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A comment on Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News?. Parent comment

Re:Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News? by avar on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @06:14AM (#11109124)
The USSR made some amazing contributions to technology, but it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that it "gave birth to human travel in space" which to me implies that it was a novel technology nobody else was working on and wouldn't have happened any time soon without them.

The first manned US flight was a month after the Soviet one, and the US had successfully returned monkeys from space before that, so arguably they were ahead technologically but less willing to use a human test subject.

It's more accurate to say that ICBM development in both the US and USSR had the unintended side-effect of giving birth to human space travel once the political benefits of using nuclear launch systems for human space travel were realized.

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Re:Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News? by ommunist on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @09:20AM (#11109921)
Well, USSR sort of had it right. This is why the US is still buying that rocket engines for new launches, designed more than 30 years ago in the "Atlantis".
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Re:Which countries are mentioned the most on Hacker News? by PerfectDlite on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @11:15AM (#11110825)
And Russia buys almost everything else in US, Europe and China.

Uncontrolled military spending is a funny thing.

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