Quote:
Originally Posted by Nigel_S
Rockets were invented in China thousands of years ago...
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Chinese &c rockets were all solid fuel, not useful for much beyond fireworks and short-range military weapons. By similar logic, you could just as well claim that squid are responsible for rocket engines :-)
Had you bothered to read a bit further in that article, you would have found that von Braun became a US citizen in 1955.
However, this is all nothing but a distraction from the point I made, which is that a population the size of the US population in 1970 could easily furnish the economic & technical capability to land people on other celestial bodies. Of course accidents of history and the interchange of ideas means that not everything was done by the US alone - but by the same token, there were many people in the US who had nothing at all to do with the space program.
Indeed, I think it could be pretty easily argued that the actual population needed (assuming they are committed to the goal) is a good deal less than the ~200 million US population in 1970. Even at the peak of the Apollo program, NASA's funding never reached 4.5% of the Federal budget
File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and that budget was less than 30% of GDP.
Since the entire Apollo program was done for less than 1.5% of US GDP, that pretty well demonstrates that a larger population is not necessary.