Some (many?) people involved were really interested in the scientific value of these efforts, but didn’t realize that the funding was largely for the reasons you mentioned or at least hoped that once they showed results they might excite people enough to keep the funding going.
Some (many?) people involved were really interested in the scientific value of these efforts, but didn’t realize that the funding was largely for the reasons you mentioned or at least hoped that once they showed results they might excite people enough to keep the funding going.
Yeah, and von Braun was famously hyperfocused on space travel, surely with some blindness about politics.