At Tyler Cowen’s recommendation, I bought One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon,by Charles Fishman. I recommend it, with reservations.
I had known very little of the moon landing. When it happened, on July 20, 1969, I didn’t have access to a television. I was working in a nickel mine at Soab Lake, 40 miles south of Thompson, Manitoba, and all we had was radio. A number of us sat around listening to it on radio and then went to bed. I still remember the question asked by my 38-year-old roommate in our 12 by 8 room, after we turned out the lights. “Do you think God will be mad at us for going to the moon?” he asked. Not wanting to wear my atheism on my sleeve, I answered, “No, I don’t think he will be.”
What I liked about One Giant Leap
It’s an excellent discussion of the development of the technology and of the various challenges. I hadn’t realized the incredible challenges that had to be met or how touch and go the whole thing was.
One of the highlights is the story of Bill Tindall, who knocked heads at MIT to get the programmers there to be focused on throwing out inessential programs and keeping only what mattered. A great line that starts the chapter “The Man Who Saved Apollo” is Tindall’s statement to the MIT engineers: “You sit at the very center of the success or failure of this extremely important program. You’re behind. Get it through your head: You are f**king this thing up.”
Another highlight is the story of how John Houbolt insisted to Robert Seamans, the second in command at NASA and way up the organizational chain from Houbolt, that the only way to make it work was to have a lunar orbit rendezvous rather than having the whole thing land on the moon and take off. Houbolt prevailed.
Another is the story of how close they came to running out of fuel as the lunar module descended to the moon. Astronaut Neil Armstrong used valuable fuel trying to find a find a good place to land on the uneven moonscape. Also, because the computer kept sending out alarms as the module was landing, one young MIT programmer, Don Eyles admitted, “If it were in my hands I would call an abort.” This was with the lunar module only feet above the moon.
What I didn’t like about One Giant Leap
Fishman’s section on John F. Kennedy’s going back and forth about whether a moon landing was a good idea and why it was a good idea is way too lengthy. Fishman tells every little quiver of thought JFK had in each direction. I would bet that most readers would be like me, finding it interesting that JFK was ambivalent, but not needing to know each little switch in his thinking.
Related to that, the book should have been at least 50 pages shorter. There’s a lot of verbosity.
The other main thing I didn’t like was Fishman’s lengthy final chapter, “How Apollo Really Did Change the World.” In it, Fishman tries to justify the approximately $20 billion, in that decade’s dollars, expenditure on Apollo. He doesn’t succeed. He does tell us how the Apollo demand for integrated circuits sped up the computer revolution and that’s probably his best case. But other things would have sped it up. Counterfactuals are hard but he doesn’t even try.
READER COMMENTS
john hare
Jul 22 2019 at 5:21pm
I’m read one economics blog and several space blogs. Sometimes write for a space blog. In general, us space nuts have a couple of opposing camps regarding Apollo. One is, “NASA has been underfunded for decades, if only we could get the same level of funding they had…..” The other is “Apollo was a mistake in the opening of space. While effective as a proxy battlefield for the cold war, it taught the wrong lessons to people about financial sustainable operations.” I’m in the second group.
Richard A.
Jul 22 2019 at 6:48pm
Nominal GDP was around one trillion dollars when the cost of the Apollo program was about 20 billion dollars. With a GDP nowadays at around 20 trillion dollars, the 20 billion would be more like 400 billion. Unmanned space exploration costs a tiny fraction of manned space exploration.
Todd K
Jul 22 2019 at 9:38pm
In today’s dollars, the Apollo program would cost about $200 billion.
Alex
Jul 23 2019 at 12:34am
According to google, it was about $150 billion in today’s money. That is a lot but still interesting that, unlike the USSR, the money had to be appropriated by an elective body so probably the majority of the population did think it was worth it.
Larry
Jul 23 2019 at 11:29am
Alex, I think there is a disconnect in your statement that “…unlike the USSR, the money had to be appropriated by an elective body so probably the majority of the population did think it was worth it.”
First, since only half of all people vote, there’s a much stronger case that the population didn’t think it was worth it.
