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I was just browsing these Wikipedia pages to get an idea of the extent of interplanetary exploration: List of Solar System Probes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik

I was just browsing these Wikipedia pages to get an idea of the extent of interplanetary exploration: List of Solar System Probes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes Exploration of the Solar System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_exploration_of_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_and_exploration_of_t... The Russian space program, despite having many firsts and many successes, had a huge number of failures early on with interplanetary probes and fell off almost completely by the mid-70's. Meanwhile Europe and Japan, both often viewed as lackluster space powers due to their lack of manned space programs, have contributed massively to solar system exploration.

Melatonic 2y ago
They did land a probe on Venus however!
WeylandYutani 2y ago
Probably learned more science from Voyager than all the manned moon missions. The first thing that astronauts on Mars will do is deploy a drone.
yencabulator 2y ago
> Meanwhile Europe and Japan, both often viewed as lackluster space powers due to their lack of manned space programs, have contributed massively to solar system exploration. ESA & JAXA are less biased toward manned exploration, and I'm no expert but I'd expect them to have less funding than NASA but the funding is more stable and easier to apply to projects (less US-style pork barrel funding), so they get to do long-term planning more. NASA needs PR more.