Lessons from the Men Who Went to the Moon Continued

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Alan Bean, the fourth Apollo astronaut to walk on the Moon, pointed out, “Death was always right outside our window.”

“The unknowns were rampant,” said Neil Armstrong, who gave himself only a fifty-fifty chance of making a successful landing.

“Everyone who went to the moon came back a changed person,” said NASA flight controller John Aaron, who was one of the people celebrated in the Oscar-winning movie Apollo 13 for his critical role in getting the crippled spacecraft and its depleted crew home safely. “It was an experience that somehow caused them to reframe, and you could tell they had some kind of emotional, or religious experience as a result of it.”

Their job was to maintain an icy resolve, “the right stuff,” as author Tom Wolfe described it in his legendary book and movie of the same name, which has become a catchphrase for audaciousness and equipoise.

The psychological profiles of those who walked on the Moon (hereafter referred to as the Eagles) revealed two virtues that Aristotle maintained are vital to a healthy society: devotion to something greater than oneself and the pursuit of the common good.

 

THE REAL RIGHT STUFF: SELECTING THE EAGLES

KEY LESSONS

• Be humble
• Be decisive
• Be brave, but not reckless
• Take calculated risks
• Give your children responsibility at an early age
• Believe in something greater than yourself

The world you enjoy today was made by these people most of whom came from often economically challenged backgrounds but had a passion about doing something that was important, in this case the space program. Tom Brokaw

The Eagles were guided by duty, honor, country, in their unrelenting climb to reach the apex of aviation’s pyramid in the 1960s: the Astronaut Corps.  The candidates had to be self-confident but not arrogant, brave but not reckless, independent but trusting of authority.

NASA’s key selection requirements for the Mercury Seven, says Dr. Santy, were that candidates “demonstrate good stress tolerance; an ability to make decisions; an effective ability to work with others; emotional maturity; and a strong motivation for team rather than personal objectives.”

The astronauts who were finally selected all cited a love of adventure, “risk,” and “pushing the boundaries,” as they were fond of saying, but the differentiator from those not selected was their consideration of “calculated risk.” Their interviews showed they all had an appreciation of danger, but with the following critical nuance: they had a conviction that accidents could be avoided by knowledge and caution. They believe that risks are minimized by thorough planning and conservatism.

Al Shepard, America’s first man in space, said of flying experimental aircraft. “You know what they say: There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

 

THE TECHNIQUES FOR CONQUERING FEAR

KEY LESSONS

• Always stay calm
• Stay focused on what’s in front of you
• Have backup plans
• Eliminate catastrophic, what-if thinking
• Never give up

Courage is basically understanding how to handle fear. Frank Borman

Catastrophic, what-if thinking can lead to paralyzing fear and indecisiveness.

In the Apollo 13 Mission, Jim Lovell took a deep breath. With complete poise—and not a trace of panic in his voice—he said what may go down as one of the great understatements of all time: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Reflecting now, Lovell says matter-of-factly: “The thought crossed our mind that we were in deep trouble, but we never dwelled on it. You instead recycle your mind and think about what you have to do now.” With that, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert began focusing instantly on solutions to the cascading failures that were crippling their spacecraft. “They’re able to focus on the job at hand,” says Dr. Santy, “despite the fact that physiologically they’re reacting like any normal human being would do. They don’t even think about, ‘Oh I’m coping with my fear.’ They’re just focusing on the task, doing what needs to be done.”

“NASA was very good at training for every contingency,” says Dr. Santy. “Training! Training! Training!” The Eagles say it helped build their confidence and manage fear.

Thorough planning, and thorough preparation, will lead to the best performance you can give.  If you’ve gone through your planning for your mission moment-by-moment, minute-by-minute and have a thorough plan—and then you train to that plan—and stay focused on that plan, then you’re going to have the best chance of coming out with a good performance.

“We had been trained to think don’t ever give up as long as you’ve got options, and we never ran out of options,” said flight director Gerry Griffin. Having multiple options was an article of faith at NASA, and they engineered those options into redundant systems that would kick in should any one part of the intricate machines they built fail.

 

THE WIVES: BRAVER THAN THE EAGLES

KEY LESSONS

• Communicate and be inclusive
• Be willing to sacrifice without resentment
• Be forgiving
• Make amends

The divorce statistic for the twenty-four Eagles was grim, with nearly 60 percent of the marriages ending in divorce.

