Five lessons of Apollo for the new space age



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The Apollo moon landings that began in 1969 were spectacular, an unprecedented demonstration of technical and scientific prowess, not to mention political skills.

But what do we have of Apollo? Critics, at the time and at the present time, consider moon landing as a cul-de-sac space, a unique achievement that has not opened the solar system to human exploration.

But Apollo taught us to fly in space, develop technology and manage a sprawling, complex and risky project over many years.

At the dawn of a new space age, in the midst of a new race to the moon, it's helpful to understand what NASA and Apollo understood the first time. Technology, computing power and materials science have grown considerably over the last 50 years, but the laws of physics have not changed. Apollo has succeeded, and by succeeding many things. It is good to take advantage of this experience this time to accelerate the return to ambitious space exploration and to avoid making mistakes that we do not need to commit a second time.

Apollo presents five ideas for the new era of space:

Lesson 1: "Innovation on Demand" works, but is unpredictable.

To go to the moon in the 1960s, it was necessary to solve 10,000 problems, but NASA engineers did not know what it was the second 5,000 before having resolved the first 5,000. NASA and companies who built Apollo created spacecraft and suits, heat shields, and an electric car that could cross the moon's surface. They took computers two times smaller than a room and made them the size of a small briefcase, while making them better, faster and more reliable. They had to "innovate on demand".

And they did it. In solving these problems, Apollo laid the groundwork for the digital revolution by dramatically accelerating the development of the computer chips that power today's world and transforming the battery technology that was the first step towards the lineup. current devices, from cordless clippers to smartphones and electric cars. But they did not know in advance which technologies would create these initial problems.

The new space age also has problems to solve: how to create spaceships with artificial gravity? How do you manage the psychological tensions on small teams, living and working in small spaces, for many years? This is what will require travel in interplanetary space.

How do you conceive the missions in which the crews are autonomous? The current human space flight is fully executed from the ground. But the radio delay of the missions lived on Mars (between 4 and 24 minutes) and beyond Mars means that Mission Control will have to become Mission Support.

Solving these problems, as well as new problems to identify, will generate new technologies and new breakthroughs – we simply can not predict what these technologies will be and where they will lead in the coming decades.

Lesson 2: Incentives Matter

The moon race in the 1960s was a government-funded, government-led, government-funded effort. Apollo did not create a space exploration system, he won a race. When the goal was reached, when the rival was defeated, the effort was deflated.

The new space age is animated by something completely different: the economy. This means that space contractors such as Bezos, Musk and Branson do not attempt to conduct "space missions"; they try to reduce the cost of spaceflight to the point that it becomes a routine. In fact, they aim to create a space economy, a zero-gravity infrastructure.

It's very different from the previous race to the moon, because a "space economy" will be (or should) stand alone. So unlike Apollo, which was a project, its growth and innovation will be organic – the way the digital economy has flourished and reinvented itself over the last 20 years. The fact that we do not have a defined goal can make the path more vague, but it also makes it much more likely that this thrust into space will be permanent.

Lesson 3: Rivalry Matters

The first race on the moon was born from the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. The Russians dominated the first years of the space age: they launched the first satellite into orbit, the first probe on the moon, sent the first living creature into space (the Laika dog) and the first nobody in the space. Apollo was President John F. Kennedy's effort to bring America back into the space race and stop being second.

The race for the moon would not have happened without the Cold War and the Cold War supported Apollo for the entire decade needed to reach the moon. It also gave NASA and Apollo entrepreneurs a sense of urgency and focus. Everyone knew that the stature of the nation was at stake.

Rivalry is also driving the new space age – just read tweets about the duel of Bezos and Musk – but differently from Apollo. This time, it will lead to an expansion of space technology and the space economy, rather than reducing it.

We already have the usual rivalry of capitalism in parts of the emerging space economy, between companies seeking to produce the best types of technology and services. This happens with small satellite cubes; this is happening at the other end of the spectrum, with the development of all new rockets by SpaceX and Blue Origin. We do not have a single car company, we do not have a single smartphone company, we do not just have a computer company or a toothpaste, and we will not have a single space company – we should not do it no more.

The rivalry led us to the moon, but then left the journeys into space with no specific purpose. In the era of the new space age, rivalry will involve a diversity of actors and objectives, a set of for-profit space companies that will not all focus on the same goal or mission, but that will create all kinds of opportunities and innovations.

Lesson 4: NASA is good for development but bad for operations.

We need NASA, but not for everything.

NASA was brilliant as a development agency. That's what Apollo was: a group charged with inventing the journey into space from scratch. But Apollo did not set up regular passenger flights to a lunar base.

It turns out that NASA does not perform "operational" missions as powerful and imaginative as development missions, at least on the side of manned flights. The Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are "operational" activities. It is a brilliant technical success that has never really found its reason for being.

Private companies are now involved in finding and taking over the operational elements of space. That's what the SpaceX, Blue Origin and Bigelow Aerospace domains are. So we should redirect NASA to the next wave of space travel issues. In terms of manned spaceflight, the example of Apollo and the experience gained since suggest that the agency should again become an advanced research and development agency and leave operational roles to companies and organizations. universities.

Lesson 5: The public cheerleading is overrated.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin came to the moon on the evening of July 20, 1969, about 94% of American households watched television.

At the time of the last mission landing on the moon, Apollo 17, in December 1972, fewer spectators followed the steps than the episodes of the week. All in the family.
The loss of public interest in the US space program has always been considered a criticism: Americans no longer pay attention to space and therefore do not represent a profitable investment.

In reality, the truth is quite the opposite: Americans have stopped paying attention because the extraordinary feat of traveling to the moon has become a routine. It's a sign of success, no failure. Americans have not followed every step of decoding the breathless human genome, with special TV shows and magazine covers every month. But the decoding of the human genome has been a huge feat. The Americans did not follow, week after week, the work of Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they sought to archive all human knowledge with Google, but we are delighted that they did.

Projects that are worthwhile – from medical research to archaeological excavations – do not need the attention of the public to achieve their goals, nor to be worthwhile.

We need to separate the value of spaceflight from the question of how much Americans pay attention to it. In fact, the success of the new space age will be the opposite of the attention that it receives. The more space exploration and space housing is effective, the less we should notice them. This is not a sign that the public is bored, it is a sign that space travel is becoming a routine as it has been expected since The Jetsons.

Charles Fishman is the author of One Giant Leap: The impossible mission that has swept us to the moon, published this month by Simon & Schuster.


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