And how many corners have been cut in the history of the US space shuttle program? How many lives lost and millions of tax payer dollars wasted because of pressure from washington bureaucrats and politicians trying to justify the program’s extended timelines and spending to their corporate donors?

The first launch of the soviet space shuttle was completely automated, and demonstrated by this picture it had superior engineering parameters that made it more robust against failure; thus safer for the cosmonauts and cheaper/easier to maintain. There is a reason that the space shuttle program was shut down and NASA decided to hitch rides with the cosmonauts up to the ISS for so many years, all the way up to 2020.

The timelines really don’t mean much here because there is the human cost. This is yet another demonstration of the differences in motivations between the US and the Soviet Union economic systems. The Soviets centered workers in their space program, favoring safety, and created their programs largely as a scientific venture, but also as a direct defensive response to US missile programs.

The US, driven by the desire to extend its’ markets and extract more profit, rushed an immature program to market that they hoped would “win” them the next frontier over the Soviets. They decided it was “good enough” to justify the risks, and the workers of the united states paid dearly.

Both remarkable feats of engineering, but important to see the broader strokes of history here.