Here’s more on the many spin-off benefits of our crewed missions to the Moon: Apollo program - Wikipedia
I’ve heard that the medical advances from the vitals monitoring equipment in the suits were, themselves, enough to justify the costs of the missions.
Besides which, competing with other countries in a space race is sure a lot better than competing with them in a hot war.
Satellite communications, safer motorcycle helmets, geomapping, GPS, hell, if it’s small and electronic, it probably was part of the space program somewhere along the line.
I hear the same about Formula 1
Maturation of Integrated Circuits (The Apollo program used something like 70% of the US IC supply). The program pretty much turned ICs from prototypes to commercial products.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells.
Scratch-resistant lens coatings and fire-resistant polymers (PBIs)
Digital signal processing that directly led to the development of CAT Scans, MRI, and Digital Cameras.
Fly-By-Wire tech was developed for the Apollo spacecraft.
The Food Safety inspection procedures/standards (HACCP) developed for Apollo were pretty much copied verbatim by the FDA and form the basis of standards and procedures that are still used today.
Those are just off the top of my head, without any Googling.
Graphite dust is flammable and electrically conductive, so having it float around the cabin (as it would if you’re writing with a pencil) and into small crevices and electronics would be bad.
I guess you could put the pencil and notebook inside an airtight box with a hole with a glove attached to let you get your hand inside, but that feels more complicated than a space pen.
I have a problem with “look at all these incidental engineering learnings from this useless trillion-dollar program” as compared to what could have been accomplished if just a small fraction of those funds had been specifically directed to badly needed research programs in science and medicine.
The obstacle to that is that it’s politically hard for government to allocate large sums of money when faced with short-sighted tax-avoidant constituents. There needs to be some huge whiz-bang impressive end goal that captures the public imagination. The solution to that ephemera isn’t more useless space missions, it’s better public education and better governance that focuses on real priorities, rather than things like Elon Musk’s “colony on Mars” fantasies.
I was in college in the late 1970s when I saw that the Space Pen was being sold at the college bookstore. After buying one, I found it indispensable sitting on my bed in my dorm room, where I used one of those backrest pillows. It was great because I could write horizontally and upside down. Plus it was a cool thing I could show my friends - my nerdy friends, not my girlfriends.
Wouldn’t the former exclude the latter unless said latter was also a member of the former? 
“Specifically directed” funds often won’t give you the results you seek. Serendipity, innovations and discoveries made along the way during a massive national effort like Apollo can bring all kinds of unforeseen rewards.
Agreed. Similarly general research can find incredible things. Some seemingly silly thing about starfish diets can accidentally discover a tumor cure.
Sure, but a policy dedicated to funding basic and applied research is very likely to have far more beneficial outcomes than one dedicated to engineering spectacles that have only incidental spin-off benefits.
I’m all in favour of space exploration. I just think that for the foreseeable future it should be done with robotics, delivering far more scientific value at far less cost.
One of our most effective cancer treatments came about because a botanist asked, “Why are my tulips stripey?”
I was almost 12 in 1969 and I recall the excitement and the pride of the moment when we landed on the moon the first time! We just had this little b & w TV, but that did not dim the meaningfulness of the event. Perhaps we cannot really explore space too much, but the moon is always possible, and it is very important to our planet (without it, life might not exist here, according to an Earth Science teacher I once knew, RIP Joyce).
That, and I think that humans have a deep, fundamental need for competition between our tribes. And the default form of that competition is war. It’s just possible that the Space Race prevented the Cold War from going hot, by giving us another outlet for competition. That’s worth a lot.
Jatan Metha has a weekly blog called Moon Monday, focusing on Moon-related developments, including automated and human-based exploration.
In this week’s issue 264, he explains the recent restructuring of the Artemis program.
That may be puhing it a bit too far. I would say it was a rather expensive distraction, with some nice, unexpected, often positive outcomes. But it worked, I concede that. The worst possible war has not happened so far. But not only, not even mostly, because of the space race.
And if another nation, say the Chinese, win the next space race, however you define that, that will not be the reason China and the USA have not gone to war over Taiwan.
To be clear, the Space Race certainly wasn’t the only thing that prevented nuclear armageddon, and it’s likely that we would have avoided it even without it. But it was at least a nudge in the right direction, and it’s possible (even if unlikely) that it was a big enough nudge to make a difference. Even if you only give it a few percent credit for preventing the Big One, though, that’s a high enough value to still make it worth it, because the cost of a full-out war would have been so high as to be nearly incalculable.
I agree with that assessment. Another such piece of ersatz-war was the sports sector, especially the Olympics.