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Comment by mempko | Hacker News Reader

When you look at the history of the space race between Soviets vs USA, one thing that is clear is the approach used by both countries to engineer their craft were very different. The Soviets would do design by testing and blow up many rockets and gather data vs the USA which would be more up-front about it's design and design testing before gong live.

SpaceX clearly took the Soviet's approach to rocket design.

EDIT: This is not a negative thing. Soyuz is pretty darn safe because of the approach they took.

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While the US had better tech and improved design they all tested the shit out of things before going live and then ran live tests on unmanned rockets, many of which exploded quick spectacularly. Soyuz might be safe now, but that safety was paid for by many near-misses and in several cases in cosmonaut blood. Your statement regarding US vs Soviet approach to the space race is simply wrong.

> As of 2020, there have been 15 astronaut and 4 cosmonaut fatalities during spaceflight. Astronauts have also died while training for space missions, such as the Apollo 1 launch pad fire which killed an entire crew of three

The numbers don't really seem to support your assertion that NASA is generally much safer than Soviet/Russia

At least 126 technicians and cosmonauts were killed by accidents during the Soviet space program. It’s rumored that additional cosmonauts died on missions that the Soviets covered up.

We also lost all three astronauts in a test of the Apollo capsule which doesn’t count as flight but I think we would agree still counts in the buckets of blood both programs have spent.

If you do more tests which kill more people before declaring the system good, you don’t get to not count those people like it’s a different color of money in some bureaucratic dystopia.

As far as technicians, I've always felt sad for the two Space Shuttle technicians who died in 1981 after entering a nitrogen-filled engine compartment (John Bjornstad and Forrest Cole).

Three died in that accident. The third lingered for a couple years before passing.

It's very sad but it's not a bad way to go. I was a nuclear plant supervisor for about 20 years. One day the temp started to increase in the control room. The 3 AC units were behind the control room so I headed there to check on things. Another guy said he'd go with me. These things are as big as locomotives. Well while we were in the room a refrigerant relief valve lifted with a huge roar. Turns out, amazingly, the relief was designed to vent into the room. We made it to the card reader to get back into the control room but my card kept being rejected. I felt myself sliding down the wall and next I knew I was sitting in a chair in the control room feeling better and better. If my buddy hadn't decided to come with me I would have died in that room.

There was no panicky brain screaming "we need air" or any feeling of being O2 short. It was just normal breathing. If you're going to end it all that's the way to do it.

I wrote an incident report with the obvious suggestion to vent the reliefs outside. It was modified the next outage.

"But what if we vent the toxic gas into the place where you go to see if there's a problem with the toxic gas..."

That's likely to include the Nedelin catastrophe ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe ) -

"The most recent estimated death toll, released by Roscosmos on the 50th anniversary of the accident and originating with agency engineer Boris Chertok, was that 126 people had died, but the agency qualified the number by saying that the actual number could be anywhere from 60 to 150 dead."

The Nedelin catastrophe was an ICBM test run of a rocket with hypergolic fuel that exploded on the launch pad; there was the 1980 launch pad explosion of a (military) sattelite launcher that killed 44 people and injured 43. The Russian version of the article says that hydrogen peroxide filters were produced with catalytic materials, this was later fixed after another launch almost failed in the same manner (it doesn't say how that blast was avoided), initially they suspected an action of the ground crew to have causes the blast in 1980. Both blasts were kept secret until Perestroika in 1989. both explosions were on rockets with hypergolic fuel.

The Russian wikipedia article also has a list of 'other failures' - these are fires in an ICBM silo in Russia in 1960 - eight dead; the US had a fire in a Titan II bunker in 1965 that killed 53 and another one in 1980 that killed one man; also Brazil had a fire of a liquid fueled rocket that killed 21, also on start preparations. (and another blast in Plesetsk in 1973 that killed seven http://www.plesetzk.ru/index.php?p=1973&d=doc/disaster - wikipedia doesn't list everything)

Rocket fuel can be very dangerous stuff! At least liquid methane/oxygen aren't hypergolic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Plesetsk_launch_pad_disas... https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%81...