Dotty Duke says it was the global spotlight, backed by NASA’s mighty engineering machine, that eased some of her fear: “We really trusted NASA. As far as him dying, Charlie, like all of them, didn’t think about death and we didn’t talk about death. I never even really thought about it and I told people, how could I be worried about a husband that has four hundred thousand people working to make sure he would have a successful flight instead of say, being in Vietnam, and getting shot at, so, I was not one that was really very concerned.”

Valerie Anders says Bill practiced two things during the Apollo years that she considers essential in marriage: communication and inclusiveness. From the beginning Bill Anders decided to make Valerie a full partner in everything he was doing at NASA—even taking her with him on factory tours so she could see, from the ground up, the assembly of the Apollo spacecraft that would take him to the moon.

During the military and NASA years, Valerie understandably kept worrying for Bill’s safety. According to Dr. Santy, one of the great ironies for the wives was the following dichotomy: what kept their husbands safe on their missions—their ability to lead with their intellect as opposed to their emotions—proved disastrous in their marriages. “Take somebody like Neil Armstrong, for example, you couldn’t find a less expressive man,” says Dr. Santy. “He was more the John Wayne, strong silent type.” “That steadiness and that fortitude didn’t carry over well when it came to being emotional,” agrees Valerie, who remained close to Neil’s first wife, Janet, until her death in 2018.

So what did Valerie consider the right stuff for being the wife of an astronaut? “General stability, I’d say, and just the strength that it takes to raise children… and not being resentful for doing it alone. I felt my responsibility was at home and to my children, and to do everything possible to help Bill fulfill his dream of going to the moon.” It was a marriage bargain that worked. Sacrifice and commitment on Valerie’s part, inclusion and constant communication on Bill’s part.

From The Air Force Wife, a 362-page book that was required reading for all the wives, “It is said that domestic troubles have killed more aviators than motor failures, high tension wires and low ceilings, so as an Air Force wife your responsibility is great and your job is of big proportions if you live up to the finest traditions of the service. This was one part of the handbook the wives took seriously, and while they were able to convince their husbands that they were okay, they weren’t able to fool each other.”

Eagle Frank Borman ultimately came to see that his “mission versus family” mind-set was a false choice. “I should have spent more time with her and communicated better,” says Frank, “and not been blind to the impact my devotion to mission and duty had on her. She needed me and I wasn’t there.”

Dotty Duke explained, “You want your husband to do well in his job, and so I looked at that as a wonderful opportunity and I supported him the way I was supposed to support him. The military trains you like that. I had my duty to the kids. And I had my duty to my family. And I had my duty to NASA—and the press.”

What was completely unexpected for Dotty was that Charlie withdrew even more after his flight to the moon.  He likes to say that his walk on the moon lasted three days but that his “walk with God is forever.” Today, Dotty and Charlie are eager to tell their story of how God helped them rediscover their love for each other.

The Eagle wives created talking points good for almost all occasions. They reduced them to three crisp words hoisted on three separate placards for the press to photograph. Their bumper sticker simplicity had a touch of Madison Avenue to it. What they came up with was “Proud, Thrilled, and Happy.”

Proud? Definitely! But thrilled and happy? Mortified and distraught were more like it.

Jim Lovell tended to his marriage the way Bill Anders did, always communicating and paying close attention to Marilyn’s needs. He was also a master of surprise and the grand gesture. On Christmas Day 1968, as Jim was orbiting the moon on Apollo 8, he arranged for a Rolls-Royce to deliver a special package from Neiman Marcus with the following note, “To Marilyn, From the Man in the Moon. It was attached to a mink coat.”

There would be no breakdowns for Marilyn until Apollo 13: “Nothing compared to Apollo 13. I really had to be strong because I had these young children, and I put myself in a shell and I stayed in that shell, and the shell didn’t break until the flight was over and he came back.”

For four excruciating days in April of 1970, she was trapped in her house. Apollo 13 had turned into both a global deathwatch and a prayer vigil.  President Nixon called for a national moment of prayer. In Times Square, crowds glued themselves to the famous news ticker, which flashed continuous live updates.

