Originally Posted by
Deep Throat
Would 'we' have GPS if they had not gone to the moon?
Yes. Navigation was one of the first practical applications proposed for spaceflight, e.g. in Goddard's 1918 paper "The Ultimate in Precision: The Rocket in Interplanetary Navigation". So it is no surprise that the first satellite constellation for navigation, "Transit", was developed starting in 1958, three years before John F. Kennedy announced the manned lunar program. One might even argue that GPS would have come a decade earlier if all the good dollars hadn't been burnt in the Apollo program ;-)