“All this is possible only through the blood, sweat, and tears of a number of people…All you see (are) the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others.

– Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut

“I think one of the things we had was a common goal, and we all realized that we were into something that was one of the few things in history that was going to stand out over the years. We’re going to go to the moon! We’re putting a man on the moon! And that is what captured our imagination, and our emotion, that we didn’t want to go home at night. We just wanted to keep going, and we couldn’t wait to get up and go back at work in the morning — because we’re going to the moon!”

– Charlie Mars, NASA engineer

Half a century ago on July 17, the spacecraft and crew of the Apollo 11 mission were one day into their 240,000 mile journey to the Moon…just four days away from fulfilling a goal that President Kennedy had urged America to undertake back in 1961. 

The Challenge

At the time JFK issued the challenge to land a man on the Moon and bring him back safely to Earth before the end of the decade, he famously stated that America should do so not because it was easy, but because it was hard. In fact, it would have been more accurate to have called it impossible. After all, at the time of Kennedy’s Rice University speech, the American space program had only 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience — of which 5 minutes were in the weightlessness of space. We had yet to even put a human into orbit around the Earth. 

In essence, what Kennedy wanted to achieve had not only never been done, we really had very little theoretical knowledge as to how to go about doing it. And then there was the issue of designing and building the necessary space craft to achieve a lunar landing and takeoff, the computers that would guide those space craft, and the spacesuits that would keep humans alive and safe on the Moon’s surface. And yet, eight years and two months after JFK’s speech, the impossible was about to become history.

To find an event in American history that would be in any way analogous to landing on the Moon, you would have to go back to the Second World War. As with the space race, we were ill prepared to face the forces of fascism some 20 years earlier. Regardless, less than four years after the disaster of Pearl Harbor — and less than two years after a humiliating defeat of the U.S. Army at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa — America and its allies were storming the beaches of Normandy to win Fortress Europe back from the Nazis. Operation Overlord was a triumph of manufacturing, mobilization and logistics, strategic planning, and the sweat, blood, and tears of thousands — many of whom made the ultimate sacrifice to achieve a goal that united them.

Unprecedented Scale

While the accomplishments of the Apollo program certainly stood on the shoulders of giants (going back to Robert Goddard, the “Father of American Rocketry”), it would be truer to say that it stood on the shoulders of multitudes. To visualize their size, think of four large sports arenas filled to capacity. Over 400,000 people took part in the Apollo program — more than fought in Vietnam for three years of that conflict! Compared to another epic, albeit problematic, American accomplishment, three times as many people worked on the Apollo program as on the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb. In point of fact, the race to the moon was the largest single civilian project ever undertaken in American (or world) history — one that was the equivalent in scale, impact, and urgency of any wartime effort. NASA’s effort was huge even by the standards of post-war corporate America. In the three peak years of 1964, 1965, and 1966, NASA and the Apollo program were bigger in terms of staff and contractors than every company on the Fortune 500 except the biggest: General Motors (more than 600,000 workers). NASA was bigger than Ford, GE, and U.S. Steel.

The intensity of the effort expended by hundreds of thousands of individual Americans in getting America to the Moon was, in the words of Charles Fishman, author of the recently published book, “One Giant Leap”, almost mythic. In researching his book, Fishman calculated all the hours of work required to get the astronauts to the moon. There were, he explains, 2,500 hours of Apollo spaceflights. Across 11 flights between 1968 and 1972, American astronauts spent little more than 100 days traveling to the moon, on the moon, and coming home. For each hour of Apollo spaceflight, a million hours of preparation and work was required on Earth. The typical American works 100,000 hours in a lifetime, so each hour of Apollo spaceflight required the equivalent work of 10 lifetimes back on Earth.

What Does $40 Million Buy You?

Not surprisingly, this vast expenditure of time and talent required a vast expenditure of treasure as well. In 1961, the year Kennedy issued his challenge to America, NASA spent $1 million on its spaceflight program. Five years later it would be spending that same amount every three hours, 24 hours a day. 

So what does $40 billion buy you besides a collection of Moon rocks and eternal bragging rights? In his 1961 report to President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson described the race to the moon as revolutionary. As Charles Fishman reminds us, “The execution of Apollo was revolutionary — a sprawling government program that was done on time, on budget, without scandal or corruption or simple incompetence. The management of the project was revolutionary — a blend of private and academic innovation with government oversight, weaving thousands of companies, hundreds of thousands of employees, and millions of individual parts into a system that required absolute quality and reliability. And that worked.”