Neil Armstrong

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Apollo 11: The Inside Story by David Whitehouse

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip

NASA Charlie Duke, Capcom for the landing. To his left are Jim Lovell and Fred Haise. NASA Flags and cigars in Mission Control as Apollo lands on the Moon. NASA Buzz Aldrin starting his descent to the lunar surface, as photographed by Neil Armstrong. NASA Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong can be seen in his visor. NASA Neil Armstrong back in the Lunar Module after the first moonwalk. NASA The ascent stage of the Lunar Module, ‘Eagle’, returns to the Command Module, ‘Columbia’, 21 July 1969. NASA The Apollo 11 crew in the mobile quarantine facility in which they spent two and a half days en route from their recovery ship USS Hornet to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, Texas.

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‘When you added up what we would gain, as opposed to what we would lose, the decision was pretty easy.’ On 24 March 1969 Neil Armstrong was told that his mission, Apollo 11, would be the first to attempt a lunar landing. He said: ‘During the flight of Apollo 8 I had three or four meetings with Deke Slayton about, first, would I take the third one down to the surface and then we had a lot of talks about who might be available and be right to be on that crew, that sort of thing.’ The crew of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins – were introduced to the press on 9 January 1969 and immediately the assembled reporters got down to the big question, ‘Which of you gentlemen will be the first man to step out onto the lunar surface?’

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Aldrin talked to his colleagues but for some that was seen as lobbying behind the scenes to be first. Gene Cernan says: He came flapping into my office at the Manned Spacecraft Center one day like an angry stork, laden with charts and graphs and statistics, arguing what he considered to be obvious – that he, the lunar module pilot, and not Neil Armstrong, should be the first down the ladder on Apollo 11. Since I shared an office with Neil Armstrong, who was away training that day, I found Aldrin’s arguments both offensive and ridiculous. Ever since learning that Apollo 11 would attempt the first Moon landing, Buzz had pursued this peculiar effort to sneak his way into history, and was met at every turn by angry stares and muttered insults from his fellow astronauts.

"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today by Jay Barbree

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, dark matter, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, white flight

In the lunar dust they placed mementos for the five astronauts and cosmonauts who had lost their lives, and Neil Armstrong read the words on a plaque mounted on Apollo 11’s descent stage: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the American flag on the moon. (NASA). The two astronauts gathered fifty pounds of lunar soil samples and rocks, and once everything was loaded for the flight back to Earth, they shut down the first moonwalk. Twenty-one hours after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, they fired Eagle’s ascent engine and left the moon.

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The way it was working out, Neil Armstrong would command Apollo 11 and Pete Conrad would be at the helm of Apollo 12. Deke had long ago made the decision to have either Neil or Pete land the first lunar module on the moon. Neil was learned, experienced, and had the moxie to get out of a harrowing situation. As NASA’s own test pilot, he had survived potential tragedies time and again. Apollo 11 would get the first shot, but the odds were very high something would go wrong and 11 would have to abort. Deke realized there was no other feasible plan, and he called Neil Armstrong and crew into a private room.

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“Damn right,” Scott Carpenter said, slamming a fist on the table. “It’s gotta be Deke.” They stood solid. Stonewall Jackson would have been proud. NASA knew the Mercury Seven could not fly all the orbital flights in the upcoming Gemini program. New pilots had to be recruited for the astronaut corps. The agency went back and hired Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles “Pete” Conrad, James Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliott See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young. They had just missed the Mercury Seven cut, and with the exception of civilian Armstrong, they were all military. They were immediately dubbed the Gemini Nine. NASA had also come to realize it needed someone to manage the astronauts’ office, to select flight crews, make assignments, plan and schedule training time, and be a link between the pilots and management.

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

And what more evil trick could this all-seeing, all-powerful and yet somehow utterly clueless leviathan play than telling us that they – that we – did this magical thing, waltzed into the stars and set down on the Moon, when we never actually did? From this point on, I see a fresh continuity in the story of Apollo. Sibrel claims that “Neil Armstrong started shaking like a leaf when I asked him to swear on the Bible,” but I’m not sure whether to believe this. I absolutely do believe him, however, when he admits that yes, that right hook from Aldrin back in LA really did hurt. When all other argument is exhausted, conspiracy believers inevitably draw your attention to one thing: the sullen, peevish withdrawal of Neil Armstrong from public life. It seems doubly strange to me, then, that only days after finally chasing down Sibrel, I find myself en route to Portugal and a rare opportunity to see the first Moonwalker speak – even though that’s not why I’m going.

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There was another, bigger, surprise waiting for me when I got back from Portugal. Before I went, I’d finally made myself write to Neil Armstrong, expecting no more than a polite brushoff. Now, trawling through my e-mails, I came across a message from an unfamiliar address which suggested another piece of spam. I opened it and giggled like a schoolboy. The name at the bottom hit me first, sitting solid and square, as if carved on a tablet of stone, avatar of an alien world. Neil Armstrong. He told me that he received lots of requests from people writing books and making films, but he could see that this was a different kind of story about Apollo.

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There were a few official celebrations, but most of the accompanying newspaper articles and feelgood TV news items seemed unsure of how to present Apollo after thirty years of neglect. With a new millennium dawning, perhaps our first and only embrace of another world felt, if anything, more distant than it does now. Even the man who led that hazardous trip, Neil Armstrong, offered nothing that might clarify, angering townsfolk in his home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, by failing to turn up at a party thrown in his honour. Legend has it that he went flying at the local airfield instead. Thus, by 2002, it appeared to me that the most remarkable thing about these men was the extent to which they and their farout story had been forgotten ” not least, up to that point, by myself.

Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

It was so sensitive that it picked up the motions of Neil Armstrong turning over in his sleep within the lunar module following the moonwalk. The iconic image of Aldrin on the lunar surface, with Neil Armstrong reflected in the mirrored visor. Because Aldrin was assigned to take photographs of the landscape and the condition of the lunar module, there are few good images of Armstrong standing on the Moon. For my mother, who awakened her ten-year-old son in the middle of an English midsummer night to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make history as they walked on the Moon.

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An hour and forty minutes after an Atlas missile launched an Agena docking vehicle into orbit, two rookie astronauts, commander Neil Armstrong and pilot David Scott, headed into space aboard Gemini 8. Unlike what had happened a few months earlier on Gemini 6, the Agena worked perfectly this time. When Gemini 8 was in its fourth orbit, Armstrong closed in and maneuvered near to the Agena. A member of Astronaut Group Two, Armstrong was already a famed X-15 rocket pilot, and his unusual status as one of the few civilian astronauts set him apart. Neil Armstrong’s view as he moved Gemini 8 toward the Agena target vehicle above the Pacific Ocean before accomplishing the first successful docking of two spacecraft.

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Fellow astronaut Alan Bean regretfully told him the tragic news from the Cape and informed him that he had been assigned the solemn task of officially notifying Ed White’s wife, Pat, of her husband’s death. It was a duty that each astronaut knew he might have to perform someday. Anders changed his clothes and arrived at the Whites’ house ten minutes later. The Whites lived next door to Neil Armstrong, who was away in Washington for the signing of the Outer Space Treaty. When Anders arrived, Pat White was on the porch, talking with Armstrong’s wife, Jan. Had Neil Armstrong called her from Washington and asked her to be there as well? Anders wasn’t sure, but as he walked up to the house and looked into their faces, he received an impression that Jan Armstrong had a sense of the dreaded news he was about to relay.

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Apollo Moon Landings by Jay Barbree, Howard Benedict, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton, Neil Armstrong

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, clockwatching, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making

The Apollo 11 crew: Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Mike Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin. On July 16, 1969, Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin rocketed away from earth and four days later Armstrong and Aldrin rode the Lunar Module Eagle to a touchdown on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility while Collins stood watch in lunar orbit aboard the Command Module Columbia. Aldrin (shown here) and Armstrong were on the moon more than 21 hours and spent two hours exploring outside their lander. President Richard M. Nixon greeted Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific Ocean following the spacemen’s return from man’s first moon-landing mission.

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MOON SHOT The Inside Story of America’s Apollo Moon Landings Alan Shepard AND Deke Slayton WITH Jay Barbree INTRODUCTION BY Neil Armstrong Moon Shot is for the quintessential space journalist Howard Benedict, the senior aerospace writer for the Associated Press and a perennial winner of spaceflight’s top awards. Howard employed his magnificent talents to herd the facts and details for the original Moon Shot. He was simply the best and we miss him. CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION by Neil Armstrong CHAPTER ONE: 2011 CHAPTER TWO: The Beginning CHAPTER THREE: The Pilots CHAPTER FOUR: The Astronauts CHAPTER FIVE: Training CHAPTER SIX: The Selection CHAPTER SEVEN: The Cape CHAPTER EIGHT: First in Space CHAPTER NINE: Freedom Seven CHAPTER TEN: NASA Is Made CHAPTER ELEVEN: Mercury CHAPTER TWELVE: Houston CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Space Walk CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Gemini: A Bridge to the Moon CHAPTER FIFTEEN: We’ve Got a Fire in the Cockpit CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Aftermath CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Apollo 8: First Around the Moon CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Getting There, Getting Back CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Landing CHAPTER TWENTY: Boots on the Moon CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Apollo 13: NASA’s Finest Hour CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Apollo 14: All or Nothing CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: No Turning Back CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Longest Walk on the Moon CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: An Astronaut’s Heart and The Last Stages of Apollo CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: A Handshake in Space CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and the Day After Image Gallery About the Authors Index PREFACE “Houston, Tranquility Base here.

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Early on, Deke had established a pattern: “I would assign the crew that backed up a prime mission crew to fly the third flight after that.” Thus, Deke and Alan called the backup crew that had supported the moon-orbiting flight of Apollo 8. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins and were told they were it. They would fly Apollo 11. They would get the first chance to land on the moon. But NASA had yet to fly that bug-eyed spidery creature it called the lunar module, which would take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to lunar soil. It must be flown, and successfully, on Apollo 9. That meant firing the entire Apollo assembly of command, service, and lunar modules into earth orbit and simulating as many lunar flight procedures as could be squeezed into the mission.

A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Gene Kranz, gravity well, index card, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

When Borman turned down Deke Slayton’s tentative offer to fly the first lunar landing it had everything to do with the fact that he had been the commander on Apollo 8. If Lovell had any disappointment about his commander’s decision, it vanished when Slayton assigned him to lead Neil Armstrong’s backup crew. Within weeks after Armstrong’s team came back from the moon, Lovell and his crew were training for their own landing. By the spring of 1970, most of Lovell’s colleagues from the second astronaut group had moved on to other things. Neil Armstrong had disappeared into the world of postflight P.R. that greeted him on his return from Apollo 11; it seemed unlikely he would fly again. Jim McDivitt had traded the demands of flying Apollo missions for the equally demanding job of preparing for them, as manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office in Houston.

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On the night of July 20, 1969, our world changed forever: two Americans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walked on the moon. After the horror of the Kennedy and King assassinations, amid the deepening quagmire of Vietnam, the moon landing brought the sixties to a triumphant end. But the upheavals of that decade have somehow eclipsed this “one giant leap” and the even bolder explorations that followed. Now Andrew Chaikin tells the story of the Apollo missions as never before: through the eyes of the astronauts who made those heroic voyages. A decade in the making, A Man on the Moon is based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with each of the twenty-four moon voyagers, as well as those who contributed unprecedented brain power, training, and teamwork on earth.

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But in our own time their impact was fleeting. Even as astronauts returned to the moon for bolder and more ambitious explorations, our attention was diverted. While the nation was absorbed in the war, the environment, and unrest at home, NASA was expanding the reach of human beings on another world. On Apollo 11, the first lunar landing, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had spent little more than a day on a bland acre of moonscape. In their single moonwalk—which lasted a bit longer than a feature-length film—they never ventured more than a couple of hundred feet from their lander. By 1972, the final pair of moonwalkers, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt, were living for three full days on the moon, exploring a lunar valley ringed by spectacular mountains whose rocks would provide a key to the origin of the solar system.

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight by David A. Mindell

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 1960s counterculture, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Mars Rover, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Soul of a New Machine

Coordinating the conversion between NASA and Grumman was a committee that included Neil Armstrong and lunar landing designer Donald Cheatham. The LLTV was a pilot’s dream—a craft that was difficult to fly, that showed how much skill and experience would be required to land on the moon. ‘‘It gave me confidence that I knew what I was doing on the Moon,’’ David Scott recalled in a recent interview. ‘‘I didn’t have to think about things. I didn’t have to consciously program myself to do things. I was automatic. . . . Hell of a challenge. A tough thing to fly.’’49 Neil Armstrong noted at the time, ‘‘It is such a cotton picking unusual environment, so different from anything you’ve been in before, that you are continually amazed at how machines can fly like that.’’50 Nor did they always fly like that: Armstrong ejected from a failing vehicle in May 1968, narrowly escaping with his life.

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Duke interview with Ward, 21. 6. Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 377. 7. Eyles, ‘‘Tales from the Lunar Module Guidance Computer,’’ 7. 8. Armstrong interview with Ambrose and Brinkley, 21. For Armstrong’s account, also see Hansen, First Man, 465. 9. Neil Armstrong, ‘‘Apollo 11 Postflight Crew Press Conference,’’ August 12, 1969, Houston, Tex., 21. 10. Neil Armstrong, ‘‘Apollo: Past, Present, and Future,’’ Proceedings of the 13th SETP Symposium, Beverly Hills, Calif., September, 1969. 11. Inadvertent LPD in Bennett, ‘‘Apollo Experience Report.’’ 12. Bennett interview with Ross-Nazzal, 24; Bennett, ‘‘Apollo 11 LM Descent Postflight Analysis’’; figure 12 seems to show that Armstrong was well outside the abort boundary between 200 and 100 feet. 13.

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The command and service module (CSM) (sometimes simply ‘‘command module’’) was now the mother ship, the capsule and its supplies that would carry the astronauts home. The CSM continued to orbit the moon, with astronaut Michael Collins alone in the capsule. ‘‘Listen, babe,’’ Collins reported to ground controllers at NASA in Houston, ‘‘everything’s going just swimmingly. Beautiful.’’ His two colleagues Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘‘Buzz’’ Aldrin had just separated the other spacecraft, the fragile, spidery lunar module (LM, pronounced ‘‘lem’’), nicknamed Eagle, from the command module. This odd, aluminum balloon, packed with instruments and a few engines, would carry the two men down to the lunar surface. A rocket engine fired to slow the LM, causing it to fall out of orbit.

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 by James Donovan

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, drop ship, Gene Kranz, Hans Lippershey, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, white flight

Early on, Chris Kraft had given serious thought to the historic importance of that first step on the moon—the man who took it would be another Columbus, thought Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. He believed that man should be Neil Armstrong, who, unlike Aldrin, had never petitioned for the privilege. Kraft voiced his concerns first to Slayton, then to George Low, who both agreed with him. Sometime in mid-March, they met with Gilruth in his office. Everyone was aware that Buzz had been lobbying for the honor, and no one was critical of him for that. After some discussion, they made a unanimous decision. Neil Armstrong was their choice. He was the right kind of man to be the first to walk on the moon. Next up was the dry run for the lunar landing, and it had just as many new dangers as the previous flight.

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Hughes, Christopher Kraft, Gene Kranz, and others; author interviews with John Aaron, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Steve Bales, Bob Carlton, Mike Collins, and Jack Garman; Eric Jones’s superb Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal. Seventeen: Moondust “We were lucky”: Vine, “Walking on the Moon.” “Good…good…good”: Houston Chronicle, July 21, 1969. had known about beforehand: Michael Collins interview by Robert Sherrod, Collins autobiographical file, Robert Sherrod Collection, NASA History Office; Hansen, First Man, 488. Armstrong would later express: Hansen, First Man, 494. in front of a TV: Editors of Life, Neil Armstrong, 76. the Apollo 11 crew: Scott et al., Two Sides of the Moon, 245–47.

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A former World War II bomber pilot and test pilot and an original Mercury Seven astronaut, he’d been made chief of NASA’s astronaut office when a minor heart problem grounded him before he had a chance to fly a mission into space. Slayton understood better than anyone that to a certain extent, the men’s fates were in his hands, since he selected the crew for each mission and could make or break their careers. He was scrupulously fair in his choices—for the most part. The men behind the three doors were astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They constituted the crew of the Apollo 11 scheduled for launch that morning. In three hours, they would climb into a small chamber atop the 363-foot, three-stage Saturn V, the most powerful machine ever built, and blast off into space. A few days later, two of them would attempt to do something that had never been done before: pilot a small, fragile craft down to another world, 239,000 miles from Earth, and walk on its surface.

Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure by Dan Parry

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, undersea cable, white flight

The factual drama Moonshot is one of a number of TV shows produced by Dangerous Films focusing on the history of NASA generally and Apollo 11 particularly. Some were completed before the Moonshot project was conceived, but during their production I was enormously privileged to discuss NASA's work with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke, Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, George Mueller and others. Humanity possesses the knowledge and experience to leave our planet at will thanks to the pioneering actions of men such as these, and I remain in awe of their achievements. To those who so patiently helped me with some of the more technical aspects of these achievements, I am grateful.

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Above all, I'd like to give heartfelt thanks to my gracious and loving wife Saira, who I'm sure on occasion felt she'd been whisked off to the Moon and stranded in lunar orbit. And to Yasmin, I'd like to say that 'Ubba's boop' is finally finished. PROLOGUE What would the Moon be like? While this question fascinated those back on Earth, for Neil Armstrong the Moon was playing no more than a supporting role. Here was a chance for man to achieve something beyond comparison. If it were successful, the Apollo 11 mission would demonstrate that humans, as a species, were capable of escaping from their planet and visiting somewhere a world away from home.

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In climbing to 50 miles and above, the X-15 was in effect the first manned sub-orbital spacecraft; three of its pilots reached altitudes that entitled them to receive NASA astronaut wings. At such heights the atmosphere was too thin to have any impact on conventional control surfaces, forcing the pilot to rely on the small rocket boosters and the prototype hand controller that were tested by, among others, Neil Armstrong, one of only 12 men ever to fly the X-15.2 For Neil, it was not so much a love of flying that took hold of him at an early age, more a fascination with the design and construction of aircraft. Armstrong rarely discusses his personal life, but he revealed in his authorised biography3 private details about his childhood, describing how he came to build model aircraft out of straw, paper and wood.

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

“It took them eight days to get there and back.” “Mmm,” I said noncommittally. This made no sense, this claim that three full-grown men had crammed themselves into this container the size of a Volkswagen Beetle’s backseat, even for an hour. This story seemed like a misunderstanding best politely ignored. “Neil Armstrong sat there,” my father said, pointing at the couch at the far left. “Michael Collins sat here. And Buzz Aldrin sat here.” For the rest of my life, the syllables of those three names would call up for me this moment, those couches, that tiny cramped space, the way the capsule, then only ten years old, felt both futuristic and outdated at the same time.

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In the future, fourteen more will die, and the shuttle project will never entirely recover from their deaths. But the plaque knows nothing of all that, and I love it for that reason, for the vigorous simplicity of its language. I love the language of spaceflight: the go and the no-go, the translunar injection burn, the nod and the twang. The names Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The sonorousness of the very acronym NASA. These are the sounds of dreams. Can we who were not there be blamed for wondering whether it was all a dream? The trees rose solid as a rampart, the last boundary of the Earth, and beyond stretched the spaceport for the space flight to the Moon: a silence of sand and water, a handful of islands thrown down by God on the seventh day when He couldn’t think what else to do with them….

