The Apollo 11 moon landing 40 years ago yesterday was a huge waste of money, but so what?
Landing three men on the moon on 20 July 1969 is a triumph of endeavour that arguably hasn’t been topped since. The Apollo programme employed 390,000 people (around the same amount as employed by IBM worldwide at the moment) and the project cost $25bn at the time — around £140bn in today’s dollars — roughly the same amount the US is expected to spend on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars this year.
It pales into insignificance compared to what the US has pledged for the 2008 and 2009 TARP payments ($700bn) but looked at another way, it would pay for the construction and running for the next ten years of the new University College London Hospital in Euston about 200 times over.
So, given the enormous amount of money spent, what did the moon landing do for us?
For starters, there’s the sheer achievement of transporting three men 211,000 miles over eight and a bit days, through an environment that is lethal to human life in a number of ways. That can’t be discounted.
Second, there is a range of spin-off technologies, many of which are commonly available today, including:
- Freeze-dried and cook/chill foodstuffs
- Kidney dialysis
- Cordless tools
- Fabrics which help control body temperature
- Cheap, lightweight building materials
None of this is much of a revelation, but probably less celebrated is the Apollo moon landing as a triumph of good management.
In his review document of the moon shot, Roger D. Launius of the NASA History Office said the project thrived on a highly hierarchical organisational structure, which brought together a large number of separate bodies.
Three main factors where hard-wired into the management of the project - cost, durability and delivery, with each one having to be justified by the other two.
According to Launius, the project leaders at NASA, believed Apollo was much more a management exercise than anything else. The engineering challenge was sophisticated and large in scale, but viewed as within their grasp. What was less certain was the team’s ability to manage the technological skills and resources at their disposal in an effective way.
Different elements of the project competed for resources and worked in different ways. For instance the project’s engineers were used to working in teams, while the space scientists were used to working with complete autonomy.
There was also a culture-clash between the staff employed by NASA internally and the outside contractors. Managing these different factions, while maintaining a healthy level of discourse and competition, was of the highest priority to the project leaders.
Failure to do so would almost certainly have resulted in the deaths of the three astronauts involved.
Launius quotes a 1968 article published in Science Magazine, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
“It may turn out that [the space program's] most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.”
Arguably, space exploration has stalled since 1969 and physically, we haven’t got as far as we expected in the last 40 years, but while your commute to work isn’t very space-age, your management processes, when you get there, might well be.
