"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

"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.

Umm, Jeff, you clipped out what I was responding to. *I* did not propose
the metric, the original poster did.

I was simply pointing out how useless it is because both countries have done
about the same.




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.


Key words are "early success". No real on-going successful programs. And
even there one could say we one-upped them, we landed on there and survived
with something not really designed to ;-)


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.

And done what exactly?


They've also performed many more automated rendezvous and dockings than
any other nation.


I will grant that is one area where they excel at. (In fact better at the
automated ones than the remote controlled ones :-)



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.

True, the "door" design on the Orlan is innovative and a good one.



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


Exactly. Yet there are many who seem to think that somehow the
Soviet/Russian one was intrinsically "better".


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





--
Greg Moore
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