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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

> If you ever come across a bright teenager getting lulled into communism keep this in mind as a very edifying example of the pitfalls of that system

This does not work at all in most instances. I'm a descendant of Poles who suffered greatly from Soviet oppression and later due to communist rule in Poland. I'm always open to share their horrific stories because it's important to know the past.

The two most frequent arguments I'm getting from those young people fascinated with communism is:

1. The history books are false, Gulags were education communities where people chilled and exchanged ideas

2. USSR was not real communism and we'll make it work this time.

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There is no cure for stupid.

I could spoon feed more details about this incident but if they are already going out of their way to avoid reality there is nothing to do but avoid them.

Or 3, USSR/Russia’s safety record is actually far superior here.

> As of March 2024, in-flight accidents have killed 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts in five separate incidents.

> USSR/Russia’s safety record is actually far superior here.

It's not; the US has launched more people into space; most of them using far more complex vehicles (reusable shuttles); some of them into far more dangerous missions - beyond the low earth orbit, to the Moon and back.

The US has had no fatal in-flight accidents involving simple rockets and space capsules comparable to Soyuz despite going much further and flying to the Moon. Their accidents happened with an experimental space plane (X-15 in 1967) and space shuttles (Challenger in 1986, Columbia in 2003). Russians spent over 20 years on their space shuttle, but it only flew a single unmanned test flight. The US space shuttle flew 133 successful manned missions out of 135 launches. Likewise, the US flew 199 missions with X-15 space plane, whereas its Soviet counterpart MiG-105 flew only 8.

In other words, Russians never got to flying at scale the kind of missions that killed US astronauts. You need to take that into account when comparing safety records.

Are you ok? My comment has nothing to do with space programs.

The comment you replied to cites a communist cosmonaut’s death as “a very edifying example of the pitfalls of that system”.

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