Originally posted by Ozark
OK…If it NEVER happened. Who do you think would be the first to scream “fake”?
Hehe, you said it first
There was absolutely no doubt here that Americans reached the moon. Certainly, there was not much information about Apollo program, but if you were interested in it - you could find it with minimal effort. For instance: detailed reports of American space missions were published in Grand Soviet Encyclopedia yearbooks.
Official propaganda was accented on Soviet achievements, but it never ever said that moon landing was a fake. It only said that Soviet space program was more pragmatic. You could even think that Soviets never had any mannable moon programm. "Zond" returnable moon orbiters were "supposed to bring back high-quality photoes of moon surface".
As for Buran project - it was absolutely different concept fron Space Shuttle. Take a look at
http://www.buran.ruIn fact that project costed us like WWII... And with the new-fangled "democracy" all that tremendous effort went down the drain
My Father worked on the Buran lauch facility, (26th NII VVS, supervised capital construction). He retired in 1987, less then half-year before the first Energiya launch. His former students who worked in Baikonur in early-90s said that when independent Kazakhstan first tried to seize the spaceport - Russian military simply destroyed most of the fueling facilities (square kilometers of kryogenic equipment!!!), and evacuated everything they could to Russia...
The last heroic (it
was heroic, believe me!) effort of Soviet state was one of the causes of it's destruction. Very sad
