The Lunar Era – Part 3: "We Came in Peace for All Mankind"
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[00:00:00] JFK: For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond. 

[00:00:08] John Mulnix: This is the Space Shot, episode 448, the Lunar era, part three, "We Came in Peace for All Mankind." I'm John Mulnix. I'm recovering from another cold, so apologies if I sound a little bit rougher today than normal. The crew of Apollo 11 left a message of peace on the moon.[00:00:30] 

[00:00:30] John Mulnix: But the story that got us there and the story that followed is far more complicated than the words etched on a plaque left on the lunar surface. In this episode, I'm talking with Dr. Roger Launius about some of the larger cultural and geopolitical context of the Apollo era space exploration more generally, and how this legacy shaped our world today.

[00:00:54] John Mulnix: If you missed parts one and two, now is a perfect time to go back and catch those episodes before continuing with [00:01:00] part three. In this episode, we're going back to the world that made Apollo possible, a time defined by tension, rivalry, and a very real fear that everything could end in a nuclear fire.

[00:01:15] John Mulnix: Here's part three, "We Came in Peace for All Mankind." 

[00:01:20] Apollo 11 Historical Audio: Ignition sequence start 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, [00:01:30] 0. All engine running. Lift off. We have a lift off 32 minutes past the hour. Lift off on Apollo 11

[00:01:44] Gene Kranz, Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 11 Flight Controllers: program. Okay. All flight controllers Go/No-Go for landing. Retro. Go. Go. Guidance control. Go eCom. 

[00:01:54] Gene Kranz, Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 11 Flight Controllers: Go Capcom. We're go for landing. Eagle Houston, you're a go for landing Over. 

[00:01:59] Gene Kranz, Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 11 Flight Controllers: [00:02:00] Standby for 30.. Forward four forward drift into the right little 30, 30 seconds and a half, 30 seconds.

[00:02:11] Gene Kranz, Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 11 Flight Controllers: Contact light. Okay. Engine stop a PA at a defense motion control. Both auto exit command override off engine. Arm off four 13. 

[00:02:27] Gene Kranz, Buzz Aldrin, and Apollo 11 Flight Controllers: We've had shut down. We copy you [00:02:30] down, Eagle. Okay, everybody. Keon, standby for Keon T. Quality based here. The eagle has limited. Roger T Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue we're breathing again. Thanks a lot. Thank you. You're looking good.

[00:02:55] Neil Armstrong: It's one small for man,[00:03:00] 

[00:03:01] Neil Armstrong: one giant leap for mankind.

[00:03:07] Neil Armstrong: Those who haven't, uh, read the plaque. Uh, we'll read the flag that's on the front. Landing gear of the lamb. There's two hemispheres, one showing each of the two hemispheres of earth. Underneath it says, airman from the planet Earth, foot upon the moon, [00:03:30] July, 1969, 18. In with all mankind and the the crew members, signatures and signature of the President of the United States.

[00:03:50] Dr. Roger Launius: Sure. I'm Roger Launius. Um. I have spent 35 years doing aerospace history in some form or another. Written several books on the subject. [00:04:00] Um, most recently, 2024, uh, Smithsonian books published a. Uh, and at a Smithsonian Atlas of Space, which I am the author of, and that's sort of a big deal. Uh, I will say it's an accomplishment.

[00:04:18] Dr. Roger Launius: The American Library Association's, uh, organization that oversees reference works have given it the Dartmouth medal, which is their prize for the best book. [00:04:30] When we think of Apollo, even if we don't know very much about it, we, most of us have probably heard of it. And that we know that, that it was a moon landing effort in the 1960s and it was, uh, driven in large measure by a Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

[00:04:48] Dr. Roger Launius: And of course, the Soviet Union doesn't even exist any longer. But it was a big deal in those days, and we cannot understand these early efforts in space without having some sense [00:05:00] of that Cold War mindset. We absolutely believed, and the Russians believed too, that we would nuke each other at any moment and it could happen, and the potential for that was very real.

[00:05:15] Dr. Roger Launius: And for the first time in human history, and this makes it so unprecedented, the first time in human history, we had the ability to wipe out every living being on this planet. And we had peer competitors on the other side who were sort of intent on trying to do [00:05:30] that. So this is what drove so much of the Apollo program.