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My research was turning into something more like an obsession, and even once my Challenger novel was published, I kept reading, wanting to be able to grasp a historical era that in many ways seemed better than my own. The books that mean the most to me are the firsthand accounts, the people who grapple with what they have seen and experienced, and by doing so take on the emotional meanings of spaceflight. Michael Collins, who went to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, is also a first-rate prose stylist with a natural feel for detail and a light touch with humor; his book sounds a lot like what you would expect if E. B. White had qualified as an astronaut and flown to the moon. Tom Wolfe undertook to grasp the courage of the astronauts and uncovered a brotherhood that is both unprecedented and ageless.

The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon by James Schefter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, Great Leap Forward, Kitchen Debate, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

But it festered until two years later when I was working for both Time and Life magazines and Neil Armstrong banned me from an interview. No way, Armstrong said, was he going to talk to that reporter who got his kicks by telling widows that their husbands were dead. Haney and I went to Slayton, who’d forgotten the unfortunate circumstances. “You’re right,” Slayton said. “It was my fault. I’d never delivered that kind of message and I took my time getting up the courage to go to the house. I’ll talk to Neil.” He did. Neil Armstrong and I made peace. Nothing similar ever recurred. In the wake of Ted Freeman’s death, Slayton set up quick and rigorous procedures to send astronauts to inform and counsel families in the moments after a tragedy.

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Still not a vacuum in here. He waited a few seconds, tried again, and it slowly gave way. “Hatch coming open,” Neil Armstrong said. On Earth, a world of people waited. With a nod to Aldrin and an unseen smile, he turned around, crouched, and began to back out. The porch sloped down just a bit. He reached over to a D-ring, pulled it gently—in the one-sixth gravity of the moon, he had the strength of Samson—and a desklike panel in Eagle’s side came open. There pointing at Neil Armstrong was a black-and-white TV camera. A fuzzy but awesome image appeared on television sets in every part of planet Earth.

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There was this bulky human form in a ballooned white suit, backing down a ladder so very far away. The steps were easy, but the last one was higher than Neil Armstrong expected. He jumped into the big circular dish at the bottom and still hadn’t touched ground. An entire world watched. They listened to him briefly describe what he saw out there on another world. They wished he’d get on with it. “Okay.” His voice was scratchy with distance and static. “I’m going to step off the LM now.” Neil Armstrong put his left foot down into the dust. He felt that the ground was solid underneath. The other foot came down. He took a deep breath and the words he’d written in his mind only minutes before flowed slowly from his mouth and then on to immortal history.

Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Gene Kranz, imposter syndrome, James Webb Space Telescope, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic, Yom Kippur War

All the living legends from the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo programs would be there, including Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. My hero. Everyone’s hero. Our training manager, Paige Maultsby, was the mother hen taking us new kids through the orientation, and she put in a request asking if Neil Armstrong would come and speak to our class. He said that he would, but that he would only speak to us, the new astronauts; he didn’t want some big public event with tons of people showing up. I’d seen Neil Armstrong once before. In 1989, during graduate school, I’d worked as an intern at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and that summer there was a big twentieth-anniversary celebration of the moon landing.

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John Young may have been the only Apollo legend still on the active roster, but all those guys—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell—they were still a part of NASA. Many of them still live in Houston and come by often for business or personal reasons. These guys are our heroes, but there’s this connection that’s passed down with our group. A good story one of my friends tells is that when he got back from space, Armstrong was visiting. Neil stopped to talk to him and said, “You know, I haven’t been up there for a while. Tell me what it’s like these days.” My buddy was like Are you kidding me? This is Neil Armstrong, and he’s asking me about my trip to space.

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He talked to us for about fifteen minutes, and the whole time he didn’t say anything about walking on the moon, not one word about being an astronaut—nothing. Instead he talked about his days as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, flying the X-15, the hypersonic rocket plane that set speed and altitude records in the 1960s by flying 50 miles above the Earth, the outer limit of the atmosphere, the edge of space. That was how Neil Armstrong thought of himself: as a pilot. Not as the first man to walk on the moon, but as a guy who loved to fly cool planes and was grateful for the opportunity to have done it. By focusing on his test pilot days and not on the moon landing, I think he was trying to tell us that life is not about achieving one great thing, because once that thing is over, life keeps going.

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

It was a unified enterprise, a synergy of innovation, effort, and teamwork that was unstoppable to transform a long-held dream into a reality. Buzz Aldrin on Gemini 12 space walk, November 1966 (Illustration Credit 1.7) Eight years after President Kennedy committed us to strive for the impossible, Neil Armstrong and I walked across the sundrenched terrain of the moon. Nearly a billion people all over the world watched and listened as we ventured across that magnificent desolation. With Mike Collins circling above us, and even though we were farther away from our planet than any three humans had ever been, we felt connected to home.

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These bold journeys of exploration will require determination, support, and political will—as did our mission to the moon over four decades ago. If we have the vision, we can reach these destinations on the pathway to Mars within the next two decades. And if we persevere on this path, we can reach out some 200 million miles to Mars before 2035—66 years after Neil Armstrong and I flew the quarter-million miles through the blackness of space to touch down onto Tranquillity Base. There’s a historical milestone in the fact that our Apollo 11 landing on the moon took place a mere 66 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight. But to realize the dream of humans on Mars, we need a unified vision.

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One thing to keep in mind: President Kennedy said send a man to the moon and bring him back safely—a man. We could have satisfied that goal by having a person land on the lunar surface, look out the window, maybe deploy a robot, but not open the hatch to the environment. Instead, we chose to have two astronauts moonwalk because of the buddy system. Thanks to that decision, Neil Armstrong and I stood on the shores of an inhospitable, desolate yet magnificent landscape. Looking at Earth from that perspective, everything I knew and loved lay suspended overhead, residing on a small, fragile, bright blue sphere engulfed by the blackness of space. What I didn’t anticipate until my return to Earth is that America’s success in achieving the first landing of humans on the moon was viewed as a success for all humankind.

Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Lynn Ross, John Norberg

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, glass ceiling, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, space junk, Ted Sorensen

It was unusually quiet; there was nobody else there. From around a corner, dressed in tuxedos, appeared Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan. Simultaneously they saw us, raised their arms, waved, and called out, “Hey, Jerry, how are you doing?” For Karen and me to be back on campus at our alma mater and have two of my heroes—fellow Purdue alumni and the first and the last men to walk on the Moon—instantly recognize me and greet us in such a fashion was a special moment we will never forget! Neil Armstrong is a class act. He is an unassuming, soft-spoken, thinking man, who almost seems shy until one spends some time with him.

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I see no benefit in sending people to an asteroid. It’s not a good idea. In my opinion, it would be a waste of money and time. Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Gene Cernan testified to Congress against the Obama administration proposal to cancel the Constellation program. All of us in the Astronaut Office were cheering for them when they spoke. They spoke for us. In response to a question of what he believed the US spaceflight priorities ought to be, Neil Armstrong responded: 1. Maintain US leadership in space 2. Guarantee US access to space 3. Continue to explore the solar system I couldn’t agree more!

…

advance reading copy ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SPACEWALKER “Spacewalker is the book for anyone who ever dreamed of flying in space.” –Neil ArmStroNg, Commander of Apollo 11 “this is the story of one man’s lifelong quest to explore the unknown, overcome setbacks and obstacles, and keep the beacon of space shining in the hearts of all people, young and old. this book is about an American Dream.” –eugeNe CerNAN, NASA gemini and Apollo astronaut “this book is the story of a common man from the midwest who became an American hero . . . a model for the youth of our nation and for those who will accept the challenge to follow in his footsteps.”

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space by Eugene Cernan, Donald A. Davis

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, full employment, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, Teledyne, white flight

One of Smitty’s best friends from New Trier was Jan Sharon, who happened to be the girlfriend of one such former serviceman. This fellow was a year ahead of our class, and so modest that you would never know he had flown seventy-eight missions in Panther jets off the aircraft carrier Essex and won three air medals. His name was Neil Armstrong. Years later, when Neil was a top test pilot for the experimental X-15 rocket plane at Edwards Air Force Base, Smitty dropped by for a visit and soon found himself beneath the house with the quiet aviator, wrapping pipes with insulation tape. Smitty, by then an aeronautical engineer, was naturally curious about the plane, which was the hottest thing in American skies, and asked, “So, Neil, you’re flying the X-15 now?”

…

“Hell, yes, I would,” I replied, then reality set in. I was still too young, and not yet close to having the necessary experience. We thought little more about it. My feelings of not yet being qualified for such an assignment were confirmed in September 1962, when the second bunch of astronauts was chosen—civilians Neil Armstrong and Elliot See, Air Force pilots Frank Borman, Jim McDivitt, Tom Stafford and Ed White, and Naval aviators Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell and John Young. I noticed the selection criteria had changed slightly, and that NASA now wanted fliers who were under thirty-five years of age, held at least a bachelor’s degree in a physical or biological science or engineering, had test pilot experience, graduated from a military test pilot school or had equivalent credentials.

…

So the Seven really were only four, which loosened things up slightly for future seat assignments, but not much. No seats would be coming to any members of my group for a long time. The entire Next Nine stood between the Original Seven and us. MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE SOME master personnel plan was behind the selection of Neil Armstrong to be the first astronaut to walk on the Moon. It isn’t true, and the saga of Al Shepard explains why. Shepard, just as he had been in the Mercury program, was first in line for a Gemini flight, where he was to be paired with Tom Stafford, from the Next Nine. In the middle of 1963, before the assignment became official, Shepard experienced some dizziness and doctors reached a tentative diagnosis of an inner ear problem known as Meniere’s disease, and temporarily grounded him.

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon by Colin Burgess, Kate Doolan

Apollo 11, Charles Lindbergh, Ferguson, Missouri, Gene Kranz, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, profit motive, Ronald Reagan

The flight of Apollo 11 stands as one of the greatest achievements in human history and fulfilled the pledge made by President Kennedy back in 1961 to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth. Launched on 16 July 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins flew to the moon aboard Command Module Columbia. Armstrong and Aldrin then transferred to Lunar Module Eagle for the final descent to the moon, and on 20 July Neil Armstrong became the first person to ever set foot on another world. Watched by hundreds of millions of people back on Earth, Armstrong planted his booted left foot in the lunar soil and proudly stated, "That's one small step for a man—one giant leap for mankind."

…

This is a book about some extraordinary men I worked with in accomplishing that lunar triumph. Most were my good friends as well as colleagues but tragically they fell short of their dreams. In eight years we went from blasting a man into space on a quick ballistic flight to that incredible day in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong first set foot on another world. For each of those eight years we lost an astronaut, but the tremendous pain of this loss could not be sustained for long in our nation's race to the moon. Mission followed hard on the heels of mission, and our training took place at breakneck speed as engineers and planners worked with diligence and inspiration to achieve our goal of a manned lunar landing.

…

Heartfelt thanks to my friends Geoff Allshorn, Judy Brewer-Fischer, Nigel Denning, Mark Hillyer, Helen Hodgman, Therese Power Rsm, Ian Whalley, and the remarkable Sister Gerardine Cooney for their ongoing assistance, friendship, and encouragement. Further sincere thanks go to Apollo-era astronauts Neil Armstrong, David Scott, Tom Stafford, Michael Collins, Wally Schirra, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell, Vance Brand, Jerry Carr, Don Lind, and Gene Cernan, and to an astronaut friend from today's shuttle program, Timothy ("T.") Creamer, for his special insights into flight procedures. We must also thank noted spaceflight author Michael Cassutt, Simon Vaughan, Francis French, and fellow Australian space enthusiasts Justin Wigg and David Sander for their perusal of the draft manuscript and their incisive, helpful comments and corrections.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

SOME FIFTY YEARS after the advent of the Space Age, no one ever had flown a rocket past the edge of space and landed it vertically. Now, it had been performed twice in less than a month. For generations, spaceflight had been celebrated largely for the takeoffs. But the landings were reminiscent of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s touching down on the surface of the moon in the lunar module. Or the “seven-minutes of terror” landing of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The sight of the boosters standing on terra firma, scorched but triumphant, portended a sense of arrival, and offered hope for another Apollo 11 moment, the next giant leap many had felt they were promised but had never come.

…

“NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA,” he wrote. “The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five year olds?” Bezos was five when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969. FOR A WHILE, the company’s only employee was Bezos’s friend Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author. They had met in the mid-1990s at a dinner party, where they had started talking about rockets. While the pair may have “bored everyone else at the table,” Stephenson said, they hit it off.

…

Mike Bezos adopted him and raised him as his own. Gise made Jorgensen promise to stay away. “I’ve never been curious about him,” Bezos told Time about his biological father. “My real father is the guy who raised me.” Bezos’s passion for space started when he was five years old on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. As young as he was, he could tell he was watching something historic. “It really was a seminal moment for me,” he said. “I remember watching it on our living room TV, and the excitement of my parents and my grandparents. Little kids can pick up that kind of excitement.

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, private spaceflight, Skype

Neil Hutchinson, Gene Kranz, and Gerry Griffin 23. Apollo 17 Lunar Module Challenger lifts off of the lunar surface 24. Jay Greene following the breakup of the Space Shuttle Challenger 25. Marianne Dyson 26. 2005 NASA flight director class Foreword 20 July 1969—The Eagle had landed, and Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin were now preparing for man’s first walk on the moon. In contrast to the intense drama that played out earlier in the day, activities in mission control had settled down, and my fellow mission controllers were starting to relax, at least a little. What a day!

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Although John Aaron very nearly left the agency early in his career, he went on to become one of the most capable flight controllers ever to sit a MOCR console. Courtesy NASA. However, today was to be no simulation. This was the real deal. Two months earlier, Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan performed a powered descent to within nine miles of the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were going to try to go the rest of the way and settle the Eagle spacecraft down on the dusty plains of the Sea of Tranquility. And sure enough, following a nail-biting, drama-saturated, should-we-keep-going powered descent to the surface, it actually happened at just past 3:17 p.m.

…

My friend Milt Heflin was a step or two ahead of me and entered before I did, and I was glad of that. I was embarrassed to be standing there like that, but I could not help it. There was the Trench, and just above it a row of systems consoles. Just across the aisle from the EECOM console on the second row was the capcom station, where Charlie Duke sat as he helped talk Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the lunar surface. Up a row was the throne itself, the flight director’s console. Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, Gerry Griffin, and Milt had all held court there once upon a time. Amazing. It was in those few moments when the concept for this book was born. Countless stories about human spaceflight have been told from the air-to-ground perspective, that is, mostly from the viewpoint of the astronauts whose flights this room controlled.

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

I think we got a real good crew.”169 In addition to getting a really good crew, they got a great commander in Neil Armstrong. Low’s experience with Armstrong extended from first meeting him at NACA Lewis to going with him and Dick Gordon on their South American tour during the Gemini program. He was impressed with Armstrong’s cool handling of his near-fatal Gemini flight. He also watched and studied Armstrong throughout his training and preparation for flight. To say he was impressed with Armstrong’s capabilities would be an understatement. He could think of no one better not only to command the mission but also to be the first man to walk on the moon. “Neil Armstrong had the same qualities as George Low,” Gerry Griffin recalled, comparing both men and noting the admiration each had for the other.

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George and I would become even closer later in our careers, but I could tell from those early interactions at JSC that he was a special talent and a special person. He was one of my all-time favorites—an inspirational leader, a terrific boss, and an overall great guy. In many ways, George’s style reminded me of another NASA legend—Neil Armstrong. Both were not big talkers, but whenever they spoke, everyone in the room got quiet and listened. George had a unique ability to get everyone’s input, instantly synthesize and summarize all he heard, and then quickly make a decision. We trusted his decisions. George was a stabilizing force in almost everything we did, especially during the chaotic time right after the Apollo 1 fire.

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Recognized by Silverstein and other leaders at Lewis for his natural ability to manage and motivate people, as well as his creative intellect and meticulous attention to detail, Low advanced rapidly. In short order, Low became head of the Fluid Mechanics Division from 1954 to 1956 and then chief of the Special Projects Branch from 1956 to 1958. Given the focus on X-15 rocket plane research, Neil Armstrong spent five months as a test pilot at the NACA Lewis in 1955, during the middle period of Low’s tenure at the facility.61 Like Low, Armstrong was studying high-Mach heat-transfer issues. While they didn’t get to know each other very well at the time, their paths did occasionally cross.62 “The only product of the NACA was research reports and papers,” Armstrong said, describing the environment in which they both worked at Lewis.63 “When you prepared something for publication, you had to face the technical and grammatical ‘Inquisition.’

Speed by Bob Gilliland, Keith Dunnavant

Airbus A320, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, US Airways Flight 1549, work culture

Son Robert Jr. and daughter Anne were shaped by their father’s high expectations. Courtesy of Gilliland family. 17. & 18. On the Legends of Aerospace Tour in 2010, Bob joined fellow aviators Steve Ritchie, Jim Lovell, Neil Armstrong, and Gene Cernan. Courtesy of Thomas M. Lee. 19. During a memorable dinner in London, Gilliland (second from left) chatted with speed-record holder Andrew Green, legendary test pilot Eric Brown, and Neil Armstrong. Courtesy of Thomas M. Lee.

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The Blackbird 13. Vice President Hubert Humphrey with the Blackbird 14. Bob with the Blackbird 15. Bob speaking at the National Aviation Hall of Fame 16. Bob with his son, Robert Jr., and daughter, Anne 17. & 18. Bob on the Legends of Aerospace Tour in 2010 19. Bob with Andrew Green, Eric Brown, and Neil Armstrong Foreword Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger Over the last century, thanks to the work of some very dedicated and gifted professionals who learned to harness the wonders of science, air travel has evolved from risky to routine. Most of the passengers who regularly cruise from city to city at 600 miles per hour, six miles above the earth, do so with a confidence approaching certitude.

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Soon after his death, the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) began presenting the Iven C. Kincheloe Award for “the most proficient test work” conducted during the previous year. It became one of the most coveted honors in the aviation industry. The winners of the prestigious trophy have included John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Scott Crossfield, and Dick Rutan. On a memorable night in 1964, during a black-tie dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel attended by the aerospace elite, Joe Tymczyszyn, president of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, stepped to the podium, alongside Dorothy Kincheloe, the pilot’s widow.

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969 by Francis French, Colin Burgess, Walter Cunningham

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, lost cosmonauts, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne, X Prize

Edgar Allen Poe, Eldorado Illustrations Foreword Thirty years ago, when I was identified as an astronaut, as often as not the first question I was asked was, “Which one are you?” I was asked that question hundreds of times but was only quick enough to come up with the best answer one time: “I’m this one!” Today, the same situation elicits “Did you fly in space?” and “What was your mission?” This happens because, except for John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and one or two others, the public sees us as generic heroes—a Mark IV, Mod 3 Astronaut. The media made us heroes at a time when we did not take ourselves all that seriously. When I was selected to be a NASA astronaut in late 1963, it was still the early days of spaceflight. Like it or not, we were instant celebrities or, more accurately, a celebrity’s celebrity.

