Sorry, you have things horribly backwards.

I fail to see how huge expenditures for a fairly useless project like sending people to the moon are justified by memory foam and freeze-dried food.  Say, "We did it, yeah for us!" and have done with it.

I expect most items like this would have been developed anyway, and more cheaply, outside the space program.

The biggest benefit is that we proved we were the best at lofting huge amounts of material into space and dropping it with reasonable accuracy anywhere we wanted on either the Earth or the Moon.  Image that material as weapons of various kinds and then tremble in your boots Russia.  That's what it was all about.  The fact that we can put a happy face on it all is just another bonus, one we might have bought more cheaply and efficiently.

Sorry, but apparently you are unable to read and understand the English language.  How you manage to type coherent sentences is beyond me.  Where in there do I complain about the benefits?

What I am complaining about is how people continue to praise to high heaven the round about way we got them.  There are many other paths one can imagine to all this technology they trot out and say, "This is from space research, isn't it wonderful." that might have been more productive and cheaper.

You honestly believe we wouldn't have computers except for the space program?  Sorry, but we already did.  Depending on how you define what you mean, we had them 20 years before the space program or even 100 years before the space program.

Freeze dried food?  Come on, there are so many people in the past up to the present day doing research on food processing from the guy who won the prize from Napoleon for canning to the papers I looked at recently on new ways to dry grapes to make raisins and so many reasons for people doing so unrelated to space in any way.

SCUBA gear?  Geeze, concepts and real devices from Leonardo on up.

Let me put it another way.  So far as I can tell, the reason for the Apollo program was *not* to generate new technology for you and me, so to bring it out and present it as a wonderful justification is suspect.

    I think it seems quite common that research, innovation and discovery  do not have the main effect intended for them. Edison thought the chief value of recording would be for wills. Almost all new media technologies pay off first in pornography.

      The space race was, indeed, touched off by the cold war and naysayers spoke of what a waste it was. Now we use satellite communication every day to instantly transmit news reports around the world. I remember when the wedding of the Queen of England was filmed, hustled onto jet fighters, flown across the Atlantic and, with the assistance of later time zones,  displayed to the public within "hours" of its occurrence. Does anyone want to imagine life without satellites now?

      The space program also created needs that contributed to the development of faster, smaller, better computers of all kinds. I would be surprised if there were not benefits to commercial air travel.

     Finally, it is in the nature of mankind to learn, explore, invent,  build and, unfortunately, compete to the point of violence. While not purely a blessing, I think it is pointless to resist the drive to learn.

      War is not the only motivator. Entertainment seems to drive technology development quite furiously. Medical treatment seems to pull technology along at an amazing pace.

      From my childhood, there have been three simultaneous and continuous explosions. One is information. Another is computer processing and storage. The third is communication. I remember when every phone call was operator assisted. I remember the first commercial electronic calculator. Last week, I watched and listened to my heart pumping and squishing in real time.

     It has been an amazing ride. I have a friend of 93,  26 years older than I am, who says life is so interesting he really wants to stick around to see what is coming next.

     I was wildly excited when Neill Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. It would have been even better with on a hi def digital colour, giant TV.

     We need to smarten up a lot about we use technology but stopping research and exploration are not, I think, a useful option.

Someone said "Two people can keep a secret -- if one of them is dead."

Erasing the memories of the 11,000 co-conspirators at NASA, the contractors, politicians and bureaucrats was my real and best technological achievement.

Keep the faith!

Anytime a great many people (= a lot of money spent) are involved in a technically-challenging project or significant R&D, there will be spin-offs. One question is what is the ROI, comparatively.

Some examples of money and time spent:

Dept of Defense space and spy satellite technology likely had as much or more to do with communication satellites than NASA did, with its focus on manned spaceflight.

The internet was begun by DOD (as ARPANET) then spread to research institutes (like national labs and universities). The Web was initiated at a high-energy physics lab in Europe.  BTW, it was created as a two-way system then -- the intent was that 'users' would add content (Web 2.0 = Web 0.0?).

The National Science Foundation very likely provides a much higher ROI than NASA does.

There have been a lot of studies of R&D economic benefits; I wonder if there is a study in which the entire NASA budget is reckoned as R&D?

The Moon itself is a satellite of Earth.  The best example of the benefits of manned space flight is the Hubble repair mission. If it were not for people like Story Musgrave, his crewmates and the engineers behind the scenes, all the Hubble would be is a billion dollar piece of junk.