[00:05:36] Dr. Roger Launius: Now we don't necessarily think about that in the same way anymore, but it's, it, it's, it's a critical element and there's a mythology. That we've sort of grown up, that everybody thought it was great that we went to the moon. That's definitely not true. That's a myth. Uh, we did it for this Cold War competition purpose.

[00:05:55] Dr. Roger Launius: That purpose was significant and by itself was enough to, [00:06:00] to drive this particular effort, but there was a lot more beyond it as well. I could go on about mythologies. When we look back on it, we view it as this great bright shining moment. And those of us who know a little something about the subject or maybe we lived through it, may think this even more so than those who were not alive at the time.

[00:06:21] Dr. Roger Launius: But nonetheless, it's, it's a, there's a sense that in, we had a leadership in the 1960s that said, we're gonna [00:06:30] do this. We're gonna do it by the end of the decade. And lo and behold, we did that. How often does that happen? It doesn't happen very much in, in anybody's daily life. You know, people promise things all the time and then don't deliver.

[00:06:46] Dr. Roger Launius: But this was one in which we did that. So it's a huge success story in that particular sense, but that's only a very small part of, of this. That mythology also suggests then if we [00:07:00] just set our minds to doing something, we will be able to accomplish it. And so it's a sense of American exceptionalism that's behind a lot of these ideas as well, that, uh, the United States is different from most of the rest of the world, and that exceptionalism suggests that it's better than the rest of the world.

[00:07:22] John Mulnix: In the 21st century, you've probably heard about getting support for a moonshot to beat cancer. Obviously, a very good goal and [00:07:30] noble goal, or a moonshot for some other program to get it back on track. But the actual moonshot when we traveled to our moon, didn't exactly have the full support that most people think, especially in light of how much this moonshot cost.

[00:07:48] Dr. Roger Launius: Obviously, it was a huge investment. It doesn't sound like it today because it was about $24.5 billion in Then year dollars, multiply that by the inflation factor and you've got something [00:08:00] approaching a half a trillion. That's a significant investment would be. We'd be willing to do that again today if that was the cost to return to the moon.

[00:08:10] Dr. Roger Launius: I would question that there are some things with which we will do regardless of the price, but that's not necessarily one of them. But this was about national security. And that's why we were willing to expend those kinds of dollars. But as soon as that price tag gets trotted out both [00:08:30] sides of the political spectrum on the, on the liberal side as well as the conservative side, oh, we're wasting this money.

[00:08:35] Dr. Roger Launius: Why are we doing this? And so there was criticism from both the left and the right of the decision to go to the moon and to carry this out because mostly of the cost, if you were. A conservative, you might think, well, our threat is the Soviet Union. Let's put that money into the military and let's do something in that arena.

[00:08:57] Dr. Roger Launius: Or another alternative would be, well, maybe we [00:09:00] don't need to put more money into the military. Maybe we need a tax cut for the American people. That would be another criticism of this from the political, right? The political left would be, oh my goodness, you know, we've got all these problems here on earth.

[00:09:13] Dr. Roger Launius: Why don't we take this same amount of money and expend it toward. Resolving some of those problems, you know, feeding those that are hungry, clothing, those that are unclothed, providing shelter for those that need it on and on and on. You can [00:09:30] talk about this in that context, and so both sides of the political spectrum.

[00:09:35] Dr. Roger Launius: Had their criticisms of this, but there was a a fundamental middle road, which said, this is significant. We are doing this because of this national security component in a non-threatening way with the intention of demonstrating to our Soviet competitors and to our allies that we can. Undertake these great activities, this [00:10:00] high technology, uh, uh, effort and succeed at them demonstrating our, our capability in the technological and scientific realm, which translates directly into all kinds of other factors.

[00:10:14] Dr. Roger Launius: Some of them military, some of them commercial, some of them business, some of them, all kinds of other issues. So that is what won the day. 

[00:10:23] John Mulnix: The soft power aspect of Apollo was a geostrategic win for the United States at a time [00:10:30] when two competing visions for the world were vying for dominance. Another interesting aspect of space flight is that it has taken on an almost religious aspect for some people.

