Furthermore, a lot of the 'advances' space exploration bring us is irrelevant to daily life: why bother spending money developing a pen that works in zero-gravity when a pencil will do and the vast majority of the world's 6 billion people will never experience zero gravity?
Hmmmm...here's a couple you might not be aware of. Maybe not directly developed BY NASA but certainly developed with NASA in mind.
1. The standardization of "time-code" editing, more than any other development, made frame accurate videotape editing viable. Developed by EECO in 1967, time-code was awarded an Emmy in 1971, and standardized by SMPTE shortly thereafter. The process assigned each video frame a digital "audio address," allowed editors to manage lists of hundreds of shots, and made frame accuracy and rapidly cut sequences a norm.
But EECO had originally developed time-code as the
EECO "On-Time" Telemetry Management System, to be used by NASA (and the military) for more accurate control of commands sent and received by aerospace vehicles in flight and for more accurate logging of telemetry tapes. Each second was divided into hundredths and each hundredth second was assigned a digital audio address. SMPTE adapted it for use in television videotape.
An early AMPEX VR-2000 VTR, circa 1960
2. Microprocessors were going to be invented no matter what but because NASA and the military needed them way more than the consumer market, the industry received some help and in return they scaled up manufacturing on a fast track for consumer needs.
Eventually that would have happened anyway but if one looks at the Soviets, one cannot deny that there was at least a fifteen year gap between their own microprocessors being used in aerospace, and the release of that technology to the Soviet marketplace. The Russian consumer was still deep in the vacuum tube and transistor era long after the USA and the rest of the western world had adopted microprocessor technology.
Thanks to Ma Bell, NASA and the military, research got fast tracked, and it got popularized and released to the consumer market in short order.
There are literally thousands of technological advances that we take for granted today that had some or all of their roots in the NASA Lunar Program.
The USA/Soviet Space Race to the Moon spurred the single largest technological leap forward in the entire history of the human race.
What's more, it was a "war" in which thousands and millions were not killed, there was a clear objective and the losers eventually shared the fruits of the winners.
I would much rather we invest billions in cooperative space ventures than endless wars and proxy wars.
