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What If America Had Beaten the Soviets Into Space?
MarkWhittington writes "April 12 is the 50th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first space flight. Coming less than four years after Sputnik, Gagarin's orbital space voyage galvanized the United States and led to President Kennedy announcing the race to the Moon six weeks later. The question arises: what if America had beaten the Soviet Union into space instead?"
This is revisionist crap.
ICBM tests were ballasted to give other groups in the US (not staffed by Nazis) a chance to launch the first US satellite.
Also, the US was fully committed to the space race by the time of Vostok 1, which is the actual event being discussed here.
The idea that early Soviet successes were part of some cunning ploy by Eisenhower is utterly retarded. The public perception of the Soviet threat helped carry Kennedy in the 1960 election, so you are supposing that Eisenhower would deliberately sabotage his own party and his own vice-president. I am calling bullshit on this one.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
You can't see the leftovers from the landing via telescope from earth. The resolving power just isn't good enough, even with adaptive optics. You can still find the retroreflector though, with the appropriate instruments, and there are a number of sites that not only can do so but do on a regular basis in order to track the earth-moon distance.
Agreed. Detroit might be a slice of third-world wasteland today, but it used to be the economic engine of America.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.