So media coverage was crucial.

I've seen a documentary once, stating that without the Disney show with Wernher¹ they wouldn't have had the public backing to begin with a space program. Show was always involved...

It's insane how much money was spend.

OTOH death by intercontinental weapons matter too. The military aspects were also relevant... ;)

¹) "The show also contributed, greatly, to public knowledge and interest in the possibility of human-space flight and in some ways led directly to public demand for a three-stage rocket (as was described by Wernher von Braun in "Man in Space") that would eventually be developed into the Saturn V Rocket of the Apollo Program."

Military projects mattered (and matter) more than many people realize. Voyager (Solar system grand tour, first mission to sample interstellar wind) and Viking (first Mars landers) were lobbed into space ontop of Titan IIIE vehicles. A rocket family originally designed to throw very big nukes at the soviets.

Somewhat more recently, the U.S. military invested a huge pile of money to developing and deploying something called the "global positioning system" to help soldiers (and cruise missiles) find their target. You probably have a receiver for that in your phone that helps you find the nearest fast food place on a saturday night out.

While i'm not a big fan of, you know, paying people to kill other people, the vast budget the U.S. military had in the 1950 to the 1970 gave them the attitude of "lets just research everything and see what is useful". A lot of that has been declassified since, and the range of topics is just insane. From "you can build heatshields of out certain types of wood", atomic clocks (GPS, again), to things like atom-bomb powered interstellar spaceships the size of a small town to projects to standardize programming languages, this is just an amazing resource to use, even for current research and engineering.

Randall Munroe even used declassified military research to answer questions like if a steak could be cooked if dropped from space. or the rather devastating effects of a baseball going at 90% the speed of light(*)

It's just a shame that we need to spend money for more effectively killing people to get a lot of research done.

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(*) Steaks and relativistic baseballs are surprisingly mild compared to most of his other thought experiments. Most of humanity survives.
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And in order to "circuit" back from the Off to the On Topic ... ;)
The computer that flew the astronauts to the Moon—the Apollo guidance computer—was a marvel of the 1960s: small, fast, nimble ...

MIT and NASA were able to do all that because for year after year, Apollo was the No. 1 customer for computer chips in the world.

• In 1962, the U.S. government bought 100% of integrated circuit production.
• In 1963, the U.S. government bought 85%.
• In 1964, 85%.
• In 1965, 72%.

Cheers Rolf
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