[00:10:42] John Mulnix: As Dr. Launius explains, 

[00:10:46] Dr. Roger Launius: there is what I contend, a religion of space flight. And it, it's, it's one that is built around a set of concepts that are, uh, have a lot of religious overtones as we understand religion, [00:11:00] uh, including a salvation theology, if you will. And that salvation theology is not an individual salvation, uh, like you would find in most religious groups in the world.

[00:11:12] Dr. Roger Launius: It is one in which you are saving the species life on this planet by transporting it to other locations beyond this planet. And we all know that. It's just a question of of time before this planet will [00:11:30] become un uninhabitable. The best case scenario, as Carl Sagan said, was there will be several billion years in the future, a last perfect day on earth.

[00:11:40] Dr. Roger Launius: And after that time, uh, the sun will ultimately become a red giant. It will engulf this planet, and if we're not planet hopping through the rest of the galaxy, we will become dead. So this is a way to ensure against that there's obviously more [00:12:00] immediate threats that could destroy life on this planet. We could nuke ourselves out of existence.

[00:12:04] Dr. Roger Launius: We could sole foul the planet. Uh, environmentally that we can't survive here. In which case, by the way, I think we probably deserve extinction. And, and we'll have to see how that unfolds. But the reality is that is a piece of this and those who are, uh, inside the space community who are aficionados of this, uh, effort to become a multi-planetary [00:12:30] species are very much a part of this, of this larger religious dimension here.

[00:12:35] Dr. Roger Launius: And, and, and it's also wrapped up in sort of, of our Myth of America because we are a nation that was founded by people who came from somewhere else and took over this land and this territory, and tried to create a place that we believed was better. Some cases that was out and out a utopian effort, uh, we are gonna create a perfect society.

[00:12:58] Dr. Roger Launius: Or the, the Puritans of [00:13:00] New England were very much in that particular mindset. They asked their themselves the question in England, can, how can you be a righteous person in an unrighteous land? And their answer was, you can't, you, all you can do is get away and recreate the society that you believe is in.

[00:13:15] Dr. Roger Launius: Is the appropriate one. And they did so in Massachusetts Bay and other parts of New England, uh, and they were adamant that everybody's gonna follow their rules. And that's of course the problem with Utopia. It might be your utopia, [00:13:30] but it may not be anybody else's. And that is a fundamental challenge, but it's also part and parcel of this larger, uh, component of cultural shift.

[00:13:42] Dr. Roger Launius: And I would, I would use the term religion in this context. 

[00:13:48] John Mulnix: It's amazing how belief can inspire great things, but it can also distort how we remember them. And speaking of distortions now is probably as good of time as [00:14:00] any to talk about the conspiracy that we didn't land on the moon. Dr. Launius has some strong words for those moon landing deniers.

[00:14:10] Dr. Roger Launius: Well, okay, let me preface that by saying anybody who believes that we never went to the moon has deficiencies in their education or their intelligence, or both. There were hundreds of thousands of people that engaged in this activity, [00:14:30] and, uh, you just don't keep a secret like that, uh, in that particular context.

[00:14:37] Dr. Roger Launius: Uh, there, I mean, it's fascinating to think about. So, so my grandfather who, uh, who was over 75 when we landed on the moon. He's a product of the 19th century. Uh, when he was a boy, they, there weren't, weren't much in the way of [00:15:00] cars, automobiles, certainly no flight with airplanes or anything like that at that particular point in time.

[00:15:08] Dr. Roger Launius: So it, he was very suspect of these sorts of things. But I, I will say this about him and, and, and he. Made a statement that I've seen lots of people make in other settings at other times. Well, you know, those guys in Hollywood, they can fake anything and, uh, they can and they can't, quite frankly. Uh, I look at some of these special effects and I'm just [00:15:30] not particularly impressed.

[00:15:31] Dr. Roger Launius: But, uh, be that as it may, the, uh, uh, he's not a guy you should take your cue from. He was a farmer his entire life and he only ever used horses. For farming. He never had a tractor as far as he was concerned. It was a passing fad. So you can't listen to people like my grandfather about stuff like this. And he would accept this kind of idea because he was [00:16:00] unsophisticated and he didn't have much of an education.

