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National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
One of the effects of the Sputnik Crisis was of course its main contender NASA. NASA was created to conduct civilian missions for the advancement of America’s space technology. This of course led to increased efforts to beat the Soviets into space which eventually led to the Apollo space program where Americans were the first to land on the moon. Because of NASA’s mission it became influential in the computing world. NASA’s Apollo program was one of the first instances where a microprocessor was used. Microprocessors were used for “The Apollo Guidance Computer.” Besides being the first to use the ancestor of the modern day computer chip it also created a lot of spin-offs which are technology created using government money but has been commercialized for civilian use. One such spin off was Artificial limbs where the artificial muscle systems used in NASA’s space robots were used to create better artificial limbs for commercial uses. A huge contribution to the computing world though would be NASTRAN, the NASA Structural Analysis Program. Besides NASTRAN, NASA also has a library of programs called COSMIC NASTRANNASTRAN was a program developed by NASA using government funding. It was created primarily because research centers would develop their own structural analysis program that would only be used by them because of how specific it was. The committee suggested that NASA create a program that would be compatible between all the research centers. The end result was a General Purpose Structural Program called NASTRAN. It was originally developed to help design a better Space Shuttle but in 1971 the program was released to the public. Such a use of this program was to compute and analyze the behavior of elastic structures. A commercial sector to use NASTRAN was the automobile sector which used NASTRAN to help design suspension and steering systems. Besides the automotive industry, NASTRAN has helped in the design of railroad tracks, cars, bridges, power plants, skyscrapers and aircrafts. COSMICBesides NASTRAN, NASA created many other programs. Most if not all of these programs were put into a database called COSMIC which stands for “Computer Software Management and Information Center.” COSMIC contains over 1200 programs and are each sold at the fraction of the original cost it cost to make it. The idea is to allow companies cheap access to already created software that is easily adaptable for less than they would have spent creating it. The programs in the library include programs for structural analysis, artificial intelligence, computational fluid dynamics, thermal analysis, image processing, project management and more. One of the benefactors from this program was a company called American Airlines Knowledge Systems who used the a program in COSMIC to help with aircraft maintenance, scheduling, fare administrations, flight operations and computer operations.
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