Christian asks:

> Hmmm.... Wasn't ADA also developed at NASA during the Apollo program ?

No, Ada was a language mandated by the US Department of Defense to be the
sole programming language used by all military contractors. The idea lasted
about a year.

But as for the general tendency to credit the space program with the
development of all kinds of things in your life that wouldn't have existed
without the program, I've always thought it was a foolish rationalization to
justify the expense of the program. First, I doubt that there is any single
item that now exists that wouldn't have existed with or without the program.
But more importantly, it's never been why or what space exploration has been
about, and to argue such trivialities greatly diminishes the program.

The space program has always been a matter of national prestige, and at the
worst of times, a spectacular surrogate for war, but it has also been an
extension of the pioneering spirit of the United States, a reason to look
upward and outwards, a reason to engage in activities other than the colonial
imperialism that has tarnished the superpowers of the past, and a mechanism
to carry the hopes and dreams of all humanity on the back of the machines we
build.

But most importantly, the program is a mechanism that allows us to ask the
most religious of all questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? And
where are we going? -- with the real hope of obtaining at least a portion of
the answer. It is our time's equivalent of building the great cathedrals of
Europe, buildings that often required several hundred years to complete and
greatly stretched the resources and imaginations of those who were building
them in their attempt to answer the very same questions.

Wirt Atmar

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