This article remembers key events that have shaped Wall Street history.
The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. The war for the future unofficially began on September 20. That day, seven top German scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, arrived in the United States to begin work on American rocketry programs. The knowledge they'd developed building V-2s in Nazi Germany would later be put to work in the Space Race, culminating in a successful moon landing in 1969.
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Von Braun was a tireless advocate of manned space exploration. He published numerous treatises throughout the 1950s on the subject, and also lent his technical expertise to several episode of Disney's
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G. Scott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, estimated that for every dollar spent on the space program, the U.S. economy gains about $8 in economic benefits. That may underestimate the long-term value gained from Apollo's technological advancements.
For example, the guidance computer developed for Apollo's Lunar Module was one of the first to ever use an integrated circuit. It was only one small part of the Apollo program's $109 billion cost when adjusting for inflation. Intel
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