How did space exploration affect the cold war during the 70s?

The U.S. and the Soviet Union were in a space race to develop technology to land on the moon 1st. By the time, that John Kennedy declared his plans, in the early 1960’s, to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade; the US was far behind the USSR in space technology. But from a historical perspective, John Kennedy was completely uninterested in space. His reasoning was that the US “had” to strike the USSR to the moon. As the people of the US became responsive that the USSR was out pacing them in technology, which they’d quite well believed that the US was greater in up until that point, sustain for a fully funded space program began to grow quickly. This permitted the support required for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to virtually give NASA a clean check to fund the space program. Thus making U.S. landed Louis Armstrong on the moon 1st a day earlier.