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Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target. Unbeknownst to engineers at the time, DART's main sensor mistakenly believed it was flying away from the satellite when it was actually moving 5 feet per second toward it, investigators found."
Which part of the XPrize got something into orbit?
-mkb
So your evidence that the industry cut its size in half each year or two because of the Apollo program is based upon a quote by a journalist who offers absolutely no evidence to the claim that it was the Apollo mission that forced them to do this? This isn't evidence of anything other then one journalist's opinion that Apollo helped to drive the industry forward.
It sure as hell isn't evidence of your initial claim which was that "Without the Apollo program, our computers might still be room-sized behemoths."
I have a better link.
The trend doubling CPS every year or two is a solid 100 years old. It wasn't Apollo that made industry leaders suddenly want to cut the size of electronics as rapidly as possible. The utility of smaller circuitry has always been clear and there has always a rabid race to miniaturize for as long as we have had vacuum tubes and solid state transistors.
The claim that miniaturization would never have happened unless the Apollo program had spurred it forward is completely false. Industry had been demanding smaller components since day one and has been willing to shell out a lot more money then even the Apollo program for them. Hell, even the base research for the solid state transistor was conducted in a private lab, and you can't even begin to try and give the government credit for what Fairchild and the companies that it spawned did.
I am not claiming that government research is inherently bad. In fact, I fully support throwing some money at universities to do base research. The claim that the government is the only way things get done though, that is just silly and ignores reality, especially in the case of the semiconducting industry which is very much self motivated to drive forward as fast as possible.