Sputnik and AC

[kniper]

Today or yesterday is supposed to be the 50th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik, that dastardly Russian probe that beat the US into the space race.

It seems pretty clear to me that if a socialist/communist republic was able to beat the US into space, had the world been under an AC system space flight would not have been realized until much later. It has only been in the last few years that spaceflight has been privatized (not taking into account satellites) -- and travel to the moon has not been undergone since the 70s. (I understand that this does not necessarily mean an AC system would have taken until now to achieve space flight, but it almost certainly would have been much later than when the US and Russia achieved it).

The US and Russian focused efforts to make space travel a reality was extremely beneficial for all sorts of sciences. This would seem to me to be one example where a coercive government system (this means the US too, I'm just using ACish language) would outdo its AC counterpart in the advancement of pure science. Those endeavors that take an unimaginable amount of resources with comparatively little to be made in returns (e.g., the moon) just does not make sense to be done under the free market alone. Discuss plz.