Celebrating the ongoing legacy of the moon landing
About a month from now, we’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of humanity’s first landing on the moon: July 20, 1969. (Fun fact, the moon’s proper name is actually “Luna”, and it’s the root word for things like “lunatic”, “lunacy”, and “lunch”. Okay, I made that last one up…but people used to really believe the full moon would drive people mad.)
The moon landing, and space program in general, had a profound effect on me as a child. Honestly, I thought that, by now, we’d have colonies on the moon and Mars, and maybe even cloud cities above Venus…but other priorities, like killing each other in vast quantities and wrecking the atmosphere, seem to have gotten in the way. Oh well, at least we had “Vines” for a short, glorious time. But, I digress.
In those 50 years, a lot has changed, but we still owe a lot of our current technology to the breakneck pace of innovation that was spurred on by the Space Race between us and those pesky Russians. So, I thought it would be neat to take a look back at some of the tech that was used to get us to the moon, and how it’s helped create the world we live in today.
Computers
There were a few computers involved in the Apollo program, but we’ll focus on the one that actually got them to the moon: the Avionics Computer. This beast weighed 70 lbs., took up a cubic foot of space and had 4K (about 4,000 characters) of RAM. For comparison, your phone probably has 64GB (about 64 billion characters) of RAM, and it’s much smaller and lighter.
For another point of comparison, this article, before editing, was just over 4K in length, and I’m going to save it onto a device with about a trillion characters of free space. So, yeah, computers have come a very long way.
Electronics
Launching things into space isn’t easy. Especially if those things are heavy. So, another consequence of the Apollo program was the drive to make things smaller. It’s easy to draw a direct line from the computers of Apollo to an iPhone, but that same drive also gave us things like smaller switches, transistors, circuit boards, and memory chips.
The smaller and lighter something is, the easier it is to get it off the planet, but small form factor also helps in the creation of consumer products like TV’s, radios, automobiles…pretty much anything you can imagine. All of these things benefitted from the drive to miniaturize basically everything used in the space program.
Rockets
The Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon was, and still is, the biggest, most powerful rocket ever built. (And, I don’t think anyone has plans to build anything bigger in the near future.) But, while today’s rockets may lack the sheer power of the Saturn V, they make up for it in other tricks. Today we have rockets that can land themselves and be refurbished and reused. This drives down the cost of subsequent launches and is bringing “cheap” access to space closer to reality.
And, while we might not be putting humans on any big rocks, we have gotten really good at throwing robots at things and landing them there. Mars is currently crawling with robots—several are in orbit around it, a few are driving across it, and at least one is standing very still, listening for Mars-quakes. Heck, we’ve landed a robot on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, landed on one comet, and thrown a refrigerator-sized brick at another one.
Unfortunately, one thing seems to have been lost in these last 50 years, and that’s our sense of adventure. In the years immediately following that first landing, every kid wanted to be an astronaut, to get out there and explore. Now, it’s rare to hear a kid talk about wanting to explore anything beyond the bounds of their day-to-day existence. This, to me, is a very sad thing.
So, if you were around for the Apollo missions, maybe take some time to talk to the kids in your life. Tell them how exciting it was to actually live through that, and how, for a time, it seemed like we could do anything and go anywhere. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to inspire the first person to walk on Mars!
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.