Thread by @SCWKorsgaard

The great thing about the #Apollo50th is that there have been hundreds of beautiful articles from dozens of authors and outlets. Heck, I even wrote a couple of them.

I don’t know which of them has been the best, but I think this bad hot take from the times is the worst.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1151854186386153473

There are multiple reasons why offering praise to the Soviet space program on the eve of the #Apollo50th is in very poor taste, but one of the biggest is that they literally only did these milestones for propaganda purposes.

After early milestones like Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, bits of tokenism like these were the only achievements the Soviet space program could reasonably achieve before us - they knew once NASA got going, the Americans would beat them to anything that mattered, including the moon.

While we focused on getting astronauts to the moon, they focused on achieving various "firsts" that were worthless for anything beyond propoganda purposes, and impressing the various useful idiots in the West dumb enough to crow the party line. Take a bow @nytimes!

The other, more important reason NOBODY should be praising the Soviet space program, is that by the late 1960s was getting its cosmonauts killed.

Valentina Tereshkova's biggest achievement wasn't being the first women in space, it was living to old age as a cosmonaut.

To this day, we don't know the full number of how many cosmonauts died, and likely never will, that's been up for debate since the Cold War. Hell, we only learned the truth behind what got Yuri Gargarin killed in 2003 - forced to fly during bad weather in a plane unfit to fly.

Worst of the bunch was the one "first" not even the New York times was dumb enough to glorify - first in-flight fatality in the history of spaceflight, Vladimir Komarov, the ill-fated pilot of Soyuz 1, in one of the most horrifying stories of space exploration.

There were 203 different design flaws detected with Soyuz 1, all reported to Soviet command, which ordered them to make the flight anyway "to mark the anniversary of Lenin's birthday." Those who suggested such were demoted or fired.

Cosmonauts knew how shoddy most of the Soviet spacecraft were even in the best of times, and even by those standards, that Soyuz 1 was a death sentence.

Komarov still accepted, because they would send Gagarin if he didn't, his dear friend, and "he would did instead of me."

Gagarin still showed up in full flight suit on launch day, begging to take Komarov's place, literally having to be restrained. Komarov launched into space aboard Soyuz 1... and then literally everything that could have gone wrong began to do so.

Antennas didn't open properly. Power was compromised. It was running dangerously low on fuel, and control was limited. Upon atmospheric reentry, the parachutes didn't deploy - not that it mattered because the shielding had begun to fail. Komarov was literally roasting to death.

We only know this because a listening post on a US Air Force base in Turkey picked up his transmission, including his final moments. Howling mad and broiling alive, Komarov cursed the Soviet Union, those who built Soyuz and those who forced the mission, with his dying words.

This is all that remained of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, his corpse literally being turned into molten rock during atmospheric reentry. By his request, it was an open casket funeral.

THAT is the kind of thing @nytimes is saluting on #Apollo50th - useful idiots to the last.

Hey, thrilled to see this take off... if everyone retweeting this wants something positive about #Apollo11 for the #Apollo50th, this is the write up about the #MoonLanding50 I did for @vagazette, about how NASA HQ was nearly in Virginia instead of Houston.
vagazette.com/news/va-vg-moo…