Ukraine Quietly Tested Space-Launch Capabilities in Middle of War Twice

Yep. Not even "kinda" just straight up the same thing with a different payload.

100%. The space race was really a way for two nations to flex their ICBM capability without escalating to outright conflict. Sure, the US put a man on the moon for science, but Russian Intel just heard " we can put nukes in orbit around the moon, what do you have?"

That and satellite launch capabilities.

Partially. On the one hand, a lot of the guidance and upper part technology is similar. As for the lower part, the military mostly uses solid fuel rockets while dedicated space rockets increasingly shift to liquid fuel, with solids sometimes used as disposable side boosters. You can put something in orbit with solid fuel rockets, but you get exactly one shot, and there is no real opportunity for reuse (space shuttle SRBs were nearly rebuilt from the ground up every launch which is why Artemis SLS gave up on recovering them). The article doesn't specify what kind of rocket this is beyond it being suborbital, but since Ukraine used to build the lower stage of Antares for Northrop Grumman, an orbital rocket is absolutely within their capabilities. Sadly, I imagine that survival is a higher priority and this is something designed to hit surface targets. Hopefully after the war they can make something else.

Kinda. And Ukraine had capabilities to build and launch both

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Destination: The moon. Or Moscow.

And now you know why USA and Russia had a "space" race and all of a sudden China is now trying to go to "space" and the USA is now like we gotta go to the moon again.

Sorta. There’s a lot of overlap and ICBMs have been used as space launch vehicles, but there are also differences when you get into the optimized designs for each (e.g., type of fuels, flight trajectory, etc).

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where theycome down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

Most modern total war scenarios begin with a Nuclear EMP blast in near space

Yes. The fundamentals of rocket science are interchangeable and don’t change based on whatever it is you desire to do with it.

The soviets approach to rocket tech during the space race was to take their icbms and put sputnick where the warhead was. 

I guess it doesn't need to go very far when they only have one target...

...but is it capable of bombing Moscow?

They invaded because we stood our ground and didn’t allow them to transform us from a poor corrupt democracy (which we still are, progress is too slow) with a puppet leader to another autocratic puppet state.

From what I have read Western nations were involved in rebuilding UKR military to match NATO standards, Including moving decision making down from centralized command structure to what ever the term in Western military parlance. The heroic actions of UKR stand by themselves,

Just keep Trump looking away, being busy with Hormuz strait

Mark my words Ukraine will be a super power after this is all set and done.

Russia keeps this up and Ukraine may be the ones to figure out how to pull off the 'Rods from God'.

They wouldn't even need FOBs for a credible deterrent. The bulk of the Russian targets that are even worth hitting are within 1000 miles of Ukraine. That gives you everything from Saint Petersburg, to Moscow, to Sochi, along with the bulk of the population and manufacturing.

That second paragraph is a little strange to me. Which launch system are they talking about from the 1970’s? Pegasus was in the 90’s. ASM-135 was in the 80’s. LauncherOne was in the 2020’s. What else is there? If we’re not talking orbital then we also have to include SpaceShipOne I would expect.

A lot of Gagarin posts on listnook lately who had same faith as a dog launched earlier. But nobody celebrating Korolev, ukrainian spacecraft designer from Zhytomyr who made missiles for that launches.

My dad was instrumental in engineering the module that pressurized the rockets on Sea Launch.