[GH85Carrera]

Back when I was in high school my 11th grade English and home room teacher was convinced NASA just took huge barrels of cash and dumped it in space. She thought we should spend it on helping the poor.

I was lucky enough to have a dad in the US Air Force. We lived on base, (Maxwell AFB) and I had access to the Air War College library. They had to escort me through the classified area to get to the term papers written by the students. The good old Dewey Decimal System worked and I found a paper on the benefits of NASA in general and in particular the moon race. It was an inch and half thick. I had access to the copier, and I copied the entire paper. I took it to school after reading it. I plopped it on my teachers desk, and told her she has homework. Read that paper, and tell me NASA is a waist of money. She actually read it, and she actually changed her mind. I was amazed.

Even back then entire new ways of making things and the push to make circuit boards, and chips had to be invented. NASA research was instrumental.

One of the goals was the moon buggy. They quickly realized that a compass is useless, so unless they stayed withing a line of sight the could get easily get lost. They (NASA) tasked a team at MIT to make a system to keep track of movement and get them back to the spacecraft. They invented from scratch the Internal Measurement Unit or IMU. It was a large expensive and complex system, but it worked perfectly.

Every smart phone has one built into it. That is how your phone knows which way is up. Coupled to another thing NASA was part of, the GPS you can get around with ease using a cell phone. IMUs are tiny now, and dirt cheap, like a GPS chip.