Re:Chandrayaan 1 captured by Moon
by pfedor on Sunday November 09, 2008 @03:48AM
(#358194)
Any actual examples of useful new technologies that were developed during the Apollo program? Any that couldn't have been had two orders of magnitude cheaper if funded directly and not as a "side effect"? Not that I'm against manned space flight or public funding of it.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I would like to believe that the side effects of the space race couldn't have been easily emulated by just funding projects directly. I think a lot of the technologies that came out of the time period weren't "Oh, let's make a <technology>." Development seems to have been a result of NASA encountering a problem and then inventing something to fix the problem. That new invention then just so happened to have applications to other fields.
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/apollo.htm
As I stated above, I think the Apollo missions were unique in their historical context and unlikely to be repeated as a model.