Wasn't the space race just a massive dick waving contest?

Its a showing off their ability to nuke each other without nuking each other.

It was a dickwaving contest that brought real advancement to the world, as in, it was worth it in the technologies it produced that we now use every day.

Computers, microwaves, integrated circuits, wireless communication, etc etc, technologies such as that are here because of it, so for that, the space race did a lot more to benefit humanity rather than be seen as a waste of money to plant a flag on a rock.

People who talk about all the beneficial technology that followedfrom it are correct, but they ignore that ever since turbo-capitalists justify their large-scale destruction of the earth saying "so what, if this planet collapses we'll just move to another one hurr durr", which the crazies that call themselves transhumanists think is a viable option

We all lost.

I think he meant because they competed naked. Dicks, waving.

This.

America wouldn't be too happy if they overtly knew that all their money was going into faster and more efficient ways of rendering humanity all but extinct, so the government sugar coated rocket development with space exploration.

That said, space exploration is fucking awesome and we should do more of it.

Satan and Jehova have spoken. The only real sad part about the Space Race is that the Soviets gave up so soon, would have been nice to have had a "Colonise Mars" race too, think of all the advances needed to pull something like that off.

I wonder if dudes would be at a bigger disadvantage with dangling dicks or women because of flopping tits.

Underrated post.

>We seem to pay for it by the stagnation of space exploration right now.
One wonders what would have happened if the Soviets had managed to pull of a manned mission before the Apollo era ended. Witht he Russians playing "We never wanted to eat those sour moon-grapes anyway," the impetus to push ahead collapsed.

ignoring all else, if the nazis had time to spend money on non-war things, wouldn't space exploration be quite far up there? they really wanted to do something with the moon, and that is while they had a lot of other things to focus on.
how come nobody else was as interested in space? the space race was a one off thing where the destination was more or less irrelevant

>how come nobody else was as interested in space?

It had to wait for steam engine time. Germans got to usable rocketry slightly ahead of most everybody else, but only slightly -- Russinans and Americans were close behind.

>the space race was a one off thing where the destination was more or less irrelevant

Not sure what you mean by this

Isn't the entirety of human existence just one massive dick waving contest?

they didn't do it to go to the moon or to explore space, but going to the moon was a nice goal line and could also be used to up propaganda to the general populace

Ah, thanks, I understand now.

Kennedy set the Moon as a goal on the advice that it was something that could be achieved in a decade, and far enough out that the Americans had a decent chance of overtaking the Russian lead in heavy boosters. (He could have gone for a space station as the target, but the Russians' advantage in boosters would have made that a race they would win. Ditto unmanned planetary probes. But the Russians were almost as far from a manned moon flight as the US at tyhat moment in time, so it would be a race that was winnable.)

But various other "destinations" were used earlier on -- the Soviets boasted first satellite, living thing and man in orbit. Once you make orbit, there is really only one possible destination to be your next target, though you could of course go with unmanned flight and shoot for Mars or Venus, which in fact the US and Russians did as well.

But if you want to send doods to a place, you only have one logical next-choice once you have already achieved Earth orbit.

Yes. You could argue it was worth it because
>muh new technologies
but that's after billions of dollars spent on useless shit.

What are ICBMs?

>women
That's not how it works.

>Kennedy set the Moon as a goal
and when he got killed, the US felt they had to fulfill his vision

hippies out

>but that's after billions of dollars spent on useless shit.
F A G G O T

Funfact: One of the proposed ideas was to simply hit the moon with a nuke. The idea was thrown out because they figured (rightly so) that putting a man on the moon would be more popular and less blatantly aggressive.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119

NASA's budget has always been pathetically small. The defense budget for one year is nearly equal to all of NASA's yearly budgets combined.

Friendly reminder it was the Nazis who laid the foundation for the technology to leave Earth

Whenever we become a spacefaring people, we will have the Nazis to reflect on and thank for the gift of space flight

Heil Hitler

what about Goddard
or Tsiolkovsky

The Space race was one the greatest, most beautiful things in human history that will most likely never be appreciated for what it was

Russia: hey lets do some fun things with space. it'll cheer our people up about the bomb
USA: HEY RUSSIA WHAT THE FUCK YOU DOING SENDING MEN IN SPACE. YOU GONNA MAKE A SUPER DEATH RAY OR SOMETHING
Russia: hey calm down, we just wanna see what's possible in space
USA: HAHAHA YOU MAY HAVE SENT MEN IN SPACE BUT WE SEND A MAN ON THE MOON WE WON THE SPACE RACE GUYS.

I liked that Star Trek Into Darkness had a model of a V2 in its lineup of spaceship (obviously not an inclusive term here )models.

thank you, for correcting the record

No they wouldn't have, it was Jewish Physics.

