John Kennedy’s famous speech charting the course for the Apollo project came when I was a senior in high school. A year later at the tender age of 19, I realized my dream of joining this audacious technical crusade as an Auburn University co-op work/study student, working six months/year at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. I worked there until I graduated, married and in early 1966, moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA. Working on the Apollo program while Saturn V was moving from the drawing board to its first flights, in three short years, was a truly life-changing experience; it generated a tsunami of enthusiasm on which I have surfed throughout my career. I was 26 and nearing completion of my dissertation in July of 1969. The landing of the Eagle on Tranquility Base was not just history to me, it was an intensely emotional event – I literally cried. My tears came from a combination of excitement, pride in the overall accomplishment of the Apollo team, pride in my small contributions to the effort, and relief that the astronauts were not only alive but also having a great time. Humans were actually walking on the Moon, wow! I also felt we had opened the door to a new era of human space exploration. Regrettably my optimism on this front has not been realized over the past forty years. We voluntarily gave up the quest of human space exploration. We were in the midst of a national depression over Viet Nam, were coming down from the afterglow of having beaten the Soviets in the Moon race, and we reaped the rewards of the political impetus to “do something different” every four years that has always been built into our USA presidential politics. Rational multi-decade planning is not something the USA has shown a particular appetite for, the Apollo program budget had been living on borrowed time since the mid 60s.
Man on the Moon
Reflecting on this project, it stands with the Manhattan Project as the two most impressive historical examples where the our country rolled back the frontiers of basic science and engineering on many parallel fronts at an amazing pace, while simultaneously pursuing an incredibly aggressive large scale design and implementation goal. These days, we have somehow lost sight of the truth that basic and applied research can be effectively and aggressively coupled. Both of these projects took place during a time of national emergency with looming external threats. It is relevant to observe that we face equally monumental threats these days, but they are not in a politically convenient (i.e., an external nation state military threat) form that has historically served to best mobilize our national body politic. These mega projects, however, show what dramatic progress we can make when the right combination of political and technical leadership come together. It is also relevant that in today’s dollars (about 150 billion dollars), the total cost of the Apollo program is a small fraction of the bailout money (pennies on the dollar, actually) spent over the past six months. The challenge for modern society in general and the community of scientists and engineers in particular is to draw inspiration from the Apollo program as we tackle, for example, the energy challenges before us. It is not really about money (we are truly wasting much more federal money than the entire Apollo program cost, in any given year). It is about marshalling our political and technical wisdom, committing to pursue aggressively a worthy and ambitious goal, and finding the staying power to pursue the quest over more than one presidential term. Can we do it? Yes We Can! But will we?
John L. Junkins, PhD, PE, NAE
Regents Professor, Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering
Holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker ‘39 Chair in Engineering
Director of Center for Mechanics and Control
