With all the spin off technology that became commercial items, the rate of return on government spending for Apollo was found to be 26:1, and the economists who did the study said it was higher, but impossible to quantify past that point.
Apollo: How Moon missions changed the modern world
The Apollo programme took humanity to the Moon but also changed the face of technology back here on Earth.
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Astronaut Mike Massimino was six years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the Moon in 1969.
"That's what inspired me to go into space," Massimino says. "I remember thinking very clearly that this was the most important thing that has happened in hundreds of years."
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It's impossible to say if Hubble – and its vast scientific achievements – would have existed without the Apollo Moon landing programme. Apollo certainly revolutionised and accelerated space technology along with our ability to live and work in space. But, perhaps more significantly, Massimino is among a generation of children who – thanks to watching astronauts walk on the Moon – were inspired to become scientists, engineers or astronomers. People who have helped develop new cancer treatments, designed the smartphone and built Hubble.
For anyone with any degree of aspiration, the Moon landing is hard to beat. If we can put a man on the Moon, we can surely cure malaria, fix the potholes in the road or nail that presentation. It's not rocket science, after all.
But inspiration alone is probably not enough to justify the estimated $25.8bn (£20.6bn) – equivalent to around $257bn ($205bn) today – spent sending men to the Moon. A raft of inventors and entrepreneurs also owe their success to something much more tangible from the space programme of the 1960s: advances in computing.
"Apollo was the moment that people stopped talking about how big their computers were and started bragging about how small they were," says David Mindell, professor of the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT and author of a book on the Apollo Guidance Computer.
Around the size of a small suitcase, with a separate display and input panel fitted to the main spacecraft console, the guidance computer was a marvel of miniaturisation. With the equivalent of only around 74KB ROM and 4KB RAM memory (an iPhone 14 has more than a million times as much memory), it enabled astronauts to navigate the roughly 380,000km (236,000 miles) from the Earth to the Moon and then descend to a precise spot on the lunar surface.
"The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer that people staked their lives on – a digital computer in the loop of the thing that they were flying," says Mindell. "That was a very important moment of showing people that computers could be reliable and could be built into things."
Miniaturisation ultimately led to personal computers and smartphones
That concept led to Nasa's subsequent development in the early 1970s of fly-by-wire technology now fitted to almost every modern aircraft. Instead of employing mechanical links that included cranks, pulleys and hydraulics, today flight controls are electronic and coordinated by computer systems. The first Nasa prototypes even used a spare Apollo guidance computer.
Miniaturisation ultimately led to personal computers and smartphones. But it was also the sheer scale of the Apollo programme that helped transform computing technology, driving down costs and putting it – literally – in our hands.
For everything from mission control to the complex technology needed to keep the giant Saturn V rocket on track, Nasa was hungry for the latest silicon-chip tech.
"The Apollo programme was at one point in the 1960s consuming 60% of the integrated circuit output of the United States, that's a huge boost to a technology," says Mindell.