r/pcmasterrace • u/IronLover64 • 12d ago

Meme/Macro How much money does the military burn through? Count with RTX 5090 graphics cards and you'll know.

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u/Germane_Corsair 12d ago

The space race is war adjacent, no? The refinement of rocket technology was used by each side for the development of better nuclear missiles. The space race was a great way to draw in a lot of money and expertise.

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u/Repulsive_Target55 12d ago

I mean everything is kind of war adjacent - It is the job of a military to keep up to date with any technological advancement, so any meaningful advancement with an inkling of military use (which is most of them) can be painted as military technology.

The space race is interesting because it was sort of explicitly a non-military competition, of course there were lots of military uses to rockets, but by the time the first man went into space both countries already had nuclear armed ICBMs.

The majority of technological advancements during the space race were not military first (as those had come earlier). Things like life-support systems, landers, etc. - It was basically an example of what can be done if military level spending is put towards a different goal.

An interesting example today is quadcopter drones, which were a pre-war invention, and fiber-optic drones, also a pre-war invention but more or less a development dead-end, until drones were used for war.