If We Can Put a Man on the Moon

Project Apollo became the twentieth-century archetype of a successful, large-scale, government-led program. As peacetime engineering endeavors sponsored by the government, only the construction of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914 and the construction of the Interstate Highway System over several decades beginning in the 1950s rivaled Apollo in terms of the scope and difficulty of the task and the scale of human and financial resources required. The success of Apollo has also led to the cliche, “if we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we. . . ?” In their 2009 book titled with that cliche, Eggers and O’Leary suggest that “democratic governments can achieve great things only if they meet two requirements: wisely choosing which policies to pursue and then executing those policies.”18

I believe that this study demonstrates that Project Apollo met both of these requirements for success. Eggers and O’Leary attribute much of the successful execution of the lunar landing program to the leadership of NASA administrator James Webb. I suggest that many others, both within and out­side of NASA, should share credit for that implementation success, including particularly John Kennedy.19 President Kennedy gave Webb a great deal of freedom to manage NASA as Webb saw fit. A number of times between 1961 and 1963 Kennedy heard from others, often science adviser Jerome Wiesner or budget director David Bell, who questioned or disagreed with the path chosen by Webb. In particular, Wiesner waged a vigorous campaign to over­turn NASA’s choice of the lunar orbit rendezvous approach for carrying out the landing mission. Brainerd Holmes let it be known to Kennedy that Webb opposed his suggestion that the schedule for the first lunar landing be accelerated; Kennedy shared Holmes’s desire for the earliest possible landing. Even the Mercury astronauts took their plea for an additional flight in the Mercury program directly to President Kennedy. In every instance, Kennedy deferred to Webb as the individual responsible for carrying out the space pro­gram and thus the person who should make these decisions. Kennedy’s style as chief executive was to seek as much information as possible in formulating his policy choices, but once a decision was made, Kennedy seldom intervened in its execution.

In my 1970 book, I suggested that “the experience of the lunar landing decision can be generalized to tell us how to proceed toward other ‘great new American enterprises.’ ” I set out in that book four conditions that seemed to me to be requirements for making a wise decision regarding an ambitious future objective:

1. The objective sought must be known to be feasible, with a high degree of probability, at the time the decision to seek it is made.

2. The objective must have been the subject of sufficient political debate so that the groups interested in it and opposed to it can be identified, their positions and relative strengths evaluated, and potential sources of sup­port have time to develop.

3. Some dramatic “occasion for decision,” such as a crisis resulting from an external or domestic challenge, must occur to create an environment in which the objective and the policies to achieve it become politically fea­sible.

4. There must be in leadership positions in the political system individuals whose personalities and political philosophies support the initiation of new large-scale government activities aimed at long-term payoffs and who have the political skill to choose the situations in which such activities can be initiated successfully.

Even writing in 1970, I recognized that the first of these conditions was very limiting, and would not work when the end desired required both tech­nological breakthroughs and significant changes in deep-seated behavior patterns. However, I thought that “finding objectives with high social utility which could be achieved by a specific time using technologies, either physi­cal or social, which are based on existing knowledge is not difficult.”20 Forty years later, I find these comments either remarkably optimistic or remark­ably naive, probably both. What was unique about going to the Moon is that it required no major technological innovations and no changes in human behavior, just mastery over nature using the scientific and technological knowledge available in 1961. There are very few, if any, other potential objec­tives for government action that have these characteristics.

The reality is that attempts to implement other large-scale nondefense programs over the past forty years have never been successful, in the space sector or in the broader national arena. Both President George H. W. Bush in 1989 and President George W. Bush in 2004 set out ambitious visions for the future of space exploration, but neither of those visions became real­ity; the political and budgetary support needed for success were notably missing. More recent attempts to re-create a space race mentality by posit­ing that China was intending to send humans to the Moon before a U. S. return have fallen flat. In 2010, President Barack Obama proposed a dra­matic move away from the Apollo approach to space exploration, stressing the development of new enabling technologies and widespread international collaboration; he also declared that the Moon would not be the first desti­nation as humans traveled beyond Earth orbit. This proposal was met with skepticism and political controversy; as I write these words, its fate is still unclear. In the nonspace sector, there have been few opportunities for large – scale government programs that do not require for their success a combina­tion of technological innovation and significant changes in human behavior. The attempts to declare a “War on Cancer,” for example, required not only research breakthroughs but also changing the smoking habits of millions of Americans. Attempts to move toward U. S. “energy independence” run afoul both limited research and development spending and the complex ties between non-U. S. energy suppliers and the U. S. financial and government sectors. Providing adequate health care for all Americans turns out to be primarily a political, not merely a technical, challenge. Managing global environmental change has both high technical uncertainties and challenging social inertia to overcome. And so on.

Given this situation, I am now inclined to accept an alternative explana­tion that I rejected forty years ago: that the lunar landing decision and the efforts that turned it in into reality were unique occurrences, a once-in-a – generation, or much longer, phenomenon in which a heterogeneous mixture of factors almost coincidentally converged to create a national commitment and enough momentum to support that commitment through to its fulfill­ment. If this is indeed the case, then there is little to learn from the decision to go to the Moon relevant to twenty-first century choices. This would make the lament “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we. . . ?” almost devoid of useful meaning except to suggest the possibility that governments can succeed in major undertakings, given the right set of circumstances. Other approaches to carrying out large-scale government programs will have to be developed; the Apollo experience has little to teach us beyond its status as a lasting symbol of a great American achievement.