…

Scott had concentrated on spacecraft guidance and navigation during his training, which fit the Gemini 8 mission objectives perfectly. Indeed, Mike Collins later wrote that seeing Scott picked first reassured him that nasa knew what it was doing. Commanding the mission would be another space rookie—Group 2 astronaut Neil Armstrong. Armstrong was the last of his selection group to be given a prime crew flight assignment. He had in fact been waiting so long that he was now commanding a member of the next group. Although Scott found Armstrong “a taskmaster” at times, the two had a great mutual respect and worked well together.

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This meant that he would neither fly Gemini again nor be immediately available for an early Apollo crew. If it had not been for a lengthy delay in the Apollo program due to the death of some of his colleagues, it is possible that he would have been waiting for a second flight for quite some time. As it was, Neil Armstrong would ultimately do very well with his next, and last, prime crew flight assignment. 3. The Ballet of Weightlessness No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience. John Locke It had taken eight Gemini missions to achieve, but it seemed that rendezvous and docking was now, if not perfected, at least understood.

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

Scores of protesters lined the Kennedy Space Center’s surrounding causeways that day, wielding placards that pleaded with the president not to destroy NASA. In the weeks to follow, many people—including marquee astronauts—felt compelled to choose sides. Two moonwalkers sharply critical of Obama’s plan to cancel the return to the Moon testified before Congress: Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11 and Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17, poignantly presented as the first and the last to step foot on the Moon. On the other hand, Neil Armstrong’s command-module partner Buzz Aldrin was strongly supportive of Obama’s plan and had accompanied the president to Florida aboard Air Force One. Either Obama had given two different speeches at the Kennedy Space Center that morning and I heard only one of them, or else everyone in the room (myself included, perhaps) was suffering from a bad case of selective hearing.

…

He didn’t hesitate to announce how much money he wanted for the space budget— “fifty cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority”—but then justified that generous funding by presenting a vivid picture of the outcome he envisioned: But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the Moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than three hundred feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the Sun . . . and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold. Who could remain uninspired by such words! Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, was part of NASA long before NASA formally existed. He was a naval aviator, the youngest pilot in his squadron. He flew seventy-eight combat missions during the Korean War. Neil Armstrong is someone with firsthand experience of the Moon, someone who’s had both a bird’s-eye view and a moonwalker’s view of the Sea of Tranquillity. Some people seem to believe that we just strap the astronauts to a rocket and fire them to the Moon.

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Republican president Richard M. Nixon’s signature is on the plaque left on the Moon in 1969 by the Apollo 11 astronauts. And maybe it’s just coincidence, but twenty-four astronauts hail from the swing state of Ohio—more than from any other state—including John Glenn (America’s first to orbit Earth) and Neil Armstrong (the world’s first to walk on the Moon). If partisan politics ever leaked into NASA’s activities, it tended to appear on the fringes of operations. For example, President Nixon could, in principle, have dispatched the newly commissioned USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier to pluck the Apollo 11 command module from the Pacific Ocean.

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

Finally, in the fall of 1962—eighteen months after he first put his name in the hat—Borman became one of the agency’s nine new astronauts, selected from America’s best to go where mankind had only dreamed of going. * * * — NASA introduced its second group of astronauts to the public at the University of Houston on September 17, 1962. Soon to be dubbed the New Nine by the press, they included James Lovell and Neil Armstrong. All nine had been test pilots and had studied aeronautical engineering. All were married and had children. From the moment he stood beside these men, Borman could tell he was among a rare group, talented and competitive beyond any he’d met. The new astronauts became instant celebrities. As with the Original Seven, each received a contract with Life magazine and Field Enterprises that paid him $16,000 a year for exclusive access to his and his family’s personal stories.

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Even the violent pogo problem seemed to have been tamed. Pending a few final checkouts, the rocket looked ready to launch three astronauts to the Moon. The crew of Apollo 8 spent much of the next day, September 18, in the command module simulator in Florida. They were joined, as they often would be during training, by their backup crew, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Fred Haise. By Slayton’s assignment scheme, backup crews became primary crews three flights later. That meant Armstrong, Aldrin, and Haise would be prime crew for Apollo 11. Late that night, while the astronauts slept, the famed British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell (no relation to Jim Lovell) reported that a massive radio telescope in England had tracked a Soviet spacecraft (Zond 5) as it passed within a thousand miles of the Moon.

…

“We have serious problems here. We’re—we’re tumbling end over end up here.” The spacecraft was rolling violently out of control while in orbit around Earth. Suddenly NASA was face-to-face with disaster. While Anders calmly relayed information from Mission Control and reassured the astronauts, commander Neil Armstrong battled to regain control of the ship by using the craft’s reentry thrusters. Several agonizing minutes later, Gemini 8 had been steadied. The mission was terminated early and the crew survived. Anders didn’t think he’d done anything special; he’d just stayed cool under pressure, and it was Scott and Armstrong who deserved credit for a terrific save.

Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

Schmitt APPENDIX Lunar Exploration Time Line Acknowledgments Further Reading Photo Credits About the Author FOREWORD LET’S GET OUR GLOBAL SPACE ACT TOGETHER BY BUZZ ALDRIN LUNAR MODULE PILOT, APOLLO 11 FIFTY YEARS AGO, ON JULY 20, 1969, I know exactly where I was standing. I was well suited for where I was, but without a tie. On the Moon, my get-down-to-business attire weighed 180 pounds. After stepping down from the Eagle lander, I stood there with my fellow space traveler, Neil Armstrong. High above the barren lunar scenery that I viewed as “magnificent desolation” was our Apollo 11 partner, Mike Collins, orbiting the Moon. America’s Apollo program was an impressive team effort. It drew upon the talents of thousands and thousands of individuals who came together to make real a vision.

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In the meantime, private aerospace groups are hyping tourist flights around the Moon, quick package delivery to the Moon’s surface, and lunar modules, including inflatable pop-up living quarters, to form a Moon base. Consider this futuristic outlook. If preservation advocates are successful, the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base touchdown zone where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed 50 years ago could become the number one tourist hot spot, a mecca for rubbernecking, camera-toting visitors. Encompassed within a large transparent protective dome, onlookers would take in the celebrated landing site, gaze upon still visible footprints stamped in the lunar dust, and witness hardware left behind from that first human sortie to the Moon in July 1969.

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The voyage from Earth was the culmination of a bold, risky gambit—shouldered by some 400,000 people who banded together to make real a vision. It was a unified enterprise, a mix of government, industry, and academic wherewithal that transformed a long-held dream into reality. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. Apollo 11 colleague, Mike Collins, remained in lunar orbit to receive the Moon visitors returning after their brief but history-making stopover on the uninviting lunar land. He watched from the command module as the Eagle began its traverse to the Moon’s terrain and would later recall that the lunar lander was the weirdest looking contraption he had ever seen in the sky.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, the medium is the message

The directions we will follow remain unknown, but books such as this by Michael Collins stimulate the mind, enhance awareness, and assist us on our way. PREFACE TO THE 2019 EDITION I guess another decade must find me ten years older but I don’t feel that way, although some sad things have happened. Old friends, John Young and Neil Armstrong, have died, and my life has changed with the death of my wife, Patricia Mary Finnegan Collins, after fifty-seven years of marriage. I miss her dearly and daily. My beautiful and competent daughters, Kate and Ann, help me fill the void. I still live and fish near Florida’s Everglades. I have hated the word octogenarian, but as I look at age ninety in 2020, it doesn’t sound too bad.

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I fear this complication would run into its own snags and delays, costs would escalate, and the schedule would dissolve into “Yes, of course we are going to Mars, but first we have to fix the lunar_____.” Not direct, not simple. Sometimes, in space planning, it costs less in the long run to go all-out in the first place. On the other hand, Neil Armstrong thought it was wiser to first fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge, and a lunar base could do that. Neil was a much better engineer than I, and I concede he was probably right in this case. Perhaps the fact that I would gladly bypass the moon makes me confess that I don’t think it too homey a place.

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(No one, not even a celebrity, talks about the national debt.) But please, don’t invite me to your celebrity golf tournament. Okay, okay, let’s press on (a favorite astronaut saying). The last forty years have worked out well for me. On my tombstone should be inscribed LUCKY because that is the overriding feeling I have today. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, Buzz Aldrin in 1930, Mike Collins in 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. I used to imagine a gigantic grandfather clock in the sky, its pendulum stuck over to the left in the “too young” position—you couldn’t drink, drive, make money, or do anything really interesting.

Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, company town, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, trade route, white flight

By 1970, the United States had been flying in space for nine years, and while Americans had developed a fondness for their spacecraft and their astronauts, they had come to expect the missions to turn out one way: successfully. Oh sure, there had been that nasty bit of business back in 1961 when Gus Grissom’s Mercury 7 capsule sank in the Atlantic the moment after it splashed down. There had been that hair-raising time five years later when Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott’s Gemini 8 suddenly began pinwheeling in Earth orbit, requiring the crew to slam on the brakes and return home just ten hours into a flight that was supposed to have lasted five days. But while Gus and Neil and Dave might have known the kind of deadly mess they were in, the public—to NASA’s relief—never fully grasped it, figuring that as long as the boys got into space and came down all right, any minor scrapes they had before their feet hit the carrier deck didn’t amount to much.

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Like no other newsman before him, Bergman had made it his business to learn the ways of space flight, getting himself spun in centrifuges, lofted in zero-g aircraft, and set adrift in splashdown rafts, all in the service of better understanding the tightrope the pilots walked so he could better explain it to the public that paid the bills. The problem was, these days the public didn’t seem to want the explanations. This wasn’t Shepard’s Freedom 7 or Glenn’s Friendship 7 anymore, and it certainly wasn’t Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11—the magnificent mission that just nine months earlier had made the first landing on the surface of the moon. This was Apollo 13, the third such landing, and by the spring of 1970, both the network and the country it reported to were bored. What ABC was showing instead of the late-breaking moon news was The Dick Cavett Show.

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This provision guaranteed that any astronauts or cosmonauts who veered off course and splashed down in a hostile ocean or thumped down in a hostile wheat field would not be scooped up and carted off by security forces of the violated country. Rather, they would be treated as “envoys of mankind,” to be “safely and promptly returned to the state of registry of their space vehicle.” In picking the astronaut delegation tonight, NASA had chosen carefully. In addition to Lovell, who had flown twice in the Gemini program, was Neil Armstrong, a veteran NASA test pilot, whose sole Gemini flight, Gemini 8, had ended in near disaster ten months earlier when one of his thrusters suddenly went south on him, causing his ship to begin spinning at a stomach-knotting 500 r.p.m. and forcing flight controllers to abort the mission and bring him down in the first ocean or sea or duck pond they could find.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

She had never seen the video. He hit pause. “Is this emotional for you?” he asked, sounding sharper than he intended. “It’s okay,” she replied. They didn’t discuss the dangers of his job much. Death was one of those things test pilots didn’t like to ponder. It was “an unpleasant thing to think about,” Neil Armstrong said before he went to the moon. But Stucky didn’t sugarcoat it: he was a test pilot for an experimental rocket ship program, a tremendously risky endeavor. Four men had already died for the cause, including Stucky’s best friend. “A Marine Corps colonel once told me, ‘If you want to be safe, go be a shoe salesman at Sears,’” said Stucky.

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Stucky insisted that it was always slow, but the medics wanted to wait before clearing him for flight school. Stucky took advantage of the downtime. He flew his hang glider and read a lot of books, including one by Michael Collins, the third and often forgotten member of the Apollo 11 crew. Stucky appreciated Collins’s sense of humor; when asked how he felt on the dark side of the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were making cosmic history, Collins joked, “I just kept reminding myself that every single component in this spacecraft was provided by the guy who submitted the cheapest tender.” The book convinced Stucky that it was possible to be an astronaut without becoming insufferable. Eventually the doctors agreed that Stucky’s heart just beat slow.

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A football coach had fragile egos to protect, while Moses had to worry about corporate secrets and all the risks that came with allowing an outsider access to inside information. Frankly, letting a reporter embed with a high-performance flight-test program was unheard-of. “Keep that man away,” Neil Armstrong once said about a journalist. “He’s a ghoul.” But Moses had been around long enough to trust his own instincts. “My calling card was built long before I got here,” he would say. Until now, most of Virgin’s PR pushed glitz and celebrity. But Moses had techs and engineers and pilots with greasy hands and heavy hearts working overtime in the middle of nowhere, trying to do something no one had ever done before, and that was worthy of documentation, he thought.

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey by Fred Haise, Bill Moore

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, Gene Kranz, ice-free Arctic, index card, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, panic early, Strategic Defense Initiative, two and twenty, women in the workforce

NASA Lewis had been the starting point for several other pilots who I joined up with later in my career. Joe Vensel, Joe Walker, Neil Armstrong, and Warren North all had transferred to other NASA centers from Lewis. When I later transferred to the NASA Flight Research Center, Joe Vensel was head of Flight Operations and Joe Walker was my boss in the Pilot’s Office. When I joined the Astronaut Office at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), which is now known as the Johnson Space Center (JSC), Warren North headed the Crew Training and Procedures Division, and Joe Algranti headed the Aircraft Operations Division. I served on the backup crew with Neil Armstrong for the Apollo 8 Mission and as the backup lunar module (LM) pilot for his Apollo 11 Mission.

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There were a series of lake beds we used for emergency landings, including Cuddeback, Three Sisters, Hidden Hills, Mud, Delamar, Smith, and Rogers (the launch and recovery lake bed). For the lake bed checks, the aircraft of choice was the C-47, because of its large tire footprint. The dry lakes could be deceiving because though appearing to be dry, they were sometimes wet. That was the case when Neil Armstrong and Chuck Yeager were checking out Mud Lake, Nevada, in a T-33A. Against Chuck’s advice, Neil attempted a touch-and-go landing, but the aircraft’s tires got stuck in the mud, which is where they were mired until a pickup came to the rescue. If the lake beds could talk, they would tell of a number of unplanned X-15 landings by Scott Crossfield at Rosamond, Jack McKay at Mud Lake, and Milt Thompson at Cuddeback.

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Milt Thompson and Bruce Peterson flew evaluation and training flights for their upcoming M2F2 flights, launching from the B-52 aircraft. * * * — Astronaut selection had progressed at NASA. In 1959, Group One, as the original seven Mercury astronauts were known, was chosen. In 1962, the New Nine were added to help get us to the Moon. Fourteen more were chosen in 1963 and, in 1965, six scientists were added. One day, Neil Armstrong visited the Flight Research Center after leaving that assignment for the Astronaut Office. My friend Don Mallick asked him what it was like being an astronaut. Neil’s answer was, “It’s a lot of meetings, with a lot of time sitting in simulators, and not much good flying.” I evaluated my situation.

Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic of the Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic by James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Neil Armstrong, Skype, social distancing, UNCLOS

Not just any song, but a powerful elegiac hymn to which I was introduced during the preproduction of the 2018 motion picture First Man, the story of Neil Armstrong, based on my 2005 biography of the same title. The song “Ocean Cloud” by the British neo-progressive rock group Marillion had nothing to do with the film, but its filming by Universal Pictures and director Damien Chazelle was indirectly responsible for the song coming to my attention. For with me consulting on the making of First Man was Neil Armstrong’s eldest son, Rick Armstrong, whom I had met and interviewed for my book about his father some 15 years earlier, but I had not chatted with him about our love of music.

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Naturally, besides the ORSI website, I found numerous articles on the World Wide Web about both of my men, including news articles, feature stories, a few interviews and video clips, and obituaries (in the case of Fairfax, as he had died in February 2012, five months before Neil Armstrong passed away). My research materials were quickly building up. But I needed to go to the source. As I knew from writing the Neil Armstrong biography and many of my other book projects over the years, it was essential to include firsthand personal testimony; in other words, oral history through one-on-one interviews directly with the historical actors was vital to accuracy, filling in unrecorded details, and adding color, tone, and vibrancy.

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And that you arrived at your destination quite near the time that we reached ours. Yours, however, was the accomplishment of one resourceful individual, while ours depended upon the help of thousands of dedicated workers in the United States and all over the world. As fellow explorers, we salute you on this great occasion. The Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong Michael Collins Edwin A Aldrin Jr. —Telegram from the Apollo 11 astronauts in quarantine inside the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, to ocean rower John Fairfax, July 30, 1969 “More than twice as many people have walked on the Moon as have soloed the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat.”

After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program by John M. Logsdon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, general purpose technology, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Teledyne

Letter from President Richard Nixon to Archibald MacLeish, July 1, 1969, Outer Space-3 File, RNPL; Safire, Before the Fall, 147–148. 14. Memorandum from Dwight Chapin to H. R. Haldeman, “Apollo 11,” June 16, 1969, Outer Space-3 File, R NPL; letter from Richard Nixon to Neil Armstrong, June 25, 1969, Box 1, Federal Government 164 Files, R NPL. Although Armstrong was a civilian who had resigned from the Navy in 1952, the letter was addressed to Commander Neil Armstrong, USN. 15. Memorandum from Dwight Chapin to H. R. Haldeman, “Status Report on Apollo 11 Project,” July 1, 1969, Outer Space-3 File, RNPL; William Safire, “Of Nixon, Kennedy and Shooting the Moon,” The New York Times, July 17, 1989, A17; memorandum from Jim Keogh (one of Nixon’s speechwriters) to the President, June 16, 1969, Outer Space-3 File, RNPL; Safire, Before the Fall, 144–145. 16.

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Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 2–3; Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 349; telegram from Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin to the President, July 9, 1969, Papers of Spiro T. Agnew, University of Maryland Library, College Park, MD; telegram from the President to Commander Neil Armstrong and the Apollo XI Astronauts, July 15, 1969, Outer Space-3 File, RNPL. 18. I am grateful to former George Washington University graduate student Steve Wolfe for first bringing this episode to my attention.

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I am sure that many people will not agree with my assessment of the Nixon space heritage, especially with respect to the space shuttle, and my characterization of the recent and current state of the U.S. space program. After a career devoted to that program, I regret that my conclusions are so downbeat. I can only remain hopeful that better days are ahead. John M. L ogsdon January 2015 Overture On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong took “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” as he became the first human to set foot on the Moon. The success of the Apollo 11 mission satisfied the goal that had been set by President John F. Kennedy just over eight years earlier—“before this decade is out, landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”1 Inevitably, it also raised the question “What do you do next, after landing on the Moon?”

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

After this, he entered private practice, but, as he put it, “I had a couple of acquaintances at the Johnson Space Center who pestered me to come and visit them. And after five years of private practice, doing occupational medicine—which is a little more mundane—I went and visited JSC and I saw a picture from the moon showing the Earthrise that was signed by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins. I said, ‘You mean I could meet Neil Armstrong?’ and they said yes. Well, that just lit my fire, and here I am.”35 As a part of this elite cadre of about twenty NASA space doctors, and as the former president of the Space Medicine Association, he is in a unique position to observe and evaluate the effects of extended weightlessness on the human body, as well as the effects of recirculated air, a restricted diet, and levels of radiation that, while lower than those experienced in deep space, are still much higher than we receive on Earth.

