Some of the difference can be explained by the different attitudes to management and planning.

In Soviet Union, "planning" was a magical ritual revealed by Lenin the Prophet and his followers. (Five-year plans, for example, were invented by Stalin.) The theory of planning was prescribed by Party dogma, and any scientific study of the discipline — just like cybernetics, linguistics, or non-Lysenkist evolution — was hampered by politics. In practice, the early Soviet space programme ran largely on the One Man With Experience model. When Sergey Korolev died in 1966, his administrative experience was gone, and it took roughly a decade for the Soviet space programme to fully recover from this setback. (The previous Nedelin explosion didn't make things go any faster, either.) By that time, the Moon Race was over, and the Brezhnevian Stagnation — itself largely a result of poor central planning — was already looming on the horizon.

On the other hand, in the United States, government spent millions and millions of dollars to study effective and useful ways of managing megaprojects, in a truly scholarly fashion, and achieved considerable success. Because planning methods were developed that are not quite as dependent on the manager's specific experience in the relevant subject, Americans became able to train general-purpose managers — which increased the supply of management-capable personnel as well as their interchangeability for emergency purposes. (By the way, many of these ideas from 1950s and 1960s are even today used in most medium- and large-scale engineering projects throughout the world.)

Half a century later, dogma is now eating the American edge instead. Neither the Randian desire to replace planning and management with pure market forces, the Villager vision of subjugating national government to a punditocracy, nor the Tea Party demands of applying intuitionistic microeconomic solutions to macroeconomic problems are helpful. To the Sputnik crisis, USA responded by ramping up the National Science Foundation's funding, setting up NASA and ARPA, and passing the National Defense Education Act — with the express purpose and result of making discovery of new things possible. Today, many American politicians are instead afraid that scientists might discover new things — things that do not match their preconceived political narratives about stem cells, evolution, or climate.