Yes, they sent probes. They never sent a Cosmonaut. Here's why. (Warning: the link has a photo of Vladimir Komarov’s open coffin funeral.
In the 1970s I heard rumors that the Soviet Space Program killed some of it's Cosmonauts but thought that we did, too (in Apollo 1, although that was on the ground rather than in space). This is the story behind that rumor. Komarov went to his death in a spacecraft that he knew to be a death trap. He did it because Yuri Gagarin was the backup pilot and he wouldn't back out to allow Gagarin to die in his place.
They had guts and determination, but that wasn't enough to get them to the Moon. Rest in peace, Vladimir Komarov.
I know what you'll think, but I've never been completely convinced that we made it to the moon ourselves. Anything that important is important enough to lie about when you're in a cold war.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone were going to lie about such a thing, the Kremlin would have beat us to it.
ReplyDeleteWell, our Germans were better than their Germans. Plus, the Apollo 1 disaster really lit a, pardon the expression, fire under our program to fix some serious quality and concept issues. We're just lucky we never blew up a Mercury or Gemini capsule with the O2 mix we ran until Apollo 1.
ReplyDeleteAs to making it to the moon, yep, I do believe. It actually is a relatively simple concept. But like all simple concepts, execution is far from simple. We had the people and the equipment to do it. And, for a brief time, we had the will to excel and achieve.
Then we tossed it away to go play space truckers. What a waste. We should have had either a reusable capsule (Apollo NextGen was going to be about 70-80% renewable, about the same as the Shuttle) or a smaller winged craft (DynaSoar or something similar.) And launch cargo via separate flights. But, nooooo, had to screw around with that abomination of a shuttle...
What SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing is what we as a nation and NASA as an organization used to be able and want to do, before it became just bread and circuses.
Sad, but that was/is the Russian mentality...
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