Russian Moon Photos

Found this site and thought I'd share:

http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogMoon.htm

Apollo 8 got the fame for the legendary "Earthrise" photo, but check out Zond 6 - seems they weren't the first to take that photo - the Russians appear to have taken one (a much grainier one, but still impressive) first.

Cool - if the Soviets hadn't faked this by building an actual size replica of the moon in Siberia.

Minorly cool.

Would be more cool if there were actual photos from the surface of the moon.

Or from a manned ship...as ours were.

What's really sad to think about is how amazingly far ahead in space exploration we'd actually be if the Soviets and Americans had cooperated.

Indeed.

Pretty much the glaring case study for my final conclusion about political ideologies.

Uh, there are some actual surface photos...

There's no Russian footprints there, but there are some Russian rover tracks and they even pulled off a sample return mission.

Noble idealism, but if you have no recollection of the Cold War or the relationship between the US and Soviets in the 60's and 70's, you'd realize just how impossible this level of cooperation would have been. Different world back then- much uglier and more dangerous than now in many ways.

Yeah, yeah, no crap.
Don't have to be a "historical realist", to be able to comment on the human stupidity of it.

We'd be nowhere. Space exploration is a dick contest on the highest levels, and the only reason we bothered with the moon was because the Russians put their bird in orbit first.

I dunno, if the military hadn't taken charge of it, we mighta coulda had a space Howard Hughes do it privately.

Oh, I remember the cold war quite clearly.

See Diacanu's post on "human stupidity".

Shit, I didn't know that Russia had their own moon

I agree. The competition made it happen. Heck, competition often gets better results than cooperation.

What about these?

There's nothing wrong with "individuality" as long as we're all doing it together.

"What American wants to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon?"

I can think of at least one person over at TrekBBS who would

The Soviets got a couple of pounds of lunar soil that happened to be near one of the lander legs (and was probably contaminated by the braking rockets).

The U.S. got more than 800 lbs of carefully selected samples and deployed instruments on the moon that sent back information for years.

Yes, the U.S. spent much more than the Soviets.

But we got much, much,much, much more.

You pay more, you get more.

The question remains, though we did a great and historic thing, what exactly did we get that couldn't be accomplished through robotics?

We could build a probe right now which could deploy a rover on Mars, one that could wander all over the place, return a ton of rocks and soil samples to the lander, which could return those samples to Earth for analysis...for a LOT cheaper than sending a human.

Granted, I'm all for "boots on the ground" as you are, but realistically - we're much more likely to get the money for the robot probe than we are for getting the funding to send a human. That's just the unfortunate reality.

You could probably explore Mars pretty thoroughly with 10 billion dollars worth of probes.

But you are more likely to get 100 billion for a manned mission than 10 billion dollars of unmanned probes.

No Buck Rogers. No bucks.

That was in the 60's. "Nobody wants to sleep by the light of a communist moon" is a principle that hardly applies these days.

I remember the space fever of the 60's. That's gone now. It's gone from novelty to humdrum, with the only tension being "is this shuttle mission going to come back intact?"

Plus, because of Challenger and Columbia, few have the same kind of faith in NASA as they did in the 60's. I've been reading about Columbia, and learned that there were at least two ways Columbia (or at least her crew) could have been saved, had NASA officials been roused to even check if the foam strike had damaged the shuttle.

It seems to me that NASA doesn't have the same "Failure is not an option" attitude these days that they had when Apollo 13 ran into trouble. It's fallen prey to the political considerations that plague every other governmental organization.

Can that organization safely pull off a manned Mars expedition? I have my doubts. I can't see our national pride or our space program being helped by the last image of Mars coming from an astronaut falling down from asphyxia because some manager at NASA ignored warnings about the space suit life support system because it would endanger his future job with SpaceCorp.

Or it could be I'm just too cynical...

Is that whole, "big mirror on the moon thing real? Or did someone get bored and make it up?

Kneel before Zond!

According to historical accounts, Kennedy and Krushchev were actually working on that, but the idea died with JFK's assassination.

What makes you think the Soviets had any technology that the U.S. didn't?

And what financial resources could the Soviets bring to the table?

Say what you want about the USSR/Russia, but they had numerous firsts in spaceflight and have managed to maintain a far more energetic, stable, and consistent space program than we ever did.

We beat them to the Moon...and then stopped going there, but their cosmonauts hold the records for the longest stays in space. In the time since we only sent 3 manned missions to Skylab back in the early to mid-70's, they've had several Salyut space stations and Mir. We could never get our shit together to build a station until ISS...with Russia's help. Whenever our shuttle fleet gets grounded, their Soyuz and Progress ships keep right on chugging along. We're learning how to assemble and resupply a space station in orbit: they've already done it.

We beat them to the Moon and our planetary probes are miles ahead of theirs, but the Russians have pretty much managed to maintain a manned presence in space that we never did.

The Russians are more primitive, sure, but they well and truly have their shit together.

They also kept their heavy-lift boosters and can throw much heavier loads into orbit than we can, and more reliably too. Their gear may be the space equivalent of a DC-3, but it gets 'er done.

NASA seems to have demonstrated the Scotty Principle - i.e., the more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.