[00:16:01] Dr. Roger Launius: He was certainly a smart enough guy, but uh, he was not well read and he did not study this and he didn't understand technology. And by the way, if you're farming with. Horses, when you've got tractors that are doing the job a whole lot better suggests that you don't know much about technology. The reality is that at the time of the moon landings, you've got some people who begin to say these sorts of things.

[00:16:25] Dr. Roger Launius: The science editor from the New York Times went over to a [00:16:30] couple of bars that he frequented in New York City, and there were some. Some guys who sort of stayed in there every day, cliff and Norm or whoever it happened to be, Sam Malone and the guys from Cheers. You know, a couple, a couple of know-it-alls who spout all kinds of stuff, most of which is incorrect.

[00:16:46] Dr. Roger Launius: And he talked to these guys about landing on the moon and they, and they would say, ah, I don't think they did this kinda stuff. And he sort of took a poll of, of people who were sort of hanging out in bars about this and found that, well, you know, about half of 'em [00:17:00] thought there might be something to this and there might be something that's, you know, not quite right about it.

[00:17:05] Dr. Roger Launius: So the jury was out, and we've seen this over and over again and the 50 plus years since we landed on the moon. People have continued to sort of make the same arguments that were debunked and have been debunked many, many, many, many times. And I can debunk them. Now, I don't see a point to it because quite frankly, if you don't wanna believe me, you're just gonna say I'm part of the conspiracy, which I've had numerous [00:17:30] people tell me that I am, which is sort of interesting.

[00:17:34] Dr. Roger Launius: So the Russians had both the desire and the capability to call a fake. A fake if it was indeed a fake. And, uh, they never said a word. In fact, they congratulated the Americans and we're really quite impressed.

[00:17:52] John Mulnix: Francis French joins us again to share his unique take on these deniers. 

[00:17:57] Francis French: What. more of an ultimate [00:18:00] compliment. Is it that something seems so audacious, so outrageous, so impossible that a large number of people don't think it is was ever possible? That's actually quite a compliment. Now you drill down a little bit further and people start making ridiculous arguments and start holding that position.

[00:18:16] Francis French: When shown evidence. That's a different story. Some of those people are just. Wanna be done, basically. But the initial idea of we can't have done that. What a, what a compliment. 

[00:18:27] John Mulnix: So right now we've got some people who, for whatever reason, [00:18:30] will choose to remember the Apollo program as a conspiracy and as we move farther away from these historic missions, history will hopefully remember these conspiracies as an aberration.

[00:18:41] John Mulnix: The incredible triumph for the United States and for humans will be that we've moved beyond Earth for the first time. Here's what Dr. Launius had to say when I asked him about what will be remembered a hundred or a few hundred years in the future. 

[00:18:58] Dr. Roger Launius: The, the excitement of [00:19:00] setting feet, putting boots on the ground and a body beyond earth.

[00:19:05] Dr. Roger Launius: Is is something that will be remembered 500 years from now. People will talk about that. They will, they will know that, you know, think back 500 years in time, unless you're a historian, you probably don't know very much about this. Um, and, and there are a lot of historians, myself included, who are certainly not masters of, of, of things, say in 1500 or even 1600, knows something about certain parts of it, but only a small amount.[00:19:30] 

[00:19:30] Dr. Roger Launius: But there are some big significant events from that era that. That can be recounted by. By almost anybody. And some the, you know, the wars of, uh, of conquest, uh, the, uh, exploration of the Americas, the movement into Africa, the movement into Asia, those sorts of things of the European expansion are the one things that a lot of people can point to and say, oh, that took place 500 years ago.

[00:19:55] Dr. Roger Launius: Actually, a little more than that, but not that much more. And I think when you [00:20:00] look back on the 20th century, a hundred years from now, you're probably going to. Remember only a few things about it. Probably the two great world wars will be something that a lot of people will know. Something about the use of an atomic bomb and the rise of, of, of nuclear power.

