Nick Szabo offers a very brief history of the space program:
We once heard endlessly about supposed spin-offs from NASA (Tang? Are you really a fan of Tang?). In reality, almost everything successful NASA has done was a spinoff of technology developed by private entities (Robert Goddard’s Smithsonian-funded work on liquid rockets before the war, Bell Labs that invented the transistor and the communications satellite and much else), German military engineers (Von Braun and company), and most directly contractors of the U.S. Department of Defense.
The only important technologies that can be mostly attributed to NASA are preposterously costly and impractical programs such as the Shuttle and International Space Station. The initial launch vehicles used by NASA and (more importantly) the U.S. military, the Jupiter, Athena, Delta, Titan, and Atlas, were repurposed intermediate-range or intercontinental missiles. No basic changes were needed to go from launching big nuclear bombs to the other side of the planet to launching slightly smaller satellites into orbit. When the spacecraft got larger they added booster rockets. Eventually, mostly due to military and commercial purchases, these ICBM designs evolved into the expendable launch vehicles that transport all military and commercial satellites to their orbits to this day.
The U.S. military’s contractors were already building spy satellites, which would prove very useful for keeping track of the Soviet nuclear missiles aimed at the U.S., when Sputnik flew. Old World War II general and then President Dwight Eisenhower wanted the Soviet Union to set a legal precedent that flying satellites over foreign territory without permission was fine. Traditionally land ownership and sovereign territory had been deemed to rise to infinity. Airplanes had become a novel exception to the rule for private land ownership, but not for sovereign control. Sovereign permission is generally required for airplanes, including (or especially) for the spy planes the U.S. military was already flying over the Soviet Union. As crucial as these flights were for U.S. security, they were also a violation of international law, and the Soviet Union shooting them down was justified under that law. The flights were thus a major propaganda loss for the U.S. in the eyes of other countries. Eisenhower could not win the legal or propaganda argument for spy satellites unless he let Soviet actions make the argument for him.
The Soviets, in their own propaganda quest to exaggerate the state of their otherwise mostly backwards technology, obliged. But Sputnik, which did nothing but orbit and beep, drove the U.S. space-crazy. It was not the first or last time we’ve had such a moral panic, and over the old general’s wise reservations NASA was born. Democratic politics now demanded that we be “ahead” of the Soviets in purely symbolic ways, mostly in how fast and far we launched our new media heroes, the astronauts. Echoes of this moral panic motivate the odd politics of NASA to this day, in the form of complaints about how it’s disgraceful to pay Russians to launch American astronauts, warnings that it would somehow be a disaster if China planted any flags on the moon before we send our astronauts back there, and so on.
The space race was on. The Soviets repurposed their nuclear missiles to launch the Sputniks, Yuri Gagarin, and so on. When they tried to develop a new rocket specialized for sending cosmonauts to the moon, it spectacularly failed, albeit under top-secret conditions so that laymen never heard of it in the West. Rejiggered Atlas and Titan ICBMs launched astronauts huddled inside NASA’s Mercury and Gemini capsules. The Saturn that launched Apollo to the moon was mostly a scaled-up Jupiter missile, overseen by the Jupiter team which had been recently transferred from the Army to NASA. (Whether Apollo itself was really so historically important as is often claimed I discuss here). Apollo nevertheless must be counted as a genuine big accomplishment of NASA in its early years. But NASA’s planetary probes? Repurposed spy satellites, made by the same contractors on the same spacecraft buses. The Hubble Telescope? They basically turned a spy satellite upside down. Yes, I know I’m glossing over many technological improvements during this era, and much rejiggering and tinkering done in converting military missions to civilian ones and missiles to launchers — but the useful improvements were largely made by military contractors in the nuclear missile programs, and the rejiggerings by those same contractors but for NASA or for military spy satellites and launches, not by NASA itself for its projects.