Also, the price of failure in the US was being fired or demoted, the price of failure in the USSR on high level project was being sent to Siberia (or reassigned to a new work place, as they were saying). And you could not really pick a place where to live in the USSR, after getting your degree, you were assigned to a certain factory, where you work for the rest of your life.
Someone's been drinking the kool-aid. I know people who actually lived in the USSR, it wasn't like that at all. If you look at the history of the Russian space programme you can see that there were failures, but it was understood that the task was difficult and things would go wrong. Obviously there was pressure from the military for military applications, the same as in the US.
Yes same here. I know someone from the Ukraine that lives here in the UK now through his son (who both incidentally just bailed thanks to the war over there). He was actually involved in the old USSR space programme between about 1965-1985 as a mechanical engineer working on support equipment. Three things he told me...
1. There was lots of pressure but no one was punished for failure unless it was due to complete negligence or incompetence and that usually just ended up as demotion to positions such as chef and cleaner. Failure was expected as a whole and those who manned the craft were aware they'd probably end up toast. It was a great honor to either end up toast or survive and their families would be rewarded either way. Plus it was rather cool. There was definitely a cool factor. Plus they were mostly Orthodox Christians which meant they thought they were going to heaven anyway...
2. The tech was pretty advanced at the time. They had access to everything that anyone else had. They had pretty good clones of western equipment. They'd just started buying in things like VAX minicomputer clones from VEB state run companies in East Germany when they wall came down (which was when he left) to run simulations on. They had Fortran and all sorts available to them. Most of the equipment they used was cloned American tools.
3. This one is my favourite... they were very social and everyone knew everyone and everyone drank together from officers to engineers to cleaners. Outside of the day job, everyone was equal.
Now I've worked with a lot of people from Russian and former Russian states and they're all pretty good people as a whole. Don't ever challenge them to a drinking competition though; that stereotype has left me unconscious under numerous tables before. Also poker. They're shit hot at poker. Well shit hotter than me.
Not the Russia I suspect you see elsewhere.