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LIST OF INTERVIEWEES Michael Alegria-Lopez Chad Anderson Alfred Anzaldua Howard Bloom Tory Bruno Franklin Chang-Díaz Tim Cichan Leonard David Jason Dunn Pascale Ehrenfreund Charles Elachi Bill Gerstenmaier Jeff Greason Lori Garver Mark Hopkins Hiro Iwamoto Steve Jurvetson Jim Keravala Pascal Lee David Livingston Robert Meyerson Scott Pace Bruce Pittman Stan Rosen Gwynne Shotwell Dale Skran Bill Tarver Rick Tumlinson Jakob van Zyl George Whitesides Robert Zubrin NOTES CHAPTER 1: SPACE 1.0, THE FINAL ACT 1Open letter from Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan to President Obama, published April 15, 2010. Retrieved from Guardian online on August 7, 2017. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/15/obama-nasa-space-neil-armstrong. 2O’Kane, Sean. “NASA buys two more seats to the International Space Station on Russia’s Soyuz rocket.” The Verge, February 28, 2017. www.theverge.com/2017/2/28/14761058/nasa-russia-spacex-soyuz-seats-contract-space-station-iss.

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Chapter 9 A New Space Race Chapter 10 Investing in Space Chapter 11 The Space Between Nations Chapter 12 The Russian Juggernaut Chapter 13 The China Wildcard Chapter 14 Truck Stops in Space Chapter 15 Defending Earth Chapter 16 Settling the Final Frontier Chapter 17 A New Age Dawns Chapter 18 Your Place in Space 2.0 Acknowledgments Special Thanks To Notes Glossary Index About the Author Join the National Space Society Image credit: James Vaughan FOREWORD About a half century ago, in July of 1969, I participated in a great adventure that was the culmination of the first space age—the first humans to land on the moon. As Neil Armstrong and I climbed down to the desolate expanse of the Sea of Tranquility, with our crewmate Mike Collins orbiting overhead, we were cognizant of the vast, organized effort by an entire nation that delivered us safely to that distant body. Five more landings followed, and just three short years later, the Apollo lunar landing program came to an end.

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster by Allan J McDonald, James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, flying shuttle, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway

“In other words, you accepted the recommendation of no-launch that was made by your company?” “That is correct.” Vice Chairman Neil Armstrong followed up. “Would you be surprised, Mr. McDonald, if your comments were interpreted by both your own company personnel and by Marshall personnel as being supportive of the Marshall position?” “Yes, I would be surprised at that. I wouldn't be surprised that that would be evaluated as the effect of that, but I would be surprised that it was interpreted as supporting a launch.” What I couldn't tell Neil Armstrong was that I wasn't at all surprised that the Commission had heard this interpretation from some of its witnesses, because it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that both Morton Thiokol and NASA management were trying to find any shred of evidence they could to support a launch decision and discredit my earlier testimony before the Commission.

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As this final testimony was being given, I was in an airplane returning home from Washington. While in the air, I wrote a series of thank-you notes to various members of the Presidential Commission who had supported me. The next day I mailed them to Chairman William Rogers, Vice-Chairman Neil Armstrong, Dr. Sally Ride, and General Don Kutyna. A short time later I received two autographed photos from Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong. Sally thanked me for the help I had provided the Commission, and Neil sent me a picture he had taken of Buzz Aldrin standing next to the flag on the Moon. Previously, at the end of the Presidential Commission's hearings, I had asked Neil to autograph one of my business cards for each of my children, and he had graciously done so.

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Armstrong (Simon & Schuster, 2005). The book, which had just been released and had already become a New York Times bestseller, was the authorized biography of professor, engineer, test pilot, and astronaut Neil Armstrong. Its author was Dr. James R. Hansen, a professor of history at Auburn University in Alabama and a former NASA historian. I read the book over the holidays and thoroughly enjoyed it. Neil Armstrong had been the Vice-Chairman of the Presidential Commission on the Challenger accident and later became a member of the board of directors of Thiokol. Since I had appeared before the Presidential Commission on five different occasions, I felt like I really knew him.

Amazing Stories of the Space Age by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, centre right, desegregation, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic

Other parts of the project, such as using the AMU or Gemini capsule to maneuver close in to a Soviet satellite or manned spacecraft, turned out to be unnecessary. In the end, the air force met most of its important goals in space with robotic spy satellites, and NASA flew ten manned Gemini flights and met its own goals on the march to a lunar landing. The right people did the right jobs after all. UNCLASSIFIED Neil Armstrong was in a cold sweat, using every bit of skill he had honed as a test pilot in some of the most dangerous planes ever designed. Dave Scott, sitting only inches away in Gemini 8's right-hand seat, was scanning the instrument panel furiously, looking for a clue…any clue. As Armstrong continued to struggle with the thruster handle in his left hand, firing this way, then that, he was simultaneously compiling a list of what he'd tried to arrest the motions of the wildly gyrating spacecraft.

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The spacecraft would just keep spinning for months in the vacuum of space, with two dead astronauts slowly decaying inside their suits. It could mean the end of the program, and nobody wanted to prevent that from happening more than the man at the controls. But he had no idea what to try next. Fig. 9.1. The crew of Gemini 8: Commander Neil Armstrong, to left, and pilot David Scott, to right. Both would be tested to the limits of their experience as test pilots during the inflight emergency. Image from NASA. By the time Gemini 8 flew in March 1966, the program seemed to have hit its stride. Gemini 3, the first manned flight after the tests of Gemini 1 and 2, had been routine.

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A postflight analysis indicated that a thruster had gotten stuck in the open position, firing continually and forcing them into an unrecoverable tumble, until Armstrong switched over to the reentry control system. The Agena had been fine. Dave Scott would go on to command Apollo 15, and be the first man to drive on the moon in the lunar rover. Neil Armstrong, of course, gained fame as the commander of Apollo 11 and the first human to set foot on the lunar surface. But their substantial mettle was first tested in the hair-raising flight of Gemini 8, the ultimate challenge for test pilots in space. CLASSIFIED: DECLASSIFIED IN 2015 It was to be the ultimate two-way stare down of steely-eyed Cold War missile men: while frustrated Soviet generals grumbled over radar images of a capitalist-spawned steel tube orbiting insolently above their country, Americans in that tube would be taking rapid-fire telescopic images looking back down at Soviet military installations and ICBM sites.

Apollo by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cuban missile crisis, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, index card, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, old-boy network, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ted Sorensen, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty, white flight

“Well, let’s light this sumbitch and it better work” The events of the rest of that day were watched on television by a worldwide audience estimated to be in excess of a billion people. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin told flight director Milt Windler that they wanted to postpone their planned rest period and proceed directly to the E.V.A. Kraft, not surprised that the crew didn’t feel sleepy, agreed. Cliff Charlesworth’s Green Team, which had trained for the lunar surface activities, was hurriedly brought on shift (not difficult, since most of the team had been hanging around Building 30 all day anyway). At 9:56:15 P.M., Central Daylight Time, July 20,1969, Neil Armstrong hopped from the bottom rung of the LEM’s ladder onto the lunar surface, proclaiming, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

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Conrad took manual control, steering the LEM across the crater to a safe distance—on the far rim after all. A few years later, after the four LEMs following Intrepid had each descended to within a few yards of their targets, Neil Armstrong was giving an interview to a historian of the manned space program. The interviewer, thinking of astronauts and senior managers, asked Armstrong: After all the years he had spent at M.S.C., who did he think stood out in talent and ability? Neil Armstrong grinned. “Emil Schiesser!” he replied. “I’d vote for Emil every time.” Chapter 27. “You really need to understand that the C.S.M. is dying” When Apollo 13 lifted off on April 11, 1970, manned space flight was one day shy of the ninth anniversary of Gagarin’s flight.

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Often things went wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong … and they did not falter, did not make excuses, but proceeded onward, taking new risks. They covered ground in giant strides. Contemplate for a moment the bare bones of their timeline: On November 5, 1958, the United States formed the Space Task Group, consisting of forty-five people. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon—an elapsed time of ten years and nine months. Think back to what you were doing ten years and nine months ago, and realize how short a time that is. Now try to imagine a nation beginning a space program on that day with forty-five people, no launch vehicle, no spacecraft, no launch facilities, no experience with manned space flight—and landing on the moon this morning.

Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, white flight

They believed that only an astronaut should get the job as the remote site CapCom. I disagreed. My remote site teams had matured. In my view, astronauts assigned to remote sites were observers given the job of assisting the controllers if that became necessary. In any event, five days before the launch Slayton deployed astronauts Charles (Pete) Conrad and Neil Armstrong to Carnarvon and Hawaii, respectively, continuing the tradition of stationing astronauts at critical positions on the ground track. Hunter and Conrad were both men of strong conviction. But given orders, they would salute their leader and then execute with few questions asked. Three days before launch, the mission readiness review was concluded, and the time had arrived to begin the countdown.

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With the planning, training, mission reviews, and the press conferences, by the time we were ready to fly we were flat-out exhausted. The two-shift arrangement, however, fitted in with the Agena team’s staffing. They had only two teams of controllers. The astronauts for this mission were Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong. Scott, a former Air Force pilot, later flew on Apollo 9 and Apollo 15 as well, racking up more than 546 cumulative hours in spaceflight and more than twenty hours doing EVAs. Armstrong had done it all. Neil was a decorated Navy combat pilot in Korea. Then as a civilian, he spent seven years as a test pilot at Edwards AFB and was one of the few who had flown the X-15 to the fringe of space.

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I think we should knock it off for a while and consider EVA for tomorrow.” Due to the low maneuvering fuel levels we all knew that there was no way to re-rendezvous with the target the next day, and that waving off today was tantamount to saying NoGo to the shroud EVA. I could have kissed the crew. Neil Armstrong turned in his chair and looked for my input. Smiling for the first time in hours, I gave Neil a thumbs-up, followed by a resounding, “Flight concurs.” Before I received any further top-level input, I had the controllers give the Agena a few more jolts to see if we could kick the shroud loose.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Alexander, “Little Joe Series,” in This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA, 1989), https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch7-7.htm. 4. NASA, “MR-1: The Four-Inch Flight,” in This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA, 1989), https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch9-7.htm. 5. Jeffrey Kluger, “On TIME’s Podcast ‘Countdown:’ The Flight That Nearly Took Neil Armstrong’s Life,” Time, July 31, 2017, http://time.com/4880012/neil-armstrong-apollo-gemini-nasa. 6. FailCon, “About FailCon,” http://thefailcon.com/about.html; FuckUp Nights, https://fuckupnights.com. 7. Shane Snow, Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking (New York: HarperBusiness, 2014), Kindle. 8. Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 12. 9.

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Starbuck and Milliken, “Challenger: Changing the Odds.” Epilogue: The New World 1. Ross Anderson, “Exodus,” Aeon, September 30, 2014, https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation. 2. Paul Harris, “Neil Armstrong’s Death Prompts Yearning for America’s Past Glories,” Guardian, August 27, 2012, www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/26/neil-armstrong-passing-us-yearning-glory. 3. Marina Koren, “What’s So Special About the Next SpaceX Launch,” Atlantic, March 1, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/nasa-prepares-pivotal-spacex-launch-iss/583906; Brad Tuttle, “Here’s How Much It Costs for Elon Musk to Launch a SpaceX Rocket,” Money.com, February 6, 2018, http://money.com/money/5135565/elon-musk-falcon-heavy-rocket-launch-cost. 4.

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The giant rocket to take the astronauts to the Moon, he explained, would be “made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch” and sent “on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body.”7 Yes, even the metals needed to build the rocket hadn’t been invented. We jumped into the cosmic void and hoped we would grow wings on the way up. Miraculously, the wings sprouted. In 1969, less than seven years after Kennedy’s pledge, Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind. A child who was six years old when the Wright brothers took their first powered flight—lasting all of twelve seconds and moving 120 feet—would have been seventy-two when flight became powerful enough to put a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

“A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome” by Richard Green et al (Science, Vol. 328, p. 710, May 2010: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710.full). 10. Missed Opportunity 1. “Neil Armstrong’s Photo Legacy: Rare Views of First Man on the Moon” by Robert Pearlman (Space.com, 27 August 2012: https://www.space.com/17308-neil-armstrong-photo-legacy-rare-views.html). 2. “Man on the Moon—Neil Armstrong’s Iconic Photograph” (Amateur Photographer, 24 August 2017: http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/iconic-images/moon-iconic-photograph-neil-armstrong-18051). 3. “The Apollo Astronaut Who Was Allergic to the Moon” by Lucas Reilly (Mental Floss, 6 February 2017: http://mentalfloss.com/article/91628/apollo-astronaut-who-was-allergic-moon). 4.

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—ALAN SHEPARD (APOLLO 14 ASTRONAUT) DURING THE APOLLO PROGRAM, NASA, by its own estimates, spent about $25 billion on sending humans to the moon, which must be well in excess of $100 billion dollars in today’s money. But, incredibly, the American space agency missed out on arguably the biggest photo opportunity of all time. It failed to obtain a photograph of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong’s copilot and the second man to set foot on the moon, simply did not take one. Actually, this is not quite true. There is one photo of Armstrong on the moon—only he has his back to the camera!1 Additionally, in Armstrong’s iconic photo of Aldrin on the lunar surface, it is possible to see his own small white figure reflected in Aldrin’s helmet visor.

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They’re sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they’re hitting back and forth.” Neil Armstrong. “Yeah, I wasn’t chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn’t planned by anyone.” Neil Armstrong. “I think the Space Shuttle is worth one billion dollars a launch. I think that it is worth two billion dollars for what it does. I think the Shuttle is worth it for the work it does.” Pete Conrad. “The Space Shuttle has been a fantastic vehicle.

…

“I think most astronauts are not risk takers. We take calculated risks for something that we think is worthwhile.” Michael J. Massimino. “I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.” Neil Armstrong. “Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.” Neil Armstrong. References 1. Committee on FAA Airworthiness Certification Procedures, National Research Council, 1980, Improving Aircraft Safety, 118 pages; Committee on FAA Airworthiness Certification Procedures, National Research Council, 1998, Improving the Continued Airworthiness of Civil Aircraft: A Strategy for the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service, 86 pages. 2.

…

“10, 9, ignition sequence start, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero. All engines running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff! Thirty-two minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11!” Jack King, NASA Chief of Public Information, on the launch of the Apollo 11 over a live television broadcast on July 16, 1969. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Neil Armstrong tells NASA’s Mission Control base in Texas that the Eagle landing module has reached the Moon’s surface on July 20, 1969. “This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”

Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, card file, centre right, data acquisition, Eratosthenes, Gene Kranz, invention of gunpowder, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But the voice of the Public Affairs Officer came out of the loudspeaker mounted on a speaker’s platform on the grass in front of the grandstand. This is Apollo-Saturn Launch Control. T minus 61 minutes and counting—T minus 61 minutes on the Apollo 11 countdown, and all elements are GO at this time. Astronaut Neil Armstrong has just completed a series of checks on that big Service Propulsion System engine that sits below him in the stack. We want to assure ourselves before lift-off that that engine can respond to commands from inside the spacecraft. As Neil Armstrong moved his rotational hand controller we assured ourselves that the engine did respond by swiveling or gimbaling. Aquarius felt chopped into fragments. The combination of waiting in line at the mechanical vendor, of undergoing Lyndon B.

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You can expect nothing less on a night so filled with heat, human meat, bubbles of fear, prayer soft as love, and tropical sex in every sauce. And that mill worker with red hair and gray-green eyes, red sunburn, red peeling skin on his knotty forearms—he could be an astronaut in another life. He looks like an older version of Neil Armstrong, maybe, he looks like some of them, like Gordon Cooper for sure, or Deke Slayton, or Walt Cunningham of Apollo 7, yeah, the mill worker is tonight an American all drenched in pride and fear and sorrow—his wild rebel yell guaranteed to diminish each year, is riding the range with awe tonight. He has worked with machines all his life, he has tooled cars to the point where he has felt them respond to his care, he has known them and slept beside them as trustingly as if they were hunting dogs, he knows a thousand things about the collaboration between a man and a machine, and he knows what can go wrong.

…

What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest.… What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.” (Which would lead Aquarius days later to wonder at the origin of Armstrong’s first speech on the moon.) “It will cause a new element to sweep across the face of this good earth and to invade the thoughts of all men.” He was almost done with his formal remarks.

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White, Richard Truly

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, William Langewiesche

Stafford began, offering a glimmer of hope as he talked through plans for the Apollo missions 13 to 19 and Skylab beyond that. Stafford’s words were powerfully reinforced by action. As the MOL group pressed their case in interviews with Deke Slayton, the director of Flight Crew Operations, in July 1969, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin were already on their way to the moon aboard Apollo 11. TWELVE Houston, 1969 With Neil Armstrong’s descent to the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, NASA, after an extraordinary eight-year campaign, had succeeded in “putting a man on the moon.” Inside Mission Control, John Young wasn’t sure anyone was following the journey with deeper interest than he and his Apollo 10 comrades were.

…

That, though, seemed positively conventional next to Dottie’s keen interest in astrophysics. Growing up in New Orleans in the 1930s, Dottie had known that there would one day be men on the moon. Now, thirty years later, she was working as an engineer at Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center and the prospect of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin realizing that goal was just months away. After graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1948, Lee had trained on the job under Houston’s chief engineer, Max Faget. Part of the team working on the heat shield that would protect the Apollo 11 crew as they returned to Earth, she was already anticipating the celebrations that would mark their safe return.

…

And that meant gathering together experts in every field. • • • Engineer Dottie Lee got the call on a Friday afternoon. She was with contractors from Avco in Building 13, working on analysis of the Apollo command module heat shield. In May, Apollo 10 would all but land on the moon before returning home; then in July, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were due to fly the big one: Apollo 11. Lee’s boss called her up to his office. “Monday morning,” he told her, “you’re to report to Building 36. You don’t tell anybody where you’re going or what you’re going to do. Read this document.” He handed her a sheaf of paper that elaborated on Gilruth and Faget’s ideas and concepts for a vehicle that could reach orbit then glide back down to Earth and land horizontally.

Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in Histroy by Ben Mezrich

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, dark matter, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley

He realized, as he read it to himself, that it was from the very first Apollo mission. It had been collected by Neil Armstrong—the first man on the moon. Thad lifted the little container out, but he couldn’t get the words to come out of his mouth. Rebecca and Sandra were both looking at him. Finally, he cleared his throat. “This one I’m keeping.” “Thad—” “We have more than enough to sell.” And then he had an even better idea. He was going to keep a little bit from each sample—just some dust, a pebble or two. Even after selling what they sold, he’d have the best rock collection in the world. He placed the container with Neil Armstrong’s sample aside and went back to the safe.

…

But it was still amazing to see this gray-haired, slightly balding, bespectacled scientist—a genius who had taken part in the greatest adventure in modern human history—so enthusiastically involved in something new, something that would take at least a quarter of a century to become real. At the beginning of the speech, Gibson talked about the first samples he’d ever seen when he started at NASA—the Apollo 11 samples, which were collected by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Gibson went on to describe how different the samples were from each successive moon mission, how each of the six landing spots had been chosen to study different areas of the moon’s topography. The results were startlingly different types of rock, from the very fine-grained materials brought back from the valley of Taurus Littrow, a deep mountain valley in the northeastern part of the moon—a material that was made up of little tiny beads commonly known as “orange glass,” to the gray, almost black Apollo 17 samples—the very last samples ever collected by human beings, from the dark portion of the moon.

