The Peaceful Benefits of Space—From Tang to Medical Telemetry
What American wants to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon?
—President Lyndon Baines Johnson
The U.S. space program was conceived in Cold War fear after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, and it is an investment that has yielded the greatest bounty of peace-time benefits one could ever imagine. Myriad technical miracles that improve all our lives have been spun off directly or indirectly from the seemingly purposeless race to the moon. There is, of course, that most sublime nectar of the astronaut gods: Tang. There are also these incredible life-enhancing, life-giving, and life-saving innovations:
The GPS network
The World Wide Web, a.k.a. the Internet
Solar power, fuel cells, ...
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