To begin with, Russia is not the same as the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union once had 22 million square kilometers and almost 300 million inhabitants, while Russia has just over 17 million square kilometers and less than half the population of the one that came to have the union of Soviet nations.
Nations like Ukraine or the Baltic countries no longer participate with technology and human talents in space planes as they did in Soviet times because now they are independent actions.
Other reasons that the breakup of the Soviet Union also produced a break in the technological development of the space race, and finally, not only have human talents been lost due to a lack of generational change, but a large amount of valuable information may also have been lost. on designs, manual protocols for the use of ships and also instruments and plans, it is an enormous mass of information that in the 60s and 70s was on paper and a lot of misinformation has either not been digitized or has simply been lost.
The latter is more of a supposition and not a statement, but it is a supposition that I say based on what has happened, for example, in the United States, NASA has had much fewer problems and conflicts than those suffered by the Roscosmos in Russia, but it has also ended up losing valuable information on space technology, one of the most curious recent cases occurred in 2022 when Voyager 1 began to fail.
The spacecraft was launched on September 5, 1977 and was located some 23,300 million kilometers from Earth. The problem arose when the mission operators could not find the specific operating manuals. It is true that they have a general manual, but the The ship's failure in this case required a very precise detailed review and they just couldn't find those precise documents that had been written 45 years before.
In the end they found them, they had to search a lot, but they found them in several boxes scattered around different NASA facilities and if this happens to NASA, imagine what will have happened to the Roscosmos with the division of the Soviet Union and having abandoned the lunar plans for so many years.
I think is completely stupid to compete who will be the first. Why not work all together as the same species, we are going to advance much faster to that goal.
That would be the ideal, to work together in a common objective as a species, the question is what we always know, there are interests and fears...
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