Everyone forgets Goddard. He invented what the German scientists perfected after a lot of government investments. The US didn’t want to go that way with Rocketry, until the world saw the Germans make it work.
The US set Goddard to work on Jet assisted take off in WWII.




I would love to see data on this. For example how do the Scandinavian countries continue to exist while exploiting third world labor? As far as I can tell, all four are net exporters.