[00:20:20] Dr. Roger Launius: Either discredited or used will be something a lot of people will know about, and I think the moon landings will be something that people will know about. [00:20:30] Beyond that, in terms of space, they may not know very much about planetary exploration and robots sent to Mars and things of that nature, unless there's a follow on set of activities that sort of solidify that in their mind and it becomes routine for us a hundred years in the future.

[00:20:45] Dr. Roger Launius: It might, but we don't know that yet. 

[00:20:49] John Mulnix: The Apollo program was one of those rare moments in human history that may not be eroded by the passage of time. I also asked Rebecca Boyle this same question. What will [00:21:00] future generations remember? 

[00:21:02] Rebecca Boyle: Really if you think about the scope of human history in the last thousand years?

[00:21:06] Rebecca Boyle: Aviation. Yeah, I would put that up there. I would put the age of sale, the ability of, of humans to travel across the whole globe and to circumnavigate and to understand how to get there. Even that, yeah, steam is a faster way of doing that, but you know, it's still navigation itself is what enabled it. And then like the humans left this planet and walked on another one.

[00:21:29] Rebecca Boyle: You know, [00:21:30] and the moon's on a planet. I know I don't need to get emails about that, but like a planetary body, it's a celestial object. And the fact that we did that, it's nuts. Like think about how weird it, we like put these young men in a on a bomb and we're like, go away from here for a week. And come back and hopefully you make it back alive and maybe grab some rocks too while you're at it, because that would help us.

[00:21:55] Rebecca Boyle: And that has been the, the real story of Apollo actually, I think is the, the [00:22:00] history of the geology, of the moon and the earth system, what we learn about that. But yeah, it's, it's an absurd thing that we did. It's, it's nuts and I, I honestly can't imagine it happening today in the same. Way that it did in the sixties.

[00:22:15] John Mulnix: Apollo looks inevitable in hindsight, but at the time it was absurd, ambitious, almost to the point of recklessness, and that is part of what makes this period in history so special. The Apollo [00:22:30] program may have come about in the Cold War, but interestingly enough, the people that flew these missions often transcended those disagreements and conflicts when they were in space.

[00:22:41] John Mulnix: Francis French joins us again. 

[00:22:44] Francis French: One thing you see about pilots in World War memorials in reunions after Korea, Vietnam, world War ii, the Gulf, you name it, is often there have been people who have been flying against each other trying to kill each other. A couple of [00:23:00] years later, they are drinking and laughing and saying, you remember this?

[00:23:03] Francis French: Remember that I was there. You were on the other side. And for outsiders, civilians like me. Some of that seems really strange because you're thinking this was your mortal enemy. But the interesting thing when I was writing the books about the Soviet Union, Cosmo Alts, as much as the American astronauts trying to tell these human stories of people is most pilots just love to fly.

[00:23:27] Francis French: They do care. They're patriotic. [00:23:30] They love their country, but given an airplane, that's what they're there for. They're there to fly. Yuri Garin, for example, first person in space came from a very poor background and a certain point he realized flying's, what he wants to do. He, he joined a hobby club, learn to fly, and he went, how do I keep doing this?

[00:23:48] Francis French: Like most people around the world, you join your military. Does that mean you suddenly become a huge advocate of every policy your country is trying to do? Probably not. Maybe you do, but most people are like, I [00:24:00] just really wanna fly airplanes. They're gonna pay me to fly planes. Great. I'm gonna do that. So the things that these flyers have in common, no matter where they're from, are often a lot more than the things that keep them apart, which is more up to the politicians.

[00:24:15] Francis French: At the beginning of the space program, there were all kinds of conversations about the very first time American astronauts met Russian cosmos at an air show in a neutral European area. There was conversations up to the last couple of hours of, is this gonna be okay? Maybe they should just walk by and see if they're [00:24:30] there, and if they do go over and shake hands.

[00:24:32] Francis French: But this can't be a formal thing. Oh, these conversations. Uh, which the pilots didn't care. They just wanted to go over and say hello and have a drink. You saw this very much where the Lexi Leonov, the first person to walk in space, one of the original Soviet cosmos and Tom Stafford, American astronaut, who they had been flying in East Germany and West Germany ready to take off and shoot each other down if the Cold War got hot.

