Unknown to most people is the fact that the Macintosh has played a significant role in the saving and promotion of the space program. This occurred when President Clinton was trying to gather support for the space station from Congress and the public. As described in the Machine Design article titled "Space Station Orbits in Virtual Reality" included below, President Clinton asked NASA to present options to the original space station project that would get the station into orbit faster, increase safety, and cut costs as well. Because time was important, NASA needed to quickly communicate the new concepts or risk losing funding altogether. NASA's engineers , together with John Frassanito & Assoc. (JF&A) chose VIDI's Modeler because of its Digital Clay™ capability to update the space station's designs and then Presenter 3D to generate realistic 3D images of the new configuration.
NASA used the visual imagery created on the Macintosh to get its point across. As a result, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee voted to authorize $15 billion in spending for the agency, including $1.9 billion for the space station. Presenter 3D Macintosh-generated graphics imagery created by Bob Sauls was also used to promote Russian and worldwide cooperation in space. The realistic images and animations were used to show the simulated shuttle docking of the first and subsequent shuttle and Mir space station dockings on CNN, Nightline and network evening news simultaneous to the actual docking that was occurring out in space, and on the Discovery Channel. The computer generated images and animations were of such quality that it was not possible to tell the difference between the live feed and the simulation of the docking. To expand on the presetnation, Bob created the capability to do Virtual Walkthroughs of the Russian space station using Apple's amazing QuickTime VR technology.
