I’ve never seen a more accurate application of this meme, honestly. The amount of grandstanding by the US on one achievement out of a hundred is impressive.
The US still hasn’t landed on Venus and probably never will
Not much to gain by going there. Wildly corrosive, too hot, too hard to terraform with present tech.
Terraforming isn’t on the table anywhere. We can’t even stop fucking up this planet, let alone unfuck it, let alone apply much more advanced unfucking tech on planets without any of the environmental cycles we take for granted.
Space programs do science stuff and military stuff. Revisiting Venus would be for science stuff.
Space programs definitely do science and stuff. All I meant to say was that Venus might not be the lowest hanging fruit for scientific discovery.
It’s really expensive to go there. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
I see now how my post could read as an elon-fanboi type “colonize all the things” and that was not what I intended.
I do think Atmospheric sensor clusters on Venus would be pretty awesome. It could give us an interesting set of insights into a wildly different environment.
At 50km high it is literally the most Earth-like environment in the whole of the solar system (outside of Earth / the ISS / Tiāngōng obviously)
You wouldn’t even need a spacesuit or a pressure suit to stand outside, just a respirator and some light protection against acid
Maybe we should try terraforming earth before we start to look elsewhere idk.
Soviets are also the only country to have landed on Venus. Not just the first, the only one.
It always comes across to me as maximum cope when Americans brag about “winning the space race”. I mean, even if it was true, the US’s economy was massively wealthier than the USSR’s. This “race” was literally between the wealthiest country on earth and a very poor country. Even at the height of the USSR, its GDP was only about half that of the US’s.
It really does not show the US’s “strength” to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources. It’s a sign of weakness to actually even be in a “race” with a developing country to begin with, which suggests they are actually competitive and have a chance of winning.
That’s really what the whole “space race” shows. It does not matter who “won”, the very fact a poor developing nation could compete with the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth in the first place demonstrates the extraordinary weakness of the capitalist system.
The US only placed a man on the moon because of NASA, which they founded as a direct response to the Soviets launching Sputnik. Meaning, the US literally only implemented this space program as a response to the Soviets, they were not a natural outgrowth of the US’s system and would not have happened without the Soviets (as we have seen NASA massively defunded ever since). The fact the US even got on the moon in the first place only happened because of the USSR.
That was back in 1969, and we’re now in 2022 yet, funnily enough, the capitalist private sector has not got a man that far yet.
—aimixin
It really does not show the US’s “strength” to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources.
It really does show the US’s strength when no country has nearly the same amount of resources.
“Everyone else being weaker than you does not show your strength” is a very odd take.
With all that wealth plundered from the rest of the world they ought to perform better.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing.
Yes, the US has a large amount of wealth. That is what makes them strong.
they ought to perform better
So you’re saying they should be even stronger (than the strongest nation to ever exist)?
Or are you saying that “strength” is not about the total power one has, but about the efficiency with which one can convert resources into power?