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Couple of guys, walking around hitting golf balls, planting some freakin’ flag—you think any of that was real?” Thad rubbed his eyes, trying to figure out if the stoner was playing with him, or actually meant what he was saying. He realized that he had never explicitly told Gordon that he worked at NASA. Gordon had no idea that Thad hung around men who had actually been there when Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon. “So you think—” Thad started, and then stopped himself. He wasn’t going to get into an argument about conspiracy theories. “Look, here’s the thing. I might know somebody who can get his hands on a couple of rocks. They’re worth a lot of money, if we can find someone who’s interested.

Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, place-making, Silicon Valley, William Langewiesche

But in the interview room he’d act like a cold, hard stranger. And when he later called to tell a candidate he’d been selected, he wanted a black-and-white response. One of those selected told Shepard he was “99 percent sure” he’d say yes, which Shepard said was an unacceptable answer. Once they were chosen—men like Neil Armstrong, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman—the next astronauts would come to understand Shepard’s attitude. NASA could only build so many rockets and schedule so many flights. Any new-comer was seen as a threat, a competitor. As the number of astronauts grew in subsequent years, so did the intrigue: rooting for your friends to fail, scheming to get ahead, always on guard against some form of political sabotage.

…

They spun him in the centrifuge and dunked him underwater and whipped him about in the MASTIF. These were all efforts to shake loose Dr. House’s tube, but they all failed—the flesh around the tube in his ear had healed and now held the tube tightly in place. On July 16 Alan and Louise joined the crowds at the Cape to watch Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin make history in Apollo 11. In a roped-off VIP section of the viewing stands, Shepard stood off by himself, looking out at the enormous skyscraper of a rocket, the same Saturn 5 booster that would soon deliver him above. He stood looking dreamily out at the rocket standing three miles away, “aloft in my own thoughts,” when an old man wearing rumpled clothes and an upside-down sailor cap approached and introduced himself.

…

The same was true for all of us,” Kraft said years later. “If we’d been older and wiser, we would have known that we couldn’t get it all done. But we weren’t. So we did it.” Not, however, without various terrifying imperfections. Three days after leaving the Cape, Apollo 11 reached the moon and began to circle it. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed through a hatch into their lunar module, called Eagle, and separated from the nose of the command module, called Columbia,piloted by Mike Collins. Standing side by side inside the backward-flying LM, Armstrong and Aldrin fired the thruster engines that slowed Eagle’s orbit and allowed it to be pulled by the moon’s mild gravity down toward the lunar surface.

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

There is, for a start, an interesting synchronicity at work: at the moment when Thomas and Lovelock were putting forward their ideas (in the late 1960s, at the same time as the beginning of space travel and, in part, because of it, of course), the geological sciences were also changing very profoundly, as we shall see. Neil Armstrong was able to gaze across the quarter of a million miles that separate these two small planetary bodies and look directly towards that area of America from which he had come, at the hills and valleys of the selfsame rocks where he had grown up – rocks that established geology and the fossil record tell us belong to the Silurian Age. And I have no doubt that it was in large measure because of this most extraordinary vision – extraordinary both for Neil Armstrong and, in time, for the rest of us too – that the birth was signalled of what is now coming to be regarded as an entirely new science.

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It is a town with a past built on the solid bedrock of America’s previous success, a present that clings by its fingernails to its own notion of stability, and yet a future in which the old Ohio bedrock seems not quite as firm as had initially been supposed, one that most people in consequence care not to ponder too closely. However, those who expect Wapakoneta to be only blandly Middle American, and perhaps a little unadventurous and dull, might be surprised to find another side to its history. The astronaut Neil Armstrong, born in the town in 1930, went to the local high school and, quite rightly, no one will let you forget it. (Only two other luminaries of the town are thought worthy of mention, and both are by contrast memorably forgettable: one a heavily moustachioed hero of the Civil War who fought at Vicksburg; the other the screenwriter of The Bells of St Mary’s, who also happened to have invented a device allowing naval vessels to lift mines harmlessly from the seabed.)

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It is fitting that this small town should celebrate so eagerly the exploration of space: the worldwide excitement over the samples of lunar rock brought back to earth is just one small indication of the value, in real scientific terms, of America’s having sent up a man to get it. But there was an unanticipated and less obvious consequence of the expedition, the effect of which has been, in many ways, rather more enduring. For it appears now that one field of scientific discovery was changed for ever by the journeyings of Neil Armstrong and all those others who have gone to the moon in the years since. This sea change has come about specifically in the science of geology, and it is a change that has its origins in a very simple fact: when Wapakoneta’s first citizen was teetering gingerly about up there on the moon, he was able to do something that had never been done before, and that provided science with a profound, paradigm-shifting moment of unforgettable symbolism: he was able to stand on the lunar surface and look back at the earth.

Flying to the Moon: An Astronaut's Story by Michael Collins

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, place-making

I am too old to fly to Mars, and I regret that. But I still think I have been very, very lucky. I was born in the days of biplanes and Buck Rogers, learned to fly in the early jets, and hit my peak when moon rockets came along. That’s hard to beat. 1 Early on the morning of July 20, 1969, I was circling the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in our spacecraft Columbia. We had just awakened from a short sleep and were sucking lukewarm coffee out of plastic tubes and munching on bacon which had been squeezed into little cubes, like lumps of sugar. While we were eating our breakfast, we were talking on the radio with our friends in Mission Control in Houston, Texas.

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They probably just wanted to make us laugh a little bit so we wouldn’t be too nervous about landing on the moon for the first time ever. We were a little nervous that morning. We were concerned about how well our spacecraft and computers would work. We also worried about the rocket blast from Eagle, our lunar module, which might kick up a lot of dust and prevent Neil Armstrong from being able to see well enough to land. Or suppose Neil couldn’t find a spot smooth and level enough to put Eagle down? As it turned out, we need not have worried about the moon, because the Eagle landed beautifully in the Sea of Tranquility, and Neil and Buzz were able to walk around and collect some rocks.

…

I was happy that everything had gone so well, and sad that I had not been able to go with Borman and Anders instead of Lovell. In place of a trip to the moon, I had only a scar on my throat and a great desire to make up for lost time. The news was not long in coming, and it was all good. I was assigned to the Apollo 11 crew, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin! We were to be the first crew to attempt a lunar landing, provided everything went well. By that I mean that Apollos 9 and 10 must make near-perfect flights before us. Apollo 9 was the first test flight of the lunar module, in earth orbit, and Apollo 10 was to be a dress rehearsal in lunar orbit, involving a rendezvous but not a landing.

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

“The twentieth century was born yearning for a new type of hero,” writes aviation historian Robert Wohl, “someone able to master the cold, inhuman machines that the nineteenth century bequeathed and at the same type transforming them into resplendent art and myth.” From Charles Lindbergh to Neil Armstrong to “Sully” Sullenberger, the cultural icon of the pilot embodied the human on the cutting edge of technology and social change. Analogies flowed freely—the adventurer of the sky, the aerial artist, the athlete of the third dimension. World War I offered new identities, particularly the “knight of the air” flying fighter ace, reviving ancient mythologies to rescue heroism from an anonymous war of trenches and random death. Ironically, most pilots, including Wilbur Wright, Charles Lindbergh, and Neil Armstrong conformed to none of these archetypes so much as to that of the mechanic or engineer imbued with the middle-class virtues of temperance, deliberation, and focus.

…

From its beginning in the twentieth century, spaceflight has raised the question of what kind of presence, and what kinds of machines, best convey human experience. Nearly fifty years ago, when Neil Armstrong landed the lunar module on the moon, he had both a HUD and an autoland. The HUD was an early, passive design—a series of angle markings etched into Armstrong’s window. The onboard computer read out a number on an LED-like display, and if Armstrong positioned his head correctly he could look through that angle marked on the window. Directly behind the indicated number, then, he saw the actual spot on the moon that the computer was flying him toward. Computer graphic depiction of Neil Armstrong’s view out the window from a few hundred feet above the moon during the Apollo 11 landing.

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When lives and resources are at stake, time and time again, over decades, from the deep ocean to the outer planets, we have reined in the autonomy. It is not a story about progress—that one day we’ll get it right—but a story about the move from laboratory to field. That transition tempers autonomy, whether the task is to respond to instructions and return useful data or to protect or defend human life. In retrospect, Neil Armstrong’s last-minute manual intervention—turning off the automation of his moon landing—signaled the limits of the twentieth-century vision of full autonomy, and foretold the slow advent of potent human collaboration and presence. The lone, autonomous drone is as much an anachronism as is the lone, unconnected computer.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

People who witnessed a Saturn V launch recounted that even at a distance of two miles, its engines produced coruscating heat and waves of pressure that passed through the ribcage. The five massive engines gulped 15 tons of fuel each second and produced eight million pounds of thrust. The giant rocket was 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty (Figure 10). In July 1969, there were plenty of white knuckles at Mission Control in Houston when Neil Armstrong assumed manual control of the Apollo 11 landing module, after a series of technical glitches, and guided it over a field of rugged boulders to a soft landing on the Moon with less than a minute of fuel left. Back in Houston, Charles Duke radioed him: “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

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This incident and the death of seven aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 are sobering reminders of the hazards of space travel. However, the Space Shuttle did provide case studies in the importance of having astronauts rather than robots work in space. Robots are not versatile or reliable enough to match a well-trained astronaut. We can all admire the “seat-of-the-pants” problem-solving skills demonstrated by Neil Armstrong as he guided Apollo 11 over a boulder field with hardly any fuel left, and by the Apollo 13 crew as they nursed their crippled spacecraft around the Moon and home to safety. In particular, the five servicing missions of the Hubble Space Telescope defined the state of the art for astronauts, with multiple long space walks, challenging technical jobs, and difficult decisions made under time pressure.

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Like Chuck Yeager, he had his share of close calls; on one flight, he lost power to all onboard systems and had to bring the X-15 down from an altitude of 173,000 feet for an emergency landing.12 The Air Force and NASA collaborated on developing the X-15, but they diverged when the young space agency chose the Atlas and Redstone rockets for the Mercury program that put the first Americans in space. Eight Air Force pilots flew the X-15 high enough to earn their astronaut wings, including Neil Armstrong, who would later become the first man to set foot on the Moon.13 Only three X-15s were built. They flew 199 missions. One pilot was lost when his plane went into a hypersonic spin and broke apart at 60,000 feet, scattering wreckage over 50 square miles. The only other spaceplanes so far have been NASA’s Space Shuttle, its Russian counterpart Buran (which flew once, in 1988), Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne (which flew seventeen times between 2003 and 2004 and is discussed in chapter 5), and the X-37.

Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, space junk, white flight

Inside and outside NASA, the nine astronauts who followed the Original Seven were often known simply and glamorously as the Next Nine. Four of the new group—Frank Borman, Jim McDivitt, Tom Stafford, and Ed White—were Air Force, meaning that Borman’s beloved service still hadn’t achieved a majority. They were joined by four Navy men: John Young, Elliot See, Jim Lovell, and Pete Conrad. And finally there was an oddball, Neil Armstrong, a Navy man originally, and one who had flown seventy-eight combat missions over Korea. In 1960, however, he had retired and become a civilian test pilot. To some, it was more than a little awkward that NASA would recruit an astronaut who could dress only in civvies. The Original Seven sniffed at their new colleagues, and the Next Nine acutely felt the disdain.

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But the odds of that happening were slim: Collins kept exceedingly fit and did not do a lot of the hard drinking and fast driving some of the other astronauts did. If he was assigned to fly a mission, there was very little chance he wouldn’t go. That meant that Lovell would get a starting spot on a later, distinctly better, flight: the center seat on Apollo 11, between Neil Armstrong on the left and Buzz Aldrin on the right. Apollo 11 might or might not be a lunar landing, and even if it was, Lovell would have to wait overhead in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin flew down in the LEM and got their boots covered with moon dirt. Still, 11 could easily be a bona fide moon shot, an adventure that looked a lot better than the Earth-orbit dog-paddling Borman had been assigned.

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He then went from bedroom to bedroom, knocking on each door, opening it up so that the light could flood in, pointing at his watch and reminding the crew of what time it was and that medical call was in fifteen minutes. The menu of steak, eggs, toast, fruit, juice, and coffee was the same as it had been since the Mercury days, and the practice of having the backup crew tuck in with the prime crew remained unchanged, too. This morning, that meant breakfasting with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and rookie Fred Haise. Lovell looked their way, reflecting that but for Michael Collins’s bad back, he would have been a member of that trio of stay-at-home astronauts today. Lovell had only recently come to know Haise—the man who’d replaced him on the backup crew when he’d replaced Collins on the prime crew—but he liked what he saw.

The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

“Hubble Space Telescope Sees Evidence of Water Vapor Venting off Jupiter Moon,” NASA, last modified August 7, 2017, http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water-vapor. 475.Wright Brothers National Memorial North Carolina, “Announcing Details of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Event,” press release, July 16, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/planyourvisit/apollo-11-50th.htm. 476.A. Hamer, “Neil Armstrong Took a Piece of the North Carolina Outer Banks to the Moon,” Curiosity, last modified October 13, 2018, https://curiosity.com/topics/neil-armstrong-took-a-piece-of-the-north-carolina-outer-banks-to-the-moon-curiosity. 477.W. Guthrie, “This Land Is Your Land,” on Folksay: American Ballads and Dances (New York: Asch Record Company, 1944). 478.J. Salute, telephone interview by author, October 25, 2018. 479.T.

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They’d pressurize the Eagle, and boom: Mare Tempestatis. NASA needed geologists to sharpen their pencils and solve the problem most ricky-tick—and to the great relief of Apollo astronauts, they did. The magnitude of the achievement of geologists to understand an orbiting ancient alabaster rock was reflected in the second thing Neil Armstrong said, after taking a giant leap for mankind: “And the—the surface is fine and powdery. I can—I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.”43 And planetary science was off to the races.

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And there they were: the historian and the moon scientist, making lunar history. At night, the two of them would sometimes go outside and look up at the moon and just think . . . wow. Not only about the Apollo program, but where their lives had taken them. They’d look up, and they knew it would happen, the moon landings—had no doubt. What they didn’t know was that with Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon and his second sentence on its powdery surface—an instant geologic analysis—this would not be the capstone of some brief, bracing phase of Ron’s career in geology but rather would mark the beginning of something new entirely. After his two-year army hitch ended, Ron was supposed to go back to Lafayette and look for bugs, but you put men on the moon, be among the first to apply scientific rigor to something so spectacular and unsullied, unpack the geology of a pristine world unspoiled by humankind, and you look around yourself at Ames, see not only what they’re doing—they—us—what we’re doing—and not temporarily: Armstrong was the starting point—and he knew Armstrong!

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

And if you’re a whistleblower, it’s worth remembering: snail mail remains among the best ways to leak material to a journalist. In the summer of 2019, the New York Times received a brown envelope containing almost a hundred pages of sealed court and other documents that revealed possible medical malpractice in the death of Neil Armstrong, the first human on the moon. Even if you don’t foresee a need for encrypted communications, it’s worth making sure online predators aren’t using email as a phishing rod into your life. Avoid following links and opening files from untrusted senders. If you must open a suspicious attachment, experts recommend that you do it in Google Docs, so any infections don’t end up on your computer.

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p. 136 Moxie Marlinspike on Trump: Brian X. Chen, “Worried about the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal,” New York Times, December 7, 2016. p. 136 Facebook buys WhatsApp: Adrian Covert, “Facebook Buys WhatsApp for $19 Billion,” CNN Business, February 19, 2014. p. 138 snail mail: Scott Shane and Sarah Kliff, “A Scoop about Neil Armstrong Arrived in a Plain Brown Envelope,” New York Times, August 1, 2019. p. 139 NSA cracks VPNs: “NSA Broke into Secure Network of Al Jazeera and Others: Report,” Al Jazeera, August 16, 2018. p. 140 laptop cameras: Katie Rogers, “Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too,” New York Times, June 22, 2016.

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Manning” pseudonym Manning, Chelsea, 10, 28–9, 63, 130 Marcus, James, 138 Marlinspike, Moxie, 110, 136 Mayer, Jane, 43 McAleenan, Kevin, 136–7 McMullan, Patrick, 112–13 Medsger, Betty, 86 Microsoft, 48, 145 Miller, Shane, 54, 55, 56 Mills, Lindsay, 80, 133 Mondale, Walter, 89 Moscow, 42, 85, 133 Musk, Tosca, 129 My Country, My Country (Poitras), 14, 15 National Security Agency (NSA), 1, 20, 22, 57, 81; AT&T and, 66; “black budget,” 35; Church Committee and, 89–90; Clipper chip and, 6; congressional hearings (Clapper), 8–9; data harvesting and public disclosures, 48, 56, 57, 93; EFF lawsuit against, 66; FOIA letters, 124–5, 127; Hawaii, 58; metadata purges, 93; Patriot Act and, 92; Poitras and, 14, 76, 77; PRISM, 41–2; protests against, 83–5; Snowden position, 2; Trump, 10; Vietnam War protesters and, 90; view of Tails, 33; VPN cracking, 139; Wäscher on, 94 New Yorker, 43–4 New York Times, 18, 40, 45, 57, 86, 88; Cambridge Analytica scandal, 102; Manjoo column, 97–8; Neil Armstrong death and, 138; Pentagon Papers, 43 New York Times Magazine, 115 NSA. See National Security Agency (NSA) The Oath (Poitras), 64 Obama, Barack, 10, 47 Omidyar, Pierre, 126 OpenWhisper Systems, 136 Orwell, George, 31, 132–3 Palantir, 113 Passionflix, 129 Patel, Priti, 136–37 Patriot Act, 47, 84, 91–2 PEN, 107–8 Penning, Henk, 73–4 Pentagon Papers, 36–7, 43 PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), 69, 73, 138 Pidgin (software), 116 Poitras, Laura, 14–25, 31–46, 50, 54, 55, 61–5, 72–3, 80–1, 111, 115–33; Berlin, 18–19, 21, 22, 31, 59, 117–19, 123, 125–6, 132; Citizenfour, 119–20, 123–4; Customs and Border Patrol and airport detention, 15, 16, 37, 76; EFF role, 67; First Look Media, 127–9, 130; Guardian video, 48–9, 92; My Country, My Country, 14, 15; Micah Lee and, 70, 73, 74–8, 81; Oath, 64; Program, 18, 49–50, 72, 134; Risk, 16 Postal Service.

Falling to Earth by Al Worden

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, California energy crisis, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, lost cosmonauts, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley

He was at the very least the equal of anyone in the astronaut office—and I suspected he was better than all of them. When he came to check out the spacecraft, he took meticulous notes, then gradually checked off each item to ensure that everything was resolved to his satisfaction. Absolutely no detail, however small, got past him. He’d flown in space once before, on the Gemini 8 mission in 1966 with Neil Armstrong, bedeviled by a stuck thruster which spun the spacecraft out of control. Dave and Neil nearly passed out, but kept their cool and saved the spacecraft and their lives by regaining control and returning from orbit. They impressed their NASA colleagues, especially their fellow pilots. They had taken care of the problem and made it home.

…

Rather than the fulfillment of an ambition, I hoped that Apollo 11 would be the beginning of sustained exploration of the moon. Not least, I will admit, because I wanted to fly there myself and didn’t want the program to end before I had my chance. I vividly remember the moment in July 1969 when mission commander Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, his lunar module pilot, touched down on the moon. I had been on yet another trip to the North American plant and was in the cockpit of my T-38 at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, south of Downey, preparing to fly home. The tower at the airfield told me that Apollo 11 was about to land and asked me if I would like them to relay the audio coverage.

