Here's an accident of history that most people don't realize. It is likely possible that MOL led to Vostok, which then led to the American commitment to the Space Race and Project Apollo†.

Originally, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were skeptical about a crewed space program. Eisenhower's attitude has been widely reported as,

> Why go to the Moon, he asked, if we don’t have any enemies there?

[Rocket Age: The Race to the Moon and What It Took to Get There, George D. Morgan]

And his attitudes were shared by most of his advisors and the senior administrators. Bob Gilruth has stated, on record, that during one meeting one of them remarked (and I believe this was in front of the POTUS), "It would be only the most expensive funeral [a] man has ever had." https://airandspace.si.edu/research/projects/oral-histories/...

Everyone laughed.

The attitude was similar behind the Iron Curtain. Despite the PR coup of Sputnik, Korolev, at best, received tepid support from the politburo,

> In 1958 the Soviets finally authorized Korolev to begin work on a manned space capsule, but budgeted no money to actually send it aloft. The Soviet military wanted satellites that could pass over the United States and other countries and point spy cameras below to keep watch. Khrushchev and the Politburo had feelings similar to Eisenhower—cosmonauts flying around in space just seemed like so much joyriding. The message given to Korolev was blunt: a “reconnaissance satellite is more important for the Motherland.”

[Rocket Age: The Race to the Moon and What It Took to Get There, George D. Morgan]

Both Eisenhower and Krushchev saw astronauts and crewed spaceflights as joy rides on the national dime. Almost everyone was politically against it.

And then came MOL.

In March 1959,

> the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General Thomas D. White asked the USAF Director of Development Planning to prepare a long-range plan for a USAF space program. One project identified in the resulting document was a "manned orbital laboratory"

And then August of that year,

> The USAF Air Research and Development Command (ARDC) issued a request to the Aeronautical Systems Division (ASD) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on 1 September 1959 for a formal study to be conducted of a military test space station (MTSS).

These two events winded up reaching the Soviets, and one plucky scientist in particular - Sergei Korolev. He spun up the idea of an equivalent military space station††, and he got the funding he needed to actually send someone up in the capsules he had been designing.

Arguably, without MOL the Soviets wouldn't have fully funded Vostok, and Gagarin wouldn't have beaten Alan Shepard into space by a few chance weeks. And a charismatic POTUS then wouldn't have had his VP, Johnson, draw up plans for a counter-proposal that then led to the Apollo Program and the Space Race.

† The links go a bit deeper when you realize that Neil Armstrong qualified as a MOL astronaut before he became one with NASA.

†† What's funny is that they got what they paid for. After his death, the Salyut stations that the Soviets put up were military and likely performed surveillance activities similar to what was proposed with MOL.