Last year at a family gathering, someone from the younger generation commented that they had no idea why NASA was still in the business of shooting people into space. They felt like the money was sorely needed for things like the next generation of renewable fuel, for example.
My father was there, a sixty-something electronic engineer who worked on Apollo. He said many important things came out of the space program. Naturally he was asked how exactly our society benefited from the Apollo program. He replied that important inventions, like Velcro, had come from the space program. Velcro?