Let’s not forget they managed to match the Americans in the space race even though their space budget was so small they were using cardboard boxes as office furniture.
The USSR beat the US in every other stage of the space race.
First unmanned space vehicle (Sputnik), first manned space flight (Gagarin), first space walk (Alexei Leonov), first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova)… the list goes on, and I didn’t even have to look up any of this.
The space race didn’t end with the moon landings. The USSR launched the first manned space station program - which became crucial in the development of the ISS - and performed the first landings of probes on Mars and Venus. The space race effectively only ended when the Cold War ended, and I think historians could spend days arguing who actually ‘won’ it.
The Soviets might have aspired to socialism early on, but slipped into totalitarian state capitalism.
Even so, they did start the space race from which a surprisingly large number of technical advances came. There are over a dozen advances in your cell phone that came from NASA research. That includes almost everything except the touch screen which was invented by the Smithsonian museum.
Unfortunately every example I’ve heard of communist and socialist countries is always followed by “unfortunately someone took over and they weren’t actually that”. Are there any countries since the industrial revolution that use actual communist or socialist economic systems and aren’t effective dictatorships?
It works the same for capitalism. I’m in the camp that says neither pure capitalism nor pure communism are systems that can realistically exist at all. In one system, the government usurps the power of capital and in the other capital usurps the power of government. They both end up totalitarian by different paths.
I’m libertarian, but that gets confusing since in America the right wing has twisted the definition beyond recognition. Libertarianism started as a left wing philosophy that uses the power of government and democracy to protect individual freedom from both government and capitalist tyranny.
Nice to meet someone in the wild who knows the difference between libertarian and the US definition of libertarian. I’ve often wondered why US politics takes perfectly decent words (conservative, socialist etc) and proceeds to redefine them at odds with the rest of the world. For example: team red’s loony religious right wing being called conservative or calling anybody from team blue left wing.
Because the Soviets were so well known for their social and technological innovations, right?
Let’s not forget they managed to match the Americans in the space race even though their space budget was so small they were using cardboard boxes as office furniture.
I don’t remember the USSR making it to the moon first.
The USSR beat the US in every other stage of the space race.
First unmanned space vehicle (Sputnik), first manned space flight (Gagarin), first space walk (Alexei Leonov), first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova)… the list goes on, and I didn’t even have to look up any of this.
Yet they still lost the space race.
The space race didn’t end with the moon landings. The USSR launched the first manned space station program - which became crucial in the development of the ISS - and performed the first landings of probes on Mars and Venus. The space race effectively only ended when the Cold War ended, and I think historians could spend days arguing who actually ‘won’ it.
The Soviets might have aspired to socialism early on, but slipped into totalitarian state capitalism.
Even so, they did start the space race from which a surprisingly large number of technical advances came. There are over a dozen advances in your cell phone that came from NASA research. That includes almost everything except the touch screen which was invented by the Smithsonian museum.
Unfortunately every example I’ve heard of communist and socialist countries is always followed by “unfortunately someone took over and they weren’t actually that”. Are there any countries since the industrial revolution that use actual communist or socialist economic systems and aren’t effective dictatorships?
It works the same for capitalism. I’m in the camp that says neither pure capitalism nor pure communism are systems that can realistically exist at all. In one system, the government usurps the power of capital and in the other capital usurps the power of government. They both end up totalitarian by different paths.
I’m libertarian, but that gets confusing since in America the right wing has twisted the definition beyond recognition. Libertarianism started as a left wing philosophy that uses the power of government and democracy to protect individual freedom from both government and capitalist tyranny.
Nice to meet someone in the wild who knows the difference between libertarian and the US definition of libertarian. I’ve often wondered why US politics takes perfectly decent words (conservative, socialist etc) and proceeds to redefine them at odds with the rest of the world. For example: team red’s loony religious right wing being called conservative or calling anybody from team blue left wing.