How did going to the moon affect technology?

Answer 1

Perhaps the biggest effect was it funded the tooling up of the semiconductor fabrication industry for making integrated circuits. When they began designing the computers for the Apollo spacecraft the integrated circuits (containing only 2 logic gates each) cost about $1000 each, by the time all of the computers needed for the Apollo spacecraft had been built the same integrated circuits cost only about $25 each.

This price drop permitted many commercial computers to afford to use integrated circuits too, introducing the minicomputer era.

When Intel first made the 8008 microprocessor it would have likely cost between about $8000 to $10000 each instead of about $200, virtually eliminating any market for microprocessorsand making it unlikely that Intel would have even considered trying to design it in the first place. As the price of Intel 8008s fell (eventually reaching as little as slightly more than $1 each) and other microprocessors and microcontrollers were created, introducing the microcomputer era.