…

Once again, I was glad that it had been designed with such well-tested components. It was amazing—everything was fine—but I bet that the launch was a very scary experience for the crew. I know I would probably have crapped myself. A couple of days later, Pete Conrad was ready to make his first step on the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong’s first words as he stepped on the moon—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—were famous by then. Pete was Neil’s polar opposite in temperament, and many people wondered what he would say when he made his own first step. We had sprinkled a whole bunch of suggestions throughout Pete’s in-flight checklist, many of them so risqué that he would have been fired if he’d dared say them.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

But perhaps this is a possibility that we should give a little more thought to, each time we go shopping. 11 Under Pressure Suits Suitable for Space Suited to the Moon That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.1 Neil Armstrong, live transmission from the moon’s surface, 21 July 1969 In the early hours of 21 July 1969 (GMT), 528 million people – 15 per cent of the world’s population and 95 per cent of America’s – tuned in to watch as an ungainly white boot made the first human impression on the surface of the moon.2 For Neil Armstrong himself, it must have been uncanny. The landscape into which he stepped was devoid of colour. ‘It’s grey,’ he told Mission Control, ‘and it’s a very white, chalky grey, as you look into the zero-phase line; and it’s considerably darker grey, more like ash – ashen grey as you look out ninety degrees to the Sun.’

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., The Story of Linen (New York: Chemical Publishing Company, 1945) Lenzing Group, The Global Fibre Market in 2016 (Lenzing Group, 2017) <http://www.lenzing.com/en/investors/equity-story/global-fiber-market.html> [accessed 19 September 2017] Levey, Santina M., Lace: A History (London: W. S. Maney and Son, 1983) Lewis, Cathleen, ‘What Does Alan Shepard’s Mercury Suit Have to Do with Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 Suit?’, National Air and Space Museum, 2015 <https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/what-does-alan-shepard%E2%80%99s-mercury-suit-have-do-neil-armstrong%E2%80%99s-apollo-11-suit> [accessed 9 December 2017] Lewis, David, The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific Island Navigators (Sydney: Collins, 1978) Lewis, Randy, Molecular Biologist at the University of Utah, interview with author, September 2016 Lightfoot, Amy, ‘From Heather-Clad Hills to the Roof of a Medieval Church: The Story of a Woollen Sail’, Norwegian Textile Letter, II (1996), 1–8 Linden, Eugene, ‘The Vikings: A Memorable Visit to America’, Smithsonian, December 2004 <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-vikings-a-memorable-visit-to-america-98090935/> [accessed 18 October 2017] Litherland, Piers, ‘Re: Egyptian Linen’, 12 June 2017 Litsky, Frank, ‘El-Guerrouj Sets Record in Mile’, New York Times, 8 July 1999, section Sports, pp. 56, 60 Lu, Yongxiang (ed.), A History of Chinese Science and Technology, trans. by Chuijun Qian and Hui He (Shanghai: Springer, 2015), ii Lucas, A., and Harris, J.

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Sue, ‘Captive Breeding and Husbandry of the Golden Orb Weaver Nephila Inaurata Madagascariensis at Woodland Park Zoo’, Terrestrial Invertebrate Taxon Advisory Group, 2014 <http://www.titag.org/2014/2014papers/GOLDENORBSUEANDERSEN.pdf> [accessed 3 January 2017] An Individual’s Guide to Climatic Injury (Ministry of Defence, 2016) ‘A Norse-Viking Ship’, the Newcastle Weekly Courant (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 5 December 1891), section News ‘Apollo 11 – Mission Transcript’, Spacelog <https://ia800607.us.archive.org/28/items/NasaAudioHighlightReels/AS11_TEC.pdf> [accessed 7 December 2017] Appleton Standen, Edith, ‘The Grandeur of Lace’, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 16 (1958), 156–62 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3257694> Arbiter, Petronius, The Satyricon, ed. by David Widger (Project Gutenberg, 2006) <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5225/5225-h/5225-h.htm> [accessed 14 August 2017] Arena, Jenny, ‘Reboot the Suit: Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit and Kickstarter’, National Air and Space Museum, 2015 <https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/armstrong-spacesuit-and-kickstarter> [accessed 7 December 2017] Arnold, Janet (ed.), Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d: The Inventories of the Wardrobe of Robes Prepared in July 1600, Edited from Stowe MS 557 in the British Library, MS LR 2/121 in the Public Record Office, London, and MS v.6.72 in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (London: W.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The world waited for the door of the crab-like mechanical contraption to open. It took four hours. Then, finally, at 10:38 p.m.: sighs, applause, exuberance, dumbstruck silence, from all corners of the Earth, as Neil Armstrong planted his foot on luna firma. The actual landing had been the one part of the mission that had been impossible to rehearse prior to the actual moment—and the most dangerous. The Apollo 11 astronauts had given the mission only a middling chance of success: though Neil Armstrong handicapped the odds of returning to Earth safely at 90 percent, he thought they had only a 50-50 chance of landing on the Moon on the first go. Katherine Johnson had confidence: she knew her numbers were right, and she assumed that everyone else—Marge Hannah and the fellas there in her office, Mary Jackson and Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams, everyone from the top of NASA to the bottom—had given their all to the mission.

…

.: Ibid. 243 fourth in command of the ship: Ibid. 243 asked him to tear up the resignation letter: Ibid. 244 curiosity always bested fear: Moore interview. 244 Then, finally, at 10:38 p.m.: CBS News coverage of Apollo 11 lunar landing,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E96EPhqT-ds. 244 Neil Armstrong handicapped the odds: Neil Armstrong, interview with Alex Malley, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfj2jqpst_Q. 245 “You have to expect progress to be made”: Johnson interview, December 27, 2010. 245 born at a time when the odds were more likely: 1920 US Census, Statistic of the Population. 245 circling the Moon every fifty-nine minutes: Richard Orloff, Apollo by The Numbers: A Statistical Reference (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2005), http://histry.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-01_General_Background.htm. 246 plot a course to Mars: Johnson interview, January 3, 2011; Harold A.

…

Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child—a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school—would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America. And epic it was. Katherine allowed the moment, with all its implications, to sink in. There were still challenges ahead. She watched the men in the dust of the Moon and thought of the orbiting command service module, out of view of the camera, circling the Moon every ninety minutes. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon would have a brief window to get back into the lunar lander and reconnect their dinghy with the mother ship above. After that, it would be three long days on the highway back to Earth, then through the fire of the atmosphere and into the terrestrial ocean below. Each leg carried the specter of the unknown; only after their landing matched the numbers of her equations, when they had been plucked from the ocean and cosseted in the waiting navy ship, would she be able to exhale.

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

These first explorers, alone on a seemingly lifeless planet as much as 250 million miles away from home, have everything in common with the trailblazers who preceded them—the great explorers throughout history who scaled mountains and sailed oceans to create new lives. And yet, despite their commonality with explorers of years past, these spacefaring pioneers are in every way more important than any explorers who have ever preceded them. Their presence on Mars represents the greatest achievement of human intelligence. Anyone who watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969 can tell you that, for a moment, the Earth stood still. The wonder and awe of that achievement was so incomprehensible that some people still believe it was staged on a Hollywood set. When astronauts stepped onto the moon, people started saying, “If we can get to the moon, we can do anything.”

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He is keenly aware that Earth will not be habitable forever. Musk seems frustrated by our denial about what we are doing to our habitat, and is ever cognizant of a simple fact: humans will become extinct if we do not reach beyond Earth. Elon Musk’s appearance as a rocket man came none too soon. The technology had advanced very little from 1969, when Neil Armstrong placed his boot on the moon, to 2002, when Musk began SpaceX. In fact, according to Musk, space travel since the Apollo program not only hasn’t moved forward much, it has gone “backward.” He says, “Once we could go to the moon, and now we can’t. That’s not forward, or even sideways. The United States can’t even send people into orbit right now.”

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

He listened to a clip from a speech given by President Kennedy in May 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” The onscreen countdown began for Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin to park their lunar lander on the surface of the Moon, a quest for the ages, a Cold War imperative, and a high-stakes contest between nations that had begun when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. Now, almost twelve years later, America was trying to make history of its own.

…

He had drawn the Saturn V over and over, with its first stage, second stage, and third stage, its lunar module, service module, and command module. At 363 feet, it was taller than a football field set on end, both beauty and monster, weighing more than 6.4 million pounds when prepared for launch. Peter had watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climb through the docking tunnel from Columbia to Eagle to check on the lunar module. The lunar module—the LM, pronounced “LEM” and originally called the Lunar Excursion Module—had never been tested in the microgravity of the Moon. Peter was not alone in wondering whether this spaceship would make it back to Earth.

…

It was both answer and question, new frontier, old Earth. It was NASA doing what it said it would do. The astronauts were modern-day Magellans. Cronkite rubbed his hands together and dropped his paternal demeanor. “There’s a foot on the Moon,” he said, removing his black-rimmed glasses and wiping his eyes. “Armstrong is on the Moon. Neil Armstrong—thirty-eight-year-old American—standing on the surface of the Moon! Boy, look at those pictures—240,000 miles to the Moon. I’m speechless. That is really something. How can anybody turn off from a world like this?” It was close to midnight when Tula finally got the kids to bed. Marcelle, who was six, was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

Schematic diagram of the trajectories that enabled NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft to tour the four gas giant planets and achieve the velocity to escape our solar system. (NASA/JPL) The twelve-year-old me had become hopelessly hooked on space exploration watching the adventures of the Apollo astronauts on the moon. My parents tell me that they woke me up on that Sunday night in July of 1969 to witness Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make history on live TV in the Sea of Tranquility. We saved the Monday MAN ON MOON! giant headlined copy of the Providence Evening Bulletin, which I later had framed. For the next three and a half years, I was glued to the television, whenever possible, watching these guys walking—and driving cars!

…

The ability to ride along with Voyager, to be a passenger on this trailblazing journey destined to discover entirely new worlds, to see history made, was irresistible to the young me. In fact, it still is. EXPEDITION LEADERS Famous ships of exploration are usually led by a famous captain or commander, like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, Ernest Shackleton, or Neil Armstrong. The Voyagers, however, are led by a committee of captains—managers, engineers, and scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and elsewhere who were tasked with overseeing the design, manufacture, and operation of the most ambitious robotic planetary exploration mission yet attempted—and a pair of equally powerful commanders, a project manager and a project scientist.

…

Even the JPL Deep Space Network team got in on the game, increasing the sensitivity of their receivers to deal with Voyager 2’s weaker and weaker radio signals as the spacecraft sped farther away, and adding the capability to communicate with Voyager 2 from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia (the one made famous by successfully broadcasting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 lunar landing live to the world in 1969) during the most critical part of the Uranus flyby—which would be best visible from the Australian DSN stations. As Ed Stone wrote in one of the early scientific papers describing the Voyager 2 results at Uranus, “That all of this worked so well testifies to the high level of expertise and the spirit of teamwork within the Voyager project and supporting organizations.”

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield

Apollo 13, dark matter, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Skype, éminence grise

Slowly, methodically, a man descended the leg of a spaceship and carefully stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The image was grainy, but I knew exactly what we were seeing: the impossible, made possible. The room erupted in amazement. The adults shook hands, the kids yelped and whooped. Somehow, we felt as if we were up there with Neil Armstrong, changing the world. Later, walking back to our cottage, I looked up at the Moon. It was no longer a distant, unknowable orb but a place where people walked, talked, worked and even slept. At that moment, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was going to follow in the footsteps so boldly imprinted just moments before.

…

Roaring around in a rocket, exploring space, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and human capability—I knew, with absolute clarity, that I wanted to be an astronaut. I also knew, as did every kid in Canada, that it was impossible. Astronauts were American. NASA only accepted applications from U.S. citizens, and Canada didn’t even have a space agency. But … just the day before, it had been impossible to walk on the Moon. Neil Armstrong hadn’t let that stop him. Maybe someday it would be possible for me to go too, and if that day ever came, I wanted to be ready. I was old enough to understand that getting ready wasn’t simply a matter of playing “space mission” with my brothers in our bunk beds, underneath a big National Geographic poster of the Moon.

…

I can let that crush me and spend the rest of my life looking back over my shoulder, or I can maintain attitude. Since that choice is mine, I’ll keep on getting ready to play “Rocket Man.” Just in case. 3 THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING “HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH YOUR FEAR?” It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often. When people think about space exploration, they don’t just picture Neil Armstrong stepping off the ladder of the Lunar Module and onto the Moon. They also remember the smoke plume etched in the sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch, and the startling, fiery bursts of light as Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, raining down metal and human remains.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

First of all, though, it's time to go back to the dreams of my youth, dreams that took us to the moon and led us to thoughts of life on Mars. CHAPTER ONE TAKING PROGRESS FOR GRANTED One of my earliest childhood memories was waking up at some ridiculously early hour of the morning to watch the late Neil Armstrong step out of the Eagle – Apollo 11's lunar module – and utter his now famous ‘one small step’ mini-speech. In the years that followed – alongside millions of other young boys – I became obsessed with space travel. I read articles and books which predicted – with considerable confidence, I might add – that lunar colonies would soon be established and that humans would be heading to Mars before the end of the twentieth century.

…

Even those momentous events are now fading from our collective memories: for younger generations, Buzz Lightyear is more familiar than Buzz Aldrin. Meanwhile, the next man on the lunar surface, if Beijing has its way, is likely to be Chinese, not American. Yet the sentiments that led to overly optimistic expectations about space travel have proved to be correct in so many other ways. Back in 1969, the year in which Neil Armstrong's boot first touched the dusty lunar surface, my parents' television was a small black and white device hiding in the corner. There were only two channels (BBC1 and ITV; newfangled TVs offered BBC2 but we couldn't afford the upgrade). Our television used valve technology – which meant the set took around five minutes to warm up – and the valves frequently broke, leaving us all-too-often without television altogether.

…

And we rely on political promises regarding education, health care, our treatment in old age and our national defence, all of which are based on ever rising prosperity. What happens, however, if the future is no better? What happens if, collectively, the claims incorporated into our pieces of paper and our political promises cannot be honoured? Back to Neil Armstrong. Imagine that, as a consequence of the moon landings, an entrepreneur had decided to sell tickets offering the gullible a chance to head off on a Martian space holiday before the end of the twentieth century: more Thomas Crook than Thomas Cook, perhaps. For extreme science fantasists, this might have been an opportunity too good to miss.

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings by Earl Swift

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, COVID-19, data acquisition, Internet Archive, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, zero-sum game

Only the first pair to land are readily known to many (I dare not say most) Americans. That’s understandable, if disappointing: Apollo 11’s touchdown marked a triumph of imagination as much as technology. The courage it required, the precision it demanded, and the sheer boldness of the undertaking—not to mention the anticipation attending Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the regolith—thrilled and inspired a world witnessing it live on television. But fact is, the greatest achievements of our lunar adventure came later, when the world was no longer hanging on every word the moonwalkers spoke or following every step they took, on missions that are recalled dimly today.

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“He wound up on an airplane runway about a quarter of a mile off, and the men in the control tower had to stop air traffic so he wouldn’t be hit by an incoming 707.” 33 ON JULY 16, 1969, FIVE DAYS AFTER MOREA RELEASED THE REQUEST for proposals, Apollo 11 launched for the moon from an oceanfront pad at the Kennedy Space Center. When the lunar module Eagle touched down, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped from its relative safety into the Sea of Tranquility’s “magnificent desolation,” rover teams at companies scattered across the United States were racing to assemble proposals by the August deadline. Apollo 11’s brief lunar visit offered a strong argument for the LRV project.

…

They compared lunar soil to a beach on Earth—loose on the surface, firmer and more cohesive with depth—and “felt pretty strongly that some type of lugs or cleats from one-half to one inch should be in the wheel design,” Morea reported. Bekker, one of the world’s leading authorities on lugs and cleats, had listened quietly. He sensed that Neil Armstrong “was particularly skeptical in respect to the wire-mesh wheel developed at GM,” he recalled later. When Bekker did speak up “to convince those present that it is all right,” Buzz Aldrin sketched his own design for an alternative he reckoned might work. It featured seven hiking boots radiating from its hub.

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

“It’s going to be expensive,” he says, “and we’ll need to take on some debt to fix everything that needs fixing.” But DiMicco argues the work is essential and the improvements will pay dividends in the long run. It can be done, he says, through the kind of public-private partnerships that helped America win World War II and put Neil Armstrong on the moon. Then in chapter 9, DiMicco makes the case for expanding U.S. domestic energy resources. Natural gas can be a real game changer for American manufacturing. It isn’t just about weaning the United States from foreign oil pumped out of the desert in increasingly hostile countries.

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Kennedy went to Congress in May 1961 and announced that putting a man on the moon should be at the top of the nation’s list of priorities. Kennedy renewed the call the next year at Houston’s Rice University, in what would become one of his more memorable speeches. Kennedy spoke not far from where NASA would run the 1969 mission that secured Neil Armstrong’s place in history. For me—and for millions of young Americans in the early 1960s—Kennedy’s words were inspiration to pursue a career in science and engineering. That speech also reflected the optimism of the era and offered a reminder of what a nation could do with the right kind of leadership, the right policies, and the right kind of partnership between the public and private sectors.

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Adjusted for inflation, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was bigger than the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, which was supposed to help end the Great Depression. It was bigger than the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe and contain Soviet communism after World War II. All told, the federal government spent about five times as much on the 2009 stimulus as we spent to put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969.4 Does anyone really think the stimulus was money well spent? No way. Not even close. But, remember, I supported the stimulus plan. I hated to ask the government to do anything for us. But we had no choice. The crisis was unprecedented. Something had to be done, and the government was in the ideal position to do it.

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

Redundant rubber O-rings had to seal the SRB joints or astronauts would die. Yet another aspect of the design of the space shuttle made the craft significantly more dangerous to fly than anything that had preceded it. It lacked an in-flight escape system. Had theAtlas rocket, which launched John Glenn, or theSaturn V rocket, which lifted Neil Armstrong and his crew, blown up in flight, those astronauts would have likely been saved by their escape systems. On top of theMercury andApollo capsules were emergency tractor escape rockets that would fire and pull the capsule away from a failing booster rocket. Parachutes would then automatically deploy to lower the capsule into the water.

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Where to sit was the first issue I had to address. A large table dominated the room. On it sat some conference phones and an overhead projector. A screen hung on the wall at the front of the room. Chairs ringed the table, but I gave no thought to taking one. This was the sacred table of Apollo. Alan Shepard and Jim Lovell and Neil Armstrong had sat here. At the moment moonwalker John Young was sitting at its head. There was no way one-day-old Ascan Mike Mullane was going to sit at that table. Perhaps the chairs were assigned to the veteran astronauts and I would be embarrassingly evicted like a Cheers’ patron being asked to move from Norm’s bar stool.