As Jim Lovell noted, “You had to have a positive attitude because there was no alternative. You say, ‘Here’s the problem, how do we solve it.’ Optimism is perhaps the most basic thing a person needs to have.”

 

LEADERSHIP LESSONS AND DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE

KEY LESSONS

• • Find bold leaders
  • Set a clear mission with a deadline
  • Don’t wait for perfection to make decisions
  • Admit mistakes as they happen

Delegate almost to the point of abdication. Warren Buffett

Apollo 13’s mission clock became an hour-by-hour scorecard measuring two things that Lovell, Haise, and Swigert counted on to keep them from certain death: teamwork and leadership from NASA’s engineering juggernaut on the ground.

NASA itself has described Apollo 13 as its finest hour. Among other things, it produced a management axiom that is still a favorite among business leaders and is a go-to motivational phrase in crisis situations: “Failure is not an option,” which originated with flight director Gene Kranz, who told his assembled team that the Apollo 13 crew would not die on their watch.

Consider the eight-year deadline, mandated by President Kennedy, to land on the moon before 1970. Jeff Bezos, who scaled Amazon into the giant it is, believes NASA’s feat was one of the greatest organizational achievements in human history. “We as a civilization, we as humanity, pulled that Moon landing way forward—out of sequence—from where it actually should have been. It was a gigantic effort which in many ways should have been impossible.”

They had to invent a lot of what today would be foundational operations research kinds of ideas…it’s amazing that they did it in 1969!

To analyze the management methods used to achieve the moon shot, NASA’s History Division gathered the six key executives overseeing its success in a daylong symposium held in 1989.  Here are the ten management principles the conferees identified that would be recognizable to any CEO today running either a large or small organization:

• • 1. Have a clear mission
    2. Find leaders with vision
    3. Hire the best people
    4. Have sufficient funding
    5. Delegate authority
    6. Foster teamwork and trust
    7. Own mistakes (and admit to them in real-time)
    8. Engage in open communication and coordination
    9. Ensure quality control
    10. Take calculated risks and have moral courage

Charlie Duke, who like many of the Eagles gives speeches on leadership, describes how effectively NASA’s management practices and principles were put into action: “Well, first, NASA picked the right people. Then the right people that I interfaced with delegated authority, and they stayed focused on their mission, and they listened to their subordinates and the engineers in their area of responsibility. And they had an open door, and they were knowledgeable enough in their area of expertise to figure out, ‘Yeah, we can do that, and no, we can’t do that.’ So it was knowledge on their part, it was the ability to delegate authority and keep the whole team focused on their goal, and that was to make sure our part, or their part, was delivered on schedule—and it worked.”

When President Kennedy stepped in front of Congress on May 25, 1961 (and later at Rice University), he unveiled a mission that was breathtaking for its magnitude: We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

President Kennedy consulted with Dr. Robert Gilruth, NASA’s first director of the Manned Spacecraft Center. “Can it be done?” Kennedy asked Gilruth. “I told him that I thought that maybe we could go to the Moon, but I wasn’t sure that we could. And there were a lot of unknowns that we would have to uncover before we were sure. And he said well, let’s go ahead and say we can do it in a decade. And we will do the best we can.” Kennedy had just laid the predicate for a teachable moment in leadership and moral courage. He was a realistic idealist who appreciated that calculated risks could lead to greatness.

“Was Kennedy a visionary, was he a dreamer, was he politically astute? The chances are yes, he was probably all three,” said Gene Cernan.

In his speech to Congress, Kennedy estimated the cost of the moon shot at between $7 billion to $9 billion. James Webb told Kennedy to double it to $20 billion. He had seen too many government programs (and private businesses) suffer slow deaths from inadequate funding estimates, and he wanted NASA to have the largest cushion possible to succeed. “Webb’s decision to double the budget estimates guaranteed NASA’s survival,” says Schmitt, who later served as a US senator from New Mexico. “As a result, NASA started out the Apollo program with 100 percent management reserve.”

Webb needed a new center to house the thousands of new engineers and technicians it would take for the moon landing (thirty-five thousand direct NASA hires). It would mean new jobs, new construction, and innumerable spin-off benefits, so Webb picked a city for the new center that just happened to be in Thomas’s voting district: Houston. Thomas happily swallowed the bait. He and Johnson made sure that NASA got the funding it needed, and it is no coincidence that today its headquarters is called the Johnson Space Center.

