Uhh, but at what cost?
How many of the failures and deaths do we know of prior to the USSR's sucess in manned launches? They always mentioned the ones that went right, but I imagine there were many failures of the early MIS attempts...Oh well, I guess freedom of information has a price, tooo..We lost our first astros in a plane crash in '66, I think they were Basset and See.....How many of the early Russion failures were reported? It took the fall of Communism for the truths to come out.