[00:24:55] Francis French: That was what they were there to do. They were trained to kill each other, and yet, a few years later, in [00:25:00] 1975, they're making the very first handshake in space as two different countries send two different spacecraft up in space to dock. And they remark on that, particularly as they fly over Germany and go Look down there.

[00:25:11] Francis French: That's where we were trying to kill each other. Now we're up here as best friends and they stayed lifelong friends. So these things do supersede that. 

[00:25:20] John Mulnix: After the Apollo Skylab and Apollo Sous missions, NASA entered a nearly six year period, about 2088 days to be precise [00:25:30] before NASA's first shuttle mission STS one.

[00:25:34] John Mulnix: During the shuttle program, NASA learned some hard lessons, and today the Artemis program will hopefully benefit from those lessons that have been learned over the past few decades. Here's Dr. Launius. 

[00:25:46] Dr. Roger Launius: Well, I mean, we, we, we have to, obviously, we have to relearn over and over again how hard this is to do. It is difficult to fly in space.

[00:25:56] Dr. Roger Launius: It's difficult, difficult to fly anyway, but it's difficult to fly in space, [00:26:00] especially the extreme, uh, the extremes of the environment, the difficulties of reaching it, uh, the sustainment of long-term missions. Uh, those are things that, uh, you sort of have to relearn over and over and over again. And even when you think you've got.

[00:26:16] Dr. Roger Launius: Certain things learned. I mean, for instance, uh, the space shuttle program, uh, was intended to be routine access to space, do it on a regular basis. In fact, the mission model in the 1970s, uh, [00:26:30] in the early 1970s in any way, but the point that they were just starting to build a shuttle was gonna be 50 missions a year.

[00:26:36] Dr. Roger Launius: Can you imagine? A space shuttle flight every week, basically, that's what we're talking about. Uh, well, it got cut back and cut back and cut back and cut back, as you know, and it wasn't feasible. And a question you have to ask is, what would you be doing in space with, with 50 space shuttles a year? Y you know, safety is prime.

[00:26:56] Dr. Roger Launius: Accomplishing the mission is secondary to safety is prime, but you still [00:27:00] wanna accomplish the mission. And by the time of the challenger accident in January of 1986, they had 25 missions under their belts, or they had 24, they were working on 25, and they lost a shuttle and killed a crew. And it's a horrific, horrible experience.

[00:27:15] Dr. Roger Launius: They had sort of forgotten some of the things that were primed previously and had become a little bit sort of complacent in these sorts of things. There were all of these efforts after the fact to [00:27:30] understand not just the technical cause of the problem, which they, they knew pretty quickly what what the problem was and they knew the fix for that.

[00:27:39] Dr. Roger Launius: But the larger. Issue was how do you keep these things from happening Again, not this specifically one, but anything else. You don't want people to become complacent, and so they really worked hard on cultural change at NASA to try to focus on that, and the agency went back to flight two and a half years, 30 months later, basically.

[00:27:59] Dr. Roger Launius: And they [00:28:00] successfully flew. They had glitches, they had problems. They had some, some crises, but they flew successfully without the loss of a crew, uh, again, until TS 1 0 7 in 2003 when they lost Columbia. It was exactly the same problem. The cultural mindset that was driving the changes at NASA had to be relearned after that.

[00:28:25] Dr. Roger Launius: How many times do we have to relearn these things? And I would contend that it's an [00:28:30] ongoing process, and it's especially true in the context of operations where you're doing the same thing day after day after day. How can you not get complacent? It's hard to do. And that's gonna be a challenge moving forward.

[00:28:46] Dr. Roger Launius: And that's one of the things that I hope NASA appreciates fundamentally. I mean, you know, this next, next mission to orbit with a crew, uh uh, around the moon on Artemis is probably gonna be the safest mission they'll [00:29:00] ever fly. Because everybody's on their toes. They all, nobody wants this to fail, and you certainly don't want to have yourself be implicated in that process of failure.

[00:29:10] Dr. Roger Launius: If you're doing it over and over and over again, it becomes harder and harder to do. 

