Posted by
Bill Crawford on Friday, July 24, 2009 2:09:24 AM
When JFK called for us to land on the Moon "by the end of this decade" in 1961, he set into motion a national calling that we still live under. How many times have you heard somebody wonder why we can't get something done with a sentence that begins, "If we can land a man on the Moon..."?
Truth be told, it was a wonderful adventure, but it was filled with waste and was expensive as hell.
Was it worth it? God, yes. It spawned so many things that it boggles the mind to recount them. Advances in technology. Smaller computers- I mean MUCH smaller. Machinery that chaged avionics overnight.
It also changed management styles. There was a problem with the Lunar Module weeks before a launch, and there were a thicket of techs trying to yammer through it. Somebody came up to a group of senior Grumman execs in the room and asked who was in charge. The response was, "The guys up there with the tools. We're here to make sure they get whatever they need." That statement upended the top down, pyramidial management structure that America grew up with from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and many corporations learned from it, even before the Japanese tried to teach it to us as if they owned it.
It was the end of a time of furious advancement. In 1947, we were just starting to play with jet engines, nobody had gone faster than sound and our best rocket was a reverse engineered version of the German V-2. In twenty years, we were flying jets at 2300 MPH, the X-15 rocket plane at more than twice that, building the Boeing 747 and going to the Moon. That is an absolutely astounding rate of change.
When Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the Sea of Tranquility, the entire world gaped at the live television pictures. It all happened so fast that it took a few years for many to get their arms around the staggering accomplishment it was. At the time, it was just slack-jawed astonishment.