At Mission Control there were no organizational or operational precedents for any of it and no pool of experienced talent to draw from. Dr. Kraft created it all from scratch, and because it was new, Kraft wanted engineers with immense energy who were not set in their ways. “I looked for people right out of college. That is where I wanted them from.… And I want you to know that the average age of my organization in 1969 was 26,” Kraft told his fellow conferees in 1989.

“When I went to NASA I didn’t know anything,” explained John Aaron. “I learned everything at NASA, just by probing my curiosity, and they made sure you performed, and it was very clear what the expectations were. And I think from that process, a very important principle that I learned as a manager later, is never underestimate what you can get people to do. Always put the expectation out there of doing a little better than they’re performing. And you’d get surprised, they’ll do it.”

To help eliminate and catch mistakes early, NASA created what modern management experts call a flat organization, in which there are the fewest layers of management possible separating staff from executives.  To ensure proper communication between the centers, they utilized the five-box management structure, which clearly defined everyone’s responsibilities:

• • 1. Headquarters
    2. Program control
    3. Systems engineering
    4. Flight operations
    5. Reliability and quality

Following the Apollo 1 fire and the death of 3 Astronauts, Gene Kranz was shaken to the core by the crew’s loss and called a meeting of his flight controllers in the auditorium, which expanded to include spacecraft contractors and civil servants. His speech became another of those teachable moments when a leader finds the right words to reassure a team facing both grief and guilt over the death of men who entrusted them with their lives: From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: Tough and Competent. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room, these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control. 

 

CHANGED BY A VIEW: THE COSMIC LIGHTHOUSE

KEY LESSONS

• • • Reframe your perception of Earth
    • Remember we are one race, the human race, sharing the same planet
    • Have greater empathy for our neighbors’ plight
    • Rethink your approach to conflict from a planetary perspective

The most awesome thing, and the thing that really got my imagination, was looking at the universe out there. Al Worden, Apollo 15

NASA gave the world a front-row seat for the lunar voyage thanks to the revolution in global communications it helped pioneer through its first-generation computers and satellites, thereby laying the foundation for today’s interconnected smartphone world in which life and major events unfold in real time.

Bill Anders captures the grand paradox of the mission, saying, “We went to explore the Moon, but discovered the Earth instead.”  The notion of the Earth as small and fragile had never figured into man’s thinking or appeared before in letters of philosophy and science.

Jim Lovell explains, “I put my thumb up to the window and thought behind my thumb were 3.5 billion people on that small planet that I can hide completely. And I thought to myself how insignificant we really all are.”

You couldn’t see people, races, countries, or borders. Every reference point that man had ever organized himself around geographically, politically, and culturally vanished in the eyes of the Eagles and their cameras.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Archibald MacLeish said, “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

 

THE EAGLES AND THE GOD QUESTION

KEY LESSONS

• • • Have faith that God and science can coexist
    • Connect not only to earth, but the universe
    • Find kindness and tolerance in all that you do
    • Accept doubt as an integral part of faith
    • Stand in awe of the unknowable and embrace it

Walking on the Moon was three days but walking with Jesus is forever. Charlie Duke, tenth man on the moon

Rediscovering Jesus on the moon led Irwin—post-NASA—to a devotional life through a foundation he called High Flight, named after a poem that was a favorite of many of the Eagles, including aviators today, who turn to it for inspiration.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung.

High in the sunlit silence, hov’ring there I’ve chased the shouting winds along and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark nor ever eagle flew

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

After going to space, Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin remarked, “I see no God up here…”  Frank Borman, a committed Protestant, naturally laughed off Gagarin’s quote, saying, “I didn’t see God on my first spaceflight either, but I had an enormous feeling that there had to be a power greater than any of us—that there was a God, that there was indeed a beginning.”

At 9:31 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, on December 24, 1968, Anders opened with what would become known as the Genesis broadcast, marking one of the most spiritual moments in television history: We are now approaching the lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you: In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw the light and that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. 

“It was a religious experience to me,” recalled John Aaron. “When they started reading from the book of Genesis, that was like, ‘Wow!’ The hair on the back of my head, on the back of my neck, actually stood up. I had that kind of feeling.”

