I'm kind of at a loss for words. Are you including the past 20 years USSR did not exist in your comparison with US? I remember the timeline of lunches, if you start in 60s, overall it was much more densely packed for USSR compared to US until 90s. Your mention of 'Polyus' is the end of this timeline, 3 years past completely destructive actions of Gorbochev. Do you think Skylab beats Mir?
I can't make sense of what point you're trying to make.
I think Apollo trumps Mir/Salyut/Almaz, and I think Voyager 2 alone trumps the entire Soviet unmanned space program, even the Venera missions. As does COBE, for that matter.
Edit: which is to say, that while the Soviets may have made impressive contributions to science in the form of the peaceful exploration of space the idea that their contributions outclassed those of the US is simply preposterous.
I think my point is that being the first to plant a flag on the moon is not space exploration. You think Voyager 2 trumps the entire Soviet unmanned space program, and I think I would prefer all the papers and progress made by Soviet program. Luckily I can read them in native language. Thanks for your perspective.
Perhaps the Russians surpassed the US in terms of space research and development initially, but the US did more on the moon than plant a flag and play golf. You can't explore someplace you never actually reach in any case.
And as far as Russia being about research and the US being about militarizing space (which you seem to suggest upthread), I'd remind you that the Russians (as far as I know) were the only country to arm one of their space stations and test fire the weapon[1]: To suggest that either the US or Russia weren't keenly interested in using space as leverage against the other, as well as in scientific exploration, is probably not taking the entire picture into consideration.
Especially having more than one space station at the same time. There were Mir and Salut-7, with cosmonauts flying between them, and there were Mir and ISS - without such flights, since they were in the different orbital planes.
> You can't explore someplace you never actually reach in any case.
Meh, the Soviets sent all kinds of robots to the moon. Orbiters, landers that made pictures, moon rovers, three robots that sampled soil and returned it to earth... Not too shabby I'd say.
The U.S. got their edge in space (which I agree is preposterous to rug sweep) after Korolev's death. Without the motivated challenger, bureaucrats-led Soviet space programme (especially the deep space missions part) has stuck in 1960s since.
I also happen to think the Soviet moon project was about 80% complete. No showable results, though - which allowed to deny the very existence of the project - but at least the hardware heritage is still there in the flying systems.
Yes, but also about Blok-D - the fifth stage of N1-L3 stack - being used on Proton and Zenit today for launching telecom sats to GEO, and also about Soyuz spacecraft - which got a lot of development in preparation for Moon flights.
