Apollo 11 and the Space Race

The first account is that a democracy did this in the open, and that the openness is the point.

It announced a deadline in nineteen sixty one, in public, and had to meet it in public: televised launches, public failures, a congressional inquiry into the Apollo one fire.

The Saturn, the rocket that carried it, never lost a crew in flight.

Kennedy had made the argument for difficulty itself, at Rice University in Houston, in nineteen sixty two. The sentence runs on in the speech; this is the part his own library quotes.

The second account is Soviet, and it starts by pointing out that they were winning.

Sputnik, the first satellite, in October nineteen fifty seven, beeping over American cities every ninety six minutes. Then the first man in orbit, the first woman, the first spacewalk.

What they lost was not a race of engineers but one man. Sergei Korolev, the chief designer, died on the operating table in January nineteen sixty six; he alone had held the feuding design bureaus together.

Valentin Glushko, one of those feuding designers, refused to build engines for the N one, the giant rocket of the Soviet Moon effort, so it flew on thirty smaller ones, under analogue control.

It flew four times and failed every time, once falling back onto its own pad weeks before Apollo eleven.

Afterwards the official line held that the Soviet Union had never intended to send people to the Moon. The N one was cancelled in nineteen seventy four, and its existence denied until the Soviet collapse.

The third account was made at the launch gate itself, the day before liftoff.

On the fifteenth of July, Ralph Abernathy, a civil rights leader who had succeeded Martin Luther King, led several hundred marchers and four mule drawn wagons to the gates of Cape Kennedy, where the rocket stood.

Thomas Paine, the administrator of NASA, met him at the gate. Abernathy said his Poor People's Campaign had come not to stop the launch but to protest a country's distorted priorities, and asked its scientists to turn their genius on hunger and poverty.

In nineteen seventy the poet Gil Scott-Heron recorded a spoken word piece that set a Black family's medical debt, rat bites and rising rent against the spectacle overhead. Its title is the whole argument: Whitey on the Moon.

The objection was about sequence, not science. The United States was fighting in Vietnam, cities had burned in nineteen sixty seven and again after King was killed, and the median Black family earned about sixty percent of what white families did.

The fourth account is made in laboratories, and its claim is that the spending bought more than a flag.

The guidance computer ran on integrated circuits when the chip was a laboratory curiosity. By nineteen sixty three the space programme was buying a large share of all the chips made in the United States, and the price fell.

The missions returned three hundred and eighty two kilograms of rock and soil, and their analysis produced the theory of how the Moon formed: a body the size of Mars striking the early Earth.

And the landing itself was saved by software design. Margaret Hamilton led the software for the guidance computer at the university laboratory that built it, and coined the term software engineering to force her discipline to be taken seriously.

She was in a monitoring room there when the alarms came. Her software had been written to triage under overload: near its limit the computer cleared its queue and ran only the highest priority tasks until the landing was complete.

Decades later, Margaret Hamilton wrote down what she had thought as the decision was made to go for the landing.

The fifth account came from what is called the Global South, the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America, much of it independent for less than a decade.

In nineteen seventy, Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun in Zambia, wrote to a NASA scientist asking how he could justify spending billions on a voyage to Mars while children on Earth were starving.

Ernst Stuhlinger, the scientist, replied in print: basic research had always, indirectly, fed the hungry by advancing the tools of civilization. Both were sincere, which is what makes it the hardest version of the question.

The deeper objection was about authorship. The plaque said for all mankind, and mankind had not been consulted, had not funded the effort, and had not shared in its direction.

For much of the Global South, Apollo was neither villain nor miracle but evidence: the resources to end poverty existed, and this is what they were spent on.