What did it take to get to the moon? Tens of billions—and the help of almost every major American business by TheAlexKnapp
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One of the most remarkable things about the Moon landing was how short a time it took. President Kennedy proposed NASA would land a person on the moon, and a short eight years later, it did. That meant that it accelerated technology development far faster than would have happened otherwise, says Ella Atkins, an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers senior member. “The rapid prototyping and deployment would have been unprecedented without that kind of program.
Experience with Apollo also led its contractors to develop new kinds of businesses. Black & Decker , for example, took its experience building tools for the Apollo program into some of the battery-powered consumer products that underlies its $14 billion in annual revenue. Plantronics uses the headsets it manufactured for the Apollo mission as the design basis for headsets it makes today for applications ranging from aviation to gaming.
Hundreds of companies helped construct the Apollo spacecraft that sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon. Here are a few highlights of what they did.All of the figures here are in contemporary dollars. For a sense of what these figures would be today, multiply them by about seven.LEFT: Saturn V SA-506 at the moment of ignition. RIGHT: Lunar Module"Eagle" composite. Cost of the Saturn V rocket that launched astronauts to the Moon.
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