President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

If Shepard beats Gagarin into space, we declare victory and nobody in this country thinks about going to the moon for decades.

 

If Sergei Korolyev isn't hell bent on launching an earth satellite, the first indication the West gets of USSR missile technology isn't Sputnik, but an ICBM aimed against Washington -- and probably impacting in Chicago.

 

And this is why they call him StarChickenLittleMan.

 

Neither the military brass in the USSR or the US had any substantial interest in launching earth satellites. They were fixated on weapons delivery, ie missiles. It was basically the personal ambitions of the scientists, specifically Korolyev and Von Braun who wanted to aim those rockets into orbit.
Both of them had to essentially argue their way past harrumphing military meatheads who believed all the satellite stuff was just a distraction from the main mission of building boom boom missiles.

 

All the Dems voted for it, too. It passed unanimously.

 

Soviets kind of had a reason.

They were outnumbered 7,500-50 in warheads when Sputnik was launched.

And WE were doing duck and cover.

 

-----Joe Biden '24------
Hey, he's younger than Harrison Ford

 

Yes, and those warheads were much larger and heavier than the US bombs, making it necessary to develop a much larger and more powerful rocket to launch it, making their first operational ICBM fully capable of launching fairly sizable objects into orbit. This gave them a huge leg up in the early stages of the space race, with first satellite, first lunar flyby and lunar impact, first manned flight, first multi person flight, etc etc . The R-7 missile Korolyev first flew in 1955-56 is the basic design of the Soyuz still being launched today.

 

Redstones were our ballistic missiles from 1953 on, so it's not like our captured German rocket scientists weren't good. But Ike wanted the Vanguard program to carry the first American satellite, except it had this nagging issue of blowing up. Of 11 Vanguard attempts, only three satellites reached successful orbit.

Instead of a warhead, NASA put a capsule on top and launched Shepard and Grissom on Redstones. For reaching orbit, the more powerful Atlas was used for the rest of the Mercury program. Atlas was still a viable launch platform even when I returned to the Cape in 1986 (and for years afterward).

EDIT: But Starman is correct, the Americans were behind in payload and propulsion for quite some time.

 

Atlas V vehicles, highly modified and redesigned versions of the Atlas ICBM of the 50s, are still in service but are scheduled to be phased out in the fairly near future.

 

Can someone please tell me what “Take them to the train station “ means?

I work for a railroad and a few more this ago there was some guy in out Twitter feed who would say that about Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc.

 

The stupidest thing I’ve seen all day.