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This comment is wise beyond its words in that, by virtue of going to the moon, the United States nationalized space exploration to such a degree that if it failed to continue beyond the moon-landing accomplishment, no other party would have the experience necessary to pick up the slack. A comment attributed to Isaac Asimov is that in going to the moon and then doing little else in space, the United States scored a touchdown and gave up the ball. By monopolizing space exploration, government crowded out private sources and established, through a government contracting process cursed with overbilling, prices for space exploration supplies and services far beyond the reach of the private sector. The long-term effect of the space race on space exploration and innovation has clearly been negative. The space race froze in place the business model of the past in which large firms captured the great part of the nation’s engineering talent while the tax cut promoted innovation by enabling the rise of breakaway engineers and venture capital.
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Those tax cuts also shook the business model of many of the Fortune 500 companies that had lobbied to stack the tax code with exemptions preferential to themselves and were the principal contractors in the space race. The cutting of tax rates by upward of 30 percent in 1964–1965 was central to the accumulation of the myriad capital pools that yielded the great venture firms of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that spearheaded the technology revolution. Venture capital was difficult to accumulate in the 1950s and early 1960s because of income-tax rates that reached 91 percent on the highest incomes. It was venture capital, not the space race, that spawned the computer and IT revolution. In pursuit of this objective, he attracted the financier Arthur Rock, the person widely known today as the founder of the venture capital industry.
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His ambition, however, was to break free of the necessity of government contracting to develop breathtaking new technological products people would independently find useful on a mass scale. Intel’s chief founder, engineer Robert Noyce, secured several government contracts in the space and defense industries for the initial portion of his career in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The central illustration of this point can be found in the saga of Intel, the pioneer maker of semiconductors and microchips that opened in 1968 and around which Silicon Valley coalesced. Department of Defense birthed the Internet and inspired the “moon shot” wars on cancer, but in nearly every specific major case, the grounds for this sort of argument are found wanting. There is a vague general sense that the space race and the U.S. The connection of the great advances made in these fields to the federal space-race effort can easily be overstated. They are concentrated in two large areas: computers and information technology (IT), and biotechnology and medicine. The scientific benefits reaped by the nation since the 1960s are well known. All told, the United States spent about $30 billion on the space race from the time the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite in 1957 until the moon landing in 1969. Spending did not reach this level again until 1980 and never again in inflation-adjusted terms for the remainder of the Cold War. Outlays on space and science went from $0 in 1948 to more than $100 million in 1957 and peaking at $7 billion in 1967. space program, especially in the 1960s, was considerable and characterized by almost unheard-of rates of growth.
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Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates.įederal spending on the U.S. Then, complete the comparison questions that follow.
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Read the two arguments in response to the question posed, paying close attention to the supporting evidence and reasoning used for each. Was the federal spending on the space race justified or was it a misallocation of money that could be better spent elsewhere? Instructions Use this point-counterpoint with the Sputnik and NASA Narrative to have students analyze the creation of NASA and its role in the Cold War.Written by: (Claim A) Brian Domitrovic, Sam Houston State University (Claim B) Jeff Broadwater, Barton College Suggested Sequencing