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From another perspective, these technologies left us with little science of utility (Tang?) while developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that loom over humanity like the Sword of Damocles. When historians from far off planets visit our nuclear wasteland they will see our thinly veiled space program as the beginning of end. :-)

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Quick list of more inventions that are not Tang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

Even something as mundane as error correction coding were developed at NASA, for communicating with spacecraft - technology that's now present in e.g. CD/DVDs, and every mobile communication system.

Now, if they hadn't developed it, someone else probably would, but perhaps not at that time - leaving us at years behind where we currently are with e.g. the speeds on our mobile devices.

Error Correction Coding is hardly mundane and in modern communication systems far from trivial. There is a lot more to ECC than Reed-Solomon. Basically nothing in our digital world today would work very long without it. You think of it as mundane only because it just works.

I think the credit for error correcting codes goes to Hamming in 1950.

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