[Nigel_S]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Whyever not? Let me just point that the only human voyages beyond low Earth orbit were all done by the US, population (per 1970 census) 203,392,031.

Very misleading - don't forget that the prototypes for the propulsion system where not developed by the USA and did cost around 20,000 lives of the slaves who were forced to build them, many of them executed:

Grim history

Although there is no exact figure, estimates suggest that several thousand people were killed by the missile – 2,724 in Britain alone. However, a far grimmer statistic is that many more, at least 20,000, died constructing the V2s themselves.

“It’s something that’s often glossed over, but shouldn’t be,” says Doug Millard, space historian and curator of space technology at London’s Science Museum, where a V2 takes pride of place in the main exhibition hall. “The V2 programme was hugely expensive in terms of lives, with the Nazis using slave labour to manufacture these rockets.”

The prisoners – many pulled from other concentration camps for their technical skills such as welding – worked around the clock in an underground factory called Mittelwerk near the Buchenwald concentration camp in central Germany. They lived under appalling conditions, with no daylight, little sleep, food or proper sanitation. Many were executed for attempted sabotage. Eyewitness accounts describe prisoners being hanged from cranes above the rocket assembly lines.

BBC - Future - V2: The Nazi rocket that launched the space age