were sacrificed. But for our Air Force, we get great results while not coercing our best and brightest to serve thus not sacrificing big brains in other areas.

[heavenlyboy34]

I get how the Bolsheviks industrialized Russia. I get how they rallied their people to defeat the Germans. It's easy to put a gun to someone's head and tell them to do something. But I don't understand how a communist state could produce the innovative scientists they needed to get Sputnik and that Yuri fellow into space before the States got their act together.

Any thoughts?

Read Pelevin's "Oman Ra". ;) It's a pretty quick read, too. :)

[Mitt Romneys sideburns]

There was no Russian space program. The Russians were going to space at freefall speed!

[johnfloyd6675]

You just said somehing incredibly moronic and insulting. It had nothing to do with a gun to the head. It was very easy to rally people against the Germans once it became known how Nazis treated people in occupied territories.

Are you suggesting that the Soviet war effort wasn't organized along totalitarian lines towards imperial ends? I didn't make any comment implying that it is invalid to fight against National Socialism; the manner of Russian resistance, however, was determined in large part by Russia's Communist orientation. Also, Russia's occupation of Eastern Europe and Germany was profoundly brutal, and its Holodomor against Ukraine rivals the Holocaust in its enormity.