Sputnik and AC

[pvn]

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People talk about the Apollo Project like it was great, but I don't understand why. It was enormously expensive, killed three astronauts and almost killed another 3 (out of fewer than two dozen missions!), and accomplished what? Primarily, beating the Russians.

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WAY WRONG. Primarily, radically improved ICBM design. Yay space program benefits!

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Furthermore, there's good reason to believe that the focus on getting to the moon in 8 year time frame pushed us away from more rational development of space. Instead of working on space stations in 1961, we were working on gigantic, useless rockets fit only for sending a couple people directly to the moon and bringing back a handful of rocks.

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Right, because that's what was needed to get popular support behind the project. If you just came out and said "we want to spend $1,000,000,000,000 to design better systems for killing billions of people in a matter of minutes" there probably wouldn't have been as much "fan support".