When that was happening, the US was spending ungodly amount of money to show Soviets that they can take ~a nuke~ sorry people to the Moon and back.
Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.
And there were a lot more players in aerospace then too. Apart from Boeing and Lockheed, Apollo also involved North American Aviation, Grumman, Rocketdyne, General Dynamics, Pratt & Whitney, Douglas, TRW, and Bell. Of those, only General Dynamics and Pratt & Whitney have not been acquired or merged into other companies.
Are there not _far_ more players in aerospace today than what you listed? Maybe those of today are not at the scale of the companies you listed at the height of the cold war, but we're really in a new era of space industry.
> Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.
To be fair, Boeing, Lockheed etc won't be the decisive players putting humans back on the moon from the US. It'll be smaller and scrappier players more akin to startups.
This is where the "ungodly" funds of Cold War make the difference. There is little incentive in the US government to spend at once as much and take political risk as much as it did back then.
Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.