How NASA’s Apollo program kicked off Silicon Valley’s tech revolution
SpaceX and Boeing are arch-rivals: They’re both gunning for the glory of returning human spaceflight to US soil for the first time in a decade. They battle it out for lucrative government contracts. The companies’ CEOs have even traded taunts about who will be the first to reach Mars.
President John F. Kennedy’s iconic 1962 speech, directing the United States to put boots on the moon within the decade, set in motion a leap in innovation. In just seven years, America went from lagging the Soviet Union in space technology to planting a flag on the lunar surface.
The Apollo program was the birthplace of the modern tech ecosystem, says Basil Hero, a former investigative reporter and media executive who authored the new book “The Mission of a Lifetime.”
“Without [Apollo], I don’t think the computer revolution would have happened as quickly and on the same trajectory,” Hero told CNN Business. “It would have taken an extra 10 or 20 years.”
