“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”
– John F. Kennedy at Rice University, announcing the Apollo Space Program
I’m old enough to remember the residual thrill of the Apollo Space Program but young enough not to have actually seen the missions. That echo of greatness was still detectable a decade later where science achievement was perhaps best measured by the short distance Evel Kenevel’s “rocket cycle” passed before it prematurely arced into the rocks of Snake River Canyon. In that time in our history we traded in the real daredevils for a guy in a star-spangled leisure suit.
The interregnum between the last footsteps on the moon and the first shuttle missions was conspicuously short on ambition. Unused rockets and modules were repurposed as an on-the-cheap first permanent space station — Skylab — which met its fate before the end of the decade in burning pieces strewn across a barren section of Australia.
Growing up then, it was still cool to dream of being a lunar visitor. For my friends and me, imagination transformed the monkey bars into our lunar base, the swingset our lunar lander, and the sidewalk the lunar surface. We would jump over the cracks shouting, “one small step for man!” We made a great show of it but it was after all just a sidewalk, a “giant leap” of a couple of inches.
We live in a world shaped by Apollo — including and especially the tech industry. Everything from the integrated circuits that were the forerunner to microprocessors, to higher level programming languages, to large-scale project management, to the velcro that holds network cables together (ever seen a poorly organized datacenter?) was born from the needs of Apollo.
The recent photos from the New Horizons mission rekindle those memories for me. Both the trill of reading about an incredibly daring and aggressive set of missions to send human beings 240,000 miles a mere 60 years after the Wright brothers first powered flight; and the disappointment that our dreams were so wanting to achieving something truly amazing. New Horizons is but a glimpse of what is possible when we decide to do something that is “hard.”
Build a machine to travel 1.4 million miles in just nine years to a very precise flyby of a dwarf planet and capture data on its chemistry, take pictures, and send them back on a wireless link that tops out at 38kbps? Yes. We have proven we can do that, but it certainly is not “hard” in the sense that Apollo was. It is long past the time for us to look up at the dark sky and set an audacious goal, whether that culminates in the first human footprints on Mars or a fixed lunar colony.
Setting bold, hard to achieve goals is what what moves society, industries — and companies — forward. We no longer have the Cold War as a spur to competition, but the great mysteries of the planets, satellites and stray, spinning rocks all tantalizing close should be enough. Apollo gave us an estimated $8 of technology for every $1 spent on the program; and the promise of space tourism, space mining are all very possible. It’s time to do bold things.
Otherwise, we’re just pretending, jumping cracks in the sidewalk.