[00:29:16] John Mulnix: The space program also opened up technical possibilities that laid the groundwork for the digital world we live in today. Dr. Launius shared this insight about an incredible piece of technology called the Apollo Guidance [00:29:30] Computer.

[00:29:32] Dr. Roger Launius: Can I just give one example of this that we don't hear a lot? You know, and I'm not talking about spinoffs here. NASA loves to talk about spinoffs, uh, things that found commercial pro uh, product release after NASA's sort of spent money investing it to investing in it to use it on space flight. There are things that happen like that, no question about it.

[00:29:52] Dr. Roger Launius: But some of the things are accidental, and this is one. So in 19. 61 Kennedy said, let's go to the moon. [00:30:00] NASA then begins the process of developing the technologies and, and, and creating the processes and training the astronauts and doing all the stuff that led to the moon landings. One of those things that they did was contract with.

[00:30:14] Dr. Roger Launius: Uh, the Stark Draper instrumentation lab at MIT to build an Apollo guidance computer. And it had to be a certain size and it had to be a certain shape, and it had to have a certain amount of memory, none of which is very, uh, sophisticated from our perspective. But [00:30:30] nonetheless, it was state of the art in 1961 and Draper Lab brought together 500 or so of the best minds they could find in computing.

[00:30:40] Dr. Roger Launius: And put them to work, working on this problem of building this guidance computer. And they built it. And it worked like a dream. And again, and I've seen lots of people in NASA and other places pull their cell phone out at this point and say, you have more computing power in your phone than they had. And they could follow guidance.

[00:30:57] Dr. Roger Launius: And that's true. [00:31:00] But the reason why you have that computing power is what happened next at the end of the Apollo program, there's no more use for these. People working at the Draper lab building, the Apollo guidance computer. They left that institution and they moved to universities and they moved to industry and they moved to think tanks and they went everywhere.

[00:31:22] Dr. Roger Launius: You can imagine taking with them the knowledge they had gained from building that computer. And [00:31:30] they're Rolodex. And when I say Rolodex, younger people look at me and say, what's that? I say it's, it's just your list of contacts. That's all it is. Their phone numbers, how to reach 'em, that kind of stuff. They took that with them and they seeded the micro computing industry of the 1970s setting in train, a whole series of innovations that lead to our modern computing.

[00:31:56] Dr. Roger Launius: And I don't know what, it's not that we never would've gotten there [00:32:00] without them, but we shouldn't have, we wouldn't have gotten there as quickly. And that is an enormous benefit from this process under indirect, never intended by anybody, but I would contend is really significant. And here's lots of those kinds of stories.

[00:32:20] John Mulnix: The Apollo missions were conducted in a world steeped in conflict, fear, hope, and ambition. The meaning of these missions [00:32:30] stretch far beyond the actual missions themselves. They've steeped into our culture, technology, and collective memory. We also have the physical story of Apollo. The capsules space, suits, cameras, moon rocks, all those pieces that return to earth.

[00:32:49] John Mulnix: These artifacts help tell the story of Apollo for the next generation. Next time we're going to catch up with Jim Remar and Michelle Hanlin to talk about [00:33:00] these artifacts and landing sites and how it's crucial for us to preserve this history. Both to remember the incredible accomplishments, but also to set the norms for behavior as humans return to the moon in the 21st century.

[00:33:20] John Mulnix: Thanks for listening to the Space Shot. As always, please leave a rating or review on your podcast platform of choice. It helps more people find out about the [00:33:30] work that I'm doing here. You can also support the work I'm doing by checking out the store. I've got Starlight and Gleam. There's some fun space themed pieces there that would make a great Christmas present for the space enthusiast in your life.

[00:33:43] John Mulnix: If you'd like to ask a question, you can also reach me at 7 2 0 7 7 2 7 9 8 8. Just leave a message and I might play it during an upcoming q and a episode that I'll do after this series wraps up. You can also check out my substack for more updates, [00:34:00] looks behind the scenes, and even more space history.

[00:34:03] John Mulnix: Music for this episode was licensed via Blue dot sessions. Full track information and links are in the show notes. Thanks for listening. I'm John Mulnix and I'll catch you on the flip [00:34:30] side.