USSR found water on the moon - in 1976!
 

Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on the Moon in 1976 - Technology Review

I am always amazed at how good the USSR was in terms of their space programs. They sent up the first satellite, the first person into space and did plenty of moon missions with a scientific background - when the Americans were just holding one "first time" that was celebrated widely - that "first man on the moon" event. And of course cool moon cars. So, while the Americans struggled to bring back so many kilos of moon rock that they could not package safely enough to prevent contamination, the USSR sent a drill up there to take a few high quality samples from below the surface. Quality instead of Quantity ;)

But of course these were only stupid communists, they cannot really do anything, right? So everyone else ignored that they found a 1‰ water content in their moon rock samples and instead continued with expensive missions to search for water on the moon...

Same reason as the whole space race - they wanted to do it themselves. Remember the context in any case - nobody wanted to share data; not that it was until 2008 that any readings were confirmed.

The article says, the Soviets published their findings in a renowned sceintific paper. In Russian of course (just as the Americans published everything in english). Does not sound so secretive actually.

Actually they did actually publish an english version of the journal, but of course with the cold war on such works were not highly read.

There are so many journals published around the world its easy for a single paper to be forgotten.

Well yes, but I think something that people spend millions of $$ on should have enough manpower to at least look for those papers that may already have shown the same results. I think it was mainly "we dont trust those Russians, they cannot do proper science because they are just stupid communists".

Did you even READ my post?

It's the same the other way around. The only reason the USSR didn't reach the moon is that their economy went down the toilet. They didn't stop just because the US managed it, thinking "that'll do".

I dont know if you can back that up.

The whole idea to put people on the moon was more of a prestige project anyways. The USA does not send people to the moon anymore either.
Most of the tasks (like taking moon rock samples or make photos or such) can be done with robotics. The USSR was actually quite advanced in their space program - more than the US. Look at all the things they did first:
Soviet space program - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
First satellite, first landing on the moon by a probe, first man in space, first probes to Mars and Venus and so on. Just because the US managed to pull off that first moon landing with a human on board does not impress me that much. Scientifically it is a no win mission compared to the data one can get from unmanned missions.

its more of a middle ground between your two postions.

It is true that the USSR did some very impressive stuff in the space race and did produce a saturn 5 scale rocket called the N1 for their manned moon mission

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...N1_rollout.jpg

However the reason that they never got a man to the moon was partly because they lacked the economy capacity to churn the rockets out like the Americans and that they failed to perfect the N1 due to racing to beat the Americans. In fact no N1 every successfully launched.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

They also produced a space shuttle, which never got off the ground past a single unmanned test (and was eventually destroyed when the unmaintained hangar collapsed on it). There wasn't anything actually wrong with what they knew, it was just behind the leading edge (and admittedly, largely the product of intelligence rather than R&D).

Yes, to go off on a tangent here, with the Buran the russians actually did what the Americans did in reverse.

After the apollo mission wrapped up Nixon decided to go for a low orbit infrastructure project instead of returning to the moon or going to mars. To do this the decided to construct a space plane which would then build a space station.

Meanwhile the russians did things the otherway round. They first built their space station (Mir) and then tried to develop their space shuttle.

Whether or not it was known, a few samples from one location at one time hardly gives a good representation of distribution.

I strongly doubt that the USSR managed to get so many "firsts" by spying on the US. I think they just had a strong interest in doing this and they had a form of economy that allowed that. planned economies are like that - if the government decides that something is supposed to be built, it can put a lot of people onto it. Look at China - they are booming to a large degree because they are a centralized controlled weird form of state capitalism. And if they decide that XY new nuclear reactors and a canal to pump water to northern China from the south are to be built, it is going to happen. The US was actually a bit more state centralized during the 1950ies and 60ies. The state at that time had a lot of power and money. So they could spend a lot of money on space stuff. Unlike later when the neoliberal agenda took hold. It did for the US what the USSR did with other means - restrict the ability of the state to operate with any significant efficiency and budget. But during the post war period, both economies were rather productive. The numbers of academics in the USSR was very high becausepeople were not restricted by finances to get education, so they had a huge number of well educated people, many of whom worked in engineering - like the space program.
I personally think, the USSR won the space race by points :P

Academics in the USSR were rare because the government kept persecuting them and sending them to gulags, actually.

Actually the USSR had a large numbers of Academics especially in rocketry and nuclear power due to Stalins drive for highly skilled workers. Most of them were kept loyal by being given better quality faclities. Anyway after Stalin died most of the persecution stopped.

Citing a general wikipedia article on emmigration from the USSR does not prove your point.

Numeraous reasons existed to emmigrate from the USSR - after all it was not really a communist state, but a pseudocommunist authoritarian regime, so there was opression, limits to freedom, restrictions at the workplace and of course the consumerism of "the West" was a big lure. Just yesterday I saw a docu on East Germany and the merger with West Germany in 1989. It was fascinating - when the wall fell, people from the east were given money for free so that they could endulge in shopping in West Berlin. In the weeks and moths following that, people from the then open East Germany filled the streets of the western part of Berlin to shop and spend all the money they had buying all the shiny consumer products. Shorty afterwards they voted to become part of West Germany and gave up sovereignty. Only months after that, they realized the meaning of that. They never before struggled with unemployment, poverty or the need to finance their childrens education or to find a place for their small kids to stay in daycare. And a few years later, they saw the dismantlement of the educational system that allowed unprecedented access to technical and scientific education for poor students as well as for girls - something the USA reached much later only and still struggles to provide.
Higher education was very much valued and promoted in the Soviet States. This does not say, that there was rreally equality or a fair treatment. Especially for political reasons, one could easily be discriminated or denied education, which is really bad. But that does not say anything on the overall acess of the states as a whole to people with high academic education.

