>>6314084As your mercenaries return swiftly from Dnipro in Ukraine, bearing the legacy of the designs from Rocket City, you wonder how the great achievements of the Space Race and the Cold War were squandered.
The scientific ancestry of space research had always resided in war - intercontinental ballistic missiles, exoatmospheric surveillance and intercept. At times, even during the very height of the Cold War, the unwillingness for all participants to openly acknowledge the distasteful true purpose of space programs, being weapons to hold to ransom hundreds of millions of people and kill them, the evasiveness and moral contortions in refusal to confront this purpose bordered on the farcical. The power that spacecraft could unleash, slaughtering helpless and powerless innocents from the unreachable great darkness of the sky.
Whilst the Soviets would argue that the space legacy of today - in space stations, modules, capsules and robotic exploration - follows the lineage of their own engineering, the United States decisively won the Space Race on the Moon, and the Soviet Union relinquished their scientific lead. It had been over before even the US descent upon the lunar surface in 1969 - the rapid surge in American progress was noticeable around 1965-66, and with the death of the Soviet Chief Designer and space systems engineer Korolev, the course was mostly set.
In triumph, the United States exhibited magnanimity in victory - for a while. For it was the generation not only of NSC-68 and supremacy, but also of Thomas Schelling and men who understood the dance of deterrence and detente. Even in the ferocious pursuit of dominance and supremacy, the words were mutually measured and assuredly credible.
