> The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national leadership identified itself less strongly as a capitalist

> The suggestion that you make here is that when the telescope was funded in the 1950s, our national leadership identified itself less strongly as a capitalist free-market nation than it does today. Those terms don't have a consistent meaning. What was considered typical "capitalist free-market" thinking then is not typical "capitalist free-market" thinking now. For instance: Atlas Shrugged was only published in 1957 and Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom in 1963, and it took until the 1980s for those ideas to start to have wide influence in popular culture and government.