People wanted to make that happen. So they did.
There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the government like that lately.
I think there are lots of parallels between the Moon landings in the 60s and the idea of colonizing Mars today. In particular, most people don't think it's possible, and so they think it's a waste of money. The Apollo program only received majority approval once we landed on the Moon. People also tend to dramatically overestimate the cost of achieving great things in space. Polling suggested people thought the Moon missions were taking up about 22% of the budget. In modern times it's down to less than 0.5%, and that's with NASA blowing tens of billions of dollars of pork projects like the SLS.
Overall support for the Moon program only began to steadily rise in the years after human spaceflight was defacto completely cancelled by Nixon, and people were able to coolly reflect on what a ridiculous and important achievement that was.
[1] - https://www.space.com/10601-apollo-moon-program-public-suppo...
> "When you divorce it from the numbers and you ask people if they like NASA and spaceflight, people say yes," Launius told SPACE.com. "75 to 80 percent are in favor."
Because obviously; people don't like paying for anything.
If you ask someone without a lot of surplus in their life whether they'd rather have the money themselves in tax cuts or benefits or they want to spend it on astronauts, they want food on their table. Especially when they're overestimating how much the space program costs.
But the question was, did people want to work for NASA? And then you get to select your idealists from the >75% in favor of the space program.
One more factor: decolonisation created new countries. That created a unique competition for ideological supremacy.
Also, you remove that second S and first R from that second sentence, and it would still be true. Our entry into the space race wasn't a matter of unmatched moral nobility.
The problem with "climate change moonshot" is that the answer isn't really a single target or anything suitable to a government spending program. You get the result you want by doing a carbon tax and then refunding fully 100% of the money to the population as a dividend so the tax doesn't trash the economy.
Then people reduce carbon to avoid the tax. Hybrid and electric vehicles become more attractive than gas (especially to people who drive more), diesel rail lines get electrified, coal power plants get shut down as uneconomical and replaced with solar/wind/nuclear/hydro, people replace furnaces with heat pumps, etc. You don't have to order anybody to do anything in particular or figure out how it should be done for them because everybody wants to avoid the tax so they do it themselves.
The reason that doesn't happen is the reason you say -- the oil and coal industries have captured too many legislators. But even if you had the votes, the way to fix it still isn't "NASA for climate change", it's just pricing carbon.
That's a funny perspective. USSR just before that time mostly killed communist apparatus members¥ and with them innocent people. In such an environment, there naturally won't be too many dissidents, so I don't think they registered.
They did kill a lot of supposed sympathiers of pre-Soviet Russia, though.
¥ As they say, internal competition is the most fierce one.
We were spending more money. There was competition among contractors. And there were skilled low-level labourers from WWII.
Corps have a responsibility to deliver a product or service at a competitive price in order to sustain growth.
Friedman was an economist, not a corporate whisperer. To the extent that corps changed, they were forced to by market forces, most notably globalization, a force much bigger than one man and a force that was inevitable and even necessary in the wake of world war one and world war two.
