I was reading Modern Times by Paul Johnson today, and his summary of the space race was fascinating. It boiled down to “Kennedy got freaked out by the Soviets having a space program, decided it was a race and that the US needed to win it. He proceeded to dump US money on the problem and obviously won because the US was the biggest economy with the best technology. Anyway, this was when the US started to realize that even the biggest economy in the world doesn’t have unlimited money and the space program downsized as soon as everyone started thinking clearly.”
He barely spent any more ink on it than that.
Did we actually need to put a man on the moon?