My favourite thing about the #SpaceRace is that the urgency forced the US to make a state space program to keep up with the USSR. They had to keep the program fully state-controlled in order to prove that Capitalism is the best. I hope the irony wasn't lost on them.
@cosine i don't remember the man who it was but i read a bio of one man who pushed for the us govt to make nasa, otherwise they were thinking about letting the air force and/or the army manage the space program instead
those are all state-planned options, and any one of them involves contractors for the actual hardware, but yeah. the military is far more autocratic than nasa was, and nasa at least had specs for the contractors unlike with spacex and shit where the manufacturer makes design decisions
