Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun gave himself up to a startled American soldier on a bicycle on May 2, 1945. It was a typically sensible, pragmatic decision – he reckoned, probably rightly, that the Yankees would be nicer to him than the advancing Russians.

Von Braun, a rocket scientist, developed the Aggregat 4 “V2” rockets that rained down on London during the last year of the war, utilising – in a wholly pragmatic and sensible manner – slave labour from the Buchenwald concentration camp to do so. If he were alive today he would probably explain to you, with some sadness, that his decision to join the Waffen SS in 1932 and the Nazi party in 1937 was similarly pragmatic, if not quite unavoidable. The soldier on the bike, who did not entirely believe the story from the bedraggled German in front of him, handed von Braun over to his superiors.

The USA thus acquired an extraordinarily fortuitous bonus from a war out of which it had already done very well indeed, economically and geopolitically. Von Braun later developed the Saturn V launch mechanism that powered the Apollo space flights and became known affectionately, in his adoptive homeland, as the father of the space programme. Well, not always affectionately. The songwriter Tom Lehrer, appalled at the money being spent on the US moon shot and at the rather dubious people involved in making it happen, wrote: “Gather around while I sing you of Wernher von Braun/A man whose allegiance/Is ruled by expedience/Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown/‘Ha, Nazi – Schmazi!’ Wernher von Braun.”

Lehrer was a man of the left, of course. We associate the early US space programme primarily with two Democrat administrations – those of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Indeed, it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who first seriously slashed the Nasa budget, despite having originally promised near unlimited funding for space exploration. But America’s frantic and obsessive drive towards the moon nonetheless came from the right – militarily, politically and philosophically – and was viewed with grave suspicion and sometimes outright hostility by the left.

Sturmbannführer von Braun, plucked from the Nazis “secret” rocket-research facility at Peenemunde, and allegedly a good mate of Himmler’s, was a useful symbol against which the left could coalesce.

There are still those who see Nasa as merely a deceptively glamorous appendage of the US military-industrial complex; certainly, that’s how it began, in 1958, created by Eisenhower as a response to the Sputnik crisis of the previous year. The notion that the commies, with their boxy, beeping little satellite, were striding ahead technologically appalled pretty much all Americans, but particularly those on the right. Rocket research developed out of the ballistic V1 and V2 missile programme (headed by von Braun) and the need to deliver weapons of mass destruction to as many Russian cities as was humanly possible – something else the left was, traditionally, a little snippy about. By 1958, both the Americans and, dispiritingly early, the Russians, had the ability to compress plutonium in order to render vast swaths of New Mexico (and, for that matter, Kazahkstan) uninhabitable: the problem was the delivery system. How to get them there accurately and quickly? Hence the extraordinary sums of money spent on rocket research: initially, at least, the US was aiming not for the moon but, more prosaically, at Moscow. The Russians, for their part, were directing their attentions towards US military bases in nearby Turkey.

The right was also more prone to engage in perpetual one-upmanship against an evil opponent simply for the sake of it; to show, definitively, that the socialist economic system was inherently incompetent and could not possibly compete against a Christian country with a free and open market. The fact that the US space programme was every bit as centralised and state-funded as its Soviet counterpart struck nobody, back then, as a paradox.

But there was a deeper, more atavistic impulse within the American right – it is a peculiarly American thing – which persists to this day.

Outer space was to be colonised, terraformed, in much the same way as was the old American West, “Red Indians” and all. It is no coincidence that the immensely popular Star Trek, which slapped over the space race a veneer of left-liberal Hollywood gloss, began each week with the words: “Space, the final frontier…”

By the 1950s, America’s Wild West had been tamed by the white “technocrats” – and now they were looking for a more challenging frontier, a little further afield. Today, with the Soviet threat having dissolved, and the pressure to discover ever more accurate and speedy missile-delivery systems having eased, the romantic American right gazes with longing at the red-orange mesas and canyons of Mars. To them, this is a new New Mexico waiting to be similarly civilised. And the left, with its new, greenish concerns, pouts and stamps about, demanding that the solar system be protected from man’s imperialism and penchant for environmental destruction.

But back to the 1960s, for a while. It is impossible to overstate – but, contrarily, difficult to remember – the extent of opposition to the vast amount of money being spent by the US on its shot at the moon, the huge leap in spending that took place at the beginning of the 1960s. Back in 1958, the US government allocated $490m (in 1996 terms) to space research; by 1965 this had risen to $25 billion. In each of the years from 1964 through to 1968, the government spent more than the equivalent of $20 billion on its Apollo programme, accounting for some 4% of the total federal budget.

This was a time of new economic prosperity in America – but also of localised, crushing poverty, civil-rights marches and an increasingly expensive war in southeast Asia; the left believed that the poor were being shunned and left behind. At the time, Martin Luther King commented: “If our nation can spend twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet, right here on Earth.” The day before the Apollo 11 mission, representatives from a whole bunch of leftish campaigning organisations, including the Poor People’s Campaign, met Thomas Paine, the boss of Nasa, to protest at the sheer scale of his budget, at the lack of a sense of priority. Paine told them: “If we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing that button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push that button.”

