A Foreign Policy Tool
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During the Cold War conflict the Space Race was an area that both powers could prove their political and ideological superiority. With America falling behind, due to the Soviet launch of Sputnik & Yuri Gagarin being the first man in space, President Kennedy understood the political need to decisively demonstrate America's space superiority. Therefore, setting the goal of landing a man on the moon became a key part of American foreign policy during the Cold War.
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Evaluation Of The Space Program
Memorandum from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to President Kennedy - April 28, 1961
Memorandum from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to President Kennedy - April 28, 1961
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The memorandum by Lyndon B. Johnson emphasizes that the U.S. has greater resources of achieving space leadership than the USSR but is not making the necessary decisions to do that. The U.S. needs to make these hard decisions because other nations regardless of our idealistic values will work with the country that they believe is the world leader. The U.S. is falling behind the USSR and will not become the world leader if it does not make necessary actions.
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Creating Agencies
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), created in February of 1958 in response to the launch of sputnik, was used to jump-start technology and defense for the U.S. ARPA worked under the Department of Defense to maintain U.S. leadership in technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprises from other countries.
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established in October of 1958 and absorbed most of ARPA’s space research and funding. NASA created a platform where it promoted international scientific collaboration but also combined political and cultural unity. The programs were sparked primarily by foreign policy objectives. Many countries took advantage of America's Space program such as France. Roger Bonnet, a European space scientist who was raised in a communist French family says, “Very soon we realized that the Americans adopted an open policy of information which we could not always get from the Russians. So, ultimately there was a greater appeal to cooperate with the Americans.”
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Commitment
The graph to the left shows the percent of the United States budget spent on NASA each year. It clearly shows that funding for space exploration was not driven by human curiosity but politics. The need to achieve the foreign policy objectives during the Cold War drove the exploration of using superiority in space as a political tool.
“Everything that we do ought really to be tied to getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians . . . I’m not that interested in space.” - U.S. President, John F. Kennedy (1962) |