Re: And in three years ...
It was all totally political, rockets exist because of politics, the Russians were beating the Americans hands down, first man made object in solar orbit, first man in space, first woman in space, first two, three person rocket, first fully automated docking, first space walk, first "hard" landing on the moon (and first deliberate crash), first "soft" landing, first "far side" pictures of the moon, first automated sample return, the first pictures from the moon's surface.
In many ways, both practically and semantically the Russians won the space race, over and over again, and of course - are still winning, by actually having a space program, the U.S. had the first man on the moon, this was such an amazing technical achievement, many considered it "the goal" and declared the U.S. "The Winner", you'll even see the moon missions broken down into multiple achievements (first human to fly to the moon, first to land, first to leave) you'll see the space station ignored as an achievement despite the Russians doing it two years before the U.S.
America jumped ahead of the Russians for a brief moment with the manned moon landings, this was sheer will, and of course money, the U.S. spent about $25bn (non adjusted) to get to the moon, Russia's budget for the next 10 years is $20bn, the potential moon base has a finger in the air of $50bn - these are not adjusted figures, adjust for inflation over the last 50 years and you see just how massive the investment was.
The space shuttle was a big white elephant, it's inability to leave LEO meant no more moon for the foreseeable future, the design constraint of launching (and retrieving) from a bay meant it's capacity wasn't as great as other heavy lift.
There's a bit of rewriting history going on as well, Goddard is credited with the first liquid propulsion rocket, but Ivan Platonovich Grave flew liquid propelled rockets earlier, ahh... the cry is "they were rudimentary and not controlled", but nor were Goddard's - yes Goddard's were better, but Sergei Korolev's were the first to have control vanes - this made it practical, so why does history ignore the two Russians and credit the American? for the same reason why the Wright brothers were credited with "inventing the aircraft" (despite being beaten to it many times before) - the reason is that the history books we in the west read credits westerners, the western history books decide what the winning post is.
And I didn't even mention Nazi's and war criminals once - apart from then, sorry.