I've always loved Ignition![0] for the perspective it gives on working with the chemistry of this stuff.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-Univers...

But the U.S. has sent 3x as many citizens into space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nat...

So combining with your statistic the U.S. has a fatality rate of 4.4% versus Russia's 3.3%. Given the low N it's probably within margin of error.

I don’t think it makes an enormous difference, but not all of those US citizens flew in US rockets (nor did all Russian ones)

Also, quite a few of those did multiple flights. Looking at that list, I think that moves the needle in favor of US rocket safety.

Soviet spaceflights were quite long compared to American - Salyut-6 and Salyut-7 both had more expeditions than Skylab, and that's before Mir, while Shuttles were limited to about a month in space per flight. Of course launch and landing are more dangerous phases of flight - Apollo-13 notwithstanding - so it makes harder to pinpoint an objective measure for safety.

At least 60 of those Americans were sent up on the Russian Soyuz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_human_spacefli... Also, How are you doing the math to get a 4.4% fatality rate? The numbers are much lower than that.

Soyuz has launched 394 people and killed 4 of them. The most recent fatality was 50 years ago. The Shuttle launched 833 people and killed 14 of them, most recently in 2003 (8 years before the program ended). That gives Soyuz a fatality rate of 1.0% and the Shuttle a fatality rate of 1.7%. In other words: You're 70% more likely to die if you ride the Shuttle instead of Soyuz.

The more you look into the specifics, the safer Soyuz seems. The Soyuz deaths were early in the program while the Shuttle deaths happened when the program was mature. (Soyuz 11 was the last fatality and it was the 10th manned mission. STS-51-L was the 25th Shuttle mission and was considered to be safe enough for a civilian teacher to ride along. Oops.)

Soyuz's design is inherently safer. It has a launch escape system (which saved the crew of Soyuz 7K-ST No.16L).[1] The Shuttle did not. Soyuz's heat shield is much more robust than the Shuttle's. Soyuz's crew section is on top of the rocket, reducing the chance that any falling debris (or shrapnel caused by an explosion) will harm the crew module. Lastly, Soyuz uses liquid fueled rockets that can be shut off at any time. The Shuttle's solid boosters could not be throttled or shut off. All of these design decisions make for a simpler and safer vehicle. If I had to pick one, I'd ride Soyuz for sure.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No.16L

Of course proving a simple design and sticking with it is safer! Not going to space and being content with remaining on the ground is safer still! Water is wet! The sky is blue!

We can all see what happened: the soviets stopped spending money on innovation and tried to re-frame their stagnation as operational brilliance. Sure, Soyuz has a reliability niche, and I'd rather ride on it too, but I'd rather fund efforts to advance space exploration, even if they wind up being a clusterfuck like the shuttle.

Aren't solid boosters, like those used by the Shuttle, a simpler design than liquid engines?

On top of that, the Raptor engines used in the Starship, which seem to be considered state-of-the-art, are based on a soviet design from the 60s.

Raptors are state of the art. They are based on a soviet design from the 60s in the same way that they are based on US designs from the 60s.

It's weird that people seem so keen to talk up the soviet part and talk down the US part.

I think he is referring to the Soviet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-270 full-flow staged combustion engine from the 60s. The Americans had not been able to preserve the high-pressure hot oxygen from eating the preburner.

Both had two vehicles lost in space/reentry, the shuttles just held more astronauts. In terms of percentage of fatal missions the two were roughly equivalent, with Soviet failures front-loaded into less sophisticated and less safe early vehicles while the US failures were later on an overly-complicated system design.

Challenger? What's your point? That Russia didn't beat the US into space? I thought the west at least accepted that fact. Or do you just have to believe the US is ALWAYS "superior"?

Downvoting again? Rather than articulate a response?

I was confused by "Russia didn't beat US into space" - you probably meant "to the Moon" (manned flights), while USSR had quite a few space firsts.

