And we were really in the Cold War with these guys?

[SaltwaterServr]

http://www.space.com/13595-stranded-russian-mars-moon-probe-outlook.html

We send rovers to Mars, they outlast their expected operations time line by a factor of 10 with one of them still going. That would be a reference to Spirit and Opportunity that started their missions on Mars in 2004.

Russia fails on it's last two attempts to do anything outside of Earth's orbit.

[Chocolate Lab]

Yeah, no kidding. The really scary thing is those guys had all those nukes pointed at us. And still do.

[Temo]

What they really needed was more german scientists.

[Romo 2 Austin]

Profiling an entire country on the failure of a space exploration program.

[arglebargle]

Are you going to ignore the NASA blunders like using metric and English measurements interchangeably? There were at least two major projects that failed fairly close together.

And who's supplying the International Space Station now?

Not that I'd put my butt in any space craft run by the Russians. But I wouldn't trust NASA very far either. Read the appendix report on the Challenger Disaster? It's chilling.

http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report

[SaltwaterServr]

Profiling an entire country on the failure of a space exploration program.

Profiling the fear the United States had that the Ruskies were better than us in science and math, thereby introducing a concerted effort by the US educational system to improve our student's performance in those areas.

No one knows to date how many cosmonauts and test pilots died in their development of a grossly inadequate space program. Seems they had a more than just a little issue of "pneumonia" within their program. Moreover, it is fairly well known that after the Soyuz/Apollo joint mission space docking that we finally found out how grossly underdeveloped and truly spartan their program was to that point.

So yeah, I'm talking about profiling a countries highest technological achievements as a basis for the technologically based fears the US had for a few decades as we squared off in the Cold War.

Kid, take a look at how many countries have put a man in space in their own developed vehicles and put 2 and 2 together.