Ten minutes after liftoff, SpaceX cut its own live feed on the Starfall demonstration flight. No orbit confirmation, no payload description, no further commentary. It was the kind of silence usually reserved for national security launches, and it was enough
  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    Dude, you realize the whole ‘going to the moon’ thing was just a way to convince the public to fund ballistic missile technology?

    And this was true for both sides of the 1960s Space Race.

    • Sputnik 1 was carried into space by the Soviet Sputnik rocket (an adaptation of the R-7 Semyorka Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) on October 4, 1957 source

    • Yuri Gagarin was carried into space on April 12, 1961, by a Vostok 8K72K rocket. The Vostok 8K72K was a three-stage liquid-fueled launch vehicle derived directly from the Soviet Union’s R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) source

    There was fierce competition inside the USSR for which rocket technology would be best used for weapons. The whole “exploration” or “civilian use” thing on both sides (USA/USSR) was just window dressing for weapons programs in space.