Sometimes, it really isn't the big things – the hadron colliders, or even the robot chuntering around Mars sending us photographs of pebbles that will change our lives. It isn't even the massive breakthroughs, like the new cellulose made of nano-particles of wood-pulp and more resilient than kevlar armour. It's the things that are just, well – and this sounds like a 1980s teenager in a John Hughes film – neat. And also cool. Very cool. Just think about this – Nasa has made three satellites out of smartphones. An Android phone has so much computing power that it can run a satellite.
For a lot of people, the space race hardly needed justifying – it was one of the more harmless ways in which great powers competed, and was never going to bankrupt us or blast us to irradiated dust. It was a way of feeling part of the universe rather than just a few square miles of one insignificant planet; it was a way of looking down on that planet and seeing how insignificant all our differences were, how precarious and fragile we are. The outpourings of grief at the death of Neil Armstrong last week only serve to reinforce this.
There were always, also, the spin-offs. Very little that is good in the modern world came from the arms race – we got the hydrogen bomb, but usable fusion never really came along, and even fission-based atomic power remains controversial, and dangerous when earthquakes happen. The space race though – well, it did wonders for strong materials, and computing power, and communications. The telephones we carry around, those small insistent voices that organise our lives and connect us to almost everything – we got those from the space race.
In an age of austerity, it is only right that the space industry suddenly wake up, and realise what terrorists got a few years ago, that smartphones are a wonderful miniaturised tool for doing a lot of things that otherwise you'd need something much larger for. After all, satellites need constantly to let their controllers know what's going on with their internal sensors – they also need to take photographs, lots of clear digital photographs, and send those off as instant or almost instant messages. Smartphones are designed to do those things, and to be incredibly light, and comparatively cheap, all at the same time. Nasa is putting phones, and parts of phones, into orbit because they are the cheap way of doing what would otherwise cost millions.
A naysayer might point to the rare earths that make some of the components, and the blood those earths are soaked in – or to the exploited workers that put their backs out and dim their eyes sticking components together. Those are fair points – and a good argument for the destruction of industrial capitalism and the current world order, not for not having good cheap satellites that can monitor weather, and crop patterns, and all sorts of things that benefit people. It's not all blood and horror – sometimes the technology does good.
And nonetheless, like I say, how very cool, how very neat.