I can’t elaborate on your example as I’m not very knowledge-able on the smallpox vaccine bit that depends on how close we were to inventing the vaccine anyway - I’ll take your word on we were not and Edward Jenner had a revolutionary advancement. Then we can say we have the vaccine thanks to him.

But when it comes to space technology, if it was possible to produce the same technology by targeting the required technology directly, we can’t say it was because of war only because some of the inventions of war were re-used. It eould be like saying we have a 45th president thanks to Trump - it would be absurd as we’d have a 45th president anyway.

So I do not think there is enough grounds to attribute this mission’s success to war - with some of the war’s budget, NASA could have invented the required technology anyway.