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How the Critics of the Apollo Program Were Proven Wrong

MarkWhittington writes "A recent story in The Atlantic reminds us that the Apollo program, so fondly remembered in the 21st Century, was opposed by a great many people while it was ongoing, on the theory that the money spent going to the moon would have been better spent on poverty programs. The problem with this view was that spending for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society dwarfed the Apollo program, that the programs in the Great Society largely failed to address poverty and other social ills, and that the Apollo program actually had a stimulative effect on the economy that fostered economic growth and created jobs by driving the development of technology,"

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  1. Re:Good to keep in mind by BasilBrush · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Lots of inventions and innovations were attributed to the Apollo project that were nothing to do with it. It was a good marketing tactic in the 1960s/70s to say that something was developed from the space program, was "space-age" etc.

    I'm not going to check out each of the ones you list, but just to take the first, Wikipedia shows the first LED being created in 1927. And whilst the first practical LED component came along in 1962, one year into the Apollo program, it makes no mention of them being created by or funded by NASA.

    It seems like a typical example. It was an innovation during the time of the Apollo program, so some people have claimed it as a result of the space program, and worse, imply that it wouldn't have been invented anyway.