• masquenox@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    but I do think we got some pretty cool stuff out of it.

    Do you know why the US had to create NASA? The US wanted to get into space - but the corporates weren’t interested. There was no profit in it. So Eisenhower had to wait until Sputnik was launched, and then used the media hysteria to push through massive state intervention to actually get it done - same way Roosevelt had to use WW2 to launch the massive state intervention that resulted in the GI Bill (without which the modern-day idea of a “middle-class” wouldn’t even exist). This was no obstacle for the USSR, of course - they just went ahead and did it.

    Here’s the thing… nobody got any poorer because the US sent a bunch of flyboys to play tic-tac-toe on the moon. But the existence of people like Phony Stark does make us all poorer.