A Meaning for Apollo

Project Apollo in general, and the flight of Apollo 11 in particular, should be viewed as a watershed in the nation’s history. It was an endeavor that demonstrated both the technological and economic virtuosity of the United States and established technologically preeminence over rival nations—the primary goal of the program when first envisioned by the Kennedy administration in 1961. It had been an enormous undertaking, costing $25.4 billion (about $95 billion in 1990 dollars), with only the building of the Panama Canal rivaling the Apollo program’s size as the largest non-military technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States and only the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb in World War II being comparable in a wartime setting.

There are several important legacies (or conclusions) about Project Apollo that need to be remembered. First, and probably most important, the Apollo program was successful in accomplishing the political goals for which it had been created. Kennedy had been dealing with a Cold War crisis in 1961 brought on by several separate factors—the Soviet orbiting of Yuri Gagarin and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion only two of them—that Apollo was designed to combat. At the time of the Apollo 11 landing Mission Control in Houston flashed the words of President Kennedy announcing the Apollo commitment on its big screen. Those phrases were followed with these: “TASK ACCOMPLISHED, July 1969.” No greater understatement could probably have been made. Any assessment of Apollo that does not recognize the accomplishment of landing an American on the Moon and safely returning before the end of the 1960s is incomplete and innaccurate, for that was the primary goal of the undertaking.⁸⁹

Second, Project Apollo was a triumph of management in meeting enormously difficult systems engineering, technological, and organizational integration requirements. James E. Webb, the NASA Administrator at the height of the program between 1961 and 1968, always contended that Apollo was much more a management exercise than anything else, and that the technological challenge, while sophisticated and impressive, was largely within grasp at the time of the 1961 decision.⁹⁰ More difficult was ensuring that those technological skills were properly managed and used.

Webb’s contention was confirmed in spades by the success of Apollo. NASA leaders had to acquire and organize unprecedented resources to accomplish the task at hand. From both a political and technological perspective, management was critical. For seven years after Kennedy’s Apollo decision, through October 1968, James Webb maneuvered for NASA in Washington to obtain sufficient resources to meet Apollo requirements. More to the point, NASA personnel employed the “program management” concept that centralized authority and emphasized systems engineering. The systems management of the program was critical to Apollo’s success.⁹¹ Understanding the management of complex structures for the successful completion of a multifarious task was a critical outgrowth of the Apollo effort.

Third, Project Apollo forced the people of the world to view the planet Earth in a new way. Apollo 8 was critical to this fundamental change, as it treated the world to the first pictures of the Earth from afar. Writer Archibald MacLeish summed up the feelings of many people when he wrote at the time of Apollo, that “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”⁹² The modern environmental movement was galvanized in part by this new perception of the planet and the need to protect it and the life that it supports.⁹³

Finally, the Apollo program, while an enormous achievement, left a divided legacy for NASA and the aerospace community. The perceived “golden age” of Apollo created for the agency an expectation that the direction of any major space goal from the president would always bring NASA a broad consensus of support and provide it with the resources and license to dispense them as it saw fit. Something most NASA officials did not understand at the time of the Moon landing in 1969, however, was that Apollo had not been conducted under normal political circumstances and that the exceptional circumstances surrounding Apollo would not be repeated.⁹⁴

The Apollo decision was, therefore, an anomaly in the national decision-making process. The dilemma of the “golden age” of Apollo has been difficult to overcome, but moving beyond the Apollo program to embrace future opportunities has been an important goal of the agency’s leadership in the recent past. Exploration of the Solar System and the universe remains as enticing a goal and as important an objective for humanity as it ever has been. Project Apollo was an important early step in that ongoing process of exploration.