It seems to me that once the United States put a few men on the Moon the space race became a lot less important to us. We knew that the technology for reaching Mars could not be developed for decades. So we turned our attention to other things. Now we're talking about going back to the Moon although Buzz Aldrin has said he'd rather see us focus on Mars. Me, too.
The race was pretty hot before Apollo 11. We went crazy when the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit. We went crazier when they put a man into orbit. We played catch up for a long time. We were so techno-heavy that we let simpler designs beat us time and again. It took a German scientist with a shady past and a willingness to risk it all to beat the Russians to the Moon but we did it.
It took three projects and countless flights to reach the Moon: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. The seven Mercury astronauts were national heroes. So were the first several Apollo astronauts. The first bunch got Americans into space. The latter put us on the Moon. What about the meat in the middle of that sandwich? What about Gemini?
Mercury and Apollo featured white knights, pristine representatives of the American dream. Gemini felt more blue collar because, well, in a sense it was. Some guys came over from Mercury. Most stayed on for Apollo. In between, they learned the lessons they needed to make it to the Moon, including the ability stay in space longer, the ability to walk in space, rendevous with other craft, and dock (an essential procedure for connecting the Apollo command module to the Lunar Module).
In other words, after Mercury's parades were over and before Apollo's started, astonauts learned how to work in space.
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