“I was enraptured, transported by the crew’s voices, finding new meaning in the words from Genesis,” writes Gene Kranz. “For those moments, I felt the presence of creation and the Creator. Tears were on my cheeks.”

“A scriptwriter couldn’t have done a better job,” Lovell says today. “Reading from the first ten verses of Genesis was the capstone of our last orbit, and it brought people back on Earth a little closer together.

What all the Eagles agree on is that, when viewed from the deadness of the moon, life on Earth is a miracle, a living paradise that much of humanity has failed to respect and care for.

 

PARADISE FOUND: AND ON THE BRINK

KEY LESSONS

• • • Take care of the only home we have: it is the crown jewel of the universe
    • Be mindful of earth’s interconnectedness; our tenure is fragile
    • Look into the night sky and ponder the mystery of things

The Earth sits at an ideal distance from the sun, the Goldilocks Zone (a life-creating sweet spot), making it neither too hot nor too cold for life to flourish. Mars, by comparison, is too far from the sun, and thus too cold for the ingredients of life to have evolved; Venus, being too close to the sun, is like a boiling sauna, making life equally impossible. Of the dozens of robotic probes that have explored our solar system in the past six decades, not one has spotted a planet containing the right mix of water, oxygen, and habitable temperature.

Water is the operative word in so many of the descriptions of Earth given by the Eagles. For those of us who are earthbound, it is easy to forget that 71 percent of the planet is water.  Water is the lifeblood of the Earth… as it is of the human body, which is 60 percent water. Without food the average person can survive for approximately three weeks, without water only four to seven days.

Buzz Aldrin described: “Standing on the Moon looking back at Earth… you see all the colors, and you know what they represent. Having left the water planet, with all that water brings to the Earth in terms of color and abundant life, the absence of water and atmosphere on the desolate surface of the Moon gives rise to a stark contrast.”

“A beautiful sunrise, the feel of a fresh breeze, and rainstorms” are what profoundly move Lovell today. “You walk here to this park, take a look at the lake, and the grass that’s growing and the trees that are coming up. This is it! You’re living! This is the best time you’re going to have.” And that is what Lovell says led to his conclusion that “we don’t go to heaven when we die, we go to heaven when we’re born.”

Jesse Jackson told the New York Times on July 21, 1969, right after Armstrong landed on the moon: While we send men to the Moon, or send deadly missiles to Moscow, or toward Mao, we can’t get foodstuffs across town to starving folks in the teeming Ghettos. While our astrophysicists can figure out the formulas that make the amazing trajectories and landings possible, we can’t seem to get nutritionists and physicians to the shanties and shacks of Appalachia. Even as astronauts stride forth in the headying atmosphere of the moon blindfolded, America moves toward the whirlwind of another long, fiery summer and on to more campus rebellions and bloodletting come September. Thus, I bid us temper our shouts of exaltation as man breaks the fetters of gravity while being unable to forge the links of brotherhood. 

The disconnect between the space program and the rest of American society was in plain view. On one side of the ledger, life-changing technological gains were made—mostly underappreciated at the time. On the other side, political and social disintegration roiled the country with disturbing regularity.

“How can you spend all this money going to the Moon when there are so many poor, so many economic inequities, so much poverty?” many wanted to know. Borman says he tried to explain that the “space program was a natural extension of the human mind, that it was something our society could not afford to abandon because the future—the students’ future—depended on our keeping up with advanced technology.”

Jeff Bezos’s and NASA’s position remain constant: that space exploration is the Rosetta stone to a deeper understanding, not just of the universe, but of our own home planet. They point to the space program as more than just a job creator but as an incubator for brilliant innovations that can help save the home planet in unforeseen ways (as weather satellites proved through their preemptive ability to save countless lives from approaching killer storms, and other natural catastrophes).

Recently retired astronaut Nicole Stott, who spent 104 days living and working on the shuttle and ISS. “We tend to think of ourselves in an isolated way” says Stott, “my neighborhood, my house, my state, or whatever it might be. When in fact everything absolutely is interconnected, and when you pull away from Earth, the way the Apollo guys did, you see it as one home.”

Since they are explorers by nature, astronauts believe it is in man’s evolutionary DNA to one day colonize the universe.

