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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

It appears to me that a rigidly controlled organization, like the Sharashka seems to have been, is actually a pretty effective way to reach a well-defined objective. For example, reverse engineering something, or "make us a thing like those people over there have". The reason the Soviet Union and China (when it was actually communist) could do well at catch-up, but not as well when it was time to move into the lead, was that it is not a good system for researching or engineering new things, because in that case you need to try a lot of different things and see what works.

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The Soviets pioneered space travel.

The Soviets dominated mathematical research; the West only caught up when the government collapsed and the Soviet mathematicians emigrated to the West.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w17800

It is logical that freedom is required for innovative scientific progress - and nice to think so, because it means that the free inevitably become more powerful, and defeat tyranny. A built-in safety device. e.g. Einstein, escapes nazis, leads to atomics (though to his regret). If the nazis had accepted everyone, they would have been more powerful... though, I guess, not nazis.

I haven't read your link yet, but I understand soviet maths developed more-or-less in parallel isolation, with some innovations on both sides - about what you'd expect. Non-isolation would have yielded greater progress.

It would be news to von Ardenne et al to hear that they were Soviet, and their input to Soviets' "pioneering" space travel is at least as important as von Braun's to American space program.

(edit: spelling)

Von Braun not only succeeded in getting German researchers to USA, but headed a major space program when the need arose. Participation of German rocket specialists in Soviet space projects was more modest - first, the level of expertise wasn't quite the same as in von Braun's team, then they didn't really collaborate with Soviets as information was going only in one direction. At some point Korolev felt that Germans became less useful than their absence - given that Germans didn't have the feedback from their proposals, how it affects the work of Korolev's team. Then the German group's work was done.

So, I don't think von Ardenne - who worked on nuclear projects, not rocketry - or other German participation is as big as what von Braun's team has achieved.

Don't forget that while Americans got von Braun and his brains, Soviets got not only von Ardenne (who was quite bright anyway) but also everything from rocket (and other) factories) that wasn't nailed to the floor. Whatever was nailes has been moved together with floors.

By all indications, von Ardenne worked on quite a few projects, and it is quite interesting that the Soviet Moon project that ran when Germans were allowed to go home, ended in nothing much more than a few spectacular explosions.

No, Soviet Moon project had a list of successes and firsts and I would estimate was about 80% complete when it was closed. You don't launch a 100+ meter high rocket four times in 1970s, with the fourth time up until to thrust terminating sequence of the first stage, and call it a few spectacular explosions. The list of spinoffs is too numerous to list - Block D derivatives still fly, NK-33s still fly, Proton... Soyuz spacecraft... and it would be hard for one person with level of distrust which Germans had in post-war USSR to affect such a program to a scale of singular importance. Von Ardenne left USSR for East Germany in 1954 when works on - hugely successful - R-7 didn't even start, and Soviet Moon project was closed in 1974 - there definitely was some time to move development ahead.

There certainly was enough time, but they never made it to the moon. These days, though, there is a nice cottage industry of "moon landing was a hoax" experts, with one of main arguments being "hey, even we couldn't make it".

No, the time was rather short. Americans made it by 1969 with almost no time to spare, and they arguably had more both time (USSR started working on the moonshot some years later) and resources (the same team which worked on N-1 also worked on strategic missiles). That's not to mention the whole point of JFK plan - to raise the bar high enough so USSR would be unlikely to get to the finish line first. JFK's advisers calculated time right.

The point where we started was that Soviets pioneered the space travel and remained - up no now - comparatively quite good at it. I'd attribute that both to good decisions made at the foundation of the industry - and to lack of commitment to space advancements on the West especially after Moon race and end of Cold War in general.

I completely agree with the latter point, but while Americans have no problem admitting that von Braun was instrumental to the US space program, Soviets never even mentioned von Ardenne's name anywhere (just like it has never been mention that Hugo Schmaisser just happened to be a war trophy at the factory where Kalashnikov worked).

Of couirse it's not like SOviet space rocketry ewxisted in a vacuum, completely separate from ballistic missiles either. Gagarin's rocket basically was one of the early ICBMs. Once they realized that making copies of B-29 will only get them so far, they threw all the effort into rockets instead. Space program was a side-effect.

It was not a secret in USSR that Germans participated in early post-war rocketry works. Boris Chertok - in post-Soviet memoirs - describes works of team of Herman Grottrup. I'm not sure von Ardenne had that much influence on space-related technologies. Soviets rather have hidden their own projects, trying to paint too rosy a picture of a string of successes.

Orbit-capable rockets were for a long time being developed for military goals, it was only governments which can afford them and governments had their own justifications. In USA, for example, a lot of military rocket technologies found their way into civilian NASA programs.

In post-Soviet memoirs, indeed. Of course Chertok would know who worked there. The general populace only heard rumours that possibly Guderian was teaching in a military academy and was convinced that of course Tu-4, Elbrus, the Bomb, rockets, AK-47 and all that were purely homegrown inventions.

At least after Stalin's death they stopped claiming that pretty much everything has been invented or discovered by Russians (with an occasional Ukrainian or Uzbek thrown in for good measure).

One would think of the Russian space program...

>As Sergei Korolev was said to have joked, the guards who protected him in his high position as the chief designer of the Soviet space program were probably the same ones who watched over him in the sharashka.

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