In 1969, Apollo astronauts change the world. Riding the most powerful rocket ever created to the Moon, they become the first to fulfill our age-old dream of traveling to worlds beyond our own. It is a culmination of a decade of pioneering work in space exploration, a grand attempt to challenge the limits of ordinary existence through accomplishment of the extraordinary. I find the Apollo missions to be among the most inspiring human endeavors of all time - they remain unparalleled in terms of our willingness to dream big and our capability to solve technical problems to make these dreams a reality. Someone recently suggested that I check out When we left Earth: the NASA Missions. It is a great series that covers the breadth of the NASA missions from Mercury to the International Space Station, featuring narratives from astronauts such as Eugene Cernan and Neil Armstrong (they’re some of my childhood heroes). So in the past few weeks, after completing the series, …show more content…
Sure, the goal of landing on the Moon before 1970 was very inspiring, but it was achieved by solving a series of hard, technical problems: Project Mercury’s goal was to learn how to put a human in orbit around the Earth; Project Gemini’s goal was to perfect EVA (extra-vehicular activity), space rendezvous and spacecraft docking; early Apollo missions had a goal of figuring out how to fly to the Moon and back. There were many failures along the way and it took a decade of painstaking effort by a large group of people before we could finally land on the Moon. When reading about Kennedy’s address to the U.S. Congress, or about the astronauts who flew aboard Apollo 11, it is possible to forget, as Charles Duke (CAPCOM for Apollo 11) puts it, that “The crew was the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the iceberg were 400,000 people that had to do their jobs or we would not have made