We need the ‘can do’ spirit of 1960s America to help us get out of the EU
They went to the Moon 50 years ago. Surely today we can solve the logistical issues of the Irish border
Ispent a few guilty minutes on Saturday watching the old footage of the 1969 Moon landing – and my word, I was wrung out by the end. They lose contact several times with Houston. The fuel in the Eagle is running so low that by the time they make their final descent they have less than 60 seconds’ worth left. They overshoot the landing place, and at one point they seem to be going so fast that there is a risk of a crash. In the final seconds, Neil Armstrong has to take over and fly the craft manually because they are in the wrong place and there are too many rocks about. You are left in awe of the bravery of those astronauts. But of course the whole mission was so spectacularly improbable.
We have totally forgotten the scale of the technological revolution, as Charles Fishman explains in his new book, One Giant Leap. When John F Kennedy had announced his plan to put a man on the Moon – eight years previously – the Americans were way behind the Russians in the race for space. Their astronauts had clocked up only 15 minutes in space, of which
just five were outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Russian dogs had spent more time in space than the Americans. And when JFK made his pledge, he appeared to be committing his country to something that was just impossible.
No one knew how to build a rocket that was big enough or powerful enough to get someone to the Moon. No one knew how to make a computer that was small enough and powerful enough to steer a rocket. No one had ever been through a hatch and into space. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was actually like.
Bear in mind that this was 1961, barely a couple of years after the inauguration of the world’s first passenger jet. Most Americans had never even been on a plane before – let alone contemplated going to the Moon in a spacecraft.
It is quite breathtaking to consider what Nasa accomplished in those brief years, the assumptions that they changed about the position of humanity in the cosmos, the thousands of technological breakthroughs that were made. But even when the Saturn V rockets were complete, they were in some ways frighteningly primitive. The parachutes for the splashdown were hand-sewn by seamstresses using black Singer sewing machines, and once they were made they were folded and packed by hand.
The spacecraft’s computer ran on software that was really a kind of hardware: with wires and tiny metal rings that were literally woven together to create the 0s and 1s of digital code. Again, this knitting was done by hand, with women using long needles, sitting on the factory floor. It was these hand-knitted instructions that were fed into the Apollo guidance computer which navigated the astronauts to the Moon and back; and that computer had probably less computing brain power than your dishwasher, and only 0.000002 per cent of the power of your smartphone.
And yet it was with the help of that computer, and with the gumption of those pilots, that the Americans were able to perform the quite incredible feat not just of landing on the Moon, but of getting back in one piece – coming back to Earth at 24,000mph without being frazzled by the friction of the atmosphere.
To understand the difficulty of hitting the right target, imagine a basketball (the Earth) and a cricket ball (the Moon) 14 feet apart. Then take a piece of paper, and think of trying to hit it edgeways on – because that was the comparative thickness of the atmospheric layer they needed to hit, if they were to avoid being fried alive in the re-entry vehicle. And yet they did it. They got there and back without loss of life or limb, and on the way they did and saw untold things that had never been done by previous generations, and in many cases never imagined.
Think of that achievement, and then think of the current debate about actually leaving the EU – which has been going on for so long that we are in danger of believing that we are incapable of finding our way out; like someone who has lost their car in a vast multi-storey car park, and is beginning to despair of ever leaving at all.
At its core, the problem with leaving the EU is technical and logistical. In order to come out of the EU customs union, and to maintain frictionless trade across the border in
FOLLOW Boris Johnson on Twitter @Borisjohnson; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion
Northern Ireland (and indeed at Calais and elsewhere) we will need ways of checking goods for rules of origin, and whether they conform to the right standards, and whether or not they have been smuggled – but we have to do it away from the border, because no one can accept border controls in Northern Ireland.
And I am afraid that there are technological pessimists – some of them apparently in London – who seem genuinely to think that such technical solutions are impossible, that they are a kind of logical contradiction, a mythological species that we will never see in this universe. Are they right? Of course not. There is abundant scope to find the solutions necessary – and they can and will be found, in the context of the Free Trade Agreement that we will negotiate with the EU (and this is common to both candidates in the current leadership contest) after we have left on October 31.
It is absurd that we have even allowed ourselves to be momentarily delayed by these logistical issues. If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border.
There is no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it. And there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off.
It is time this country recovered some its can-do spirit. We can come out of the EU on October 31, and yes, we certainly have the technology to do so. What we need now is the will and the drive.