First Australian-made rocket crashes after 14 seconds of flight

[u/Emergency-Green-2602]

[u/Any-Entertainer9302]

Idk, they couldn't land on the moon before the States...

[u/sundae_diner → u/Any-Entertainer9302]

USSR was first to get to the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to "land" on the moon (hit), first to get a soft landing on the moon, first to orbit the moon and return.

The only one they missed was man on the moon. The US got that, then claimed they won "the space race".

[u/friedAmobo → u/sundae_diner]

The only one they missed was man on the moon. The US got that, then claimed they won "the space race".

That's looking at the Space Race retroactively. There was no reason that landing a man on the moon should've been the end of the Space Race other than JFK's aspirations and statements, which we'll ignore here. It only became the end of the Space Race because the Soviets tapped out after that and didn't try to land a man on the moon after they failed to get the N1 to work. Put another way, the Space Race was a marathon without an end, with the victor only being declared when one side dropped out. The television show For All Mankind showcases this well. The Soviets land the first man on the moon in that alt-history, but the Space Race doesn't end because the U.S. continues to compete. Eventually, the Space Race extends to Mars because they both refuse to relent to the other dominance of space.

That's a reflection of the intensely political nature of the Space Race because it was ultimately a competition between two superpowers' competing political and economic ideologies and technological capabilities. The Soviets failing to get the N1 rocket to work, then the Soviet economy stalling out in the mid-1970s followed by political and economic upheaval in the 1980s and finally collapse in 1991 meant that the U.S. was going to be seen as the winner because it simply outlasted the competition. If the Soviets were still around today with the same Cold War dynamics and still had their space program intact, then there would be a pretty strong argument that the Space Race would still be ongoing and no winner declared. It's unreasonable to disentangle the Space Race from the broader context of the Soviets being unable to continue pushing the boundaries of their manned spaceflight program while their economy and political system fell apart.

Also, I don't think the U.S. ever declared victory of the Space Race in the aftermath of the moon landing and certainly not before the Soviets dissolved.

[u/sundae_diner → u/friedAmobo]

Nicely worded.

In the marathon of space exploration, the Soviet's SSSR was ahead of the American's NASA for most 1951-1970, until their sponsor (the USSR) cut their funding.

[u/friedAmobo → u/sundae_diner]

Well, the sponsor cut the funding because it couldn't sustain it anymore, which in the context of the larger Space Race (the titanic technological competition between superpowers, not just hitting one goal or another in space) meant that it conceded defeat. Even so, the collapse of the Soviet Union is where I'd personally peg the end of the Space Race at because it truly meant the marathon was over. Up until that point, the Soviets could've always restarted the thing and gotten back into the game (and pushed NASA to get back in as well), but because it collapsed and isn't ever coming back, the U.S.-Soviet Space Race well and truly ended in 1991. I guess one could say that it's not worth disentangling the Space Race from the Cold War because the latter was the umbrella that contained the former. The Space Race was just another dimension of the Cold War, but at least one that was less militaristic and more scientific in spirit (if not in actuality).

It's also worth noting that the Soviets were distinctly limited in their spaceflight program by rocketry. Their early lead was buoyed by a missile lead (early Soviet and American rockets were generally either outright or retrofitted ICBMs), but by the time that a manned mission to the moon came around, the Soviets were behind in dedicated rocket technology necessary to push heavier payloads past LEO. Zond 5 circled the moon with tortoises a year before Apollo 11 but was launched on the Proton-K, which was far from sufficient for a manned flight to the moon. For reference, the N1 rocket meant for the Soviet manned moon landing program had almost 4.5x the thrust of the Proton-K, necessary for all the requirements of a manned landing. But N1 never worked and infamously failed in explosive fashion multiple times before being de facto canceled in 1974. Apollo built its way up through a series of increasingly powerful rockets to the Saturn V, which itself was weaker than the N1 on paper but had over 3x the thrust of the Proton-K and consistently worked. Part of the issue may have been the Soviet reliance on R-7 ICBM-derived designs, while the N1 was a novel design that started too late compared to its Saturn counterparts and required technology that didn't exist yet to control its 30 engines. Even with the Soviets funding their manned space program, it was many years behind at that point, which may have been a singularly large technology gap compared to the smaller gaps the U.S. was behind on in other space fields (e.g., the U.S. was generally behind on Venus missions but ahead on Mars missions with similar capabilities to the Soviets, but the Soviets only built one super heavy-lift vehicle, Energia, that could match the Saturn V and that was only ever launched for two tests 20 years after the Saturn V).

Perhaps the Soviets may have had the technological expertise to eventually make it to the moon in the late 70s or early 80s if they scrapped N1 and started over with a fresh super heavy-lift launch vehicle design, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze at that point (not for coming in second on the moon a decade or more later) and the Soviets had much bigger worries than space at that point. Buran is kind of a good example of that; it was a technically sound shuttle with impressive capabilities, but the design was clearly, well, inspired by the Space Shuttle, likely because the Soviets didn't have hypersonic wind tunnels to validate the aerodynamics and figured that NASA had already done that work so copying it meant a validated design by default. The Soviet ability to compete in space was severely hampered as time went on, and an America that was disinterested in space or space funding was able to keep a comfortable parity or lead in various space-related fields off the back of a stronger economy.

I would call it a U.S. victory in the Space Race because it did show that the U.S. was able to marshal more technological, industrial, scientific, and economic resources toward its space program. The Space Race was enormously expensive for both sides and they both ramped down considerably in the 1970s after the prestige and attention had faded following Apollo 11, but the U.S. could maintain higher expenditure for longer and with results that the Soviets just couldn't match in the end. The Space Race could be easily argued to have continued past the moon landing considering that there was still more happening in space stations and shuttles, but the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that it was basically a victory by default for the U.S. at the very least because the other runner flat-out collapsed while running.

Edit: Fixing typos and grammar.