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The previous night I had slept lightly and each time I awoke I would pray for Young and Crippen. I had a strong sense of dread about the mission. WhenColumbia ’s hold-down bolts blew, her crew would be irrevocably committed to a flight that was more experimental than any manned flight in history. Forget Alan Shepard, John Glenn, or Neil Armstrong as astronauts who had taken unequaled gambles. Their Redstone, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets had all been proven before they had ever climbed on board. Young and Crippen would be making history by riding a rocket on its very first launch. They weren’t doing so reluctantly. The astronaut office had no problems with this decision, even though it would have been relatively easy to modify the vehicle to fly a first test mission unmanned.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

The Apollo astronauts ingest it without choosing to. In their dust-dirtied LM tiny particles move through the alveoli of their lungs and across the microvilli of their guts into their blood, tissues and cells. They bring the Moon home incorporated. They bring themselves home changed. APOLLO 11: SEA OF TRANQUILITY On the Moon: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin In lunar orbit: Michael Collins TIME SINCE LAUNCH 102:45:58 —Engine arm is off. Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. —Roger, Twan . . . Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.

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The promise of Apollo was a high-water mark in terms of what a nation might aspire to do; the lack of any post-Apollo transformation, either in the heavens or on Earth, showed, for many, the limits of such aspiration. That is not to say the world did not subsequently change. But the change was not the deliberately brought about dawning of the Space Age. It was the unwilled unfolding of a new and troubling Earth Age. Since Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder at Tranquility Base, the Earth’s population has increased by 100%, the amount of economic activity it supports by 300%; and the amount of carbon dioxide dumped in the atmosphere every year by 140%. About two-thirds of all the carbon dioxide emitted since the industrial revolution has been emitted in that past half century.

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As a spacecraft goes out to the Moon, the Earth’s gravity is pulling it back: it is, in effect, going uphill. On the return trip, as soon as it escapes the Moon’s much weaker pull, the Earth’s gravity does the rest. At the end of the fall you can get delta-v for free by turning your incoming velocity into the scalding heat of re-entry. It took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin less than 3km/s to get back to the Pacific from Tranquility Base, even allowing for a slight detour to pick up Mike Collins. As one of the characters in “Destination Moon” points out, a rocket as small and primitive as the V-2 would have been able to make the trip. This demonstrates the way in which what matters in space is delta-v, not distance.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, urban renewal

I discovered quickly enough that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage. But I did sense that the answer was not to be found in any set of traits specific to the task of flying into space. The great majority of the astronauts who had flown the rockets had come from the ranks of test pilots. All but a few had been military test pilots, and even those few, such as Neil Armstrong, had been trained in the military. And it was this that led me to a rich and fabulous terrain that, in a literary sense, had remained as dark as the far side of the moon for more than half a century: military flying and the modern American officer corps. Immediately following the First World War a certain fashion set in among writers in Europe and soon spread to their obedient colonial counterparts in the United States.

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Then one perfectly sunny day he was making a routine takeoff in an F-104 and the panel lit up red and he had that one second in which to decide whether or not to punch out at an altitude of about fifty feet… a choice complicated by the fact that the F-104's seat ejected straight down, out of the belly… and so he tried to roll the ship over and eject upside down, but he went out sideways and was killed. His backup, Major Robert White, took his place in the X-15 project. Joe Walker's backup was a former Navy fighter pilot named Neil Armstrong. Crossfield, White, Walker, Armstrong—they no longer had time to even think about Project Mercury. Project Mercury did not mean the end of the X-15 program. Not at all. The testing of the X-15 would proceed, in order to develop a true spacecraft, a ship that a pilot could fly into space and fly back down through the atmosphere for a landing.

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Not that the Original Seven's national eminence altered the true and secret nature of things, however. The self-esteem of the fighter jock knew no limits, and the members of Group II were no exceptions to this rule. As soon as they were selected, the boys began looking around and comparing themselves—the Next Nine—with the Original Seven. Here was Neil Armstrong, who had flown the X-15. (What Mercury astronaut had done anything like that?) Here was John Young, who held two world speed-to-climb records. (What Mercury astronaut, other than Glenn, could claim any such distinction?) Here were Frank Borman, Tom Stafford, and Jim McDivitt, who had been flight test instructors at Edwards.

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis O. French, Colin Burgess, Paul Haney

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, card file, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, Neil Armstrong, out of africa

After a week of negotiation, I went to work for 1tn, the commercial network in England, as commentator for manned spaceflights. As I commuted between London and Houston, Apollo 10 flowed into Apollo 11. The whole world stood still listening to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the lunar surface on 20 July 1969. In time for Apollo 12, 1tn opened a new broadcast center in downtown London. Queen Elizabeth herself showed up to dedicate the new facilities. During a break, the queen walked up to me and asked: "Mr. Haney, how is Mr. Neil Armstrong's health?" I didn't presume to ask why she was asking. I simply said, "Just fine, as far as I know, ma'am." That was the entire conversation. Several weeks later, back in Houston, I ran into Armstrong at lunch.

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The Eisenhower administration, like so many real-life fathers, wasn't sure what it had sired, so it was understandably reluctant to take too much credit. In 1961 when Houston was selected as the home of what is now the Johnson Space Center, it was the last time in the modern era that cities bid for the right to be home to a new national facility. Houston's psychic payoff for volunteering came when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong's first words back to mother earth were: "Houston . . . the Eagle has landed." In the course of 1961-63, everyone eventually "transitioned" to Houston and the new home the human spaceflight program was building on a swampflood plain twenty miles south of the city. I set up a weekly news conference that identified all coming events in the manned space effort—flight hardware tests in California, geology hikes in Iceland, jungle training in Panama, simulations in Houston.

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It was a spontaneous remark, he later explained: "The two previous Mercury flights were powered by the Redstone, a tiny rocket that couldn't provide enough power to give John the speed he required for orbital flight. What he needed, and what everyone hoped the Atlas would provide, was speed. I had not pondered this, just as Neil Armstrong maintains he'd never pondered the phrase, 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' It just popped out of thin air. He needed speed, his name was John Glenn, and it was sort of a salute to a friend, and a plea to the higher power. Godspeed? Glenn heard none of the prayerful transmissions—only Shepard continuing the steady countdown: "... eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero!"

Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account From Curiosity's Chief Engineer by Rob Manning, William L. Simon

Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong

The first US Mars landers, Viking I and II, had a landing ellipse that was 175 miles (280 km) long and 160 miles (100 km) across. This uncertainty has forced us to find safe landing areas that are huge. Without some sort of autopilot to guide our vehicle through that uncertain atmosphere, we would have to struggle to find safe areas on Mars. It began to look as if any Mars landing would require some kind of robotic Neil Armstrong looking out the window to guide our lander to a safe spot. But, of course, no such technology existed. As it turned out, Armstrong and the techniques of the Apollo man-on-the-moon era offered what became one of the most important elements that transformed our efforts from “wouldn’t be great if we could …” into a viable project.

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If the entry guidance software detected that the lander was overshooting the landing spot, it would command larger S-turns; if undershooting, smaller S-turns or none at all. What’s more, JPL studies in the 1990s pointed the way toward basing our Mars entry guidance software on the same design that had been used to return Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo astronauts back to Earth. My teammates and I tried this idea out on an old Pathfinder teammate and Mars scientist, Matt Golombek, who is JPL’s resident expert on picking safe landing sites on Mars. For years he had been struggling to find sites that were safe as well as promising enough to please the scientists.

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I thought it better not to point out that if the crew were so many miles off course, it was unlikely that whatever caused them to be that far afield would mean there would be nothing left to worry about. The robotic EDLers in the crowd were thrown for another loop when Shuttle Astronaut Commander Barry (Butch) Wilmore strongly articulated the need for the astronauts to be able to take over control during landing on Mars, just as Neil Armstrong had to do during the first lunar landing. I know that if I were an astronaut, I’d want to be able to control my spaceship. But those of us who design rovers to land on Mars also know that those landings are nothing like landing on the moon or landing the Space Shuttle back on Earth. The Martian atmosphere is so close to the surface of the planet that events during landing unfold at lightning speed.

Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

But first we must discover how we know that everything we see in the sky is made of the same stuff as us on the ground THE UNIVERSAL CHEMISTRY SET Surprising as it sounds, we know what every star, planet and moon in the observable Universe is made of, despite the fact that there is only one other place in the Universe that humans have actually visited in person. On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on another world. They spent 2 hours, 36 minutes and 40 seconds walking on the surface of the Moon, but it wasn’t until the last half hour that they carried out one of their most important scientific tasks. Using basic geological tools, Buzz Aldrin drove two core tubes into the lunar surface to collect the most famous rock samples taken in history.

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From a scientific perspective this is unsurprising, because long ago Mendeleev’s table revealed there isn’t any room for other light elements in nature – we have discovered the full set. It would take a change in the laws of physics to discover something on the surface of another world that doesn’t fit into Mendeleev’s scheme, but from the explorer’s perspective, seeing is believing! On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon. This successful landing also opened up infinite possibilities for scientists to understand the formation of the lunar landscape. This photo shows Aldrin collecting some of the lunar rock samples that they took back to Earth for analysis.

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The evidence for this theory is partly that the Moon has a very similar composition to that of Earth’s outer crust, although it is much less dense because it has a significantly smaller iron core. This is what would be expected if the Theia/Earth collision was a glancing blow, leaving the Earth’s iron core intact and so reducing the relative amount of iron in the Moon. This in turn means that the Moon’s gravitational field is much weaker than ours. When Neil Armstrong took his small step onto the Moon, he weighed just 26 kilogrammes (58 pounds), despite the fact that he was wearing a space suit that had weighed 81 kilogrammes (180 pounds) on its own on Earth – this is all because the Moon’s gravitational field strength is approximately one-sixth of Earth’s.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Chapter 8: Start with Why, but Know How 133 Steve Ballmer, the man who replaced Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft: “Steve Ballmer Going Crazy,” March 31, 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc. 134 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx. 135 Raised in Ohio, sixty miles from Dayton, Neil Armstrong grew up: Nick Greene, “Neil Armstrong Biography: First Man of the Moon,” About.com, http://space.about.com/od/astronautbiographies/a/neilarmstrong.htm. 138 What Ralph Abernathy lent the movement was something else: “Abernathy, Ralph David (1926–1990),” Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/abernathy_ralph_david_1926_1990/. 140 The pessimists are usually right: Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century.

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Loyalty to a company trumps pay and benefits. And unless you’re an astronaut, it’s not the work we do that inspires us either. It’s the cause we come to work for. We don’t want to come to work to build a wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral. The Chosen Path Raised in Ohio, sixty miles from Dayton, Neil Armstrong grew up on a healthy diet of stories about the Wright brothers. From a very early age he dreamed of flying. He’d make model airplanes, read magazines about flying and stare at the heavens through a telescope mounted on the roof of his house. He even got his pilot’s license before he got his driver’s license.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

He worked his way through the University of Idaho by spending summers and weekends as a logger. When he graduated, he moved to Los Angeles to seek work in aerospace. His grades had not been great, but his enthusiasm was infectious, and that helped get him a job at TRW, which built the rocket engine that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. On weekends he would go to the Mojave Desert to test big homemade rockets with fellow members of the Reaction Research Society, a club of rocket enthusiasts founded in 1943. There he partnered with a fellow member, John Garvey, to build what became the world’s most powerful amateur rocket engine, weighing eighty pounds.

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“It didn’t help that Elon was younger and richer than they were, with a Silicon Valley disrupter mentality and lack of deference toward the traditional industry.” Garver won the argument at the end of 2009. Obama canceled NASA’s Constellation program after his science advisor and budget director said that it was “over budget, behind schedule, off course, and unexecutable.” NASA traditionalists, including the revered astronaut Neil Armstrong, denounced the decision. “The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” said Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who had traveled with Musk to Russia seven years earlier, charged, “Essentially the U.S. has decided that they’re not going to be a significant player in human space flight.”

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We have to use some of Elon’s thinking.” 37 Musk and Bezos SpaceX, 2013–2014 Having dinner in 2004 Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos, the supercharged Amazon billionaire with a boisterous laugh and boyish enthusiasms, pursues his passions with a talent for being, at the same time, both exuberant and methodical. Like Musk, he was a childhood addict of science fiction, racing through the shelves of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein books at his local library. As a five-year-old in July 1969, he watched television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission that culminated with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. He calls it “a seminal moment” for him. Later, he would fund a series of missions that recovered from the Atlantic Ocean the Apollo 11 rocket engine, which he installed in a niche off the living room of his house in Washington, DC. His exhilaration about space turned him into one of those hardcore Star Trek fans who knows every episode.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Similarly, engineers had little experience with building motors that would work in the cold, airless vacuum of space—and could be started and restarted at the press of a button. So they constructed the rocket based on mental models of how engines work, not just in our planet’s atmosphere but also in space. Testing helped, of course, but mainly to validate what scientists had already conjured up in their minds. When Neil Armstrong took his “small step” onto the lunar surface, he was startled by its firmness: he had expected to sink down an inch or two. “The surface is fine and powdery,” the thirty-eight-year-old captain radioed to his crew and ground control. “I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch.”

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Inside every achievement is an idea; embedded in each monument is a mental model. Our economic, scientific, and social successes stem from our ability to comprehend and conceptualize, to see what is and what can be, and to connect our ideas with our actions. It is the actual basis of human betterment, underpinning the Wright brothers’ liftoff and Neil Armstrong’s giant leap. Why, then, have we focused so much on coordination and so little on the cognitive process underlying it? To an extent, the fixation on coordination is understandable: it is visible and obvious. It is something we can easily shape and directly influence. In contrast, our cognitive processes are locked in our heads.

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Britain’s Covid performance in June: “Coronavirus: UK Daily Deaths Drop to Pre-lockdown Level,” BBC News, June 8, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52968160. UK data on deaths and cases: “COVID-19 Pandemic Data in the United Kingdom,” Wikipedia, accessed October 30, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_Kingdom_medical_cases_chart. Neil Armstrong’s “small step”: Robbie Gonzalez, “Read the New York Times’ 1969 Account of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing,” Gizmodo, August 25, 2012, https://io9.gizmodo.com/277292567?jwsource=cl. On the New York Times’s retraction of its 1920 article: Bjorn Carey, “New York Times to NASA: You’re Right, Rockets DO Work in Space,” Popular Science, July 20, 2009, https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/new-york-times-nasa-youre-right-rockets-do-work-space/.

John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology) by John M. Logsdon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Ted Sorensen

My detailed study of the decision-making process by which President Kennedy became convinced that it was in the national interest for the United States to enter, with the intent of winning, the space race with the Soviet Union has been described as “classic” and “powerful and seminal” by leading space historian Roger Launius.1 Such an assessment is, of course, very gratifying. But as the years passed, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the completeness of the study’s narrative elements. The basic story stood the test of time, but because my research for the book was carried out even before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the Moon, only a very limited base of primary documents on which to base the study was available. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library had not yet opened, and Lyndon B. Johnson was still president. That meant the narrative lacked the fullness made possible only by using the documentary record; also, many oral histories discussing the Kennedy presidency were not yet available.

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K EN N E DY A N D T H E R A C E T O T H E M O O N beyond Earth orbit, he emerges as a pragmatic political leader who soon after entering office came to see the U.S. civilian space program as an important tool to advance U.S. foreign policy and national security goals. He was flexible in his approach to space activities, willing to compete if necessary but preferring to cooperate if possible. John F. Kennedy with his actions in the spring of 1961 and in the following months took the first steps toward the Moon. Eight years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong would take another “small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has suggested that “The 20th Century will be remembered, when all else is forgotten, as the century when man burst his terrestrial bounds.”6 In undertaking the lunar landing program, John Kennedy linked the politics of the moment with the dreams of centuries and the aspirations of the nation.

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To reinforce his commitment to President Kennedy’s space legacy, less than a week after the assassination Johnson announced that Cape Canaveral would be renamed Cape Kennedy and that the space launch facilities located there would be called the John F. Kennedy Space Center.1 In the more than five-and-a-half years between Kennedy’s death and the July 20, 1969 landing of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, dedication to Kennedy’s commitment to achieving that feat “before this decade is out” sustained the program through delays and difficult times, including the death of three Apollo 1 astronauts in a launch pad accident on January 27, 1967. When the Apollo 11 command module Columbia returned to Earth, landing in the Pacific Ocean at dawn on July 24, 1969, a large video screen in Apollo Mission Control in Houston displayed these words: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

In any case, it was already clear from Mariner 4 that many of the experiments considered originally would not have worked on Mars. Yet the lure of Martian life was too great. So there came, from an entirely unexpected quarter, a much more modest assault on the Red Planet. * * * Ten days after Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind in July 1969, reporters flocked to Pasadena to await results from the next JPL missions to Mars. They would not be disappointed. Mariners 6 and 7 would track across the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet, mapping about a fifth of the planet’s surface. Together, they returned a million times more data than Mariner 4 had done five years earlier.

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When the “made it” signal was received back at JPL, Mission Control erupted into sustained cheers and unrestrained joy. Jim Martin smiled the smile of one upon whom fate had bestowed great riches, as well he might. By a truly cosmic coincidence, Viking 1 came to rest on the Red Planet seven years to the day after Neil Armstrong had walked onto the Moon. Within minutes, the lander cameras started to return pictures, the first of which revealed a rock close by one of its footpads. “Oh!” cried Tim Mutch, the camera team leader. “Incredible! Incredible!” His incoherence was understandable. After eight years of planning, Viking was working perfectly on Mars.

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Strange as it may now seem, it nearly came to pass that America’s return to the Red Planet after two decades might have been completely blind. There was a sizable body of opinion that didn’t want any new cameras sent to Mars. Without them, our understanding of the Red Planet would have remained horribly incomplete. * * * When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on another world, in July 1969, Malin, then a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, was allowed into the inner sanctum of Mission Control in Houston to witness the events firsthand. It was a unique experience for anyone, let alone a Berkeley physics student.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, systems thinking

Only one way to know: Prototypes were made and the crew convened for a series of flag-assembly deployment simulations. Finally came the day. The flag was packed (a four-step procedure supervised by the chief of quality assurance) and mounted on the Lunar Module (eleven steps), and off it went to the moon. Where the telescoping crossbar wouldn’t fully extend and the lunar soil was so hard that Neil Armstrong couldn’t plant the staff more than about 6 or 8 inches down, creating conjecture that the flag was most likely blown over by the engine blast of the Ascent Module. Welcome to space. Not the parts you see on TV, the triumphs and the tragedies, but the stuff in between—the small comedies and everyday victories.

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For reasons we’ll explore momentarily, NASA goes to great lengths to keep its men and women from throwing up in their helmets during a spacewalk. Schweickart and Scott had a serious talk about whether they should skip this particular EVA and just tell NASA they’d done it. Apollo 9 was a critical step in the race to put a man on the moon. The EVA life support system that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would wear on the moon had to be tested, as well as rendezvous and docking equipment and procedures. “This is already March of 1969,” recalls Schweickart in his oral history. “The end of the decade is coming right up…. Is this basically a wasted mission because Schweickart’s barfing?

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It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. “There is L, XL, and XXL,” says Hamilton Sundstrand suit engineer Tom Chase. This was not the case during Apollo. Among the 106 items left on the moon’s surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are four urine collection assemblies—two large and two small. Who wore which remains a matter of conjecture. * And a diaper. Though the lack of a diaper doesn’t mean race-car drivers don’t pee in their suits. “People do it all the time,” reported Danica Patrick in an interview in Women’s Health.

