Ken MacLeod on the Space Race:
What I'm going to say about Sputnik is that it was a great achievement of Soviet socialism, and that it was for that very reason a great setback for human expansion into space; that it started the culture wars which are still shaking our world; and that it's why most of you are, like me, functionally innumerate.
Specifically, by spawning the innovation-killing bureaucracy of NASA, Scientific Creationism (in response to updated school biology textbooks teaching evolution), and New Math. But you should read
the whole thing.