60 years ago some thought putting anything in orbit was BS...until the USSR launched Sputnik.
no, it wasn't, dumbass
our forerunner to the CIA was no slouch, and when the Agency itself was set up after World War II, it dedicated more or less all its resources to knowing what the rest of the world is doing, then molding it to our needs by passing it onto the President and the JCS. They knew long before anyone else that the Russians had a space-capable capsule and were putting the finishing touches on it at that time. The reason they said nothing was precisely to hedge their bets in case the shuttle succeeded, because they were (of course) hoping it would fail and expose the Soviets as incompetents and amateurs. So the CIA was as surprised as anyone when they saw it succeed, but they had known about it for years and years through espionage, overhead U2 type surveillance runs, and other means. Fortunately, they had been passing all this info to NASA, which quietly got large budgets approved to quickly catch up to the Russians, which we did. And the Russians never caught us again once we sent a man on the moon, rather than an innocent dog that obviously died on the test voyage nor the guy who actually did it on the maiden voyage the year after. Scumbags. Anything breathing is expendable to those drunken animals.
