The most important benefit that we gained from Apollo was this: a clear demonstration for all to see that progress is open-ended.
Our way of life, our whole civilisation, is dominated by change, in sharp distinction to many societies of the past which were characterised by stasis over many generations. In order to make sense of change we must have an ideal of progress -- that the changes we make are leading to an improvement in the human condition. We expect our children's lives to be better than our own in terms of material wealth, moral standards, cultural values, political institutions, and so on.
Some people (for example, the scriptwriters of the film "Independence Day") believe that further material progress can only be bought at the expense, via greed and environmental irresponsibility, of moral decline. But this is not the lesson of history. The abolition of slavery, for example, was not a disinterested moral act, but the outcome of increasing material prosperity. The sense of alienation experienced by some people in the modern market economy is far outweighed by greater personal freedom, choice and education.
Progress is therefore a unified concept: you either see progress in economic, moral, cultural and political senses all happening together, or your society collapses in chaos (as in the case of the Soviet Union, which attempted to drive forward economic and technological progress while adhering to an intolerant authoritarian state), or you have no progress at all (as in dark-age Europe or in primitive gatherer-hunter societies around the world) but only a monotonously static society.
So forget the proverbial non-stick frying-pans (which were in any case on sale a year before President Kennedy made his famous Moon speech). Forget the miniaturised computers, medical sensors, dehydrated foods, fire-retardent clothing, and even the ballpoint pens which work upside down. Useful as some of these spin-off products have been, space is not about spin-off but about space itself.
Space is about a vision and sense of direction for future human progress. Before Armstrong and Aldrin scuffed their boots in the dust of the Sea of Tranquility, humanity was confined to one small planet. But now, following that iconic moment, we possess the assurance that the entire astronomical universe is ours to inhabit.
Note added October 2003. One other benefit from Apollo will bear repeating: the fact that the first human exploration of the Moon seems to have solved at last the mystery of the Moon's origin.
"The quest to understand the Moon's origin was the only scientific goal that could rival the audacity of going to the Moon in the first place" (Dana Mackenzie). But because that understanding emerged only slowly, its basis in the rocks returned by the Apollo missions has tended to be obscured. This new picture made its first public appearance at a conference in Kona, Hawaii, in 1984. The three rival theories of the Moon as "daughter", "sister" or "wife" of Earth gave way to the giant impact theory, which incorporated elements of each of them while resolving their contradictions with the facts.
For the full story, see Dana Mackenzie, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be (Wiley, 2003).
Last revised 3 August 2003 / 34th Apollo Anniversary Year