Friendly reminder that the Nazis got their start by studying American rocketry research papers.

There is a saying...

The reason that the dinosaurs are extinct is that they didn't have a space program.

I think its attributed to Larry Nivel but not sure.

The point is, without the space program or investment into it, we will eventually get BTFO by an asteroid.

It was all a big dick waving contest on who could make the best fake space movie

That displays a huge ignorance of the history of space exploration. The soviet space program was based on, and co-developed with, their ICBM program, which, at the time of Sputnik, was well in advance of US capabilities. The Soviets also had their spy satellite program mixed into the program -- all of it was under the leadership of Korolev.

The US program also started off using military technology -- the Redstone, Atlas and Titan launch vehicles were all modified ICBMs. And the Air Force had designs on a manned space presence based on Gemini hardware, to match the Soviet Salyuts, which had alternating civilian and military stations The USAF program was abandoned when it became clear that unmanned satellites could do most everything they really wanted to do.

The moon race actually moved both space programs into areas with little to no military significance. The American Saturn 5 had no real military applications, nor would the Soviet N-1 had that vehicle had a chance to mature.

However, the ties between the manned space flight programs and the military applications of space were much closer in the Soviet Union, where, if nothing else, budget constraints forced more use of shared technology.

"Earth is far to small and fragile a basket for humanity to continue keeping all our eggs in it." Or words to that effect.

Unless we develop FTL, the solar system is going to be where the homo sapiens species is born, lives, and dies.

>Was it worth it? We seem to pay for it by the stagnation of space exploration right now.

>we are paying for a massive amount of research in space by having space research now stagnate

That sounds retarded.

Asteroid strikes simultaneously blowing the shit out of life on Earth, Mars, the Moon, various orbital habitats, various outer moons and asteroids --that seems pretty fucking unlikely, so living in more than one place may have some advantages.

Also, what is a "generation ship?" They would not need FTL tech.

Well, the sun will eventually expand and fuck all our shit up, regardless. So that guy was right. Without FTL travel, we won't last literally forever.

Though personally I believe we'll fuck our own shit up before the cosmos have to.

Nah.

Two things could fix that. Generation ships where people live for generations until they reach a new star system or...

Immortality.

>generation ship
I feel like this would fail spectacularly.

Here's a cool radio play by Heinlein on the subject.

youtube.com/watch?v=LLMZHiwTuf8

If at first you don't succeed, the guy you're competing with and gets it right gets all the profit.

We may well fuck our own shot up -- but even that is less likely if we are not all standing on the same planet.

Also, generation ships or just getting into the cometary halo would protect against the expansion of the sun.

But yah, something will get us eventually -- that's no reason not to make it hard for the bastard.

It certainly tends to fail in fiction, because otherwise there's no story, might as well use FTL and get to where you are going. But not sure that impacts whether it would work in real life. It has one advantage over FTL drives, anyway -- it doesn't violate any of the currently understood laws of physics.

And that said, we're wandering away from historical space flight I guess.

(AFAIK, Heinlein was the first to come up with the concept of a generation ship, though I think a short-story preceded the drama.)

Niven's "slow boats" also ran into trouble - not from failures of the tech while en route, but through insufficient scouting. A habitual spot at the moment a scout probe arrives might not mean a particularly good target planet. So he had a string of oddball planets that might not otherwise be inhabited, such as Plateau, where all the citizens lived atop Mt. Lookitthat, which poked up out of a Venus-like atmosphere into a breathable zone, the only spot on the planet where people could live.

The satellite program alone prevented an international incident that might have cooked the world and ultimately reduced paranoia. Ultimately, the space program began as an excuse to test missile tech and spy better. The result was a reduction in global tension.

From LBJ,
"Their technical achievements were impressive enough, but most important was the psychological relief that their overhead systems gave to policymakers. The "bomber gap" and the "missile gap" disappeared, and American leaders no longer had to err on the side of survival by thinking "worst case." "Tonight we know how many missiles the enemy had," President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1967, "and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor." The U-2 and the satellites (especially the latter, after both sides had them) largely allayed fears of a surprise attack and permitted diplomacy and arms control to move ahead."

>"Their technical achievements were impressive enough, but most important was the psychological relief that their overhead systems gave to policymakers. The "bomber gap" and the "missile gap" disappeared, and American leaders no longer had to err on the side of survival by thinking "worst case." "Tonight we know how many missiles the enemy had," President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1967, "and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor." The U-2 and the satellites (especially the latter, after both sides had them) largely allayed fears of a surprise attack and permitted diplomacy and arms control to move ahead."

Beautiful.

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