Second, not everyone who votes has “skin in the game” — i.e., is paying for it. It’s likely that people who aren’t paying for it enjoy such “free” (for them) entertainment and likely feel no sense of financial responsibility but do indeed feel entitled to x, y, and z.
Last, I’m not so sure that the US population was better informed than folks in the USSR about the wisdom of the NASA program. After all, can a bamboozled public subject to a constant barrage of propaganda really make an informed choice? And frankly, the folks in the USSR were more self-aware regarding their status as a propagandized population. They knew that what their govt communications organs dispensed was designed to manipulate and control. The citizens of the US at the time (and many even now) were operating under an illusion that their govt served something other than itself.
Charley Hooper
Jul 23 2019 at 1:19am
My libertarian foundation shows some cracks when I think about Apollo. It’s true that the program was expensive, but it achieved something amazing. It was an outlier that people will talk about for the next thousand years. If that money had been spent by the government on normal governmental expenditures, such as alleviating poverty, we would likely have nothing to show for it. If the government is going to spend money, I’d rather it go for things that are intelligent, creative, tangible, and bold.
Larry
Jul 23 2019 at 11:49am
Charley, I can appreciate your sentiment on one hand, but there is a very dark side to it that I’d like to point out. The judgment that funds taken from their rightful owner by the govt syndicate can be used in an “intelligent, creative, tangible, and bold” fashion may indeed have a kernel of truth, but the dark side of that is the result: a sense of self-justification and entitlement by those engaged in, financially supported by, or acting as cheerleaders for the activity. Operating from that perspective, it is likely that there is a snowball effect that leads to more and worse examples of that kind of spending.
I’ll tell a story from my personal experience. Although I’m not a “purity” fanatic with respect to avoiding govt employment and money flows, I do indeed tend to avoid contact with it for the most part. But since I know that we live in the USSA and that we no longer can keep ourselves free of govt cash just as those in the USSR would not find “market based” work in the Soviet Union, I occasionally take on projects with companies that are heavily connected to gov-co. Once when I was a contractor at Boeing, one of the engineers involved in a space-related project was crowing proudly and self-righteously about how we Americans — in contrast with the Italians — were not buried in government socialism and inefficiency. He was, in effect, my client, so I had to keep my instinctive eye-roll under control. But I could not resist a minor quip, namely this: “So how is this program not an example of socialism given its government funding, direction, and purpose? He looked at me like I was crazy and had farted in an elevator. He said, “But this place isn’t full of ticket-punching Italians and welfare freeloaders. We’re engineers!” As if a Venn diagram could not place the NASA program within the sphere of socialistic make-work welfare programs and Pentagon waste. That kind of thinking is dangerous because such folks will excuse their activities — busywork on entertainment, propaganda-factories, monument building, and escalating tax-fed d**k-measuring contests with their locker-room counterparts in the Kremlin — as somehow “productive” because they can point to an easy rationalization that meets their personal preferences and assumes that such a personal preference somehow cleanses it from the stink of its true nature.
To make that clearer, do we prefer that more potentially productive people are employed by the military-industrial-congressional complex “doing stuff” in the Middle East rather than sitting like couch-potatoes and watching TV and eating cheesy-poofs while collecting a welfare check? Does the pretense that they are “defending America” (they’re not; they’re creating enemies and blowback that gov-co cannot prevent) make them more desirable? And the contact with such programs destroys both the people and the private-sector companies. Boeing’s cost-plus contracts has so warped that organization that it can no longer build a plane that people will use to fly. Boeing is engaged in “productive” work, helping defend America, right? But there’s no defense, only offense. And the “defense” is make more difficult because of the offense. And we’re just scratching the surface here. How deep does the rot go?
Mike Davis
Jul 23 2019 at 1:34pm
Humans will never set foot on the moon, Mars or any other place in space. These places are completely unable to support human life. Anyone foolish enough to try would die after suffering a few seconds of horrible pain.
The only question is how will we control the machines we deploy to explore these places. The Apollo mission decided to build a very complex machine called a spacesuit that would be operated by a human inside the machine. This may or may not have been a good decision—humans are very adaptable to the changing circumstances that might come up an exploratory mission but humans are also expensive to transport long distances in a hostile environment. In any case, that decision was largely dictated by politicians for reasons that had little to do with science or exploration.
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