Is this supposed to impress anybody

BEFORE us. They also put the first animal, first man, and first woman in space. Check out Yuri the spaceman.

We (or our military, Boeing and Lockheedless) have been buying their heavy lift engines forever, since they are the most reliable power plants around for that size. Without the Russians, we would have been grounded after the shuttle was shut down. Now that SpaceX and others are kicking ass, that will change.

He's going to blow a fuse and call you a Putinista now.

Hillary's choice to fuck up Ukraine was intended as throwing shit at Putin, and Nuland succeeded beyond imagination. Neocon victories abounded because of Hillary, and fucked up our relations with Putin, with predictable results.

Frankly, playing nice, predictable, and reliable would have worked better than Hillary's approach. And we still would have a relatively cheap source of large booster rocket engines.

ride that pony all the way to Nuland conspiracy land

grab a calculator

that a human landed there.

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

They landed probes on Venus and the Moon before we did. Those were incredible accomplishments. Only a geopolitical myopic snob would ignore just how advanced their high tech has been. MIR? a generation ahead of us. Heavy lift vehicles? same thing. They continued and continue to make incremental improvements, while we jump three steps forward, then fall back two steps before our congress cuts the funding. Right now, in today's reality, we have no, zip, nada, nothing in terms of heavy lift vehicles. The ones we do use employ RUSSIAN rocket engines, cuz despite billions in US tax dollar investments, Boeing and Lockheed have raked in profits, without actually doing their jobs as well as they promised.

I guess that's an irrelevant accomplishment, according to certain "points of view".

That was supposed to be Ahnold.

Then again, Russian Easter is getting closer and closer.

I guess on Saturday it'll be a "Near Easter." Just in top to pop in for Sunday morning services the next day.

Russia, China, India, Japan & Europe are expanding their space exploration & infrastructure while we keep cutting back...so much so, private companies are already intervening.

Russia actually has no non-polar launch facilities of its own. It still uses the old Soviet cosmodrome, which is located in modern Kazakhstan. Given their relationship with their neighbors, Russia partly built this new cosmodrome to reduce their reliance on their neighbor. While Russia does control the old cosmodrome under a treaty with Kazahkstan, they couldn't actually hold it if their relationship with that country deteriorated.

There's a second reason for the new location, too. China is getting into space in a big way, and the new cosmodrome is only about 50 miles from their northern border on the industrial east coast. The location puts Russia in a great position to attract lower priority Chinese space missions that can't get space on their government controlled launches.

Plus it affords them to build more modern facilities.