But I think some people just swallowed that propaganda pill of the Matrix in the West, that persistent cultural narrative of the superiority of the western (particularly USA and UK) model of society, politics, education and economy. And of course, if one does not dare to take the red pill and look a little bit beyond that, to at least question the validity of that story and hear what people outside of that cultural bubble have to say - then one can sit comfortably inside that bubble, maybe not even leave the country and pretend to know what is going on elsewhere because the media, politicians and professors at the university say so (Or because it was in the movies or computer games).

Just out of curiousity, HNM, do you travel a lot? What countries have you visited and did you talk to local people there?

...of course, West Berlin was a 'model' fed by the rest of the USSR simply because of its location, and as such, strategic and symbolic value, much like an inhabited version of North Korea's propaganda village - not representative of general living conditions.

Higher education should never be provided on a quota basis but on a meritocratic basis for those who are able to qualify for and benefit from it. The question of higher education was a dilemma for the USSR - they wanted to say "it's cheap and easy for our people" but didn't want to deal with the result - that it turned intelligent people who might otherwise have just kept their heads down into dissidents who wanted a better life.

Talking about 'Matrixes' and then going on about how ideal the USSR was seems somewhat ironic - by no means was the US/UK/Western Europe perfect, then or now, but they not only survived, but prospered, and let that prosperity be available to the individual rather than Party officials. Perhaps you're thinking wishfully about the USSR.

Ignoring the whole point about resorting to argument form authority since I've said it before and really don't see why it's relevant, I've been to Berlin, to both former West and former East, if you're really interested. Didn't get to speak to people who lived through either, but did visit several related museums, including the one at Checkpoint Charlie. I don't see the relevance though. I'll just add that somewhere people want to live does not need a wall and 'death strip'.

What I am getting at, HNM is that it should be obvious that both sides of the cold war had a propaganda machine that was working well. The West has survived the cold war, the USSR did not, so the winners propaganda is what is called history afterwards and the loosers propaganda is called propaganda. This does not make those stories about how horrible the USSR was any more realistic. I personally know people who grew up in the Eastern part of Germany (and not only in Berlin, if you declare Berlin a propaganda city, then what about Dresden, Leipzig,...) and I was in Eastern Germany in the year following the fall of the wall and my best friend frequently visited Eastern Germany for Holidays in the 1980ies. I think directly experiencing something and talking to people gives one a benefit of improved judgement. If one sticks to stying inside certain bubbles, that just serves to reenforce ones prejudices. Looking at a Museum that is set up by the former enemy of a state for example will certainly emphasize the negative sides of that enemy in hindsight. I am amazed at what I learn about Germany if I visit other places and listen to what they see in Germany that is not told to the citizens.
For example we have somethign that always was lamented about Eastern Germany - a law that prohibits people with a certain political ideology from working in their profession. In the case of East Germany it was people who disagreed with the socialist party who were shunted or sent to prison - here it is communists. If I would register with a communist political party, including the one that is in the parliament paradoxically, I could not apply for a job as lecturer or scientist in a state funded university or research institute. How exactly is that different from Eastern Germany except an inversion of communist vs capitalist?

And I dont think I am idealizing the USSR, I just refuse to condemn everything they did as stupid, inefficient and nonsensical and to portray the West as gloriously superior. What I say is that both sides had advantages and disadvantages and that we have grown up in the Side that has prevailed (or in your case maybe for most parts after there were two sides at all), so we only learn about the bad sides of the "others" and the "victory" is used as a justification. This is very shortsighted, especially given that I would not even call the West a winner. The prosperity we seem to be seeing is mor most part a material prosperity that is now fpr 4 years in decline. Do you really thing the West has won if you look at Greece, Italy, Spain, the USA, Ireland and even the UK. The UK probably has now enough data available on their people to make the STASI in Eastern Germany envious.

Oh and of course no one would ever call the fence at the southern border of the US or the one they started building in Greece a "wall" - after all it is just a fence and people are only shot if they dont surrender...

And regarding the education, I think the USSR did a rather good job at selecting people who are suited for an education for it. Actually they probably did a better job than the West, because they had a planned economy, so they needed XY people doing a certain job, so they chose the XY best suited people to give them an education. In the West, it depends a lot more on money and luck. If you have the money, you can get a higher education of any sorts you want - with better universities charging more and demanding better grades - and then afterwards you can have connections to get a job or you can totally loose and revert to driving Taxis. There are plenty of highly educated people doing menial jobs in the West. I think this is pretty inefficient. That whole concept of setting more people on a task than is needed for it of course makes it work in a way that the best suited will get it done, but it also leaves the others in that race without anything in the end and basically their work or education goes to waste. That is not efficient overall. It may be efficient from the perspective of the one who wants that task to get done, but not from the perspective of all the people living in that state or country.

But this is turning again into one of these debates I am sick of, so lets stop there. Fact is in the end, that the USSR had a very advanced space program and that they did a lot of space-related things first. And according to the logic of the competition based world, this means that they were better at it, no matter how they got it done. They had the first probe on the Moon and the first space ships going to Mars and Venus, they had the first satellite, the first man and first woman in space, the first permanent space station,... and obviously it seems they first found water on the moon. I find it sad, that the West just ignores USSR science out of a false sense of superiority. What about that idea that science is without borders and that scientists should work together regardless or political or national borders. Its probably just a nice wish.

Again, it was never ignored. Nobody wants to rely on someone else's data. Why do you think they kept trying to reach the moon even after Apollo 13, right up until their economy inevitably collapsed?