It was the nicest thing the USSR ever did for us. Borrowing from a blog piece I did, Eisenhower freaked out over the successful launch and orbit of Sputnik 1. Ike passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 [... and secured] a grant extended to Fairchild Semiconductor to further its development on the transistor... in the fecund economy of California.

Hence the US is now the big tech capitol of the world (though depending more and more on patents rather than innovation since the 2010s, so maybe not for long.)

While it’s definitely true they could’ve intercepted comms, I don’t know that they did do that. And telescopes would only get them to confirming things up to orbit probably.

I still think it’s likely they knew it was real, I’ve just never been able to confirm that they did for myself and so the argument I’m using it much weaker without that piece of evidence. Not to mention that Russia has had state actors promoting the conspiracy theory in recent years which makes things confusing