Both institutions provide access to information, but both institutions are underrated (at least by the public) in their function to interpret and contextualize information. “Context is king,” someone said a while ago.

Given the increasing need to contextualize information, once we get over the conceptual hump of understanding what the purpose of these institutions really are, they will become more, not less, important over time.

And were the 60’s really a time of optimism rather than naive utopianism? It *was* the period of RAND, the Paris riots, Cuba, fingers on the button etc. For every young, wide-eyed hippy, there was probably an older pessimist who saw the optimism of the 60’s representing the death of their own hopes and beliefs – for example in England the loss of Empire for those brought up with an Imperial world view? This was the decade, after all, that ended in the hangover represented so well and wittily in the film Withnail and I !

I think the US ‘civil’ space programme was in some part a PR-vehicle to justify huge military spending on ICMB technology; therefore the space programme was not ’separate’ from military needs - it was a consequence of them.

The US’s goal was clearly in part to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism and the American political system over Soviet ideology. I agree, there was excitement about what space travel could offer mankind, but overarching this was the United States’ anxiety that the ‘Red Planet’ might literally become that, another satellite of the Soviet union.

So the US rocket programme — rather than being something that would have flourished if only the money hadn’t been blown by those pesky warmongers in the Pentagon — was another version of the same.

Indeed, much of the technology – and indeed many of the rockets themselves – used by the Americans were essentially Inter-continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) delivery vehicles, e.g. the Redstone rocket.

The Redstone nuke missile delivery system was the vehicle hurriedly adapted to allow Alan Shepherd to try and counter the impact of Gagarin’s first orbital flight.
True, Eisenhower wanted to use a ‘civil’ rocket (as opposed to the military missile boosters) prior to learning of Gagarin’s flight as he was concerned that military rocket technology might ‘intimidate’ the Soviets (if you can send a man over Russia, you can send a nuke). Even so, much of the ‘civil’ space programmes (even if not in part a ‘front’ for the military program) in both countries was motivated by the need to develop systems to carry spy cameras over ‘enemy’ territory – rather than take men to Mars!

And the Soviet’s interest in rocketry again was hardly ‘utopian’ or optimist? Indeed it came very much from their experience of being vulnerable – and afraid – of sudden attack and invasion, following their near defeat in WW2.

Rockets were initially seen as a part of the military arsenal to discourage potential adversaries. Whilst the later ‘civil’ programme was again a politically motivated programme to win the Cold War battle of proving their system was superior to that of the US.

And let’s not forget, the Cold War itself was a consequence of the Second World War - and ironically both the Soviets and US shared the same Nazi V2 missile technology to build both of their respective missile and ‘civil-programme’ rocket armouries.
V2 rocket engineer Von Braun - always claimed it was interplanetary flight that was his real goal, but perhaps this is a case in point of how ‘optimism’ – the goal of a man, like Von Braun, who wanted man to travel to the stars, but became a Nazi fellow traveller, a user of slave labour to develop V2’s in WW2 – can rapidly become alloyed to political expediency? Von Braun is quoted as saying on his capture by US forces at the end of WW2:

” We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”

A philosophical position which is interesting to view in the modern context - of extreme Islamism. Christians and Muslims might well feel morally justified to equip their own arsenals today on a similar basis and indeed – as with the Cold War – this is fuelling current rocketry programmes in both societies.

Would we have even reached the moon without conflict? Without the argument of military spending to protect the world, would ‘optimism’ alone have got us to the stars? If we were starting off today, would we be more concerned about spending on roads, schools and how often our bins are emptied than spending our taxes on finding other worlds to explore?