No, I meant that the above response calling the other user wrong is wrong itself. The USSR, had it not had to fight a cold war against the US, could very well have been a much better system not just for space flight, but for a way to structure and run society in general.

But yet, if I say this, I will be immediately downvoted because if I suggest that anything other than the established order in the US is the best system, the powers that be as well as the indoctrinated individuals that frequent this place would rather just shut that conversation up than to engage it meaningfully.

> The USSR, had it not had to fight a cold war against the US, could very well have been a much better system not just for space flight, but for a way to structure and run society in general.

What makes you think that? If they had such a wonderful "way to structure and run society in general", why did the USSR and its satellite states have to systematically mass murder people who wanted to leave this wonderful society?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_Eastern_Bl...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schie%C3%9Fbefehl

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_graves_from_Soviet_mass_e...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD_prisoner_massacres

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Well, why did the US actively try to harm the USSR? If it was such a bad way of doing things, why did the US actively go out of it's way to sabotage it rather than just ignore it and let it die?

This is moving the goalposts.

It's possible that the USSR would have been a better system, had the cold war not happened, but that's not the world we live in. If you want to make that argument you have to explain why it's reasonable to excuse how the USSR turned out in reality, and why in your hypothetical world it would have turned out differently.

With respect to space advancement, I suspect the main reason for sustained differences in accomplishments come down primarly to the amount of resources each were able to devote to space. The US was able to sustain a high level of investment for a long time, and the USSR was not.

It's not moving to goalposts to acknowledge that the USSR beat us to space and that a large part of their collapse was due directly to the influence of the US.

On the contrary: It was Western technology and capital that propped up the USSR despite its repeated failures and inefficiencies.

https://capx.co/soviet-communism-was-dependent-on-western-te...

Lol, who beat Nazi Germany? Western technology or Soviet tech?

FDR supplied the Soviet Union with lots of Western tech, including aircraft.

Upthread there was a claim by evgen that the way the US vs Soviet approach to the space race had been characterised by mempko was incorrect, and that the current safety of the Soyuz was (at least in part) paid for with the lives of cosmonauts.

You go on to state that Russia beat the US into space (which is a non-sequitur), and later expand that "The USSR, had it not had to fight a cold war against the US, could very well have been a much better system not just for space flight, but for a way to structure and run society in general."

When challenged by alentist, who asked "why did the USSR and its satellite states have to systematically mass murder people who wanted to leave this wonderful society?" you countered with "If it was such a bad way of doing things, why did the US actively go out of it's way to sabotage it" which is moving the goalposts, and starts to slide into whattaboutism.

Specifically you claimed that the USSR "could very well have been" a better way to structure a society, and alentist provided strong evidence that it was not - people were murdered when they tried to leave. Instead of trying to prove your point you deflected, and shifted the goalposts from "this could very well have been a good system" to "the US didn't like it therefore it couldn't have been bad".

Part you aren't answering the question directly. Did the US not persecute communists? Has the US not directly been involved in wars in communist countries that have led to millions of deaths, both military and civilians? You say the USSR killed its people, yet you won't admit those people were leaving because they wanted apparently to go to capitalist societies. What happens if capitalist societies don't exist? Where are those people going to? Or was the USSR killing people just to kill people as you claim?

Of course you're right. USA has been continually at war, grinding the lives of brown people into profits for rich bastards, since before independence from Britain. Lots of Americans moved to USSR, especially non-whites. Truman had four years in which Stalin would have been happy to sign away nuclear weapons forever, but instead he was led by the nose by the armaments manufacturers and kept creating ever-more-deadly nukes. USSR continually tried to rein in communists in other nations in order to try to preserve peace, but was painted as a great instigator by the airtight propaganda that we Americans choke in from our births.

Still, it would have been better not to restrict emigration. That was not humane, and betrayed an antiquated view of how the world works.

You completely dodged the question and tried to change the subject, so I'll ask it again: If they had such a wonderful society, why did they have to systematically mass murder people who wanted to leave this wonderful society?

