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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

flight computers were already designed and built for the missles that predated Apollo- in fact, that's why the team that built them for Apollo was able to be so productive.

freeze dried food predates the space program by decades.

Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.

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>Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.

What a wonderful tautology.

These things were researched because they were necessary. You don't just sit down and think of new things to invent, you invent things to fix a problem. Without a problem to solve, how is one supposed to suddenly decide what to research?

But how many of these actually practical and useful things were invented by NASA? I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..

> But how many of these actually practical and useful things were invented by NASA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

> I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..

In many cases yes, they didn't invent the technology per se. But in those cases they improved or refined the tech and by virtue of being a public agency released the information freely for public use.

Right, the computers were built for the preliminary programs which ... were stages on the way to Apollo! Yes, theoretically, but sometimes you need a big bold exciting goal or everyone will say "why are you wasting my tax dollars inventing flight computers? these don't seem very valuable...". The side effects may even be the point of the project, but the goal is essential to getting the politics right.

They really came out of gun targeting and were later developed into ballistic missile targeting (including sub-launched). Not that the AGC wasn't a significant achievement but the basic technology had already been proven out in Polaris and earlier.

I heard--probably from someone who worked there--that the Apollo Guidance Computer was pretty much the only no-bid system in the Apollo program.

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