Moon landing felt like a miracle — but it came at an astronomical price
As the three Apollo 11 astronauts approached the moon 50 years ago this week, Pittsburgh, like the rest of the country, watched with awe — along with some silliness and some doubts.
The township of Moon hosted an all- day celebration featuring a reenactment in which an “astronaut” parachuted from a helicopter and landed in the “Sea of Tranquility” — the town park. A baby born in Harrison one minute after the July 20 landing was given the middle name Diana — the Roman goddess of the moon.
And the Post- Gazette spoke to two locals named Neil Armstrong. “I’m glad it was him and not me,” said Neil J. Armstrong, of New Kensington.
Amid the celebration, though, there were dissenters. Splashed across the pages of the city’s papers were the voices of Pittsburghers who wondered whether the billions of dollars devoted to the Apollo program would have been better spent on anti- poverty programs or on the Vietnam War effort.
A Post- Gazette editorial from July 18, 1969, pointed to the “uglier side of the moon expedition,” noting that in the shadow of the Apollo launch site in Florida, “some 7,000 earthlings of the same nationality as the astronauts struggle to avoid death by starvation.”
The critics were correct in saying that the effort to put humans on the moon was a hugely expensive and resource- sucking endeavor. The Apollo program, launched by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, employed more than 400,000 people and cost more than $ 24 billion ( more than $ 150 billion in today’s dollars) — the costliest peacetime mobilization in history.
In the half- century since those missions, a sort of legend has taken hold that emphasizes the primitive technology that those early Apollo astronauts had to work with. The best example may be the Apollo guidance computer, which charted the spacecraft’s course, using only
about 64 kilobytes of memory — less than in most modern toasters and a tiny fraction of the memory in the smartphones we fit in our pockets
But the focus on the technology’s simplicity distracts from how remarkable it really was, says Jay Apt, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering and a former astronaut who flew four NASA missions between 1985 and 1997. Mr. Apt referred to a wellknown saying that Apollo 11 was “a piece of 21st century technology that was picked up by Jack Kennedy and moved into the 20th century.”
“The technology that was used in Apollo was truly stunning in many ways,” he said.
It’s hard to overstate how far the program went in just eight years. In a new book on the Apollo program, excerpted in Smithsonian Magazine, historian Charles Fishman wrote that when Kennedy set his 1961 goal, the U.S. lacked nearly all of the equipment needed for a moon mission —it had no rockets, launchpads, spacesuits or computers that were up to the task. Some doctors even feared that astronauts would lose the ability to think in low- gravity conditions.
Then there was the matter of actually landing on the moon. Early plans called for flying straight there and landing on the moon’s surface — it wasn’t until years into the planning that NASA realized this would have required an impractically huge rocket and enormous amounts of fuel.
Instead, they went with a lunar orbit rendezvous, in which the smaller “Eagle” lander detached from the main spacecraft, made its famous visit, then flew back up to rejoin the main craft circling the moon. This delicate maneuver set the example for future inspace dockings — including Mr. Apt’s fourth spaceflight, in which the space shuttle rendezvoused and docked with the Russian space station Mir in 1996.
Mr. Apt also credited the Apollo planners for building multiple guidance modes into the lander’s computer, allowing the pilot to gradually take control of more aspects of the navigation as it neared the moon.
“When the commander would want to take over just before landing to avoid some boulders, for example, he could have full control,” Mr. Apt said.
When Cmdr. Neil Armstrong encountered unexpectedly rocky terrain in the spot where he’ d planned to land, he used manual control to keep flying for a few more minutes, finally choosing a safer landing spot after burning much of the lander’s limited fuel. The Eagle landed, and the rest was history.
A half- century later, space exploration no longer is the national focus that it was in the Apollo era. At the program’s peak in the mid- 1960s, the U. S. devoted more than 4% of its annual budget to NASA — today, it is less than half of 1%.
That shift in priorities has created opportunities for privately held space companies such as Astrobotic Technology, based in Downtown Pittsburgh. The company, founded in 2008, is partnering with NASA in an effort to land its own rover on the moon by 2021.
But Apollo still looms large. Almost every component of a modern spacecraft owes its existence to those missions, said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton, from computers to sensors to spacesuits. While the Apollo workers had to develop these components, today’s companies can typically purchase them off the shelf.
“There’s a $ 360 billion space industry worldwide that has built an industrial base of components that makes it very easy for folks to assemble spacecraft relative to the Apollo era,” Mr. Thornton said. “What Apollo built is continuing today, because that was the foundation for the entire space industry.”
Search “Apollo guidance computer” on eBay, and you’ll find functional, 3Dprinted replicas of the original device, on sale for a few thousand dollars. And the source code that powered the computer is freely available online, full of jokes and 1960s pop culture references left by the original programmers.
Given this continued legacy and public- private partnerships, Mr. Thornton doesn’t see the government’s declining spending on space as cause for concern. ( NASA’s funding actually ticked up in the most recent federal budget, approved in February.)
Mr. Apt said he’s excited for what’s to come. Aside from a mission to Mars, he cited a planned mission to explore Titan, a moon of Saturn, as well as the Trump administration’s stated goal to land the first woman on the moon by 2024.
“Any of these things fire up my imagination,” Mr. Apt said. “Taking people into space, wherever we go, is just tremendous.”
There’s something timeless about that sense of wonder, which, despite the concerns about Apollo’s costs, seemed to be the prevailing emotion around Pittsburgh 50 years ago this week.
In the July 16, 1969, Pittsburgh Press, photographer Gilbert Love wrote a piece reflecting on the upcoming moon landing styled as a letter to his ancestors.
He described the vehicles, like carriages with engines, that propel us for hundreds of miles and the little boxes that transmit sounds from the other side of the world. “Fantastic developments have come to us so rapidly that we have almost ceased to marvel at them ,” he wrote.
“We have difficulties and perils these days, but nevertheless we’re living in a golden age. Nowhere is it more evident than in our ability to see and hear the world in which we live and, increasingly, the universe.”