Much of the technology common in daily life today originates from the drive to put a human being on the Moon. This effort reached its pinnacle when Neil Armstrong stepped off the Eagle landing module onto the lunar surface 50 years ago.

As a NASA airborne astronomy ambassador and director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Manfred Olson Planetarium, I know that the technologies behind weather forecasting, GPS and even smartphones can trace their origins to the race to the Moon.

Rockets: Oct. 4, 1957 marked the dawn of the Space Age, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first human-made satellite. The Soviets were the first to make powerful launch vehicles by adapting World War II-era long-range missiles, especially the German V-2.

From there, space propulsion and satellite technology moved fast: Luna 1 escaped the Earth’s gravitational field to fly past the moon on Jan. 4, 1959; Vostok 1 carried the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space on April 12, 1961; and Telstar, the first commercial satellite, sent TV signals across the Atlantic Ocean on July 10, 1962.

Saturn V still stands as the most powerful rocket ever built, but rockets today are far cheaper to launch. For example, whereas Saturn V cost $185 million, which translates into over $1 billion in 2019, today’s Falcon Heavy launch costs only $90 million.

Satellites: The quest for enough thrust to land a man on the moon led to the building of vehicles powerful enough to launch payloads to heights of 21,200 to 22,600 miles above the Earth’s surface.

At the beginning of 2019, there were 4,987 satellites orbiting Earth. Of the currently operational satellites, approximately 40 percent of payloads enable communications, 36 percent observe the Earth, 11 percent demonstrate technologies, 7 percent improve navigation and positioning and 6 percent advance space and earth science.

Miniaturization: Space missions – back then and even today – have strict limits on how big and how heavy their equipment can be, because so much energy is required to lift off and achieve orbit.

From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, the weight and energy consumption of electronics was reduced by a factor of several hundred at least — from the 30 tons and 160 kilowatts of the Electric Numerical Integrator and Computer to the 70 pounds and 70 watts of the Apollo guidance computer. This weight difference is equivalent to that between a humpback whale and an armadillo.

Global network of ground stations: Communicating with vehicles and people in space was just as important as getting them up there in the first place. An important breakthrough associated with the 1969 lunar landing was the construction of a global network of ground stations, called the Deep Space Network, to let controllers on Earth communicate constantly with missions in highly elliptical Earth orbits or beyond. This continuity was possible because the ground facilities were placed strategically 120 degrees apart in longitude so that each spacecraft would be in range of one of the ground stations at all times.

Looking back at Earth: Getting to space has allowed people to turn their research efforts toward Earth. In August 1959, the unmanned satellite Explorer VI took the first crude photos of Earth from space on a mission researching the upper atmosphere, in preparation for the Apollo program.

Almost a decade later, the crew of Apollo 8 took a famous picture of the Earth rising over the lunar landscape, aptly named “Earthrise.” This image helped people understand our planet as a unique shared world and boosted the environmental movement.

What started in the early 1960s as a U.S. Navy satellite system to track its Polaris submarines to within 600 feet has blossomed into the Global Positioning System network of satellites providing location services worldwide.

We can only wonder what innovations from the effort to send people to other planets will affect earthlings 50 years after the first Marswalk.

The Associated Press
The Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo 11 crew launches from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 16, 1969.
https://www.bladenjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/web1_moon-5-071919.jpgThe Associated Press
The Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo 11 crew launches from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 16, 1969.

Jean Creighton

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Jean Creighton writes for The Conversation, a partner with The Associated Press. The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.