 

GRADATIM FEROCITER: THE FUTURE OF SPACE TRAVEL

KEY LESSONS

• • • Cooperate on a planetary scale
    • Don’t be risk averse
    • Step-by-step wins the day
    • Trust your inventiveness and America’s entrepreneurial genius
    • Learn from the past to peacefully explore the universe

A base on the moon is a very important linchpin if we want to be a spacefaring species. Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17

To show the resolute tenacity of his aerospace company Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos used the Latin term Gradatim Ferociter, or step-by-step ferociously. “Spaceflight is a high-risk business,” said Bean, “and when I first heard his motto, I thought he’s got it just right.”

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast,” Bezos likes to say. “Skipping steps doesn’t get you there faster. It’s an illusion.”

Even before he founded Amazon in 1994, Bezos says his first passion, his real goal in life when he graduated from Princeton in 1986, was to build an aerospace company that would create the architecture and infrastructure for systematic planetary exploration. He had been envisioning it since high school, when he ended his valedictorian speech by saying, “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!”

The space shuttle was supposed to cost one-tenth the cost per pound to orbit than the Saturn V modified. Instead, it cost ten times that in retrospect. That’s a 100-fold error, so the space shuttle had eaten NASA hollow from the inside out.

“I think with hindsight as a guide, they got that decision backwards,” says Bezos. “They should have made the orbiter expendable and made the booster a fly-back reusable booster. We would be living in a very different world now, I think, if they had taken that path.”

Bezos saw a coat of arms as a competitive differentiator to motivate his engineers and tie Blue Origin’s space mission to its earthly origins (the company’s name refers to the blue planet, Earth, as the point of origin).  It evokes the era of the great fifteenth-century explorers, showing sailing ships traversing the oceans, while in the background two tortoises point toward the heavens as a rocket blasts off into the cosmos. At the base of the Earth sits a winged hourglass embedded in a scroll with the words Gradatim Ferociter in bold letters.  The tortoise mascot is a reminder of Aesop’s fable that the tortoise, through ingenuity and perseverance, eventually overtakes the faster, more arrogant hare.  And the company’s feather logo is simple, Bezos says. “It’s just a symbol of the perfection of flight.”

Bezos is also fond of repeating the Navy SEALs slogan “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”—something that Navy SEAL and astronaut Chris Cassidy, who flew the shuttle, says is applicable in space exploration.

SpaceX slowly convinced NASA and private contractors that its Falcon rockets (named after the Millennium Falcon spaceship in Star Wars) were reliable enough to launch satellites and take supplies to the ISS.

Going forward, the larger question hanging over NASA today is: What is its goal? Not one president since Kennedy has articulated an American vision for space with the same grandeur, purpose, and commitment as the moon shot. Where, exactly, do we want to go? Where’s the money?

Each recent president keeps changing the mission of his predecessor, former Astronaut Tom Stafford complains. President Obama canceled George W. Bush’s Constellation program to return to the moon as “been there done that.” Obama envisioned crewed missions to an asteroid, Mars eventually, and accelerated the privatization of space. President Trump, in turn, killed Obama’s plan and decided again to go back to the moon per President Bush, but asking for an even bigger assist from the private sector. “This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars,” Trump said

NASA’s new administrator, Jim Bridenstine, announced that US funding for the ISS will cease in 2025. He wants most of its operations turned over to private spaceflight companies. But no companies have shown interest in taking it over, and NASA’s ISS partners, Russia, Canada, Japan, and the twenty-two nations that make up the European Space Agency (ESA), have yet to offer a plan for its continued use.

Bridenstine, who passed Senate confirmation by only two votes because of his early doubts about climate science (he now believes in climate change), has yet to lay out specific goals with deadlines, according to NASA insiders, let alone an implementation strategy. His one consistent message has been Trump’s: that private enterprise must play a key role in its plans for the space program and return to the moon.

The Eagles all see the moon as the logical gateway to the universe, a training ground for astronauts, and an eventual staging area for Mars and then the rest of the solar system. Here’s why: the moon, we have now discovered, has all the resources (water, oxygen, silicon, titanium, iron) to create a moon base that can—and this is the critical part—easily be resupplied from Earth because it’s only a three-day journey. “Many of us see a return to the moon to develop a permanent moon base,” says Charlie Duke, “to learn how to extract the minerals from the moon and to set up moon-based telescopes and other kinds of instruments, and then develop the systems where we cycle crews back and forth like we do on the space station, every three months to six months.”

