"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message
...
Let's see, what have the Russians done? Killed a couple of crews and
floated around the Earth quite a few times.

The shuttle program has done much the same, when measured by the same crazy
metric you're proposing here.

Their interplanetary science program is tiny compared to what we've done.

True, but they had some notable early success with Venus, which is a real
p.i.t.a. for a probe to land on and still remain operational.

Compared to the US, they really haven't done that much more and in many
ways have done a lot less.

And yet everyone holds them up as the paradigm of things done right.

To be fair, they've built and flown more space stations than the US.
They've also performed many more automated rendezvous and dockings than any
other nation.

They've also got a good deal of experience with LEO EVA's. Their Orlan
suits have many design features that NASA is considering adding to their new
lunar EVA suits.

Their approach to manned LEO operations is different than the US approach,
but I wouldn't necessarily call it better or worse.

Simply compare the number of manned flights for example.

The shuttle alone has flown more times than all Soviet and Russian manned
missions combined.

True, but many shuttle missions had Russian/Soviet analogs which were flown
unmanned on Proton or Soyuz launchers. For example, all of the commercial
satellite deploy missions flown by the shuttle simply didn't require
cosmonauts on board when you're launching them on a Proton or Soyuz. Ditto
for spysat deployment missions. Ditto for Progress missions.

True this changed for the shuttle, but only after the Challenger disaster
made it politically unacceptable for such missions to be flown on the
shuttle.

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein