No one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.
One day in early 1969 two engineers from General Motors were standing in the corridor just outside the office of NASA rocket maestro Wernher von Braun, holding what looked like a toy car. Von Braun was the former Nazi who had run Adolf Hitler’s V-2 rocket program during World War II. As Germany collapsed in defeat, von Braun had contrived to surrender, along with many of his pioneering rocket group, to the advancing U.S. Army instead of falling into the hands of the Russians.
Von Braun was a charismatic force for space travel in the United States. Just 33 at the end of World War II, he and many of his German colleagues ended up in Huntsville, Alabama, at what by the mid-1960s was the Marshall Space Flight Center, headquarters for NASA’s effort to design and test the biggest rockets the world had ever seen, including the Saturn V, which sent Apollo to the Moon.
As it happened, in a bureaucratic quirk, Marshall was also in charge of “Moon mobility” vehicles—lunar rovers.
The two GM engineers outside von Braun’s office that day were Sam Romano and Ferenc Pavlics. They had come to Huntsville in a last-ditch effort to persuade NASA that the astronauts had to have a car on the Moon for at least some of the Apollo missions. It was late to be making that argument—the first Moon landing was just weeks off—and NASA had several years earlier shelved rover development. In the early 1960s NASA had developed elaborate lunar rovers that were like enclosed Moon minivans. But it canceled the projects because the rovers were too big, too heavy, and too costly.
Romano and Pavlics were so determined that the astronauts have a Moon vehicle that they kept working, using GM’s own money, even after NASA decided not to send any kind of car to the Moon. “I decided it can be done, it should be done, and we want to do it,” said Romano. “If there’s going to be a vehicle on the Moon, it’s going to be a General Motors vehicle, and I’m going to make sure it happens.”
The men quietly talked to engineers at Grumman, where the lunar module was being designed and built, and got the dimensions of a storage compartment on the outside of the lunar module that was empty and that they could use to stow a lunar vehicle if they could design one to fit. The whole idea was silly on its face: that compartment was shaped like a tall wedge of pie: five feet wide at the wide end, five feet tall, and five feet deep, narrowing to a point. An odd shape, and they would be trying to design a Moon car that could somehow fit into a space no bigger than the trunk of a typical Earth car, while also being useful once it was on the Moon.
That day in early 1969 they had brought with them what looked like a child’s toy car, with the lines of a sleek, open-topped dune buggy. It was, in fact, a scale model of the lunar rover Romano and Pavlics wanted to send to the Moon. Pavlics had designed it and built the scale model, with meticulous detail, including seats sewn by his wife, and the 18-inch car motored along using batteries, operating by radio remote control. As he was finishing the model, Pavlics noticed that his young son’s latest GI Joe was a new version, “Astronaut GI Joe,” wearing a shiny Mercury spacesuit. For the trip to Huntsville, Pavlics had borrowed Astronaut GI Joe and put him in the little rover’s driver’s seat. The men set the model down in the corridor outside von Braun’s office. “I guided the little model with radio control into his office,” said Pavlics, “right to his desk. He was on the telephone, looking at what’s coming into his office.”
The NASA rocket chief, who was also director of the Marshall center, immediately hung up. “What have we here?” he asked.
Said Romano, “That gave us the opportunity to tell him what we could do.”
Half an hour later, von Braun was convinced. He slapped his hand on his desk and declared, “We must do this.”
Romano and Pavlics, who had already been told no by NASA, with their determination and their captivating motorized Moon car, had just changed the history of space exploration.
Just weeks later, von Braun created a project office to run creation of a lunar rover. It was April 1969, ridiculously late to imagine adding something as complicated as a car to the Moon flights. Spaceships, spacesuits, experiments, procedures—not only were they all designed, built, tested, and flight-qualified, but the astronauts had been practicing with their Moon equipment for months or even years.
But von Braun was true to both his word and his influence. A quick competition was run to pick companies to design and build the rover, and the companies took the competition seriously, with Grumman, builder of the lunar module, entering a credible challenger to the one Romano and Pavlics had designed.
But in the end GM was picked to design the rover, working with Boeing, which built the GM design. The ramp-up to get the work done was astonishing: Romano and Pavlics’s group of a half-dozen expanded to a team of 400 in just weeks, with Pavlics as the chief engineer. The key to GM’s victory was an almost magical system Pavlics had designed for folding up the car like an elaborate metal origami. The seats folded down, and the front end of the rover was hinged and folded flat onto the center of the vehicle—wheels, suspension, and all. The rear end did the same, like a pool lounge that could be folded flat. Once front and rear were folded into the center, the wheels unlocked and angled in as well, to make a package in the shape of that wedge storage compartment. On the Moon, the car would unfold out of the side of the lunar module and plop onto the surface of the Moon, almost ready to drive.
The whole thing weighed 460 pounds, including the batteries that powered it, a color TV camera, seat belts for the astronauts, and four quarter-horsepower electric motors, one driving each wheel. The rover was 10 feet long and 6 feet wide, and it could carry 1,050 pounds of astronauts, gear, and rocks across the surface of the Moon at 8 mph. As with much else for Apollo, the rover was an improbable combination of high-tech and handcrafted. The wheels had an inner rim of titanium; the tread was a cleverly engineered metal mesh that rolled along the soft lunar surface, allowing the gritty lunar soil into the wheel, but then flexing open as the wheel turned so the lunar dirt fell right back out. That metal tire “tread” was woven by hand out of piano wire.2
The first Moon road trip had Apollo 15 lunar module pilot Jim Irwin in the observer seat and commander Dave Scott at the wheel. The rover was operated with a single joystick control that worked exactly as we’ve come to know them: push it forward and the rover went forward; the harder you pushed, the faster it went. You angled the stick left and right to turn the rover, which had innovative dual front and rear steering to give it maximum maneuverability on the bumpy lunar surface.
The rover brought exuberance to lunar exploration. Within minutes of heading off on their first expedition, Irwin and Scott were laughing with the sheer fun of driving on the Moon. “Man, this is really a rocking-rolling ride,” Scott said to Mission Control.3
In 15 minutes of driving on that first trip, Scott and Irwin went farther than any of the previous three Apollo landing crews had been able (or been allowed) to walk in hours on the surface. And just on that first jaunt, one of three using the rover, Scott and Irwin stayed out for two hours, driving around, getting out, gathering specimens, filming geological features, then hopping back in the buggy and racing off to the next place. They not only covered terrain; the pair gave a nonstop narration of the geology they were seeing and that the rover’s camera was transmitting in real time back to Earth. The live TV coverage had a rapt audience of, among others, geologists and scientists who felt like they were looking over the shoulders of the lunar astronauts from the back seat, as it were, seeing an astonishing display of never-before-seen alien geology.
“Keep talking, keep talking,” CapCom Joe Allen said. “Beautiful description.”
Heading home from that first excursion, Scott and Irwin got going so fast down a lunar hill they accidently did a sudden 180-degree spin in the rover, going in an instant from zooming downhill to being pointed back uphill.
It sent them both into gales of laughter, which Mission Control took a moment to appreciate. Said Scott to CapCom Allen, “Boy, I’ll tell you, Joe, this is a super way to travel.”4
The rover transformed the scientific value of the last three lunar landings, missions about which there was deep skepticism after the near-disaster of Apollo 13. Apollo 14 had been successful and restored America’s faith that we could go to the Moon and come home safely—and it was the third landing. With the safety of the crews at such vividly demonstrated risk after Apollo 13, what exactly were we doing going back three more times after that?
Apollo 15, 16, and 17 each carried a rover, and the two-man crews ended up being able to explore wide swaths of terrain with the confidence that came from the experience of the previous four Moon missions. Each of the last three Moon missions had the astronauts on the Moon for three full days, and on each, the two astronauts did three long excursions using the rover.
The confidence and comfort was evident just in the basic statistics. Apollo 11’s lunar module, Eagle, was on the surface of the Moon with Armstrong and Aldrin for a total of 21 hours and 36 minutes, touchdown to liftoff. They were outside on the surface for two and a half hours. By comparison, Apollo 17’s two astronauts—the last people to visit the Moon, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt—spent 22 hours walking and driving around the Moon, in three 7-hour stints. The astronauts of the final Moon mission were outside their spaceship exploring for more hours than the first two astronauts spent on the surface total.5
And so those last three missions did a good deal more science and geology than the first three. The rover extended the range the astronauts could cover by a factor of 10 and made it easier for them to work; trekking in bulky spacesuits from place to place, the astronauts found, was surprisingly wearing, despite the low gravity, and used up limited air and water in their suits just to get them to the next task. Driving from place to place allowed them to rest and conserve their resources, so they hadn’t tired themselves out just reaching a spot worth exploring.
As with everything else about the Moon missions—and almost all of NASA’s subsequent space missions—the rover explorations were carefully mapped and scripted. But they allowed the astronauts, for the first time, to go places they otherwise couldn’t and exercise both their curiosity and their judgment.
On the second day of their motorized excursions, Scott and Irwin drove their rover up the slope of the Apennine Mountains, stopping several hundred feet up. There they almost immediately spotted a glittering white rock, positioned somewhat oddly atop a pedestal of dirt.
Irwin: “Look at the glint!”
Scott, to Mission Control: “Guess what we just found [laughter]. Guess what we just found! I think we found what we came for. . . . What a beaut!”
The rock was something they had trained to look for, a mineral called anorthosite, and they knew it was something special. The astronauts, and geologists watching on Earth, thought it might actually be a rock unchanged since the formation of the Moon’s primordial crust. As they bagged the rock, Scott said to Irwin, “Make this bag, 196, a special bag.” On Earth that day, with perhaps an excess of enthusiasm, Apollo 15 flight director Gerald D. Griffin declared, “We have witnessed the greatest day of scientific exploration that we’ve ever seen in the space program.”6
The half-pound rock turned out to be 4.15 billion years old, and it became instantly famous—nicknamed the Genesis Rock by reporters—as one of the older and more geologically revealing samples to come back from the Moon. It would have been completely out of reach without a Moon buggy.7
The rovers, like so much else, stayed behind on the Moon. Before they left, the astronauts of Apollo 15, 16, and 17 would park their rover several hundred feet from their lunar module, with the color camera aimed back at the spaceship. Operated from Mission Control, the camera would then beam back video of the lunar module’s upper stage, and its astronauts, rocketing off the Moon and back to lunar orbit, the ascent engine spraying debris everywhere as it sent the top half of the lunar module zooming up out of the picture.
The rover project, completed in a hectic 17 months, wasn’t cheap. It cost $38 million total in the early 1970s ($236 million in 2018 dollars), and each of the four flight rovers individually cost $1.5 million ($9.2 million in 2018 dollars). Three of these went to the Moon; the fourth was reserved for spare parts. The significance of the rover for the missions themselves was instantly appreciated: it was honored with its own U.S. postage stamp, issued on Earth while Apollo 15 was on the Moon.8
In that first speech on May 25, 1961, that launched America to the Moon, President Kennedy had said, “No one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.”9 By the end of the final Moon mission, Apollo 17, we had mastered a slice of space travel; we had mastered going to the Moon, exploring the Moon, and coming home from the Moon. We hauled a car to the Moon—an electric, all-wheel-drive car designed by General Motors—and the astronauts drove it around and had a great time doing it.
So what did it get us?
It’s 50 years since those first Moon landings. And yet you can’t go spend a year doing PhD research at the U.S. Moon base or the international Mars station, or even spend a few prosaic months on a work rotation doing zero-gravity medical research on an orbiting space station. You can’t even take a tourist trip into orbit for a couple loops, just to see what the Earth looks like from on high.
The promise of space has, in fact, blossomed, just as was predicted in that first decade of space missions in the 1960s. Today space exploration is indispensable to how we live on Earth every minute of every day, in terms of weather, commerce, communications, agriculture, navigation, the safety of planes and ships and nations, not to mention for directions to the nearest Waffle House.
But what we haven’t managed to do is enter what we have always imagined would be the Space Age. We rely on space; we just don’t get to go there.
The Apollo Moon landings were a spectacular achievement, a demonstration of technological excellence, of design brilliance, of American ingenuity, of organizational skill and individual courage, and of national determination. The Moon landings—with astonishing fidelity—did exactly what John Kennedy said they would do, seven years before they happened: going to the Moon tested and measured the best of us. Arthur Schlesinger, the historian who predicted that the Moon landings would still be marked 500 years from now, is unquestionably right. When everything about the 20th century has faded to insignificance, the dawn of human spaceflight will still be remembered.
The Moon landings were a triumph on the Moon and a unifying and thrilling and also humbling moment on Earth. They were quite simply an unqualified success.
And yet we think of them now with a certain wistful nostalgia, as if they’d somehow become a disappointment, as if the decades since landing at Tranquility Base had not managed to fulfill their promise. The future we live in somehow doesn’t live up to the future the Moon landings suggested. So maybe the Moon landings themselves were different than we thought—fruitless or overrated, a waste of money, a dead end. As Kennedy worried in private: nothing better than a stunt.
A lot of historians, space policy experts, and public officials would say that’s exactly what happened. Apollo was a remarkable achievement, yes, but it distorted the entire space program, and it left U.S. space exploration adrift. What next? Going to the Moon when we did it, going to the Moon the way we did it, simply didn’t have a good rationale that related to space travel, to science, to exploration. And so once we did it, we looked around and couldn’t quite figure out what to do next.
John Logsdon, one of the legendary space historians, wrote, “The impact of Apollo on the evolution of the U.S. space program has on balance been negative. Apollo turned out to be a dead-end undertaking in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet; no human has left Earth orbit since the last Apollo mission in December 1972.” Far from becoming the foundation of the next step in space travel, the Apollo flight hardware “quickly became museum exhibits to remind us, soon after the fact, of what once had been done.”10
We’ve turned Apollo into a series of historical displays. But you don’t go to a Civil War museum or a World War II museum and think, If only we made muskets like that now. If only our military could produce a plane as good as the B-29.
I had an encounter of a similar sort in person with the dean of space historians, Roger Launius. Launius was for 12 years the official historian of NASA, and went on from that job to be a senior curator at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Launius knows NASA as well as one person can; he knows the details of the race to the Moon, and also the sweep of it. He’s written or edited 20 books and more than 100 journal articles on the subject. If you go looking for a topic relating to space, you might find him.
“Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis”—Launius.
“Public Opinion Polls and Perceptions of U.S. Human Spaceflight”—Launius.
“Heroes in a Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut as Cultural Icon”—Launius.
Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership—Launius (coeditor).11
Launius was gracious enough to meet and talk about writing about space. He’s an intimidating figure, with a well-earned air of authority. Over lunch in the summer of 2016, he rocked back in his chair, looked me in the eye, and growled a question: “Was Apollo a success or a failure?”
I was 55 years old, so I knew a trick question when I saw one. I also knew I might as well answer quickly, because I was doomed to answer incorrectly. “Well,” I said, “if the goal was to do as Kennedy said—to send a man to the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade—it was a success. An unqualified success.”
“That’s true,” said Launius. “But if the real goal was to open the solar system to human exploration, to human settlement, then it was a failure.”
Quite so. Since Apollo, our planetary exploration has been spectacular and spectacularly revealing; we have ranged to the most exotic destinations in the solar system—but robotic probes have done it all. Our human spaceflight—the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station—has been complicated by politics and competing agendas, but none of it has gone beyond Earth orbit, and that’s true for the United States and for the rest of the world as well. The Russians never did send cosmonauts to the Moon, and although China has an ambitious space program, its astronauts too have only gone into Earth orbit (six crewed missions, 11 people in space total over 15 years, through 2018).
No one in the world of space thought we were going to the Moon simply to go to the Moon. We were teaching ourselves to fly anywhere in the universe we wanted to go. And so in the world of space history and space policy, Apollo became regarded as a cul de sac. A brilliantly executed failure.
The point that Launius and Logsdon make can, in some ways, be inverted with even more power: If human spaceflight is so important and so valuable, as we argued in the 1960s, well, in the past 50 years, why has no nation sent astronauts to the Moon and beyond? It can’t be that important if no one is doing it.
The historians bring to bear a sense of historical perspective. But in the case of the Moon landing, you didn’t need to wait to hear the dissenters.
Earl Warren, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, gave a commencement address on June 1, 1969, seven weeks before the first Moon landing and a month before his own retirement. Warren was one of the most important and progressive officials in the U.S. government and in the shaping of the nation as the sixties came to a close; he wrote the Supreme Court’s Brown decision that struck down segregated schools, and the decision that established Miranda rights for criminal defendants. And he was speaking to college graduates, young people embarking on a life of adventure and contribution. He was also a man who couldn’t have been less removed from the world of space travel. Warren was 78 at the time; he’d been born in 1891. He told the graduates, “We’re going to be on the Moon—perhaps by July, they tell us. But it would be better if our universities taught us how to live in our great cities.”
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest brother of John Kennedy, gave a speech on May 20, 1969, while Apollo 10 was just beginning its pioneering flight to the Moon with a lunar module. Kennedy said that with the Moon in reach by his brother’s deadline, “a substantial portion of the space budget can be diverted to the pressing problems here at home”—and that was before we’d actually landed. It was a bold moment to speak out; Kennedy was one of the honored speakers at the dedication of a new library named after the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard at Clark University, and in the audience were Wernher von Braun, NASA’s own rocket chief, and Buzz Aldrin, who would be flying to the Moon himself in 60 days. It was 1969, and the division and social unrest across America—because of Vietnam, because of civil rights, because of poverty—could easily make flying to the Moon seem like an indulgence as opposed to an achievement.12
The Moon trips—which could, with a moment of reflection, seem like the realization of a dream of all humanity since we’d first looked up at the twinkling night sky and the full Moon with puzzlement and curiosity—the Moon trips consistently inspired the need to be infused with meaning.
At the press conference of the Apollo 11 astronauts after they had spent 21 days in quarantine after returning from the Moon—three weeks of isolation to prevent any possible contamination of the Earth by Moon microbes—a reporter asked, “Many of us and many other people in many places have speculated on the meaning of this first landing on another body in space. Would each of you give us your estimate of what is the meaning of this to all of us?”13
Three years later, on the Sunday just before the launch of Apollo 17 in December 1972, the final Moon mission, the New York Times printed an essay from Amitai Etzioni, the Columbia University scholar who had published the book The Moon-Doggle in 1964, in the middle of the Moon race. Seeing the lunar rover leaping across the dunes of the Moon had not charmed him. If anything, five actual Moon landings had left Etzioni choleric. His essay opens, “The most hopeful epitaph for Project Apollo might be: This was the last gasp of a technologically addicted, public-relations-minded society, the last escapade engineered by an industrial-military coalition seeking conquests in outer space, while avoiding swelling needs on earth.”14
In that same issue the Times had asked its veteran space reporter, John Noble Wilford, the man who wrote the main page-one story of Apollo 11 and of every subsequent Moon landing, to talk to scholars, thinkers, poets, and scientists worldwide and ask them for the meaning of Apollo. The Times put Wilford’s story with those reflections at the top of the front page. The reporter asked two dozen people “for their assessment of the probable place of space exploration in the broad sweep of history and in the evolution of man and man’s perception of himself and his universe.” He talked to Margaret Mead, C. P. Snow, and the British historian Arnold Toynbee. The answers ranged from the anodyne to the memorably idiosyncratic. Almost all were, in some way, focused on the payoff or the cost.
John R. Platt, a well-known biophysicist at the University of Michigan, spoke of the “Earthrise” photo, that first color image of Earth floating in dark space, taken by Bill Anders of Apollo 8: “That great picture of Earth taken from the Moon is one of the most powerful images in the minds of men today and may be worth the cost of the whole Apollo project. It is changing our relationship to the Earth and to each other.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the influential French intellectual and anthropologist, spoke of television and boredom: “I never look at TV except when there is a Moon shot, and then I am glued to my set, even though it’s boring, always the same and lasts a long time. Still, I can’t turn away.”15
The American philosopher Eric Hoffer said, “Except for unmanned vehicles, we are not ready yet to go beyond Apollo. It is time that we returned to Earth to see what we can do about strengthening the weakest link, man.”
Daniel J. Boorstin, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, said, “The great thing about space exploration is that we don’t know what its payoff will be. This symbolizes the American civilization. The people who settled America had no idea what the payoff would be. They settled it before they explored it.”
Jacob Bronowski was a British scientist, mathematician, and historian of science, and the writer and narrator of the legendary BBC TV series The Ascent of Man. In that series, Bronowski traveled the world to trace the development of human society through its understanding of science. Of the Moon missions, Bronowski said, “I am not at all impressed with people who tell me it is useless. It is only useless if we do not know how to use the experience.”16
Bronowski was right: The Moon missions are useless only if we don’t know how to use them. If we don’t understand them and understand their impact.
That’s what we’ve utterly failed to do.
Their value wasn’t in the future of space travel. The race to the Moon helped unleash all the forces of the technological age in which we live, the culture of technology which is the hallmark of late 20th-century and early 21st-century America. We revel in that culture and take pride in it; we identify with it, we rely on it, and we also see it as an American creation that we have shared with the world, not unlike the Moon landings themselves.
What’s amazing is that we don’t connect it to the decade of the sixties or credit the race to the Moon for any of it. But the race to the Moon focused the early days of that digital innovation in the labs and factories where it was just being born, and the race to the Moon showed Americans and the world what it could do.
In the world of Apollo, we could ask computers to do anything, and they would help us do it. It was Apollo that so visibly and so dramatically transformed technology from being a tool of war to a tool of amazing accomplishment, and also a tool of everyday life. The Moon race did that for the idea of technology, and also, quite literally, for the word “technology.”
In his inaugural address in January 1961, John Kennedy called science a “dark power”: the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. must “begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity.” The Americans and the Russians “need to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors.”17
That’s exactly what the race to the Moon did: it invoked the wonders of science, with about as much drama as could be imagined.
At the dawn of the 1960s, “there was no everyday idea of ‘technology’ the way we think of it today,” according to Eric Schatzberg. He is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in the history of technology and in tracking how the word itself has revealed attitudes about science, technology, and society.
People in the 1950s and early 1960s loved household gadgets; it was the blooming of the age of TVs, lawnmowers, automatic clothes washers and dryers, dishwashers, disposals. But Americans didn’t think of those gadgets as “technology,” just a part of modern life. Technology, to the degree it was even an idea and a word in people’s consciousness, was military technology: the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the missiles created to deliver them. Technology was Dr. Strangelove.
Even as technological advances seemed to be improving life—from sleeker and more powerful cars, for instance, to the green revolution in food production—they were often shadowed by dreadful consequences. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, published in 1963, detailed the poisonous and long-lasting damage to health and to the environment from the new wave of pesticides. Ralph Nader’s book Unsafe at Any Speed, published in 1965, showed how carmakers consistently put style and cost ahead of the safety of people riding in their cars. Both books had a galvanic impact in teaching Americans to balance the benefits of technological advance with testing, regulation, and safety rules. Nader’s book led directly to seatbelt laws in 49 states and to the creation of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Carson’s book came out as she was battling breast cancer, and she died less than two years after publication. But Silent Spring sparked the modern environmental movement (and modern environmental journalism), led directly to the campaign to ban the pesticide DDT, and was in part the inspiration for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.18
What became clear in the 1960s, said Schatzberg, is that when it came to technology, “the benefit and the damage were often in the same advance.” Indeed the Space Age itself was born with a sense of unease: the eerie beeping of Sputnik as it raced across the sky over the United States and the rest of the world.
In the environment of the nuclear age, with atomic bombs being exploded out in the open and hailed as patriotic accomplishments, President Eisenhower’s decision to remove the U.S. space program from the hands of the military and create an all-civilian agency devoted to space—to satellites, space research, and space travel—turns out to have been far-sighted and to have had a powerful cultural impact.
Throughout the 1960s, culture, technology, and space travel shaped one another. The Space Age—the charmingly technologized world of The Jetsons—came to seem like a version of the world mostly free of the dark shadow that “technology” had carried since Hiroshima. “Apollo had a powerful cultural impact,” said Schatzberg. “It’s absolutely certain that it generated enthusiasm for high technology. It resonated with people.”19
NASA and spaceflight became the easy embodiment of the age: the astronaut in a gleaming white spacesuit, grinning behind the wide glass helmet; the tall white rocket, floodlit or sunlit on the pad; the ranks of engineers in white shirts and ties, sitting at computer consoles in Mission Control. Or, at least, it became one embodiment of an age in which many facets can be instantly conjured with a single image: Martin Luther King delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial; the crowd at Woodstock; Elvis or the Beatles onstage.
NASA’s openness—scientifically, but also to the press—magnified the cultural power of the dawning Digital Age. The astronauts were heroic explorers. But the engineers and scientists and technicians who sent them on their way—they were smart people, using cutting-edge technology to power a great adventure.
In 1965 Time magazine did a cover story titled “The Computer in Society” about the rapid infusion of computers across America. The story came early enough in the dawning of the Digital Age that it included a count of the number of computers in the entire United States at that moment: 22,500. (That comes to 450 computers per state, although the federal government alone was reported to have 1,767 computers.) For comparison, during the Christmas season in 2017, Apple sold 35,800 iPhones an hour. It took Apple 38 minutes to sell as many handheld computers as the U.S. had in total 52 years earlier.
The picture spread across the opening page of that Time story on computers in America was a fisheye-lens photograph of NASA’s Mission Control, with dozens of consoles and computer screens. The opening anecdote was about the network of NASA computers spread among 15 locations around the world that “guided, watched, advised and occasionally admonished the Gemini astronauts.”
Four years later, just before the first Moon landing in July 1969, Fortune did a story entitled “The Unexpected Payoff of Project Apollo,” and the opening picture for that story is as breathtaking as anything the Apollo 11 astronauts would beam back to Earth. It’s a wide shot of the Apollo launch control room at the Kennedy Space Center, and the ranks of computers and staff appear to run to the horizon. In fact there are eight tiers of computer consoles, running left to right, that recede into the distance at the far end of the room, each row with between 12 and 20 positions. Across the back of the room, in tall dark cabinets, are the actual computers driving the consoles that the dozens of staff people sit at. Television monitors and clocks hang from the ceiling. It was the digital future, come to life, in a single image.
Scientists who grumbled about Apollo—the amount of money it took, the number of highly skilled people it absorbed across the country—were missing the much bigger picture. The race to the Moon created an aura around science and technology for the first time. Yes, the single “Earthrise” picture was important, but so were all those images of Mission Control.
We spent a decade watching spaceflights on TV, which is to say, watching scientists and engineers and technicians sitting in Mission Control, using computers to fly spaceships. They weren’t in uniform; there was no military mission; there was none of Kennedy’s “dark powers of science” at work here. Just the opposite. Apollo helped us reimagine the computer. Spaceflight showed us technology at work in a completely different environment, and for a completely different purpose, than we’d seen previously. And not just any purpose: technology, science, computers were the key to the greatest adventure ever undertaken. Spaceflight was thrilling, and the thrill was in part powered by and was reliant on smart people sitting at computers. It was the dawn of the Digital Age, and it was also the dawn of the age of the nerd. “The computer,” said Time in the opening of that 1965 story, “is, in fact, the largely unsung hero of the thrust into space.”20
No question. But the space program would turn out to be the completely unsung hero of the computer.
Whatever the power and influence NASA was having on the popular perception and acceptance of technology in everyday life, deep inside the industry NASA was having an even greater effect, a singular impact, on the immediate future of computing.
NASA needed computer chips to fly to the Moon; it needed integrated circuits, and it needed them to work, to be absolutely dependable. Indeed, it needed every individual integrated circuit to be perfect. They were flying people to the Moon.
When Eldon Hall first bought integrated circuits from Texas Instruments to test for MIT, they cost $1,000 each. When he made the pitch to NASA that the leap to the Moon required integrated circuits, in November 1962, MIT was buying them for under $100 each. By the middle of 1963 MIT’s chips were $15 each—a reduction in price of 98.5 percent in just three years. That $15-per-chip price would fall another 50 percent by 1965, to $7.28. So, as NASA ramped up purchasing from 1960 to 1965, the price of computer chips fell 99.3 percent.
Then, between 1965 and the Moon landing in 1969, exactly the same thing happened again. The 1965 price of $7.28 became $1.58 in 1969, falling another 78 percent in the second half of the decade. In the space of nine years, the cost of computer chips had fallen from $1,000 per chip to $1.58 per chip—and the $1.58 chips were many times more powerful and orders of magnitude more reliable.21
That was Moore’s Law: that the computing power of integrated circuits would double every two years for at least the next 10 years, even as the cost came down an order of magnitude—kicking in before almost anyone had heard of it—or had heard of computer chips.22 But there was nothing foreordained about what happened in the 1960s. In fact the more likely path was very different. In 1960 almost no one wanted to buy integrated circuits. Who could afford to put a $1,000 chip in a product? Or a $500 chip? Or a $250 chip? And then not be certain how well that chip would work? Companies just stuck with transistors, which weren’t tiny but had two advantages: they worked, and they were cheap. (Those $1,000 chips that Hall bought for MIT seem expensive on their face, but $1,000 in 1960 is the equivalent of $8,500 in 2018. Imagine pitching the boss on buying just 64 of those, as MIT first did, just to start testing—$544,000 to test out a new possibility.)
We have a perfect case study of how wary the U.S. economy was of integrated circuits. As MIT was designing the Apollo computer, IBM was designing its new series of mainframes, the IBM 360. In 1961 IBM had two-thirds of the U.S. market in computers. The new 360 was designed to break open general-purpose computing for businesses, to let companies use computers in all the ways they could imagine, as opposed to only for dedicated functions. IBM’s revenue at the time was $2.5 billion a year, and the 360 cost $5 billion to develop. In his study of the early days of the computer chip industry, economist Richard C. Levin wrote, “By 1962 there was still considerable debate among potential military and civilian users about whether the integrated circuit could be made sufficiently reliable to gain wide acceptance. No major commitments had yet been made by private-sector customers.”23
Levin, a professor of economics at Yale who went on to be president of that university for 20 years, published his analysis in 1982, just a decade after the end of Apollo. For IBM’s key new product line, at the moment the company recognized as the blossoming of the computer era in business, IBM looked hard at integrated circuits. “After careful study,” wrote Levin, “IBM opted against the use of . . . integrated circuits in its new 360 series of computers.” The IBM 360 series was a precise contemporary of the Apollo computers: it was announced in 1964, and customers started buying it in 1965. It was a huge hit; the business scholar Jim Collins ranks the IBM 360’s impact with that of the Ford Model T and Boeing’s first passenger jet, the 707. Among the customers for the IBM 360: MIT and NASA. The computer was used to write software for the Apollo flight computer, and the IBM 360 was the core of the computing power in Mission Control during Apollo, in the Real-Time Computer Complex. Just without integrated circuits. Integrated circuits might have been the future, but not even the biggest, most powerful computer company in the world was ready to use them.24
There was only one big customer for integrated circuits in the first half of the 1960s: the U.S. government. And within the U.S. government, only two groups needed the chips badly enough to shoulder their risks: the Air Force, for its Minuteman missile, and NASA, which is to say MIT on behalf of NASA. As Levin put it, “[Those] two key procurement decisions of government agencies were responsible for moving the integrated circuit into production on a significant scale.”25
In 1962, the federal government bought 100 percent of integrated circuits produced in the world.
In 1963, the U.S. government bought 94 percent.
In 1964, 85 percent.
In 1965, 72 percent.
And even as government purchasing fell as a share, the volume soared. The federal government was buying only 72 percent of total production in 1965, but the volume in those three years had gone up by a factor of 20.26
Inside the government, the big customer was the Apollo guidance computer. In 1963 alone, 60 percent of all integrated circuits were purchased for NASA.27 And MIT didn’t just want those chips to be reliable; it insisted on it. Recall that every batch of chips was tested, and if even one chip failed, the whole lot was returned. MIT, on behalf of NASA, drove up reliability by a factor of 100 or more across the industry.
The idea that Apollo helped lay the foundation for integrated circuits has somehow been lost to computer history. Yet it’s very clear that NASA wasn’t just a pioneer with the computer that MIT designed and built; NASA drove the rapid development of the underlying technology.
When MIT decided to use integrated circuits, only Fairchild Semiconductor could produce the right chips in the quantity, and with the quality and punctuality, MIT needed. “Large scale purchases of [Fairchild’s] circuits by NASA in 1963 contributed to substantial learning economies,” Levin concluded in his study. “The following year, Fairchild announced substantial price reductions in the commercial market, which led to wide use of these circuits in the computer industry.”28
The computer chips that flew to the Moon created the market for the computer chips that did everything else.
Moore’s Law, which has become the key benchmark of the pace and impact of computing power, was born in 1965. Gordon E. Moore, a pioneer and one of the giants of the computer business, the cofounder and CEO of Intel, opens his seminal 1965 paper: “The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself. . . . Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers—or at least terminals connected to a central computer—automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment.” In the paper, the only customer for integrated circuits that Moore identifies by name is “Apollo, for manned Moon flight.”29
And what was Moore doing in 1965, as he was imagining with incredible prescience the future of computer chips and computing across American society and the rest of the world? He was the director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor (which he had cofounded with Robert Noyce), whose most significant customer was Apollo.30
By the time Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the Moon, the market for integrated circuits was 80 times larger than it had been in 1962, but companies were buying more than 60 percent of that production. If chips were good enough to fly human beings to the Moon, they were good enough for whatever you could do with computers on Earth.
Integrated circuits, and their modern offspring, are as important to the economy of the U.S. and the world today as concrete, as electricity. You can’t do anything without them except take a walk, and many people don’t even take a walk without their computer chips.
Would the computer revolution have happened without NASA? Of course. Would Jeff Bezos have created Amazon without Apollo? Probably. Would we be hypnotized by our iPhones without the race to the Moon? Almost certainly. But that doesn’t in any way diminish NASA’s contribution to each of these.
Apollo launched rockets to the Moon. It also launched America into the Digital Age. NASA didn’t invent the integrated circuit. NASA didn’t invent the culture of perfection and continuous improvement—“the learning economy”—that were the key to their acceptance and use in the rest of the business world and the economy. But NASA’s needs forced the semiconductor companies to create the perfect chip, and the continuously improved chip, on which the modern digital economy is built. And American semiconductor companies were the first to achieve that level of virtuosity. So it isn’t just that semiconductors have become indispensable; it was American companies that drove that transformation and that dominated the industry for most of the past 50 years.
At the moment when the modern computer industry was being born, the most important customer, the most influential customer, the biggest customer—almost the only customer—was NASA’s spaceship, headed to the Moon.
And so while NASA has always searched for its own impact and come up wanting; while the space historians look to the heavens and conclude that Apollo didn’t have anything like the impact everyone hoped; while the critics of spaceflight bemoan the wasted billions that could have gone to alleviating hunger or poverty or improving education (but never would have)—the most obvious and most important impact has always been there, perhaps so large, so coincident in time, that it’s always been overlooked. No, Apollo didn’t usher in the Space Age, but it did usher in the Digital Age. It helped lay the foundation of the technology that created the digital revolution, and it helped give Americans a sense of excitement and anticipation about the Digital Age, a sense of excitement that had been completely missing when the 1960s began.
That excitement is still with us. Today, when you first unwrap a new iPhone, when you first boot up a new and newly powerful laptop, that little frisson of excitement you feel is a small echo of the thrill of spaceflight itself. Hey, those guys sitting at their computer workstations in Mission Control were using computers to fly people to the Moon. Let’s see what we can make this laptop do.
Setting aside for a moment this remarkably powerful impact that Apollo had across the economy and culture of America, which has historically been overlooked, what of the criticisms of Apollo?
There are principally two. The first is that human spaceflight isn’t worth the expense compared to the other things you can do with that money.
From start to finish, Apollo cost $19.4 billion, in real dollars, in the years they were spent, if you simply add them up. In inflation-adjusted dollars, through the end of the program, and calculated so all the costs are in 1974 dollars, Apollo cost $25.4 billion ($126.4 billion in 2018 dollars).31
That Apollo was too expensive, that we could have made better use of that money, is a reasonable argument, if you oppose spaceflight already. Fly to the Moon, or feed people who are hungry? Fly to the Moon, or provide better schools? It’s not a contest.
The day before the launch of Apollo 11, NASA administrator Thomas Paine met with the protesters at Cape Kennedy who were led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. As Paine recounted the meeting, Abernathy told him that one-fifth of Americans lacked adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. “The money for the space program, [Abernathy] stated, should be spent to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the shelterless.” Paine told the protesters, “If we could solve the problems of poverty in the United States by not pushing the button to launch men to the Moon tomorrow then we would not push that button.”32
But that’s not the way spending decisions in the federal government are made (except perhaps at the margins). There’s never a vote balancing money for a new nuclear aircraft carrier against money to raise teacher salaries. It doesn’t even work that way within categories; no one in Congress in the 1960s insisted that the right thing to do was to spend the money we were spending on the space program but divert it directly to cancer research instead. No one even suggested that.
It was a common critique in the 1960s, and it still is today: that somehow, by devoting time, money, and energy to space travel, we must of necessity neglect other things. If we go to space, we can’t have good schools or accessible health care or clean water or a strong spirit of community. It’s like saying art museums cause poverty.
President Kennedy, for one, not only didn’t try to hide the cost of Apollo, he talked about it incessantly. He almost never mentioned the race to the Moon without noting how expensive it was. In private, the cost clearly worried him. But Kennedy also made the case that America could afford to go to the Moon, and he often did so insisting that we could no longer afford to be second in space—a line perfectly designed to remind Americans of those embarrassing years of Sputnik overhead and exploding American rockets on Earth.
And President Kennedy reminded us that we really could afford what we wanted to do, and what we needed to do—we could have good schools and strong defense and well-fed children and Apollo too. As he pointed out at Rice University, space was still costing “somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars.” The peak years for spending on Apollo were 1966 and 1967, when the cost each year was about $3 billion. In each of those years, American smokers spent more than $9 billion on tobacco products. Clearly we could indeed afford Moon rockets, and also our Marlboros. Going to the Moon was a decision about policy, priorities, and national goals. Space was expensive, but that was a different issue than whether the U.S. could afford it or not.33
That would become stunningly clear—really, devastatingly clear—just as the actual Apollo flights were getting under way in 1968 and 1969. Those were the most expensive years of the Vietnam War; in each of those years, the war alone cost more than $19 billion. That is, in each of those years, the U.S. spent more on the fighting in Vietnam than the total cost of going to the Moon over 11 years. Vietnam was astonishingly expensive, costing more than $14 billion a year for five years in a row. Apollo, specifically, never cost more than $3 billion in any give year.
Put aside for a moment the almost unmeasurable human cost of the Vietnam War: 58,200 American service members dead, 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers dead on both sides, another 2 million Vietnamese civilians killed, and decades of pain and adaptation for those who fought and survived. And then there was the cost of the war at home, the cost to American society.34
But just in terms of money spent:
Apollo cost $19 billion.
Vietnam cost $111 billion.
They happened alongside each other. They were both events of such significance that they shaped the future of America, although in very different ways.
Vietnam turned out to be not just a military defeat but a geopolitical defeat as well; we set the stakes of saving Vietnam from communism, and communism won. The Vietnam War, and everything that attended it, was also corrosive to Americans’ confidence in government, in the ability of the government to do what it said, and also to, quite simply, tell the truth—about American aims, American performance, and the lives of American service members.
Apollo was a success. It was a demonstration of American technological prowess, a demonstration of engineering and manufacturing excellence; it was a reminder of American economic power and also American determination. In Apollo we also set the stakes—the almost unreachable goal of landing people on the Moon and bringing them home safely. And then we did it. Many times.
And yet the way the two are often summed up:
Vietnam was a mistake.
Apollo was a waste of money.
One thing Apollo was not was a waste of money. We spent a lot of money, by any measure, but we got our money’s worth. We taught ourselves to fly in space, and that turned out to be just as hard as the people who had to do it thought it would be. The science the astronauts did, the science the astronauts enabled Earthside scientists to do, completely remade our understanding of the formation of the Moon and its composition and geology, and by extension, it changed our understanding of the early years of the Earth and the relationship between the Moon and the Earth.
Apollo also accomplished that mission which John F. Kennedy first set for it: it powered America into the leading role in space. It took most of the decade, in fact, but it turned out that democratic capitalism could not be overmatched, even in space. Kennedy also said in that speech in May 1961, “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind.” That too turned out to be true, at a level we couldn’t even anticipate, around the world.
Imagine for a moment that the first astronauts to land on the Moon had been Russian and that they had unfurled and planted the flag of the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle on a field of solid red. The Soviet flag was the international emblem for communism. But it was also a symbol of oppression, of tyranny, of simple lack of individual freedom, the inability to speak your mind, to pick your own destiny. The Soviet banner represented the supremacy of the state over the individual. That isn’t just Western chauvinism; in 1969 the people living across Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain knew that more vividly than any American. The problem wouldn’t have been Russian dominion over the Moon; it would have been the assertion of power required to get to the Moon, reflected back to the rivalry on Earth. It would have been a great achievement had the Soviets put people safely on the Moon, but it would have been chilling in a way we could only have imagined in the days of Sputnik’s beep-beep-beeping overhead: a Red Moon. First, forever.
If the Soviets had made it first, of course, it wouldn’t have changed what happened in the decades to follow; it wouldn’t have signaled some alternative future, where the Berlin Wall did not fall and the Soviet Union did not unravel, any more than the triumph of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight had.
But it was not, in fact, simply two nations racing for the Moon. The Soviets had made it “a test of the system,” as Kennedy put it. Which system had the resources and the skill and the grit to get to the Moon—communism or democracy? The landing of the Eagle on the Moon, the moments when Armstrong and Aldrin stepped off the ladder onto the gray lunar ground—those represented a soaring accomplishment of human ingenuity. The moment when they unfurled the American flag, for all the complexity of America’s role in the world, that underscored that it was also an achievement of human freedom. The American flag meant something very different from the Soviet flag. Instead of the triumph of tyranny, it was just the opposite: going to the Moon is forever the symbol of what freedom can accomplish, of how far human aspiration can take you.
As the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said of Apollo 11, “No other act of human exploration ever laid a plaque saying ‘WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.’ ”35
After the sweep of American Moon missions, the Russians did something it would have been hard to imagine Americans doing had the situations been reversed. They gave up. They had a rocket, the N1, that was designed to have the power to go to the Moon, but with its crazy complexity—its first stage was powered by 30 individual rocket engines—they never got it to work. It was launched four times and failed four times. The Soviets had already designed and fabricated a spacesuit for cosmonauts to wear on the Moon. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C., has one of the Soviet suits in an exhibit about the U.S.-U.S.S.R. rivalry. With a wryness rare from the Smithsonian, the suit is displayed with a placard that reads, “All dressed up but no way to go.”36
Apollo was both a victory and a success.
It was followed by a U.S. spaceflight letdown—really, a spaceflight hangover—that has lasted almost 50 years. That’s the complaint of the historians about Apollo. That’s what they mean when they say, as Roger Launius did, that it didn’t open the solar system for human exploration and settlement; when they say, as John Logsdon did, that on balance Apollo did more harm than good to the cause of human spaceflight. No human being has left low Earth orbit—from the U.S. or any country—since December 7, 1972, when Ron Evans, Harrison Schmitt, and Gene Cernan fired the engine of their Apollo 17 ship America to head for the Moon.
No less a figure than Wernher von Braun, in an interview with Logsdon after the Moon landings were concluded, said, “The legacy of Apollo has spoiled the people at NASA. They believe that we are entitled to this kind of a thing forever, which I gravely doubt. I believe that there may be too many people in NASA who at the moment are waiting for a miracle, just waiting for another man on a white horse to come and offer us another planet, like President Kennedy.”37
Inside those critiques is a subtler, more technical criticism: it wasn’t going to the Moon that derailed human exploration; it was the way we did it. The leap required a particular package of technology: the big Saturn V booster, the three-person command module, the very mission-specific lunar module, all produced with urgency. Those were, clearly, the right choices for getting American astronauts to the Moon, safely, in just eight years. But if you were imagining a 50-year arc of human space travel—without the need to dash to the Moon fast, without the need to beat the Russians—would you have made those choices? Apollo left us with a big investment in space hardware that didn’t seem quite right for whatever the next steps were.
That’s a reasonable point—in the abstract. But it’s a completely ahistorical criticism. It ignores reality. NASA and Apollo didn’t exist in a world where we could lay out a thoughtful, methodical, half-century-long plan of spaceships and space exploration, and then execute it. Nor has the U.S. government ever shown any talent for that kind of forward thinking. It might be true that the Saturn V or the lunar module weren’t the right specific space technologies for whatever the post-Apollo step should have been. But the skills required to build them, the insights and lessons learned about how to travel in space—those were unquestionably transferable to the next step.
In fact perhaps the real problem isn’t that Apollo was a success, but that the leadership of both NASA and the U.S. after Apollo didn’t see the world clearly and figure out the right strategy for space exploration, and human exploration, with clarity and persuasive power. NASA leaders, presidents, and Congress all made bad space policy decisions in the 1970s and 1980s. But that’s their fault, not the fault of the people who got America to the Moon in the 1960s.
Apollo was an unqualified success, and it wasn’t—judged on its performance—a waste of money, nor was it a use of money that the United States simply couldn’t afford. If we could afford the disaster of Vietnam, we could certainly afford the success of going to the Moon.
Whether it was the right expenditure of money is a different question. The early successes of the Soviet space program lasted for years, but they were built on the big rockets that the Russians had initially designed and built to help them launch their nuclear weapons. How far would the Soviets have gone if we hadn’t started chasing them?
The second big critique of the race to the Moon is that manned spaceflight is, by its very nature, a waste of money. It costs so much to fly people in space precisely because of the people: you need spaceships that are sealed, that re-create the environment human beings need, that are fail-safe, and you need to supply all the things people need: food, water, oxygen, spacesuits. And the more provisions and equipment you stack up, the more fuel you need, and the rockets and the spaceships just keep getting bigger and more complicated, more prone to potential failure, and also more expensive. And yet, once the people arrive on the Moon, the argument goes, they can’t do that much more science than a well-designed robotic lander could—at least, not enough additional science to justify all that effort. What’s more, if anything goes wrong, it’s not just a disappointment, it’s a tragedy.
That’s a much more powerful argument. In fact it’s not really arguable: it’s true. If all you care about is actual scientific research accomplished per million dollars spent, send unmanned probes. Here too, though, there’s often some muddling of what’s likely to happen. For what we spent on Apollo, we could have sent a dozen roving probes to the Moon and a dozen more to Mars. But those kinds of missions, of course, never would have gotten that kind of funding, any more than the spending on food stamps goes up when you trim a bomber program. One of NASA’s consistent demonstrations of brilliance, one of its steady sources of new knowledge for the world, has been the work of its scientists and engineers in using all kinds of uncrewed technology, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars rovers, to dramatically expand our understanding of the universe.
The serendipitous discovery that human beings in space provide—that’s always the rebuttal to uncrewed probes—that serendipity is impossible by remote control. The “Genesis Rock” that Dave Scott and Jim Irwin stumbled on during the second excursion on Apollo 15 was a purely human discovery, and also a wonderfully human discovery.
And there’s one other thing that the anti–human spaceflight crew either doesn’t know or doesn’t bring up: human spaceflight creates a halo of interest, support, and funding for all kinds of other space research, including remote space probes. In a study of the impact of the expanded U.S. space program, Rutgers University professor Jerome Schnee wrote that, heading into the space race in the late 1950s, “astronomy was a small science growing at a modest pace.” The U.S. had what he described as “hundreds” of astronomers, and their ranks grew by 4 to 5 percent a year. By the end of the 1960s, the number of U.S. scientists studying astronomy had at least tripled, to 2,500, and by the time of the Moon landings, their ranks were growing by 15 percent a year. (By 2018 the number was roughly 7,600. The number of astronomers grew at twice the pace of population growth.)38
But human space exploration and robotic space exploration serve different purposes. You can read a lot about Rome; you can see pictures of Rome; you can watch videos about Rome; you can take virtual walk-through tours of Rome. But eventually you want to go to Rome—because that’s how you really experience Rome. No robotic lander could have told us what the Moon smelled like or what the Moon’s regolith felt like, that odd combination of powdery but also gritty. No robot could have taken a picture that inspired the line Buzz Aldrin immediately came out with to describe the sweep of the Moon before him, his first two words as he set foot on the Moon: “Magnificent desolation.”39
In the report they coauthored in early May 1961, in advance of Kennedy’s decision to go to the Moon, about whether the United States should embark on a dramatically expanded space program, NASA chief James Webb and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote, “It is man, not merely machines, in space that captures the imagination of the world.”40 People in space inspired the software programmers at MIT and the parachute packers in California. People in space inspired the audience watching on TV, from New York to New Zealand. And being in space also inspired the people in Mission Control and the people who actually went—the astronauts themselves.
Many things in the world need doing. Flying to the Moon is nowhere on the list of national necessities. But if it is not precisely a necessity, it is still essential—in the way, for instance, art and music and storytelling are essential; in the way of scientists trying to solve the mysteries of the universe.
We can get up close to the tools we used to fly to the Moon: white spacesuits worn by the Moon walkers, still covered with the smudges and dust of lunar ground; lunar modules built for testing that never left Earth but that give a sense of the scale and complexity of the vehicle; Apollo capsules that came blazing back to Earth at 25,000 mph, carrying home both the astronauts and the scorch marks of that journey; and the Saturn V rocket itself, laid out horizontally on the ground, so you can take in its scale—so long, at 363 feet, that, lying on its side, it wouldn’t fit on an ordinary football field, including the end zones.
What’s sad is not the items themselves, which have a vividness that underscores how different an era that was and how risky the journey was. What’s sad is that, in part just because of how we’ve come to think about Apollo, and talk about it, we think those are artifacts from a different America, from an America with a greater spirit of adventure than we have today, that we somehow imagine they represent a better America.
At the start of the space race, the Soviets weren’t intimidated by the Americans. Up to the moment of President Kennedy’s “go to the Moon” speech, they had done everything significant in space first: the first satellite in orbit; the first live creature in orbit, the dog Laika; the first spacecraft to reach the Moon, and then photograph the never-before-seen dark side of the Moon, and then radio those photographs back to Earth; the first living creatures launched to orbit and returned safely to Earth, the dogs Strelka and Belka. And they had done all that while Eisenhower was president.
In 1961 their spaceflight achievements gave the Soviet Union—and its global reputation—a reason to swagger. Russia’s good-humored confidence was perfectly captured by a gift Khrushchev gave the new American president. Four weeks after Kennedy’s “go to the Moon” speech, three Russian diplomats visited the White House with a fluffy, white-haired puppy for the Kennedys’ daughter, Caroline. The puppy, named Pushinka, was a daughter of Strelka, one of the dogs that had spent 24 hours orbiting the Earth and returned safely to the Soviet Union. In a letter to Kennedy, Khrushchev referred to Pushinka as “a direct offspring of the well-known cosmic traveler, Strelka.” Pushinka was a gift, but also a message. Give all the speeches you want: the Americans hadn’t beaten the Russians to a single big moment in space.41
As careful as Kennedy had been to make sure NASA thought the Moon was achievable, that one speech, that one idea, to have America land people on the Moon and bring them back, immediately fired the imaginations of Americans. There are all kinds of signs of that from throughout the decade—just the fact that the man who designed the lunar rover, Ferenc Pavlics, from GM, could look around his house and find the perfect driver for his model lunar rover among his son’s toys: Astronaut GI Joe, already outfitted in a spacesuit. That’s a reminder of how quickly and thoroughly the Space Age infused the culture of the 1960s.
Perhaps the most revealing illustration is how quickly we started using going to the Moon as a shorthand way of talking about what Americans were capable of in the transformative age of the 1960s.
Not even a year after Kennedy’s speech, the agriculture commissioner of Montana was angry about federal farm policy and the impact growing too much wheat was going to have on the livelihoods of Montana farmers. Lowell Purdy invoked Kennedy’s Moon mission to criticize the president and his farm program. “Nothing is impossible in this age of miracles,” Purdy said. “If we can put a man on the Moon, we surely are capable of seeing that our temporary surplus agricultural products are placed in many hungry stomachs of the world.”42
Purdy was the first public official to be recorded using that phrase “If we can put a man on the Moon.” He said it on May 14, 1962.43 At that point the U.S. had managed to orbit a single man, John Glenn, alone in a tiny capsule, for three laps around the Earth. NASA hadn’t even figured out what a Moon rocket would look like.
But Purdy had perfectly captured his frustration with farm policy: if we can manage the logistics to fly to the Moon, surely we can figure out how to get surplus wheat, grown right here on planet Earth, into the stomachs of hungry people. The fact that we couldn’t go to the Moon didn’t spoil his metaphor.
The next use of the phrase came just three days later, at the opposite end of the country, in the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times. Columnist Ann Waldron was writing about the immaculate homes presented in home design magazines, and how silly they look to anyone with a real family and real children. “I have to laugh when I look at those glorious, glossy color pictures in the fancy home magazines,” she wrote. One of Waldron’s fantasies for combining easy decor with realistic housekeeping turned out to be carpets made of paper that you could simply wad up and throw away. “If we can send a man to the moon,” she wrote, “why can’t we have paper rugs?”44 Waldron was using the idea of the Moon in a different way than Purdy: if we can create the technology to fly to the Moon, why can’t we do something down-to-Earth, like invent easy-to-clean carpets?
A year later a well-known hero of late 1950s America was testifying before Congress. Captain William R. Anderson, skipper of the first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, and his crew had been the first to sail underneath the North Pole in August 1958, cruising 400 feet beneath Arctic ice nonstop for 1,830 miles, from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.45 Anderson had retired from the navy in May 1963 and was asked by President Kennedy to lead an effort to create a domestic version of the Peace Corps, to put volunteers into the most impoverished parts of the United States. Testifying to a House subcommittee on behalf of the Kennedy plan, Anderson said, “If we can send a man to the Moon, we can do something about the distress of people left to orbit helplessly in the vacuum of despair.” Congress didn’t fund Kennedy’s domestic Peace Corps (Johnson would revive the idea as VISTA), but that line from Anderson appeared in dozens of U.S. newspapers as part of a syndicated “notable quotes” feature.46
The idea of landing people on the Moon was so persuasive, so vivid, so easy to understand but also so daring, that it leaped far ahead of the actual effort to put people on the Moon. Going to the Moon became the all-purpose yardstick not for accomplishment but for failure on Earth. A Massachusetts state representative complained in 1965, “We can send a man to the Moon but we can’t get rid of our garbage and rubbish.” After a mysterious and dramatic drop in the population of wild salmon in Idaho’s rivers in 1965, the state’s director of fish and game remarked, “If we can put a man on the Moon, we certainly can find out where the fish went.”47 Going to the Moon was such an extraordinary leap that it created the space in which we surely ought to be able to perform every routine terrestrial task—even though we hadn’t gone to the Moon.
The phrase became a standard trope in the speeches of politicians. Senator Robert Kennedy used it to describe our inability to improve the miserable living conditions of migrant farm workers: “If we can put a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s, it seems we should be able to work out such a simple problem for farm workers after 30 years of talking about it.” Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, used it campaigning for Richard Nixon’s law-and-order presidential bid in 1968 to attack Democrats’ “dovishness” on law enforcement: “We can send a man to the Moon, but we cannot guarantee his safety in walking across the street.” Nixon’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, used the phrase in his standard stump speech: “If we can put a man on the Moon, certainly we can afford to put man on his feet on Earth.” Humphrey was particularly fond of the comparison. As vice president, he was the keynote speaker at the 1967 Westinghouse high school science awards in Washington. “If we can put a man on the Moon,” he told the winners and their families, “we can surely design a bus that doesn’t belch nauseous and poisonous fumes in our faces.”48
Sometimes people used the trip to the Moon in a simple burst of frustration. A Texas attorney spent two days trying to telephone his injured stepson, a soldier in Vietnam, at a military hospital in Saigon. “You know, it’s funny, we can send a man to the Moon,” the father told a newspaper reporter, “but we can’t get a telephone call to Saigon.” And in South Carolina, State Senator James Waddell was furious at the inability of a federal program to provide basic sanitation for poor people in his district. “We can send a man to the Moon,” he declared on the floor of the South Carolina Senate, “but we can’t build an outhouse.”49
The wide use and wildfire spread of the phrase isn’t just a curiosity or a bit of faddish 1960s slang. It illustrates three important things about America’s race to the Moon. First, it shows the sheer power of the idea, which planted itself in Americans’ psychology so quickly that “going to the Moon” became a way of thinking about the world. Second, it was, almost instantly, a fresh way of saying “Anything is possible.” And third, when people were frustrated with a lack of progress, when they were reaching for inspiration, they immediately thought, If we can put a man on the Moon . . .
The work necessary to go to the Moon was mostly invisible. But the phrase shows that Americans absorbed something critical about the journey: it was a stretch. Even for the country that won World War II, that invented the atom bomb, that had 22,500 computers, going to the Moon required us to harness every ounce not just of energy but of imagination and technological innovation.
The point of using the phrase “If we can put a man on the Moon” is precisely that you’ve chosen the hardest thing you can reach for. That’s how you make clear that the problem at hand—paper carpets, nonpolluting city buses, outhouses—should be easy by comparison.
But the most revealing thing about the phrase is how Americans used it, from the beginning, as if we had already done it. In fact the dozens of references from 1963 to the summer of 1969 make absolutely no rhetorical or rational sense because we hadn’t actually shown that we could go to the Moon. Whether it’s being used flippantly by columnists or seriously by the vice president of the United States, the phrase is literally nonsensical.What is the point of comparing something we aren’t doing to something we haven’t done yet?
But no one ever makes that point. The phrase was used more and more frequently as the sixties proceeded, and people clearly felt it had impact and persuasive power. In fact, the point of saying “If we can put a man on the Moon” is to conclude the conversation on a subject. It’s a way not just of finishing but of winning an argument and declaring victory. It must be inarguable that if we can send a man to the Moon, we can deal with our garbage, our racism, our poverty, our missing salmon. Case closed.
We knew we were going to make it. Embodied in the phrase, in the speed with which we adopted it and the way we used it, is the clear sense that Americans considered putting astronauts on the Moon to be simply the latest inspired form of manifest destiny. We had announced we were doing it, and it was as good as done. That attitude seems all the more remarkable as other things unraveled during the sixties—our politics, our cities, our race relations, our ability to figure out how to win in Vietnam.
One writer was wise to the “man on the Moon” construct in a way no one else seemed to be. Matt Weinstock wrote a daily column in the Los Angeles Times. In September 1967 he wrote a piece headlined “Found at Last—Flexible Cliché for All Occasions.”
“People wishing to show disdain for certain glaring flaws in our civilization appear to have settled on a cliché that could become the symbol of our era,” Weinstock wrote. He offered a handy list of his own comparisons, including “We can put a man on the Moon but we can’t make hippies take a bath.”50
In less time than it had taken to go to the Moon, talking about going to the Moon had gone from potent metaphor to platitude. Indeed Weinstock’s observation in 1967 that “putting a man on the Moon” had become hackneyed is all the more remarkable because he wrote it in the middle of a period when there was no visible progress on the journey to the Moon, during the two-year stand-down on manned spaceflights that followed the aftermath of the Apollo 1 fire. No Americans were actually going to space, let alone the Moon, but the phrase soared onward.
Weinstock stayed on “man on the Moon” watch. The frequency with which the expression was deployed clearly got under his skin. Twenty months later, in another column, he concluded the situation had become intolerable. The phrase was being used not to inspire but, said Weinstock, “in a nagging tone.” Writing in what was then by far the largest newspaper west of the Mississippi River, Weinstock issued a call to boycott use of the phrase, which he said had become “obnoxious.” Sadly, he added, “perhaps it’s already too late.” Weinstock’s second column on the “If we can put a man on the Moon” phenomenon was published on June 2, 1969. The lunar module wouldn’t land in the Sea of Tranquility for another seven weeks, but we’d already exhausted the idea of its doing so, at least linguistically.51
The people inside the space race, the people who knew just how hard going to the Moon was, seemed to think using their work in such comparisons was misplaced, or at least overstated. In that meeting between the anti-poverty protesters, led by Reverend Abernathy, and NASA administrator Paine the day before the launch of Apollo 11, Paine went on to tell Abernathy and the group that
the great technological advances of NASA were child’s play compared to the tremendously difficult human problems with which he and his people were concerned. I said that [Abernathy] should regard the space program, however, as an encouraging demonstration of what the American people could accomplish when they had vision, leadership and adequate resources of competent people and money to overcome obstacles. I said I hoped that he would hitch his wagons to our rocket, using the space program as a spur to the nation to tackle problems boldly in other areas.
Paine’s detailed recollection comes from a memo he wrote for his files two days later, as Apollo 11 raced for the Moon, a memo tracked down by the historian Roger Launius. At the end of the meeting that afternoon, Paine asked Abernathy and his fellow protesters to include the Apollo 11 astronauts in their prayers when they held a prayer service later in the day. Abernathy, wrote Paine, “responded with emotion that they would certainly pray for the safety and success of the astronauts, and that as Americans they were as proud of our space achievements as anybody in the country.”52
The problems that NASA and the vast army of 400,000 people overcame to get Apollo to the Moon were daunting—and are often minimized as requiring no real “technological breakthroughs,” just some smart and persistent engineering. That’s both dismissive and an odd understanding of the term “breakthrough,” given the pioneering work that got done on everything from heat shields and parachutes to the art and science of rendezvous in space.
But it is true that every problem proved solvable, and that’s in part because almost none of them involved human behavior or the social systems in which human beings live. Indeed part of the genius of NASA and Apollo in the Webb era was that Webb created his own social system to get the work done.
The problems of inadequate schools, of poverty, of hunger, of health care, aren’t susceptible to a “Moon race” fix because they are part of the whole social, cultural, and economic system in which we live. Even students attending the very same school have very different experiences, because they are different children with different teachers. Every lunar module in the same orbit, with the same equipment, with the same duration of rocket firing, heads for the Moon in exactly the same way.
Once you solve the problems of flying to the Moon, you don’t wake up the next morning and find those solutions have unraveled overnight. The problems of poverty and neglect and education don’t get solved in the same way; they need fresh energy, fresh perspective, fresh attention every day.
The really incredible thing, though, is that the complaint embodied in the phrase “If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we . . .” is wrong, especially as it applied to America in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Right alongside the race to the Moon, President Kennedy and President Johnson and Congress, and even to some degree President Nixon, applied themselves to exactly those problems. That’s what the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Great Society programs (1964–65), and the Clean Air (1963) and Clean Water (1972) acts tackled.
And they transformed American society and culture.
Black voter registration across the South soared after the passage of the Voting Rights Act; in two years, it increased from 20 percent to 50 percent of eligible adults in Alabama; from 7 percent to 60 percent in Mississippi; from 25 percent to 50 percent in Georgia. The number of black Americans who voted in the 1964 presidential election jumped to 12 million, from 5 million in 1960.
The proportion of Americans who lived in poverty fell by 40 percent from 1964 to 1973 (and the absolute number of Americans fell by 36 percent). Poverty among senior citizens was cut in half between 1967 and 1977.
Median income for Americans, in constant dollars, rose by almost 40 percent between 1960 and 1975. The GDP of the United States, in constant dollars, rose by 50 percent just between 1960 and 1970.
University enrollment doubled during the 1960s, and the number of women enrolled in universities rose 145 percent.
The number of women in the U.S. workforce grew at twice the rate of men in the workforce, and the number of women in white-collar jobs grew even faster than that.
And half a century later, the air and water everywhere across the United States are cleaner than they were in 1965, because of the laws passed then.53
Were the problems—of poverty, opportunity, health, equity—solved? No. And fifty years later, not only do many of them remain unsolved but some have gotten worse. But the big problems that Americans had on January 20, 1961, when President Kennedy took office—every one of those problems had improved when the last Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon in December 1972. In many cases, dramatically improved.
If we can land a man on the Moon, we should be able to tackle our hardest problems right here on Earth. And we did. The very same people did, in the very same decade. As we have lost track of (or never fully appreciated) the impact of the race to the Moon across the economy and culture of the U.S., we also don’t credit everything else American society accomplished during that very same time.
What could have stopped Apollo?
There were technical problems everywhere—the engines for the Saturn V, the software for the flight computers, the 100 things wrong with the first lunar module delivered to Cape Kennedy—but it’s hard to imagine the whole project coming to a halt because of a single or even a fistful of technical or management problems. When things went wrong, no one shrugged or waited for instructions. Part of the culture of Apollo, especially after the fire, involved two core principles: there are no small problems, and every problem can be solved because we aren’t going to be the ones who prevent America from going to the Moon.
The Apollo fire could have stopped Apollo, especially if it had happened at a different moment than it did, a year further along, and in space. If fire had killed three astronauts out in space, it might have seemed not just as if space were risky but as if spaceflight were beyond our current competence. At least, it might have seemed that way to Congress. But maybe the response to the fire would always have been, The only way to honor the astronauts who died is to fly to the Moon, because that is unquestionably what they would want us to do in the wake of their deaths.
John Kennedy wouldn’t have stopped Apollo, but he could have slowed it to the point that, in the presidency after his, the momentum would have dissipated and there would simply not have been enough money and energy to make it happen.
In a project like going to the Moon, momentum isn’t just your friend; it’s indispensable. It’s what keeps you hurdling problems that might otherwise stop you in your tracks.
Just as important, it’s worth remembering the things that didn’t end up crippling Apollo.
Bill Tindall rescued the computer, which so often rescued Apollo.
The changes to Apollo made after the fire, from the way control panels were wired to the fabric in the spacesuits to how much Velcro was allowed in the spacecraft, were essential and saved the program, and so the fire itself showed NASA how off-course the Moon program was, even if everything looked great on the surface.
Lyndon Johnson had much more authentic passion for the race to the Moon than John Kennedy did. Between his enthusiasm and his mastery of Congress, he wasn’t going to let Apollo falter, and the peak funding appropriations for Apollo came as he finished out the final year of Kennedy’s term and the year after that, the first year after his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. Johnson got 61 percent of the popular vote when he ran a year after Kennedy’s assassination, the highest percentage of any president in history, before or since.
Upon reflection, it’s remarkable that on the fifth day after her husband’s murder—not a week later, or a month—during a 15-minute meeting with President Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy thought to have the nation’s spaceport renamed for her husband. And it’s remarkable that Johnson not only agreed but picked up the phone and called the governor of Florida to clear the way for the change to happen. Whatever her husband’s persistent concerns about the race to the Moon, she didn’t share them. She wasn’t imagining Cape Kennedy as the site of America’s failure to win the space race. By imprinting the spaceport permanently with Kennedy’s name (at the time, reporters often referred to it as “America’s moonport”), she was quietly but insistently defining the future Moon landings as the most important, or at least most dramatic, tribute to the legacy of John Kennedy. Thousands of stories about Moon missions began with the dateline “Cape Kennedy, FL.” (Floridians never appreciated having their cape renamed for the 35th president. It had been called Cape Canaveral for 400 years, well back into the Spanish era. As soon as the Apollo Moon missions were over, 10 years after the assassination, in 1973, the legislature of Florida changed the name of the physical peninsula back to Cape Canaveral. The space facility itself still bears Kennedy’s name.)54
As Philip Abelson, the physicist and editor of the journal Science, had predicted way back in April 1963, in his snarky editorial about the Moon missions, “The first lunar landing will be a great occasion; subsequent boredom is inevitable.”55 After the novelty of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, the first two landings, and the days-long, white-knuckle rescue of the Apollo 13 astronauts, Americans stopped paying as much attention to the Moon landings. TV viewership fell off dramatically, and the big three TV networks responded in part by scaling back their coverage. Eventually, for the later Moon missions, when the astronauts were in orbit around the Moon for four days or more, when they were on the Moon for three days at a stretch, even the New York Times scaled back coverage to just a single, full inside page, or just part of a page, each day.56
Even the boredom became front-page news. The day before the January 31 launch of Apollo 14 in 1971—the first flight after the explosion and near disaster of Apollo 13—Norman Mailer held a press conference in San Francisco to promote his newly published book about Apollo, Of a Fire on the Moon, which had been serialized in Life magazine. Mailer was at the height of his influence as a journalist and cultural commentator, and he was scorching. Americans, he said, were about as interested in the next day’s Apollo launch “as in a border war in Bolivia.” NASA had drained all the drama, passion, and humanity from the Moon missions. Of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, which was the subject of his book, he said NASA had “succeeded in making the most transcendental event of the 20th century boring.” Mailer’s press conference was perfectly timed: he made front pages across the country, right alongside the pictures of the Apollo 14 astronauts getting ready for their launch.57
The idea that the Moon missions were significant or valuable only to the degree that Americans paid immediate, rapt attention to them was common as the program wrapped up at the end of 1972, and remains a critique in the decades since—about Apollo, and about Americans’ disinterest in the Space Shuttle and the Space Station as well.
The fading public interest was itself commented on, giving Apollo 17’s landing a valedictory feel. “What even a few years ago seemed like an incredible and impossible task has been done so often and so well that the average citizen now regards a voyage to the Moon as hardly more uncertain than a plane journey to another continent,” the New York Times editorialist wrote the day after Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt blasted off from the lunar surface. The editorial was headlined “Farewell to the Moon” and concluded, “Man evolved on the Earth, but he is no longer chained to it. He has walked on another planet and returned to tell the tale. The impact on the future must be enormous.”58
The New York Times had it exactly right, and Mailer had it exactly wrong: the boredom was a measure of NASA’s success. The first splitting of the atom is a milestone event in human history, but every minute of every day, nuclear power runs everything from alarm clocks and coffeepots to aircraft carriers, and the only people watching are the people in charge of the nuclear reactors. The first time a Boeing 747 took off and landed successfully, carrying 350 people, having been christened by the first lady of the United States, it was front-page news. But every day for decades there were hundreds of 747s in routine service, and their comings and goings attracted notice only if something went wrong.59
If the point of space travel is to be a spectacle, a show, then lack of public fascination is a problem. If the point of space travel is to travel in space, then lack of public interest is a sign that the operation has matured. That’s nowhere so clear as in NASA’s robotic probes, which get bursts of attention when they attempt a dramatic landing maneuver or make a particularly interesting discovery or unleash a series of breathtaking photos, but which otherwise operate under the constant tending of their scientists and engineers without the public looking over their shoulder, any more than the public is watching the daily progress of important archaeological digs or cancer research.
Part of the point of Apollo, of course, was to be a show. We were showing the Russians, and the world, that we could master space travel. But that wasn’t the only point, and Apollo didn’t evolve very effectively—or even very consciously—from the spectacular to the operational.
And that critique brings us to a deeper problem with the manned spaceflight effort after Apollo: NASA and its leaders never did a particularly good job of explaining what the point of sending people to space was after they landed on the Moon.
The really big, nonmilitary projects that have been comparable to Apollo are the building of the transcontinental railroad, the building of the Panama Canal, and the construction of the nation’s interstate system. Those were huge, challenging undertakings; they were all successful; and they all operate today without constant public attention. But they also had an economic purpose: we weren’t just building something awesome; we were laying infrastructure that we needed as a nation. All three changed the economics of life in America and around the world. Even the expedition of Lewis and Clark, a government-funded journey designed to scout the vast reaches of North America, has more in common with the interstate highway system than with Apollo. Lewis and Clark were opening that vast terrain for future settlement, recording its hazards and opportunities.
Indeed most of the legendary explorers of the sailing ship era were, ultimately, on economic missions. They weren’t terrestrial astronauts. They were trying to understand the dimensions of the world, yes, but they were also claiming territory and resources.
The race to the Moon had an enormous economic impact; as defenders were fond of pointing out, none of the $24 billion it cost to go to the Moon actually got spent in space; it was spent right here on Earth, and almost all of it in the United States. The economic impact is magnified many times when you account for the power the Moon race had in accelerating the digital revolution. It clearly had enormous political impact in reaffirming that the United States was the world’s unrivaled technological leader. But Apollo had no economic purpose at the time. We weren’t trying to open the Moon for settlement and economic exploitation. We were just checking it out. And that’s why the final Apollo missions—which were, in fact, rich with scientific inquiry—felt a little aimless to ordinary Americans. Hadn’t we already been to the Moon? What were we going back for?
That’s also why the current burst of commercial space development—the reusable rockets of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, the inflatable habitats of Robert Bigelow—is completely different from what NASA has done in space. It’s driven by economic imperatives: there’s money to be made in space, and if you can establish the value of a zero-gravity economy, then coming and going to space will become routine, regardless of how hazardous it is.
We are puzzled by Apollo not because it was a failure or a waste of money and effort; we’re puzzled because we don’t take it on its own terms. We don’t appreciate exactly how hard it was to fly to the Moon, and why we did it. And we can’t understand why Apollo alone didn’t provide the momentum to keep going. But that was never its purpose.
One of the critiques in the mid-1960s, as the cost and time of going to the Moon were really settling in, was that the pace of the leap to the Moon was the foolish and expensive part. We should go to the Moon, this argument went, but we should do it in a calm, rational, stepwise program. We shouldn’t race the Russians. With that more reasoned pace, the costs would be spread out so they were easier to manage.
But that type of program never would have happened. If we’d slowed to a “rational” pace, we never would have gone. Since the last Apollo flight, in December 1972, we’ve had four decades of stepwise plans from presidents, NASA administrators, and Congress on how to take the next steps in space. None of the grandest plans has ever amounted to anything. And the more routine, stepwise plans got us the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, both in many ways the opposite of Apollo: they didn’t deliver what was promised, while costing sums that make Apollo look like a bargain, and despite decades of operation for both, it’s never been quite clear what the actual purpose of either was.
Here’s another thing we don’t give Apollo credit for, then: it was dramatically ahead of its time. Part of why it has left so much space behind it is that it wasn’t just a leap to the Moon; it was a leap that took the technology and the people to a place we weren’t otherwise ready to go. We haven’t spent 50 years neglecting space; we’ve spent 50 years catching up.
Americans love space.
Even as the Moon trips started to feel routine, they always provided a spark of connection and pride. During Apollo 17, mission commander Gene Cernan accidentally dropped a geology hammer, which hit the right rear fender of the lunar rover, knocking it loose. The astronauts tried to use the rover without the fender, but the dust flying everywhere was too disruptive. So, with some help and instructions from Mission Control, Cernan and crewmate Harrison Schmitt constructed a replacement fender inside the lunar module, using plastic maps of the Moon and duct tape, and secured it to the rover using clips from the lunar module cabin.60
The president of the Auto Body Association of America, Reg Predham, was so impressed that immediately—before the astronauts had even left lunar orbit—he conferred official status on Cernan and Schmitt as lifetime members of the Auto Body Association. “We’re delighted to see that when something like this happens on the Moon,” Predham said from his auto body repair shop in Neptune City, New Jersey, “that they had the ingenuity to put it all back together. Those astronauts: College graduates. Pilots and geologists. They make damn good body and fender men.”61
We use the phrase “If we can put a man on the Moon” as often in the 2010s as we did in the 1980s and 1990s, although more often now with a sense of wryness. Does using the expression 50 years after the fact give it more punch or more irony?
Way back in 1986, the New York Times joined the Los Angeles Times in calling for a halt to the phrase. “We can send a man to the Moon,” the Times editorialist wrote, “but we cannot stop public speakers from saying, ‘We can send a man to the Moon, but we cannot. . . .’ So awesome was Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind that it has created the cliché standard for a whole generation.”
On January 1, 2018, the Wall Street Journal used it in what should, rightly, be its final use ever, about NASA’s sluggish efforts to return to the Moon. The headline of the story: “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?”62
We still use the phrase in 2018 for the same reason we did in 1968: going to the Moon remains one of the most amazing things ever accomplished.
Seventy percent of Americans today weren’t born, or were younger than five, when we first went to the Moon—which is to say, for 70 percent of Americans, the Moon landings are something to find on YouTube or in books. By the end of 2018, eight of the twelve men who walked on the Moon had died. Most of those who led the effort have died, as have most of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who worked to make it possible. But the appeal of the accomplishment—which 50 years later is often separated from both the politics that inspired it and what it cost—retains powerful allure.
We love space. We love tales of space: Star Trek and Star Wars, Alien and Avatar, Gravity and The Martian Apollo 13, which was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two. The original movie for the Space Age, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out eight months before Apollo 8 flew to the Moon in 1968 with its own impressive computer, albeit not one that could talk.
We are not, in fact, bored by the romance and adventure of our own space travel. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has a position of prominence on the Mall in Washington, and it has a second, even bigger set of buildings out by Dulles International Airport. (The Dulles facility is so large you could put the original Air and Space Museum inside it.) Between those two locations, the Air and Space Museum is the most-visited museum anywhere in the world, with 24,000 visitors a day, 364 days a year, more even than the Louvre with its 8 million visitors a year.63
We visit for all kinds of reasons—spaceflight hardware is, quite simply, cool and amazing. But one reason we visit is to step out of our daily lives for a few moments and connect with the spirit of adventure and daring that flying in space requires. Apollo spacesuits and Gemini capsules look accessible; you can easily imagine yourself in them. That’s where the wistfulness about Apollo comes from, as well.
What has become of the America that planted a flag on the Moon? We used to do things like that. Why don’t we anymore?
That spirit of America is just fine. It’s alive and well. In the halo after Apollo, it created Microsoft and Intel, Apple and Google. Have you noticed that all of human knowledge is accessible from a device that fits in your hand? Did not creating that world—the world we have so quickly come to take for granted—require spirit and determination, vision and daring? Of course it did. It didn’t always require physical courage, but it required intellectual courage and relentless determination and boldness of imagination.
Americans created the internet. Americans decoded the genome. American spaceships leap the solar system to unlock the mysteries of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and all kinds of quirky asteroids and comets and moons.
When you talk to the people who took America to the Moon, when you read what they said at the time and how they reflected on it decades later, those people will tell you that in working on Apollo, they did something extraordinary—that it was the greatest experience of their lives, whether they were 24 when they worked on it or 54. Those folks never diminish the accomplishment, or the commitment it required.
But they always say two other things: they didn’t do it alone, and they do not consider themselves extraordinary. The task inspired them and motivated them and brought out of them work they might not have been able to do in other circumstances.
That is the spirit of America, and it is the essence of the American dream: to imagine something that is out of reach, and then do what’s necessary to make it happen, to prove that it wasn’t out of reach after all.
John F. Kennedy was our poet of space and also our philosopher of space. Put aside for the moment the fact that in his own heart he was apparently never quite captured by space. He nonetheless gave voice to the value space travel had for us in his era and the role it can have for us in the future.
In that first speech about the Moon, Kennedy started by pointing out “the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere.” Space, he said, is a way for America “to take longer strides”; it is “a great new American enterprise.”
Kennedy worried that bureaucracy or labor issues would somehow hobble an effort that wasn’t even under way yet. Without realizing it, he imagined the culture that NASA would go on to create, a culture that owed much to Kennedy’s call itself—something those who worked on Apollo also mention. Kennedy said in that first speech, “Every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor and civil servant [must] give his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom in the exciting adventure of space.”
To go to the Moon, with the full speed of freedom. A single phrase that manages to capture all the complexity of motivation and politics involved in the race to the Moon.
But most important, Kennedy didn’t say the astronauts would be going to the Moon. He didn’t say NASA’s scientists and engineers would take us to the Moon. In that first speech he said, “In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon. We make this judgment affirmatively: It will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”64
The next year, at Rice University, Kennedy came back to the same idea: “This country was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward.” Complacency is not the American personality, courage before a challenge is.
“We choose to go to the Moon”—he said it three times in a row—“because the challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
We’re going to the Moon, all of us, because going to the Moon is a uniquely American challenge. And that too has proven true.
Americans like to be reminded of the best of their national character. And Americans want to be asked to do hard things. We want a mission, and we will do it. That’s part of the mythology we tell ourselves, of course, but it’s the reality as well. It is one of the invisible bonds, across education and wealth and opportunity. We rise to the occasion.
Those words that NASA chief Thomas Paine had for the protesters the day before Apollo 11, they were an echo of Kennedy’s own eloquence, and they contain the key lesson of the race to the Moon, the lesson that is so often misunderstood. No, the leap to the Moon is not the perfect model for solving the problems of poverty or any of the other problems of American society on Earth. But it does contain a wider truth: with inspired leadership, with resources, and, most important, with clarity of purpose, with an explanation of the need, Americans will solve the hardest problems they are asked to tackle.
But we have to be asked. We have to be rallied to the cause. Nothing has faded of the American spirit, or the spirit of Americans themselves in the past 50 years. What has shifted is the way we talk about our relationship to our country. Kennedy, sensing that after eight years of the relative quiet of the Eisenhower administration, energy and initiative and change would mark the 1960s, concluded his inaugural address with what has become a famous reminder to Americans that they are their government, they are their country. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And he did not hesitate to ask.
The big problems that shadow us in the early 21st century—crumbling and dated infrastructure, a fading sense of opportunity in the American economy, climate change—we know how to solve those problems. As the folks who flew us to the Moon came to appreciate, the hard part is not the actual solutions. The hard part is the human part: motivation, giving people a role and a goal.
When the country was attacked on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush asked Americans to keep shopping, to “get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life.”65 And remarkably, we did just that. In the month after the attacks American consumers—in a recession—spent more money at retail than they ever had before. If shopping would help fight the terrorists, recession notwithstanding, we would shop.66
If we want to tackle climate change, we can. It can’t be solved with “a moonshot,” in the sense that Apollo was solved with a series of brilliant technical, engineering, and management efforts. But it can be solved with a moonshot in the sense of rallying Americans to a purpose, to a mission, to something that takes incredible effort. With leadership and clarity of purpose. We just need to be asked.
It is a revealing affirmation of that American spirit that the sense of wonder we feel about Apollo, and any disappointment connected to it, isn’t about our failure to exploit the Moon or our geopolitical advantage in space. That wistfulness is aspirational, not nationalistic. Why haven’t we built on that achievement to create the next one?
In the speech he gave on Thursday afternoon, November 21, 1963, in San Antonio, 20 hours before he would be killed, Kennedy was dedicating a facility for researching the medical implications of spaceflight for space travelers and also for understanding how what we learn in space could be of value for tackling medical problems back on Earth. “The conquest of space must and will go ahead,” he said. “That much we know. That much we can say with confidence and conviction.” Kennedy concluded the speech this way:
Frank O’Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try, and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall—and then they had no choice but to follow them.
This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it. Whatever the difficulties, they will be overcome. Whatever the hazards, they must be guarded against. With the vital help of this Aerospace Medical Center, with the help of all those who labor in the space endeavor, with the help and support of all Americans, we will climb this wall with safety and with speed—and we shall then explore the wonders on the other side.67