alt Hacker NewsActually, in Russia do they have a pitch for where they’d rather draw the finish line? I admit it is probably influenced by having a US upbringing, but “landing on the Moon” does seem like a natural finish line for a space race.
The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.”
Maybe they have some space-station based claim.
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bryanlarsen • yesterday at 3:56 PM
Russia has the first finish line -- Sputnik. You can pick a successor finish line to diminish the American accomplishment, but Russia will always have that first one.
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But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing, planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive).
The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.