The space race?

The "Space Race" culminated in a race to put humans on the Moon.  THAT, in turn, required the creation of things that didn't yet exist, but without which going to the Moon would be impossible.  The USA government poured money into companies that hoped to be able to design and produce such things for the first time ever - money that would NEVER have been available if the space race hadn't started.  So without the space race we would never have developed those products.

The foremost example of one of those products, which went on to change the world and produce the civilisation you were born into, is portable, self-contained computers - such as your smartphone and laptop.  The manned spacecraft had to have miniaturized computing machines that were light and would fit on the top of a rocket.  The only computers that existed at that time were house-sized electro-mechanical behemoths used for artillery ballistics and code-breaking by the military, and the very earliest business versions of the same type.  Such things required teams of people, their own air conditioning plants, special power lines to feed them, and hours of intricate loading of cards, player-piano-type strips, and magnetic tapes to get them to run. 

The American "Command Module" where the astronauts rode to the Moon and back had a small suitcase-sized machine to handle the computation of the steering rockets' firings, which was completely self-loading and basically had an on-off switch to make it go.  That was the beginning of those devices that have now shaped the world you take for granted, and it wouldn't have been built if the space race hadn't taken place.  The company that built it would never have gotten the money it needed to make such a thing from private investors - who simply couldn't imagine that ordinary consumers would EVER be interested in buying such a thing.

(Incidentally, the entire processing power of that spacecraft's guidance computer was less than what's running in your wristwatch right now.)

In so many ways that it would take a 30+-page essay to even begin to cover it. Is this an assignment, or just a really vague question?