space race
Article
space race is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 22, 2022 and December 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as ""in the world created by the godawful ‘space race’ of the 1960s""; “The other factor in terms of the changing of the elite guard was the space race”; “the Space Race got started later”. It most often appears alongside 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, ACX, ACX.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: September 22, 2022
- Last seen: December 09, 2022
Appears In
- Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
- Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
Related Pages
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- 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Neumann (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Roesch (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- AMZ (1 shared issues)
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- Andre Malraux (1 shared issues)
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- Andy Beal (1 shared issues)
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- Anne Margrethe Brigham (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Building the first reusable orbital launch system, in the world created by the godawful "space race" of the 1960s, requires a person capable of writing checks for hundreds of millions of dollars without asking permission. Because the people you would have to ask for permission, will have been told by the experts that this was a stupid idea that you should never be allowed to waste the taxpayers/investors/whoever's money on.
The other factor in terms of the changing of the elite guard was the space race. When the NSF started pouring money into universities in order to land a man on the moon before the Soviets, academia became a viable career for ambitious smart people rather than a calling for well-heeled boffins; the old dollar-a-year men started getting outcompeted for tenure track jobs by people who saw an academic position as both a cozy sinecure and an activist bully pulpit (and, crucially, needed the money, not being old money themselves). This changed the character of academia entirely, led to the full democratization of education, caused credential escalation across the board (the reason you need a degree for an entry level job), and created both the activist class, and I'd argue, the PMC.
I think there's some merit in what you say, but it wasn't the space race per se, if we mean Project Apollo and such, it was nuclear weapons and the V-2, because those happened in 1945 and the Space Race got started later (and for that matter, a significant motivation in the Space Race was the fear of The Best And The Brightest that Soviet missile technology would surpass the USAF as a strategic threat multiplier).