Space Race
The space race was the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve milestones in spaceflight, from the first satellite in 1957 to the American crewed Moon landing of Apollo 11 on 20 July 1969. For electronics it was a demand engine. Rockets and spacecraft had strict limits on weight, power and reliability, and their computers and control systems had to work far from any repair shop. NASA's need for such components made it, with the Air Force's missile programs, one of the first large buyers of integrated circuits, and it helped carry the new technology from laboratory novelty to production item.
The Apollo Guidance Computer is the best example of how the space program used integrated circuits. Designed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, it was a compact digital computer used for navigation and control in the command module and the lunar module. The later version, Block II, used about 2,800 integrated circuits, each packing two three-input NOR gates, and the whole machine was built from this one simple logic building block. It had a few thousand words of erasable core memory and a larger fixed memory made of wires woven through magnetic cores, known as core rope, and it weighed on the order of tens of kilograms. By the standards of its day it was remarkably small, and by modern standards it is far less powerful than a pocket calculator.
NASA's buying power helped lower the price of integrated circuits and raise their quality. In the mid-1960s, the Apollo and Minuteman programs together took a large share of the integrated circuits then produced, which let suppliers such as Fairchild and Texas Instruments build up production and improve yields. NASA also required careful testing and documentation, with each part traceable and screened. The Gemini spacecraft that preceded Apollo used a different approach, with an IBM onboard computer built from discrete components and core memory, so the move to integrated circuits came with Apollo rather than being a feature of all NASA hardware.
The program's lasting contribution to electronics was a culture of reliability engineering and an ethos of miniaturization. Engineers learned to design for fault tolerance, to simulate before building and to test components to failure. Many of the people trained on these programs later worked in commercial computing and in the semiconductor industry. The same period saw the development of computer-aided design, software engineering methods and quality management that outlasted the missions.
Care is needed with popular claims that NASA invented everyday products. It is often said that the space program produced Teflon, Velcro or Tang, none of which originated with NASA; Teflon predates the agency, Velcro was invented independently in Switzerland, and Tang was merely used on flights. Similarly, the integrated circuit was not an Apollo invention, since Kilby and Noyce created it before the agency was a major customer. What the program really did was buy, test and publicize the technology early, accelerating it rather than creating it. The Moon landing also was not a commercial triumph by itself; its payoff for electronics was indirect.
For the modern reader the space race is a case study in how a large, mission-driven customer can pull a technology up the learning curve. The same principle shows up in later space, defense and research programs that fund technologies before they are cheap.
Read the space race as an accelerator rather than an inventor: it did not create the integrated circuit, but its demand for light, dependable electronics, ending in the Apollo Guidance Computer, gave the new technology early volume and a proven reputation.