"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
Wernher Von Braun was one of NASA's founders and its first director. He was also previously an SS officer, nazi rocket scientist, and had approved the use of concentration camp victims as slave labor.
Come learn about 🖇️Operation Paperclip📎 in the comments.
The implications only get worse once you begin looking outside of the space race. High ranking nazis were placed into the UN, NATO, the EU commission, etc. Nazi industrialists got kickbacks.
I notice in popular culture whenever Operation Paperclip is brought up, the focus is limited to NASA. It always feels like a "limited hangout" kinda moment, since it's easy to rationalize nabbing a bunch of "nonviolent" "apolitical" scientists from the nazis and putting them in inherently" nonviolent" "apolitical" institutions like NASA.
After all you (the hypothetical American) get to say "The soviets did postwar brain drain on Germany too!" and dust your hands of it.
The real thing to look at is America's postwar political institutions. America created NATO in 1949, told the USSR they couldn't join in 1954 (declassified early 00s), and used the Monroe doctrine to inject tons of money into West Germany. West Germany's recovery was referred to as an "economic miracle" and attributed to capitalism, even though the American state was directly subsidizing them, while the USSR was recovering from ~20 million dead and the loss of 2/3 of their industrial capacity via the nazi land invasion. The nazi land invasion, by the way, operation barbarossa, being a direct goal of the USA/UK/French ignoring the rise of the nazis in the first place. Rising fascism was fostered and fed by the liberal democracies looking to put the hurt on Socialism. The USA immediately let West Germany into NATO in 1955, after telling the USSR no in 1954. This was obviously meant to ice out the communists and re-write history. Churchill's boys mopped up the Communists in Greece and rehabilitated the fascists there, too. This is the real reason the USSR created the Warsaw pact in 1955. It was not some vague "soviet aggression" against the "free world" of liberal democracy. It was a direct response to America rehabilitating the nazis less than 10 years after WW2. Less than 10 years after the holocaust. Chancellor Adenauer of Germany consciously pivoted from denazification to economic recovery. He ignored groups like the schnezz truppe and embraced the myth of the clean wehrmacht. The Americans paid reparations, you heard that right, reparations to nazi industrialists for their private property (i.e., slave labor camps and factories) destroyed by the allied bombing campaign. The USSR rebuilt on their own, even as the West was forming a deliberate European alliance against them, just after they had saved Europe. The fact that American industrialists were also working closely with nazis before WW2 should tell you everything. Many of the clandestine functions of the American fascist private sector before the war were outsourced to the CIA after the war, to make it less obvious.