What went wrong in the Soviet/Russian space program?
They used to be the leaders of space exploration in the 50's and early 60's, but starting around the late 60's they've been slowly dropping off the race and facing failure after failure. Has Korolev's death really been that destructive?
You also keep hearing about how much the N1 rocket bogged everything down and what a complete failure it had been, but the people involved in it insist everything was going according to plan, that the biggest issues with it were ironed out by 1973, and if only it had another test launch it would have proved itself successful.
the problem with the N1 was they rushed it and didnt test the parts thoroughly prior to trying the complete setup
if they had, they'd have caught all the problems with fuel flow and vibrations
as another user pointed out in a previous thread, depending on how you define "engines", the N1 isn't that much crazier than the gold-standard lifters in use today
Anthony Jackson
I also think a issue was NASA talking the lead. They started buran and I think mir. Lots of R&D don't quote me I am a NASA nerd. Non related but does NASA ares include SLS?
Connor Robinson
The private sector does it now at least.
Jaxson Gutierrez
>What went wrong in the Soviet/Russian space program? It had nothing to do with their scientific team and all to do with their culture and economics.
Ares was canceled, SLS replaces it. The only thing in common is the re-use of Shuttle components and the Orion capsule AFAIK.
Luis Ross
SLS is Ares V. The Ares V design was never really settled, SLS is its final form. The same people working on Constellation carried on working on SLS.
The primary significance of the name change is that now they can pretend that an additional five years and $10+ billion weren't spent.
Daniel Nelson
It was really all economics They didn't have money, nor electronics and shit
Gavin Rivera
>What went wrong in the Soviet/Russian space program? Did they really have any other substantial failures OTHER than the N1 program? Even the clusterfuck that was the initial Soyuz eventually turned into a decent system as it matured. >For example, sending your best to the Gulag. That was definitely a major setback, but even after all that they still came out ahead of the rest of the world for a while.
Ayden Richardson
The big thing was money. America had shit tons and the soviets had very little. It was actually very similar to the last americas cup race