Early space race class- the Soviet perspective

[UH60guy]

In case anyone is interested, here is a class I put together on the early space race from the Soviet perspective. This was fun to research as I really knew next to nothing coming into it. I tried to beef up the notes pages, so that if anyone wants to use it they'd just have to print out the notes view to have the required backup information.

The class runs parallel to Journey of Flight chapters 26 and 27 (and a little on orbits/trajectories), which only mention the names "Sputnik" and "Gagarin," while proceeding to ignore the Russian program entirely. While it doesn't tie in exactly, I tried to structure the class through the notes pages to let the Cadets compare and contrast the Russian perspective with what they know about Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. I went more for dragging out the applied knowledge, rather than just giving them rote memorization lines from Journey of Flight.

Anyway, the class starts with discussing briefly why the space race was important and how a Soviet satellite over our heads was terrifying since it showed that they could get nuclear weapons in space. It then goes on to the Vostok program, and details how the Russians were kicking our butts early in the space race.

The class closes out with Voskhod, and through the lengthy tale of Voskhod 2 from Alexy Leonov's own words, explains in detail how the Soviets fumbled the lead to the Americans. The original class continued on to show Soyuz and how far behind they got due to time lost with abandoning Voskhod early, but I thought Voskhod was a good place to stop since that's where the tables turned. Plus, stopping before dozens of Soyuz missions allows more time for the Cadets to compare/contrast the American and Soviet approaches to spacecraft design.

Finally, I pulled images for this class from all over the web. Since no one here is charging for these classes and it's for educational purposes, I believe fair use applies. If someone knows better, please let me know and I'll remove it.

Since it's a large file size, here's the link to the Google Drive location:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzOxh7vTQG3gclJrYW9BNDA1MmZWWUZ1VHZOS1N0eERkOXVN/edit?usp=docslist_api

Note, depending on your computer, this link may or may not work. Please let me know of any trouble so I can fix it. I'm having trouble viewing the notes on this link, which is really the meat of the class. I'll try to figure out DropBox later and see if that gives me better results.

[arajca]

Nice. Thank you for your work on this. I sent the link to my AEO and we may be using it in the near future.

[a2capt]

I like the selection of propaganda graphics. 

[UH60guy]

I should have gone all Hunt for Red October on the cadets and played some spirited singing of the Soviet National Anthem.

[Майор Хаткевич]

I like the selection of propaganda graphics. 

Brought a dust particle to my Soviet Eye.

[Майор Хаткевич]

I should have gone all Hunt for Red October on the cadets and played some spirited singing of the Soviet National Anthem.

I was on vacation in Mexico, and one of the contests in the evening was a sing-off. Everyone doing some sort of song, then the last two guys are struggling because you can't repeat songs. This guy from Michigan starts singing the Star Spangled Banner to a good amount of clapping. The Russian guy from New York follows up with the Soviet Anthem. The whole place roared with cheers and claps.


Moral of the story - Russians love going to Mexico for vacations.