370 Chapter Ten
belated efforts to enter the technological space race, but only the
USSR had the means and motivation to match the American effort
step by step. The following tally of launches into space, 1957–72,
provides an indication of the domination achieved by the two super
powers in space technology during the first fifteen years: USSR, 612;
USA, 537; France, 6; Japan, 4; China, 2; and Great Britain, l.^9
The USSR invested heavily in a new navy during the 1960s as well
as in rocketry and space vehicles. In all probability, military research
and development in the Soviet Union more or less matched the sums
allocated to the same purpose in the United States. But comparisons
are very inexact, because of budgetary obfuscation on both sides as
well as the arbitrary values each country assigned to recondite new
devices. When there was only one manufacturer and only one buyer
for some new kind of technology, as was universally the case in the
space race, what costs and overheads to count in or exclude from the
pricing of a given piece of machinery became a more or less meta
physical exercise in accountancy. There was no doubt, however, that
expenditures on both sides dwarfed peak World War II outlays on
technological innovation.^10
Vast expenditure brought extraordinary results. Undoubtedly the
greatest spectacle was the landing on the moon by American as
tronauts in 1969. Probes of other planets sent back data of great
interest to astronomers, and scanning satellites harvested enormous
amounts of new information about the surface of the earth itself. In
the weapons field, science fiction and technological fact inter
penetrated one another in a fashion outsiders can only dimly under
stand. Control devices to alter missile trajectories in flight attained
great sophistication in the 1970s for example. This complicated the
task of interception enormously. Indeed, no reliable way of attacking
approaching missiles could be found. For at least a quarter of a century
the Early Space Age” and "Politics and Technology in the Space Age—Towards the
History of a Saltation.”
- A. C. B. Lovell, The Origins and International Economics of Space Exploration (Edin
burgh, 1973), p. 28.
- For what little it is worth, a Swedish estimate of research and development
expenditures came up with a figure of between 4.1 and 6.1 billion dollars for Soviet
military spending in 1972 compared to 7.2 billion for the United States. Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute, Resources Devoted to Military Research and Devel
opment (Stockholm, 1972), p. 58. These figures exclude NASA’s disbursements, despite
the military relevancy of many NASA programs. Military items masquerading in civilian
dress in the Soviet budget were probably equally massive, and perhaps greater. The
additional difficulty in equating American with Russian prices makes comparison well-
nigh impossible, as the authors of this study admit.
