Nor was Mars Polar Lander – the most likely cause of its loss was a mistake in units that resulted in it using too short a deceleration burn as it prepared to land, meaning it hit the surface far faster than intended (IIRC we don't know for sure if it impacted in one piece, broke apart during descent). Tabloid headlines of the time dubbed the mission as a “close encounter of the thud kind”.

Not a consequence of units used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_...

There are 31 extra-planetary human objects/, 19 of which are American, and 12 are Japanese/Soviet/European/Chinese/Indian, so maybe a bit further than the ionosphere?

Earth orbit is the only useful part of space.

(AGC) calculations were carried out using the metric system, but display readouts were in units of feet, feet per second, and nautical miles – units that the Apollo astronauts were accustomed to.

https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...

> was just the technical fellow/consultant?

There is a direct lineage from the Nazi German V2 rockets to Saturn V. Wernher von Braun and his rocketry friends were involved at all levels of American rocketry and ballistic missile programs, and I am happy to say the latter wouldn't have gotten off the ground as early as they did without von Braun's guidance at all levels. At least until the end of WW2, British (and even German) aerospace was considerably further along than American equivalents. And even afterwards, the Europeans, Canadians, Brazilians and the Soviets have remained very productive in terms of civilian and military aerospace. This legacy continues today.

> the US still dominates space 10x or even 100x times. Engineering in the US is top notch

Good for the USA, but this has very little at all to do with unit systems and much more to do with just how much capital there is in the USA. And as everyone else has said, NASA uses SI. I bet these college students did, too.

Keep in mind that the metre is barely younger than the US itself, having been formalised in the 1790s.

I took a look at the code, and I found references to both metric (meters, kgs) and imperial units (lbs) in there.

Not to start a big discussion about WW2 but the US was passive until they were attacked. Over 2000 Americans were killed in Pearl Harbor. For a nation of its size and power, the US was decidedly un-imperialist up until then. Even after they'd beat the Nazis and Imperial Japan, they actually helped rebuild their economies instead of exploiting them. Granted, that might have been the smarter thing to do anyway and turned out a win-win. But it wasn't how most leaders thought at the time. Look at the Soviet Union and how they ended up oppressing the territories they "liberated". The Western allies also wanted to keep Germany down, as did some in the US government (see the Morgenthau Plan for example). Had they prevailed there might soon have been another war.

You are simply wrong for anything other than human rated flight. They didn't have the kind of PR that NASA and Space X have, and they were never human rated, but private satellites never stopped flying on Atlas, Delta, and Titan programs that variously went from the 1960s all the way up until the 2020s. All three of those rocket programs are direct descendants of ICBM programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launcher...

I disagree with the premise that it was lack of bombing of US infrastructure related though. Space programs are very simply the public output of ICBM programs. Most of the modern day is simply a direct descendant of ICBM programs. You like distributed and reliable communication networks like the internet? Built so ICBM silos could command each other even if certain hubs were nuked. You like the miniaturization of solid state electronics? That capability was paid for entirely by the US Air Force who wanted powerful computers under 100 pounds for advanced planes and precision ICBMs. Satellite navigation was also explicitly invented for nuclear missiles fired out of submarines to have an accurate fix for guidance purposes.

Basically the entirety of the modern world exists because the US of the cold war pumped trillions of dollars into producing ICBMs and planes that were genuinely "next gen" while every single private business takes the credit for stuff they never paid for. Computer and telecommunications companies would never have built this stuff on their own: They were fine with computers taking up an entire facility that they could rent out (cf modern clouds) and fully switched networks that were reliant on a big company to manage. None of them needed to sell you a "personal computer". None of them wanted a distributed, uncontrolled network like the Internet.

It was more of an exploration lull and not much industry had came out of it quite yet as privatization was being implemented and so it’s the case the industry was actually just being born.