Did the "space race" warp and retard humanity's progress in outer space?

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Would humanity have made greater strides by now in the development of outer space if the "run for the moon and plant a flag" approach to "show up the Russians" had not been followed?

We could have done it carefully and methodically, built a space station FIRST, then a lunar orbital station, and finally, landed on the moon at the end of an infrastructure-building project.

We could have gone to the moon and KEPT GOING, and developed it, rather than just making quick trips as Cold War publicity stunts.

As it is, it's been more than 35 years since the last person walked on the moon.
 
Our strategy to land on the Moon "before this decade is out" certainly sped up space progress in the short term. However, I don't think it slowed space progress in the long term.

While it may have been more methodical to built orbital stations first, it is also much more costly. Not only do you need the heavy-lift launch vehicles to loft the stations into orbit, but you need to send a steady stream of supplies if anyone is to live there. This would require a much larger number of missions, and at the time, the affects of long-term stays in space on the human body were unknown.

In fact, it was only after the Apollo program was canceled that parts of the Saturn V rocket were re-used to create Skylab, the first US space station.

A lunar station would have committed NASA to a large number of missions, and it would have been more expensive than the Apollo missions, due to the larger payload weight and necessary resupply. Putting humans on the surface for a few hours was cheaper and more enlightening than studying the Moon from orbit.

Putting humans on Mars is an even more expensive proposition, and the technology was simply not in place (and still isn't). Perhaps it could have been if the funding given during the 60s had been continued until today, but NASA's budget shrunk to a fraction of its former size.

So I'd have to say that it is the smaller budget that retarded space progress, not the overall strategy.
 
Considering the state of the Earth, it scares me to think of us able to expand our horizons.
 
I never thought of it in that way but you do make a good point. What I don't understand is your meaning of "kept going?" It sounds nice but can't be that easy.
 
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