NASA and the US government’s spending (between $21 and $30 Billion in the 1960’s) on the moon program has been repaid many, many times over in taxes paid as a result of spinoff technologies that were results of the moon effort.

That’s because you are using the progeny of Apollo at this very moment to read this comment: integrated circuits are the heart and soul of your computer, and the first known practical use of IC’s (also called chips) was in the Apollo Guidance Computer by MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory led by Dr. Charles Draper.

Before that, IC’s were a curiosity languishing in the laboratory, and even for that time, relatively low-power computational devices. First invented in 1958, the Air Force was Texas Instruments only customer for IC’s for their potential exploration missions, but they were never used because the Air Force was disengaging from civilian space exploration efforts. Sales in the private sector were all but nonexistent and many considered the IC a dead end. Draper and MIT changed all of that because of the size and weight requirements for the Apollo capsule.

NASA and MIT helped develop more robust IC’s for the AGC, and at one point, they used 50–60% of the world’s supply of the units. Achieving the required goals of low weight, volume, and power coupled with extreme high reliability necessitated the use of one single, simple integrated circuit for all logic functions, and that drove the development of more power units.

One of the first integrated circuits used by MIT.  Photo from the Smithsonian.

They succeeded, and by so doing, they demonstrated clearly that IC’s were a viable technology and that more even more powerful units were achievable using their design topologies. That in turn spurred companies like Fairchild Technologies to work with IC’s, after which two Fairchild employees, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left the company to found their own concern in Mountain View, California: Intel.

Intel, of course, was the chip foundry that fueled the computer revolution, and Moore is known not only for that, but also for his famous Moore’s Law.

All in all, it is more than fair to say that the taxes remitted by Intel alone through the years has repaid the US government the roughly $23 Billion it spent on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo….combined. After all, Intel’s annual tax bill was $2.3 in a single recent year.  Over a ten or fifteen year period, Intel alone would recoup the government its investment.  And Intel is only one of many huge semiconductor foundries based in the US.  Add those tax bills together, adjust for inflation and then add up all the years since the 1960’s that these companies have had strong earnings, and it’s easy to see that the government has made a tidy little sum.

And we, the common person, have IC’s everywhere in our homes, cars and workplaces, largely because Project Apollo needed a lightweight, robust way to guide its spacecraft to and from the moon.