Your question, on the other hand, is silly. Substitute the USSR with Nazi Germany.

Why did the US have to systemically mass murder Native Americans and enslave Africans Americans and fight over seas wars in Vietnam and North Korea? If you can assert their atrocities, I can so also assert the US's. You are dodging, not me.

You again keep trying to dodge the question and change the subject, so I'll ask it yet again: If the USSR had such a wonderful society, why did they have to systematically mass murder ordinary people who wanted to leave this wonderful society?

If you're saying that slavery is also abhorrent and evil—like the slavery and mass murder that takes place under Communism—then we're in agreement. Now, can you please answer the question?

So you agree, capitalism has been responsible for slavery and mass murder?

Not at all. That's nonsense. Now, can you please answer the question you keep dodging?

If the USSR had such a wonderful society, why did they have to systematically mass murder ordinary people who wanted to leave this wonderful society?

The US fought an actual civil war over the right to OWN people. How is capitalism, THE economic system the US has used since it's inception, not responsible for that, as well as the current demand for slave labor that exists today? I will answer your question when you can answer that one honestly.

To our fellow readers: Notice how Layke1123 has dodged my original question no fewer than 4 times (!), all while continuing to launch barrages of new questions in an effort to derail the conversation and avoid having to answer it. This tactic has a long history in Soviet propaganda.

Let's try again:

If the USSR had such a wonderful society, why did they have to systematically mass murder ordinary people who wanted to leave this wonderful society?

Don't deflect. Don't evade. Answer.

I have repeatedly told you. The direct answer is that the US is directly responsible for meddling in the internal affairs of a foreign state repeatedly causing political turmoil and economic disaster. Do you disagree with this statement? I'd love for you to prove the US had no involvement in fighting against the USSR to varying levels of success.

To our fellow readers on HN: notice how alentist himself cannot answer a question asked back, even though I have given him the answer to his question directly multiple times. It is his attempt to save his narrowly constructed world view that he is right, America has never committed atrocities against its own people and others, and you should accept his point of view matter of factly without questioning! Notice how he acts more like the places he criticizes than I do simply for questioning his assertions?

A significant reason why Stalin was able to successfully rise to power and why the Bolsheviks were able to secure total power is because of foreign violence and interference.

When all major foreign powers say that they wish for the destruction of your country and would openly prefer you to go back to more suffering, support for monsters like Stalin increases.

Equally, when the threat of invasion is as high as it was for the USSR from Britain and the US, a lot of money and power is invested in the military.

It's very possible that if it wasn't for massive foreign interference neither Stalin nor Trotsky would ever have been able to gain much power (both of them got their power from military conflict mainly, Stalin even moreso), the NKVD never would have gotten nearly as much funding, Lavrentiy Beria would probably have been put against the wall, and so on.

It takes a profoundly ignorant view of historical facts to blame Stalin and Trotsky on foreign interference.

It takes a profoundly ignorant view of historical facts to ignore the immense pervasiveness of foreign interference in the Russian Civil War.

The mere presence of the Bolsheviks as a dominant force was due to foreign interference, as the Germans installed him and his friends in an attempt to destabilize the Russian Empire.

Trotsky's growth in authoritarianism, when he was previously a moderating force, started with the opportunistic German attacks at the fleets of the Red Army, and of course his rise to power from a middling figure to a preeminent Bolshevik was only made possible by German incitement of the Bolshevik movement to begin with.

Even Stalin's justification for power was based on (justified) appeals to centrally planned heavy industries, whose main motivation was military power which was necessary to to threats of invasion.

It is clear to anyone that both Stalin and Trotsky would have had much, much less power if they weren't able to justify centralization on the necessity to resist foreign agression, beyond that the consolidation of the Bolsheviks to begin with was a German plot.

