>>11780437> It was scrapped before they landed on the Moon as they wanted to focus on projects much closer to homeIt was scrapped because they couldn't get it to work. Salyut 1 was 1971, remember. This is concurrent with N1-L3; while OKB-1 apparently wanted to go all in on Salyut, higher Soviet leadership still held hopes for getting N1-L3 working, and did not see the programs as mutually exclusive.
We are in agreement that politicians on both sides did not care about space except as it contributed to their internal/external propaganda goals, and rushed to slash funding as soon as they could, with serious consequences for what the space programs could do.
>but who won the war?In the case of space now, the US.
Before the USSR collapsed, USSR for sustained human activity, US for unmanned/outside LEO activity.
Manned space went literally nowhere, so the key area for exploration switched to probes and rovers, where the US handily established a presence exceeding anyone else's. The later Salyuts and Mir gave the USSR/Russia the only meaningful human presence in LEO, but that presence did not contribute to anything other than sustaining the human presence in LEO. Energia had tremendous promise and would've given the USSR/Russia a dominant platform for intensive space activities, but alas fate overcame it.
>there is no benefit to studying the effects of humans staying long term in space.Only if that information is actually put to use, say in designing the craft for long duration missions out of the Earth system. Otherwise the argument becomes "we need a station to gather information about humans in space which we need because we have a station," entirely circular. Though it's not any less circular than "we need a shuttle to have a station to have somewhere for the shuttle to go to," so that is a good argument by conventional space policy standards.
