José, can you see?
We watched it live in elementary school, most of the kids didn’t get what had happened right away. Our teacher was just standing there stunned until an announcement came on the intercom asking all the teachers to turn it off. They didn’t say anything to us, just tried to pretend like we didn’t just watch people blow up live.
The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US’s program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn’t care about human lives.
always.The Soviet program is still haunted by the ghost of a frozen Laika in perpetual orbit.
The world’s bravest and first true cosmonaut.
I mean… not really.
🛰️ Space Race Fatalities Comparison: Soviet Union vs United States
Aspect 🇺🇸 United States 🇷🇺 Soviet Union Total astronaut/cosmonaut deaths 9–10 (incl. test/training accidents) 8 (official) On-mission fatalities 3 (Apollo 1, ground test) 4 (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) Training/test deaths (astronauts) 6+ (e.g. Theodore Freeman, C.C. Williams) 4+ (e.g. Valentin Bondarenko, others possibly unacknowledged) Deaths among ground personnel <10 100+ (notably the Nedelin disaster) Transparency High (accidents publicized and investigated) Low (many incidents hidden until after 1989) Major catalyst event Apollo 1 fire Soyuz 1, Nedelin disaster
Key Takeaways
- 🇺🇸 U.S. suffered more astronaut fatalities, including test pilots and training accidents.
- 🇷🇺 Soviets had higher total human losses, especially among engineers and soldiers during explosive launch and fuel testing incidents.
- 🔥 The Apollo 1 fire led to sweeping design and safety reforms in NASA.
- 🚨 The Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 tragedies were fatal in-flight accidents; Soyuz 11 remains the only in-space human fatality.
- 🕵️ The Nedelin disaster, one of the worst rocket catastrophes in history, killed over 100 but was kept secret for decades.
- 🧾 Transparency and institutional accountability were key differences: NASA publicly investigated accidents; the USSR often concealed failures.
You can certainly blur the space race with missile development as they were intimately tied on both sides, and if you want to include it then the deaths from the US ICBM disasters need to be included as well, but I do think it’s a bit absurd to uncritically report that 100+ people died in Nedelin when official numbers revealed it to be 54. Plus, wherever you sourced this from is clearly generally biased against the soviets beyond the scope of this report.
grok is this true
It’s true that all deaths on both sides were caused by people with JEWISH names. Coincidence? Not likley. Hitler killed less people. Elon is god. Sieg. Sieg!1!!!1
Grok, probably
It was a snow day. A neighbor saw it live from his huge-ass satellite dish. He called to tell me it blew up, and I thought he was taking the piss.
i wasn’t born back then, but i remember watching a punky brewster episode rerun when i was a kid that was about it. probably the first time i heard about the challenger disaster.
I watched it in person, sort of.
I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.
And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.
My entire school was gathered in the cafeteria for the event, televised live.
We were all sent home for the day (some took the week) in the ensuing chaos.
I wonder if this was when tape delayed live streams were invented?
…no, i think that was a nipplegate thing…
That we know of.