And the debate continues, right now. President George W Bush has announced his intention to send men back to the moon and to explore outer space. That prickly rabble-rouser the Rev Al Sharpton commented that the president would be better off exploring low- income areas of Washington, DC. “I mean,” he said, “it wouldn’t cost as much and it would be just as enlightening for him.”

But popular opinion has always swung behind the glamour of space exploration – so long as it is done with chutzpah and ambition: astronauts playing golf on the moon, rather than boring space stations or young women being incinerated in space shuttles.

For the Soviets, under that astute but excitable prole Nikita Khrushchev, space exploration was almost entirely a case of one-upmanship and bravado, allied to a paranoiac fear of attack from the West, and therefore a commitment to ever-increasing levels of military expenditure. The Soviet Union had much less money than the US, to be sure – but the totalitarian nature of the society meant that it was rather less hampered than its rivals by what we might call, uh, health-and-safety issues, and still less by ecological concerns. Partly for this reason too, the poverty-versus-space-race argument did not have much of a forum for debate.

Cute little doggies called Laika, human cosmonauts, the standard of living and indeed Kazakhstan could be happily sacrificed for the greater good of the country and its international reputation as the standard-bearer of socialism. And to be fair, the experience of the second world war, of enormous personal sacrifice with over 20m people dead, of collective strength triumphing against overwhelming adversity, meant that counter- arguments were never likely to carry much weight among the proud and long-suffering public. And at the back of all this was Marxism; an emphasis on man imposing his will upon the untamed natural world – which meant the moon, as much as Siberia – and Marx’s oft-cited and maybe overstated “Prometheanism” that, put crudely, meant rapid, continual industrialisation at all costs.

The Russians had their own version of Wernher von Braun, except that he was home-grown rather than acquired from the Nazis. Or at least sort of home-grown, being – like so many of the USSR’s prominent scientists and engineers – Ukrainian by birth. Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov, who had been banished to a gulag by Stalin in 1938, out-thought and out-fought not only his American rivals but also his own duplicitous and sinister Russian colleagues, who expended a lot of energy grassing him up to the authorities for real or imagined transgressions. Korolyov, an agreeably baleful and pessimistic character, provided his government with both the Vostok and Sputnik systems before dying, unexpectedly, in 1966; there is a plaque commemorating his achievements on the wall of the Kremlin – and some grey, godforsaken town, formerly Kaliningrad, was renamed after him. The Ukrainian had joined the Communist party in 1952 – much as von Braun had joined the Nazis, for sensible pragmatic reasons.

The 1970s brought Leonid Brezhnev and détente and the first US premier in 15 years to cut Nasa’s funding: Richard Nixon. Having won the race and walked on the moon, the US was now happy simply to float about in space, a few hundred or so miles above the Earth’s surface. There was tentative and awkward collaboration with the communists, who were themselves feeling the first financial constrictions of a military race that would lead them, pretty soon, to bankruptcy and extinction. Today, US expenditure on space exploration is, in real terms, much less than half of what it was during the 1960s; although rather more than what it was before Nixon was, as he somewhat disingenuously put it, self-impeached. And more of us are in on the act: the European Union, India, China. And if you wonder how India can afford to spend those hard-earned rupees exploring outer space, remember that the romantic dream of walking on distant planets has never been the sole preserve of superpowers. Back in the 1960s, Zambia got in on the act.

Under the guidance of the singularly eccentric Edward Mukaka Nkoloso, head of the, um, Zambia National Academy of Space Research, Zambia pursued its own dream of sending “afronauts” into the distant ether by means of a very large catapult and some oil drums hastily welded together. The “afronauts” trained for the hazards of weightlessness by being rolled down a hill at great speed in another oil drum – which replicated precisely, according to Mukaka, the conditions found beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Mr Mukaka applied to the United Nations for several hundred million dollars’ funding for his scheme, and very nearly got it. Not quite as stupid as he seemed. These days the Zambian government acts all embarrassed and denies that it was ever really serious about its space programme.

History suggests that the vast amounts of money needed for space exploration are forthcoming only when two conditions are met: firstly, that the technology used is either a spin-off from the arms race, or might later be used by the military as a means of annihilating ever-greater numbers of people more cheaply and expediently, or defending its own people. Hence the shift from manned space flights to orbiting space stations, just as the US was working on its “star wars” strategic defence initiative. And secondly, that the US needs a superpower rival to spur it on to ever-greater technological achievements, largely, if not exclusively, for the sake of one-upmanship. Contrary to what history has shown us, it might also be the case that the US needs a right-of-centre government for Nasa to get the dosh to fund the sort of programmes it wishes to pursue. Right now, even with George W Bush in the White House, the money being spent on space exploration would, by the standards of the 1960s heyday, count as nickels and dimes. That will change only when the Iranians announce their manned mission to Mars.