“We had won the Space Race.”
Oooops... there’s one “O” forgot to apologize for!
But times have changed and the Russians are our only ride to the International Space Station.
That was in January 1967. In other times, with a different America, they might have quit, or, at least, taken a long break. But, Americans at that time, many with fresh memories of World War II, were a hardier people and they did not quit or take a break. They learned from the Apollo 1 tragedy and kept going.
That’s because NASA had a blank check back then. They had a blank check because of the Soviets and the assassination of JFK.
If you remember that moment, you are over fifty years old.
Another vestige of a once-strong America long by the wayside. But that NASA mission to make muslims feel better is vitally important... or something.
My late husband worked for NASA at MSFC back then. We kept up with everything. Miss those days when people were excited about space.
We haven’t won any space race. We got to the moon first, but after that, we stopped running. Now, we don’t even have the capability to launch a single astronaut into space. We can hoist a few satellites, but we have to get the Russians to send our people up. So, how do we reconcile that fact with the upcoming sanctions? Do we embargo all trade with Russia, but keep hiring them to send up our astronauts? And if we get them angry, will they stop doing it for us?
Right now, we have 3 Russians, 2 Americans and a German on board the International Space Station. They could send a couple more of their people, and send our guys and the German back, and they would own the International Space Station. We would not have any recourse but to shoot it down, or let them just keep it. The billions we have spent on it would preclude shooting it down, not to mention all of the space debris it would create for future astronauts.
The real space race was to boost a hydrogen bomb into low earch orbit.
Russia had a long-standing interest in rockets & rocketry, too. So the German scientists ‘invited’ to join the Soviet program were icing on the cake.
In the US the early achievements of Dr. Robert Goddard went largely unheralded. The US program probably needed Dr. Von Braun and his “Germans” to a greater degree.