Declassified documents offer a new perspective on Yuri Gagarin’s flight

It is also a little disingenuous to characterize the russian effort as "military" and the american effort as not. It wasn't Mr. John Glen first american in orbit. He remained an military officer while at Nasa and was awarded military honors for his flight (DFC). Smack whatever label you want, both programs had heavy military involvement.

>But the frantic pace of the “space race” ensured that you had to sacrifice thorough ground testing in favor of debugging the technology in space. This means that you automatically increase the risk to human subjects on board spaceships.

By my memory, the US lost most astros to ground testing than to flight, the Apollo fire being top of the list. Training and testing are safer than flight, but are not absolutely safe. There is a balance point where the risks presented by ever more training outweigh any further reduction in risk during flight.

From this perspective Gagarin would die if both accelerating stage worked longer and retrorockets failed. Only one of this two systems malfunctioned - so, barely, he managed to return unscathed.

Overal their program probably killed about the same number of cosmonauts as US killed astronauts, or maybe even less.

You can play some games with numbers maybe if you want to include unmanned rockets exploding on launchpads or not -- China killed maybe around 500 people with an a satelite launch in the 90's. Russians killed 50 launchpad personnel during a failed Vostok lunch in the 60's.

Interesting.