To claim all of this was based on foreign interference is revisionism without foundation, ignoring the agency of the Russian people and its tragically flawed and corrupt leadership/aristocracy. The Germans did not create or even influence the conditions that led to the Russian civil war or the various abortive revolutions prior to the one in 1917; beyond helping Lenin get back to Russia from Switzerland there is a shocking lack of evidence of any direct support (just in case you are trying to suggest the "Kaiser's gold" theory, there is no evidence of significant monetary support in either German or Russian records.) Considering the fact that Russia was a participant in WW1 at the time it is naive to assume they as disinterested or uninvolved, but the Germans did not create Lenin or any of the other committees and factions involved.

You cannot just sweep across decades of internal Russian conflict and paint it with such a broad and quite frankly misinformed brush. Every European nation was involved to some extent, but none had the influence you claim nor did any create any of the central characters in this story.

Is your position that the only possible result of the Russian Revolution was Stalin and the Holodomor?

The phenomena of revolutions turning authoritarian because of an outside enemy attempting to destabilize is in no way unique to the USSR. It's a pattern you see all across the world. It's what gets a movement that was opposed to even the concept of a standing army because of the centralization of power and the risk that brings to the largest standing army.

The Germans didn't create Lenin, but they fundamentally changed the course of the Rebellion against the Tsar by sending him back to Russia at that precise time. They had an intent in doing so that was realized.

So you are saying that foreign powers had no influence whatsoever on the internal political situations in Russia, or that is was a mix of factors? You do admit that they helped Lenin get back to Russia at least. If Lenin never helps get back, does he ever rise to that level of power?

They did not have a wonderful society. It was very deficient in many ways. I didn't argue that point because we agree. The point I'm arguing is whether or not the USSR could have had a better society if it wasn't for US and other foreign intervention, and the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Exactly! They can't even consider the possibility it seems because they don't want to even consider it. Its almost as entrenched as what some might call faith that the US was superior to the USSR and if you even suggest the idea of anything else you are downvoted because you are the bad guy for even considering it.

GP: They did not have a wonderful society. It was very deficient in many ways. I didn't argue that point because we agree.

You: Exactly!

Glad you also agree with my comments, then.

You're the one that replied to

>The USSR, had it not had to fight a cold war against the US, could very well have been a much better system not just for space flight, but for a way to structure and run society in general.

thus implying disagreements. Since neither of us have contradicted such a statement, either you've been replying hors-sujet or you were just trying to show agreement, right?

Huh?

Lol we didn't agree mate but way to try and take a quick win by "selectively" ignoring the parts you don't want to quote.

> Lol we didn't agree mate

Your comment says otherwise.

No, my comment agreed with the idea that the US is the most significant factor responsible for what happened in the USSR.

Yes, it's always someone else's fault when Communist policies inevitably fail and murder millions.

Does that also apply when Capitalist policies have inevitably failed and murdered millions? The civil war actually was the bloodiest war in the US's history no? Was that not a failure of capitalism? Was the great depression not a failure of capitalism?

The Russians also were fond of “give it more gas”, which SpaceX has also embraced and Elon has called out before. The fuel is a real big piece of the launch cost but it’s far from the largest. If your rocket equation calls for a little extra fuel but in exchange you can use more reliable or at least less exotic parts, just do it.

The fuel isn't even "a real big part" of the launch cost. It's well under 1% even for SpaceX [0]. But rockets are already just about as big as we know how to make them: the expensive thing is not filling the tank 10% fuller, but building a 10% bigger tank.

[0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8330/what-is-the-c...

Does anyone know some good books that explore the space race? I've read Carrying the Fire(which was excellent), but it doesn't touch much on what the Soviets were doing.

I found "This New Ocean" by William E. Burrows to be a rather good account of the first space race, as it covers both sides in an equal amount of detail.

This biography of the chief rocket designer of the Soviets, Sergei Korolev, is also a good introduction to the Soviet space program.

https://www.amazon.com/Korolev-Masterminded-Soviet-Drive-Ame...

I'd strongly recommend Boris Chertok's "Rockets and People" - https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta... . 4-volume first hand account (Chertok's immediate boss was Korolev and then Mishin, of N-1 fame, and Glushko, Energiya-Buran) . Really good memoirs about Soviet side of things.

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