As I understand it it was Kennedy who set the parameters of the space race and not the USSR.
In a time beset by civil strife and international crises, President John F. Kennedy turned a nation’s eyes to the sky. He gave a nation hope with a simple mission: Put a man on the Moon.“We choose to go to the Moon,” Kennedy said. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Kennedy thundered those words from the podium which now sits in Destiny Theater here at Space Center Houston. The podium was donated to Space Center Houston by Rice University in Houston, where Kennedy delivered his speech imploring America to reach for the lunar surface on Sept. 12. 1962.
Yes I know we'd been getting our butts kicked since 1957 by the USSR in space. Thrust, dogs, satellites, etc.
However just as the Korean inconvenience was determined by technology so was the space race. Russia was in to off the shelf technology (steam gauge technology) while the US was into advanced technology (digital and computer technology) which became the determinant in both instances. Russians were into power systems while western nations were into command and control and systems automation.
The last example of Russian failure in extent and flexibility of control was when the Soviets shot down a civilian commercial jet flying off the Soviet coast back after the Nixon years.
History has a way of revealing itself in adaptation failures.
