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The Space Race is often seen in military terms, but there were very real ecomomic implications. The cell phone and internet are two of the many benefits of the space race. Other indistries were significantly aided by the space race such as the comuter industry. Technology today is a very important sector of the American economy and many major U,S, companies such as Amazon, Appel, Cisco, eBay, Google, IBM. Intel, Microsoft, and many major other high tech companies were aided by the Space Race or utilize technologies that flowed from the space race. One important question is why all these benefits flowed to the American economy and virtually no lasting bebefits flowed to the the Soviet Union/Russia. The Soviets did not land a man on the moon, but they had a very important space program with many major achievements. Yet there are no Russian comnpnies today that are technology leaders like the Americans companies which export high-technology goods and services. This is a stuning contrast. It cetainly is not because there were no competent scientists and technicians. There were many. The critical difference was American free market capitalism and open society contrasted with Soviet Communism and police state resrictions on the use of scientific research. We notice a discussion as to what war produced the most scince and innoivtion.
Surely the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union made enormous scientific and medical advances during the Cold War, but not the Chinese.
Curiously almost none of the advances made by the Soviet Union found their way outside of the military sphere and into the civilian economy. This is a major reason that the Soviets lost the Cold war and why Russia today does not have a modern economy, but mostly exports raw materials like a Third World country. (And like many Third World Countries blames the West for its own failures.)
All the modern advances like microwaves, transistors, computers, the internet, communications satellites, browsers, search engines, smart phones, biotech, nano-technology, and much more came from America and the West. This despite the fact that the Soviets had highly competent scientists and technicians, in fact more of them than America.
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