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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Why invest billions into space when minority patron group still suffered inequity?

Whitey on the Moon, a 1970 (!) spoken word poem which featured in the 2018 movie "First Man", shows that such ideas were already present and don't need to be extrapolated from first principles.

At least according to this article, there was at least some opposition to the original moon program from the civil rights movement. The most famous congressional NASA/space program opponent, William Proxmire, seems to have been a somewhat libertarian-ish Democrat, from his Wikipedia description. OTOH Murray Rothbard also bashed the space program, such as in here.

I don't think that pro-space-program/anti-space-program is something that is immediately returnable to left-right scale. It appeals to a certain variety of nationalism-tinged technophiliac small-p progressive thinking that has adherents both on the left and the right, though with different areas of emphasis.

It's impossible to know for sure, but I think if President Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, the US would not have put men on the moon in the 1960s. Or 1970s. Perhaps not ever (so far).

Kennedy's martyrdom made the Apollo program a political third rail, so pretty much anybody with the potential power to cut its funding kept their mouth shut until the first successful landing. But nobody spends hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars without a lot of people wanting that money to be spent on something else that they think is more important.

US would probably have still felt it necessary to not let the Soviets get all the space-related achievements for only themselves tbh.