[mannykannot]

Von Braun wanted to send people to the Moon (and he really wanted to get them to Mars), but I am guessing that if the US had adopted his plan to orbit a satellite with a modified Redstone rocket, and done so before Sputnik, followed by the first human orbital flight, there might not have been the impetus for a Moon race, no Apollo, and no Moon landing in 1969 or any time soon after. This speculation, of course, depends partly on how the USSR would have responded to these developments.

[LifeLiverTransp]

Von Brauns push for additional testing prevented the first human in space from beeing american.

"After the flight of Mercury-Redstone 2 in January 1961 experienced a string of problems, von Braun insisted on one more test before the Redstone could be deemed man-rated. His overly cautious nature brought about clashes with other people involved in the program, who argued that MR-2's technical issues were simple and had been resolved shortly after the flight. He overruled them, so a test mission involving a Redstone on a boilerplate capsule was flown successfully in March. Von Braun's stubbornness was blamed for the inability of the U.S. to launch a manned space mission before the Soviet Union, which ended up putting the first man in space the following month.[citation needed]"

[mannykannot]

I guess the story is more complicated than generalizations will allow. It is rarely obvious when decisions made in good faith will come back to haunt you, as with the decision to give the Apollo command module a sturdy hatch that could not be quickly jettisoned. For everyone saying the Shuttle booster 'O' rings were in danger of failing, there was someone saying that they had been fine so far.

In the case of MR-2, was the schedule to have an orbital flight before what turned out to be Gagarin's day of destiny? The response to Glenn's flight leaves little doubt that, in the popular view, it is orbital flight that counts as being 'in space', and the start of the Moon race might have hung on that perception.