Ulysses
Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980
In the prologue to the Apollo moonshot the mastery of spacewalks, rendezvous, docking, long-duration flights, reentry and precision landing had to be mastered first by the workhorse of the Gemini Project. The practical application of theoretical physics cultivated by a series of tutorials was the risk mitigation needed to thread the needle of docking in orbit and to walk atop the lunar surface for the Apollo excursion. Over twenty months as each new mission’s complexity became more edifying than the last NASA laid the groundwork for this big exploit. Rendezvous entailed station-keeping and docking between two craft in a zero-G environment. The moonwalk although etched in civilization’s hagiography with the iconic images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin cavorting about on the Moon would only materialize after Gemini’s 12 hours and 25 minutes of spacewalks (Machell 1967). Multiple redundancies of backups were also exported into Apollo to eschew primary-system failures. In the gospel of engineering such failsafe devices are critical to isolate malfunctions that can cascade into catastrophe. Amidst the Gemini VIII mission a runaway thruster convulsed the vehicle into an uncontrollable spin until the last-minute Hail Mary pass by astronaut Armstrong arrested the rate of rotation. Learned mistakes then bolstered Apollo.
As the apotheosis of the space programme Washington’s industrial policy did not exercise any austerity for the successor to the Mercury and Gemini projects. In its Keynesian stimulus for a dash of Cold War bravado NASA mobilized over 20,000 industrial firms at the cost of $25.4b or $186b in real value (DiLisi et al. 2019). This fiscal demand mimicked the audacity of landing a man on the Moon versus splitting the atom in the Manhattan Project which was monetized at $2b or 34 billion in constant dollars. Nuclear fission at the Los Alamos Laboratory at its zenith saw a headcount of 130,000 personnel in a foil to the moonshot’s 400,000 (Huges 2003). Therefore in Apollo’s anatomy a bevy of august firms were conscripted into service for the three million working parts of the Saturn V rocket whose power could be analogized to the output of eighty-five Hoover Dams (Bilstein 1999). It was this crown jewel of the space programme dwarfing Mercury’s Redstone and Gemini’s Titan II that brought humanity to the Moon and back. Washington’s calculated use of public funds architected an entire industry from the ground up in the space race. Between the creation of the bureaucratic mechanism in the guise of NASA and pecuniary investments in R&D an Industrial Revolution was co-authored by state-driven capitalism and firms.
Apollo embodied the Everest of engineering across the gamut of rocketry, metallurgy, thermodynamics, aerodynamics and astrophysics to cement man’s presence onto the distant orb of the Moon. But success is not at all the default of industrial policy when bureaucracies are prone to beget sinkholes of profligate spending. Where Washington excelled was to marshal a uniformity of purpose for the high stakes of President Kennedy’s promise to plant America’s flag atop the Moon. A delegation of contracts solicited expertise from Boeing, Chrysler, Rocketdyne, North American Aviation’s Space and Information Systems Division (S&ID), Douglas Aircraft, IBM and Grumman. NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Centre in Alabama helmed by the feted von Braun and his retinue coordinated all these discrete nodes of operations. Boeing and Chrysler were tasked with integrating the five F-1 engines abreast of fuel tanks and avionics for the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. Rocketdyne designed those mainstay engines together with its J-2 variant. These smaller units were married to the upper stages whose in-flight restarts parked Apollo into earth’s orbit whereupon a second controlled burn pushed the craft into its Trans-Lunar Injection path. Reawakening an engine in the cold vacuum of space was fraught with complexity.
Within this leg of propelling astronauts beyond earth’s upper atmosphere it was S&ID that fitted the five J-2 powerplants to its second stage vehicle. These furnaces of thrust catapulted Apollo into orbit to await its manoeuvre towards the alien plains of the Moon. Inside the cylindrical hull fabricated from alloyed aluminum were vast reservoirs that cradled the propellants of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Next to this coup of engineering would be the third stage manufactured by Douglas Aircraft whose import hinged on slingshotting the crew on its final approach to its mission objective. This smaller sibling of the Saturn V rocket innovated the bulkheads separating fuels with a substantial cut in mass for greater efficacy of operations when weight was at a premium. Right above this third stage sat IBM’s magnum opus. Wrapped around the circumference of the Saturn V there stood a three-foot high ring of digital computers and sensors in miniaturized form computing trajectories across the sky and into the sea of stars. Micro-adjustments in milliseconds remedied thrust deficits and directions across the battery of engines should one fail. Directly abutting the foregoing nerve centre of the Saturn V there nestled in the upper stages of the rocket was the Lunar Module under the stewardship of the Grumman Aircraft company.
This vehicle draped in Kapton foil since the want of an atmosphere fails to mediate extreme temperatures would descend upon the Moon’s regolith with a form factor resembling an arachnid. Outfitting the spacecraft with four spindly legs and an engine with modulated thrust ensured a soft landing on the alien world where the streamlined shapes of aerodynamics had no currency. Once ensconced on the surface courtesy of the vehicle’s throttleable velocity the second stage launched the explorers and their soil samples back out into space to rendezvous with the Command and Service Modules. Whilst each facet of the mission proved precocious the mission was greater than the sum of its parts. The alchemy of coordinating a phalanx of companies towards one end of landing a man on the Moon cannot be extolled enough. In this seminal act of innovation not only did a whole industry manifest from nothing but also America’s production shifted wholesale towards a knowledge economy. President Kennedy’s foresight to align industry and academia in colonizing the Moon became the verve and vim behind the boom in innovation that ushered in the era of postindustrialism. The return on investment would be a boon to technology in the crucible of Apollo as the brainchild of Washington’s industrial policy.
