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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

We would never have done it the first time if not for military competition with the USSR.

It's a mixture of both: Military competition is what drives a ton of research with an immense budget behind it. The problem I have with some nations (the US is not the only offender here) is that they deploy the poisoned fruit of that research.

Doesn't mean we have to keep competing militarily if we could go to space instead.

(Though there is potential for another military race there too - the first country to put a deorbiting system on a near-Earth rock wins.)

Military competition is always necessary. You need to be able to defend yourself, and for that, you cannot fall too far behind.

I agree with you when we get to the offensive use of weapons. Though the US is only one of a number of players in that field.

Yeah, I have no illusion that military one-upping is going away any time soon. My point was only that while it's true it was military competition that opened access to space, we don't have to forever justify space exploration by military applications. Private industry around space, and NewSpace in particular, is a good step towards that.

Military competitions is what gave us microwave tech. Doesn't mean that if world peace suddenly happened, we would stop producing microwave ovens.

The USA already has bombs, no science is being used to produce more of the same.

We had bombs before the space race, too. That doesn't mean it wasn't, in essence, a military competition.

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