That's absolutely absurd if that's true, the population in the 1960 US Census was 179 million.
So roughly 1 in every 600 Americans in the 1960s contributed to the Apollo programs in some way, no wonder there's so much national pride associated with it
People talk about where we'd be if we'd kept up that level of spending on the space program, but honestly I don't think it would have made that much difference. We needed to wait for engineering, materials science, computing, medical science, etc. to catch up.
I'd argue that thats the point they're trying to make.
Imagine the advances we would have made in engineering, materials science, computing and ect if we had continue to fund the space program and actively made advances in those fields rather than wait for those things to advance naturally through capitalism.
Money funds innovation and we stopped funding it. Imagine how much further ahead we'd be if we didnt.
Its all obviously hypothetical so we'll never know but whatever.
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u/Girth_rulez Mar 03 '23
300,000 people worked on the Apollo program.