Yeah, and who knows, soon might even manage to get to the moon, something we already did in 1969. But now better and cheaper (with tech made 50+ years after the last mission, it would a challenge not to do it better and cheaper - but is it half a century worth of better and cheaper? Considering the dreams then was a moon base and mission to mars coming in the next decades, something that never came to be).
The space race was possibly the pinnacle of the principle that government spending can accelerate technological progress in particular fields by raining money on those fields. The progress puts it way ahead of what could be expected and occurs to the detriment of sectors from which the money was taken.
We now have a good understanding of just how far ahead we pushed ourselves beyond what market forces were going to pursue: 50-60 years, which is pretty cool.
> The space race was possibly the pinnacle of the principle that government spending can accelerate technological progress in particular fields by raining money on those fields.
Actually, that might be electronics and computers. The basis for Silicon Valley was created during WWII - by unrestrained debt-based government spending.
Of course, maybe trying to rank the developments by industry or sector makes no sense, sooo much was influenced by what happened in that period. Agriculture too, if what I read and remember correctly a lot of WWII chemical industry was reused for things like fertilizer, but I don't have a good (i.e. direct and good quality scientific study instead of some blog post or pop book) source for that.
I dislike this separation of "government" vs. "business". I remember an MIT biology course (genetics) where the professor explained Gregor Mendel (the guy with the beans) a bit more - his circumstances. That man wasn't some random person who purely by chance happened to be interested in biology and inheritance. Turns out he was part of a far wider effort of church, state and industry to produce economic progress. Historically, even looking at how England became a world power, there never was such a separation. Government always acted as an extension of economic interests in combination with the merchants, later with the capitalists.