Harrison Schmitt said, “You can minimize the mass required to get to Mars, by using lunar resources, not only water but oxygen and hydrogen and potentially even food supplies. So the moon is a very important linchpin if we want to be a space-faring species.”

When Bezos looks at the moon, he sees a giant laboratory for advancing man’s knowledge and a staging area to build spacecraft for further exploration of our solar system.  Humans must see themselves as one race, which will explore space as Earthlings instead of separate nationalities.

At the Starmus Festival in Tenerife in 2011, the year before Neil Armstrong died, he told his fellow astronauts and scientists (with a slight tremor in his voice) that he did not believe man had evolved enough as a species to colonize space, “Based on our record here on Earth, we are not yet qualified to populate and govern a larger segment of our universe. We may or may not have time enough to grow as a species to control our ultimate destiny.”

Armstrong, however, did not want to end on an unhopeful note. With the same faith he summoned to steer the Eagle clear of lunar boulders to a safe landing, he offered the audience faith that man might be able to change, “Yet there is great reason for hope. And we have no other choice. There is no doubt that our instincts will force us to try.”

On reflecting on the same subject two millennia ago, Plato, around 400 BC, said: “We must take the best and irrefutable human doctrines and embark on that as if it were a raft on which to risk the voyage of life,” which indeed it is and indeed we must.

 

THE NOBLEST JOURNEY OF ALL

KEY LESSONS

• • • Don’t spin the truth, and call out bullshit
    • Beware of false patriotism and inflated heroism
    • Maintain your honor and integrity
    • Put moral courage, country, and the public good first
    • Pursue your passion and you will thrive
    • Be understated and humble in all your endeavors

Moral courage is standing for something you believe in in the face of this big opposition, so that takes a lot of sustained courage to stand your ground. Charlie Duke Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Robert Kennedy

Frank Borman says he would like to be remembered “as a committed Christian who dearly loved his wife, his family, and his country, who always strove to do his duty and never compromised his honor or integrity to achieve a goal.”

Borman, who was not intimidated by anyone, refused to accept self-serving distortions of the facts or spinning the truth. It was another of the defining characteristics of the Eagles: their “low tolerance for bullshit,” as Dr. Santy explained earlier. “When I wrote Nixon a memo with my objections, he called me into the Oval Office to explain why. I put zero spin on it,” recalls Borman. “‘Mister President, this is wrong,’ I told him! ‘You weren’t responsible for it. This was a Democratic program, and you just came into office. You didn’t have anything to do with Apollo 11. You should assume that it’s the American people who deserve the credit.”

Nixon listened without protest and followed all of his advice. He limited his lunar phone call to sixty-nine seconds (252 words), kept it apolitical, and noted its significance for everyone all over the world: Because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man’s world, and as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this earth are truly one—one in their pride in what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth. 

For the Eagles, physical and moral courage are inseparable, but of the two they believe moral courage is the greater test and the nobler journey.

Throughout their lives the Eagles have practiced their courage and patriotism with quiet humility.

Alan Bean delivers this message to college students, which was directly born of his experience from walking on the moon: The only limits for us are the limits we place on ourselves. We [humans] may be small on the cosmic scale, but we’ve been given a great gift in our lifetime. We can become and do things we’re willing to try, and work, and plan to do! There’s nothing else in the universe, except humans who can do that. We’re it! Most people are wasting that great gift. Don’t waste it! You’re unique.

The Eagles say their voyages to the moon gave them two gifts: gratitude for the solar system’s gift of planet Earth, and gratitude for the gift of life that Earth has given us. These are the two themes they have repeated consistently in their conversations for this book.

Mike Collins remembers something remarkable in the way people reacted to the Astronauts who walked on the Moon. It was, he says, the consistent use of the same pronoun. “After the flight of Apollo 11 the three of us went on an around-the-world trip. Wherever we went, people instead of saying, well you Americans did it, everywhere they said we did it, we humankind, we the human race, we people did it, and I had never heard of people in different countries use this word we, we, as emphatically as we were hearing from Europeans, Asians, Africans. Wherever we went it was ‘We finally did it.’ I thought that was a wonderful thing, ephemeral, but wonderful.”