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

It wasn’t rocket engines, but the pay was excellent, and he liked the location in El Segundo. He took the job and, after a couple of years, through a friend, Mueller found out about a job opening at TRW. This was a large automotive and aerospace firm that had done a number of interesting things in space, including building the rocket engine that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. He ended up working at TRW for fifteen years, doing mostly rocket engine development, big and small. In the mid-1990s, Mueller started on the TR-106 project, one of the most powerful engines built in decades. This new, liquid-fueled rocket engine produced 650,000 pounds of thrust, about 30 percent more than a space shuttle main engine.

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Photos of the company’s now-defunct test site in McGregor, Texas, were still online. It looked promising. In November 2002, Purdue University invited Musk to speak. It was a prestigious invitation, as Purdue’s notable aerospace engineering program has churned out dozens of NASA’s most notable flight directors and astronauts, including Neil Armstrong. Musk brought some of his senior team to recruit graduating students. While there, Buzza and Mueller chatted up a professor named Scott Meyer, who had been a senior propulsion engineer at Beal. To answer more of their questions, Meyer shared the name and number of Joe Allen, a former employee at the McGregor test site who still lived in the area.

…

That afternoon, he took his own advice and drove back along U.S. Route 101. He stopped at the iconic Santa Claus Lane, a few miles east of Santa Barbara, to take a break. “The sun was setting, so I went out to the beach,” Buzza said. “I lay down and fell asleep for hours, and woke up in the dark and salty chill.” When Neil Armstrong took humanity’s first step on another world in 1969, Anne Chinnery’s parents woke the sleeping three-year-old to experience the moment. The only conscious memory she retains of the Apollo 11 Moon landing is confusion, but it might nonetheless have proven formative. Throughout her childhood, she maintained an interest in space, and aspired to fly there one day.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

THE EARTH IN A COSMIC CONTEXT In 1968, the Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders photographed ‘Earthrise’, showing the distant Earth, shining above the lunar horizon. He didn’t realise that it would become an iconic image for the global environmental movement. It revealed Earth’s delicate biosphere, contrasted with the sterile moonscape where Neil Armstrong, one year later, took his ‘one small step’. Another famous image was taken in 1990 by the probe Voyager 1 from a distance of six billion kilometres. The Earth appeared as a ‘pale blue dot’, which inspired Carl Sagan’s thoughts:1 Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.… Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

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(Glenn later became a US senator, and, later still, the oldest astronaut when, at age seventy-seven, he became part of the STS-95 Space Shuttle crew.) Only twelve years elapsed between the flight of the Soviet Sputnik 1—the first artificial object to go into orbit—and the historic ‘one small step’ on the lunar surface in 1969. I never look at the Moon without being reminded of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Their exploits seem even more heroic in retrospect, when we realise how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment. Indeed, President Nixon’s speechwriter William Safire had drafted a eulogy to be given if the astronauts had crash-landed on the Moon or were stranded there: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

business climate, butterfly effect, complexity theory, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, impulse control, Lao Tzu, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, power law, systems thinking

So it is learning when to soothe and gentle it and when to let it run that marks the winning jockey, the true survivor. And that is what the dark humor of various subcultures is all about: It’s about gentling the beast, keeping it cool; and when it’s time to run, it’s about letting it flow, about having emotion and reason in perfect balance. That’s what characterizes elite performers, from Tiger Woods to Neil Armstrong. There are primary emotions and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are the ones you’re born with, such as the drive to obtain food or the reaction of reaching out to grab something if you feel yourself falling. But the emotional system of bodily responses can be hooked up to anything. Remarque’s soldiers learned to connect a deeply instinctive emotional response to the whistling of a shell.

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So it should come as no surprise that, in many cases, basic survival mechanisms, which have been hardwired into us and sculpted by experience, turn out to be not only the most powerful motivators of behavior but to operate at their peak efficiency out of reach of the conscious decision-making powers, which makes it easy for reason to be overwhelmed. Once an emotional reaction is underway, there can be an overwhelming impulse to act. But there are many ways of revising the script and adapting in hazardous situations. Training is one of them. Neil Armstrong would not have been able to land Eagle on the moon if it hadn’t been for years of rigorous training, not only in the technical stuff, which had to be second nature, but in emotional control. All elite performers train hard, and when you follow in their path, you’d better train hard, too, or be exceptionally alert.

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Only then are they worthy to hold the sword. The selection process at NASA seeks out those who are already on that path when they arrive. Whatever an astronaut is, he is not made that way by NASA. He arrives with it in his heart, and the purpose of his training is to extend and deepen those transcendent qualities. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he had to take control away from Eagle and fly by the seat of his pants. The expression isn’t gratuitous. It means that he had to engage his body (read: emotions) as well as his thinking with the machine (read: the environment). In the ministry of NASA, he had trained his emotions as well as his reason.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Figure 1.5: The correlation between tractors and reduced employment in farming The disruptions in the next age were perhaps a little subtler, although the news of such changes tended to be more dramatic. The Atomic, Jet or Space Age (1945–1975) My childhood heroes had the right stuff. Neil Armstrong, Chuck Yeager, Yuri Gagarin, Alexey Leonov,14 Buzz Aldrin, David Scott, Jim Lovell, Gordon Cooper and the other Apollo astronauts (just to name a few) captured our imagination, and pushed us beyond barriers that we could never have imagined. However, none of these amazing feats would have been possible without a supporting cast of thousands, and without leaps and bounds in technological capability.

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The tablet computer that you use today would have cost US$30 to 40 million in equivalent computing power to build just two or three decades ago, and would have been known as a supercomputer at the time. The smartphone that you probably have in your pocket is more powerful than all of the computers that NASA had in the 1970s during the Apollo project, and almost 3 million times more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins used to navigate their way to the lunar surface. The most powerful supercomputer in 1993, built by Fujitsu for Japan’s space agency at an approximate cost of US$34 million (1993 prices), could easily be outstripped performance-wise by a smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy S6.

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In 1969, however, John Pierce, one of Bell’s leading engineers, wrote an open letter to the Acoustical Society of America criticising speech recognition at Bell and compared it to “schemes for turning water into gasoline, extracting gold from the sea, curing cancer, or going to the moon”. Ironically, one month after Pierce published his open letter, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Regardless, Bell Labs still had its funding for speech recognition pulled soon after. By 1993, speech recognition systems developed by Ray Kurzweil could recognise 20,000 words (uttered one word at a time), but accuracy was limited to about 10 per cent. In 1997, Bill Gates was pretty bullish on speech recognition, predicting that “In this 10-year time frame, I believe that we’ll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact, but during that time we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface.”25 In the year 2000, it was still a decade away.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

His memory lives on, not least in a crater named after him on the far side of the Moon. The Soviets built on Konstantin’s work. By 1957 they’d launched their first intercontinental ballistic missile (which leaves the atmosphere) and put the Sputnik satellite into space. The same year saw Sputnik 2 – this time with added dog! It’s quite right that the names Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong are up there with the great explorers such as Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and Columbus, but history should spare a thought for the first animal to go into orbit. She was a placid little dog named Laika (Barker) after the public heard her barking on the radio in the run-up to the mission. Attached to sensors, and in a tiny space suit, she made at least one orbit of Earth before succumbing to heat and stress.

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It may be the most famous photograph ever taken and is credited with massive influence on the environmental movement. From space the crew read out verses from Genesis, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’, capturing the spirit of the times, the sense of wonder about how far humanity had come and how much further it could go. The following year, on 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon and uttered an eight-second-long sentence which will be known for as long as humans exist: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Since then twelve astronauts, all American, have walked on the Moon, but the territory covered so far would fit into a small town, so claiming that we have explored it would be akin to aliens landing in Roswell, New Mexico, and saying they’d explored Earth.

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Rushdie) 52 satellite technology/networks xv–xvi, 30–1, 132, 303, 304, 306, 313, 314, 315, 316–18 Saud, Crown Prince 84 Saud, King Abd Allah al 80 Saud, Muhammad ibn 74, 78, 79 Saudi Arabia xiii, xiv, 44, 47, 57, 58, 61, 69, 186 Al-Qaeda 88–90 anti-television protests 85 Covid-19 99 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman 90–1, 92–7, 102–4 Crown Prince Saud 84 early Saud dynasty 74–5, 78–82 Eastern Province 77, 82, 97, 99, 104 employment 98–9, 101, 104 Empty Quarter 76 Fahd of Saudi Arabia 87 Faisal I of Saudi Arabia 84–5 First Saudi State 79–80 foreign population/workforce 98–9 geography 75–7 Ibn Saud 80–3 investment in the Sahel 219, 233–4 Islamist terrorism 88–90, 104 Jeddah 77, 99 Khalid of Saudi Arabia 85–7 land borders 76 Libyan Civil War 92 Mecca 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 99 Medina 77, 79, 81, 84 murder of Jamal Khashoggi 94–5 Najd 78–9, 80, 81 National Guard 87, 88, 96 Neom city project 99 oil supplies 75, 76, 77, 82–3, 84, 85, 93, 96, 97–8, 99–100, 101–2, 104 Osama Bin Laden 75, 87, 88–9, 104 population size 75, 83, 98–9 Rashidi dynasty 80–1 relationship with China 102 relationship with France 86 relationship with Iran 91–2, 93, 94, 103 relationship with Israel 102–3 relationship with Lebanon 93–4 relationship with post-war Iraq 91 relationship with Qatar 92, 258 relationship with Syria 91–2 relationship with United Kingdom 81–3 relationship with USA xiv, 75, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 religious extremism 75, 85, 88–90, 104 renewable energy 101 resignation of Saad al-Hariri 93–4 Riyadh 77, 80–1, 99, 177 Saud family arrests at the Ritz Carlton 96–7 Shia Islam 77, 79, 97, 99, 104 siege of the Grand Mosque 86–7 slavery 84 Sunni Islam 77, 79, 91 (see also Wahhabism) Vision 2030 98–9 Wahhabism 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 water supplies 100–1 Yemen Civil War 93 Saudi Aramco 83, 85, 98, 100 SAVAK 50 Schinas, Alexandros 151 Scotland Act of Union (1707) 116 alliance with France 117, 118 colony in Panama 117–18 independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7 Scotti tribe settlement 114 wars with England 115, 117 Second Balkan War 151–2 Second World War ix–x, 23–4, 49, 83, 84, 122–3, 126, 136, 153–4, 181, 249, 303 Serbia x, 151, 152, 185, 293–4 Shammar, emirate of 74, 79, 80 sharia law 88, 186, 213, 214 Shatt al-Arab waterway 39, 42 Shia Islam xi, xiv, 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 104 Iran 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 94 Saudi Arabia 74–5, 77, 79, 93, 97, 99, 104 Sidi Yahya mosque 213–14 Sisi, General Abdel Fattah el- 92, 187, 261–2 SKY Perfect Corporation 318 slavery 84, 121, 208, 209, 249, 261 Society of Pathseekers of the Islamic Revolution 54 Soleimani, Qasem 62 Solomon Islands 28 Solomon, King 246 Somalia 242, 243, 244, 250, 251, 252, 258–9 South China Sea 26, 31–2 South Korea 31, 32 South Pacific 27–9 South Sudan 210, 242, 262 Southeastern Anatolia Project 192–3 Soviet Union 17, 25, 49, 50, 87, 123, 154, 161, 304 see also Russia space xv–xvi Artemis Accords 302–3, 309 asteroid 3554 Amun 324 astropolitical theory/space geography 311–14 Chinese exploration 314 colonizing the Moon 302 commercial companies 308 development of rocket technology 303–4 Earth boundaries 310 Earth Space/low Earth orbit 312–14 Elon Musk/SpaceX 308, 319–20 extraterrestrial life forms 322–3 first moon landing 303, 304, 305 governmental frameworks 302–3, 309–11, 324–5 imagining the future 319–25 International Space Station (ISS) 303, 306, 307–8 Jeff Bezos/Blue Origin 308 junk/debris 318 Laika the dog 304 meteor strikes 325 militarization of 314–19 mining the moon 302, 309 Moon ‘safety zones’ 309 Moon Treaty (1979) 310–11 Neil Armstrong 304, 305 Outer Space Treaty (1967) 309–11, 315 the Pioneer Plaque 323 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking (1975) 306, 325 Space Shuttle missions 305–6, 307 speed of travel 321–2 Sputnik satellites 304 travel to Mars 308, 313 water-recovery system 307 Yuri Gagarin 304–5 Spain xv, 118, 119, 210, 219, 234 attempted coup (1981) 288 attempted invasion of England 278–9 Basque Country 269, 279, 284, 289–90 Catalan referendums for independence 292–3, 294 Catalonia 269, 279–80, 282, 284, 287, 289, 291–6 Civil War 282–4 colonialism 277, 280–1 Columbus, Christopher 276–7 ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna) 290–1 EU and NATO 289, 293–4, 297 Francisco Franco 282–7 geography 268, 270–2 historical invasions 273–4 hydroelectric power 272 Inquisition 275–6 internal tensions 268–9, 272 see also Basque Country; Catalonia Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain 275–6, 277 King Juan Carlos 287–9 King Philip II 278 Latin American gold 277 Latin American rebellions 280–1 La Guerra dels Segadors 279 maritime vulnerability 277–8 medieval fortresses 268 migrants and refugees 297 military force and conflicts 271, 274–5, 277–81 military support in the Sahel 297 Moors 271–2 Muslim invaders/settlement 273–4, 275, 276 naval defence 271, 296–7 population size 270, 280 Reconquista Iberia 274–5 relationship with France 279–80 relationship with the USA 286–7 Roman occupation 273 Visigoths 273 water supplies 271–2 Spartacus film 46 Sputnik satellites 304 Stafford, Thomas P. 306 Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL) 83 Starshot/space sails project 322 Stolen Generation, Australian 12 Strait of Hormuz 43–4, 61 Suarez, Adolfo 288 Sudan 210, 242, 262 Suez Canal 120, 151, 180 Sunni Islam xi, 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64, 174, 187 Fulani 222 Iran 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64 Muslim Brotherhood 186 Salafists 223 Saudi Arabia/Wahhabism 75, 77, 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 91, 97 Sweden 126, 131, 218 Syria xii, 57, 61, 68, 69, 81, 85, 103, 143, 166, 192, 193, 195–6, 198 Civil War xi, 47, 58, 63, 91–2, 131, 173, 177, 187–8, 233 T Taiwan 28, 30, 231 takfiri ideology 223 Taliban 89, 232 Tamerlane 40 Tasmania 20 Taylor, Griffith 7–8 Tehran, Iran 42 Tejero, Lieutenant-Colonel 288 Temple of Jerusalem 45 Ten Pound Poms 17 Tesla 101 Tewodros II, Emperor 248 The Times 227 Thessalonika (Salonika) 151, 153, 154 Thiele, Heike 219 Thomas, Bertram 76 Those Who Sign in Blood 215 Thucydides 142 Timbuktu 213 Tomyris 45 Tonga 29 Torres Straight Islanders 13–14 Treaty of Lausanne (1923) 153, 189–90 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) 277 Troy, siege of 158 Truman, Harry S. 286 Trump, Donald xii, 25, 61–2, 93, 315–16 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 303–4 Tuareg people 205, 211, 212, 213, 214, 219, 234–5 Tudors 115 Tunguska meteor 325 Turkey xiii, xv, 42, 48, 92, 94–5, 96 Aegean Sea 142, 143, 191 Anatolia 172, 173, 174, 175, 191–3, 197 Arab Uprisings (2011) 185–6 Armenian genocide 164, 180, 188 arms manufacture 198 attempted coup (2016) 188–9 Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul 148–9, 152, 174–5, 178, 179 dams and water supplies 192–3 defence 172, 175–7 General Kemal Atatürk 152–3, 179–81, 196, 199 geography 172, 173, 176 Hagia Sophia 196–7 industrialisation 180–1 languages 179–80 Lausanne Treaty (1923) 189–90 Mavi Vatan/Blue Homeland strategy 189–90, 198 Mediterranean gas fields 142, 162–3, 190 migrant/refugee crisis 157, 188 military coups 182 and NATO 163, 164–6, 181, 188–9, 191, 197–8, 199 Osman Ghazi 174 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 183–9, 191, 194, 195–7, 198–9, 258 relationship with Cyprus 143, 161–2, 198 relationship with Egypt 186–7, 198, 258, 259 relationship with Ethiopia 259 relationship with France 164, 198 relationship with Greece 142, 143, 147, 152–3, 158–60, 161–3, 179, 190, 198 relationship with Israel 185–6 relationship with Russia 190–1 relationship with Somalia 259 relationship with Syria 187–8, 192, 193, 195–6 relationship with the Kurds 175, 181, 182, 187, 192, 193–5 relationship with UAE 258 sanctions 191 Second Balkan War 152 Second World War 181 Seljuk Empire 173–4 War of Independence 152–3, 179 Westernization 179–80 see also Ottoman Empire Turkmen, Iranian 42 U Ukraine xi, 175 unipolar decade (1990s) x United Arab Emirates (UAE) 44, 57, 76, 80, 92, 102–3, 186, 198, 219, 258–9, 262 United Kingdom xiii Acts of Union (1707) 109, 116, 117–18, 133 Anglo-Persian Oil Company 48, 49 Anglo-Saxons 110, 114 armed forces 131, 134–5, 136, 165, 218, 219, 249 (see also Royal Air Force; Royal Navy) Brexit xv, 108, 127, 136 British Empire 118–22, 123–4, 148, 150–1, 161, 210, 308 Catalonian independence 295–6 Celtic Britain 112–13 colonialism 108, 117, 121, 210 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (1900) 15 defeat the Spanish Armada 278 dialects 110–11 east–west divide 111, 113–14 education system 132–3 EEC and EU 125–7, 129, 131–2, 136, 164 EFTA membership 295 English language 132 geography 108, 109–10, 111 German invasion plans 122–3 historical invasions 113–15 industrial revolution 111 intelligence network 30, 129, 135 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Ireland 109–10 LEJOG cycle route 110 London 112, 113, 115, 249 Magna Carta 115 MI6 49 military support in the Sahel 218, 219, 235 Napoleonic wars 119–20 Norman invasion 114–15 nuclear submarines 134–5, 136 place names 110–11 population distribution 112 Reformation 116 relationship with Australia 22, 23 relationship with China 128, 130 relationship with France 130–1, 133 relationship with Germany 121–2, 133 relationship with Iran 40 relationship with Poland 130 relationship with Saudi Arabia 81–3, 84 relationship with Scotland 109 relationship with USA 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 Roman occupation 112–13 Scottish independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7, 296 Second World War 122–3 terrain and infrastructure 111–12 trade deals 128–30 Tudors 115 Vikings 110–11, 114 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 United Nations 28, 53, 60, 68, 84, 132, 161–2, 204, 218, 219, 225, 231, 249, 285, 310, 311 United States of America x Apollo space missions 303, 305–6 armed forces 23, 24, 30, 31, 61–2 assassination of Qasem Soleimani 63 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 30–1, 49 commercial space travel 308 Constitution 115 embassies burnt 86 embassy siege, Iran 60–1 Greek Civil War 154 intelligence network 30–1, 61, 129 International Space Station 307 invasion of Iraq (2003) 57 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Louisiana Purchase 119 militarization of space 314–19 military coup, Cyprus (1974) 161 National Space Policy 319 Pact of Madrid 286–7 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue 32 rare-earth supplies 229–30, 231 relationship with Australia 23, 24–5, 30 relationship with Ethiopia 249, 251, 261 relationship with Greece 154, 165–6 relationship with Iran 39, 44, 49, 60–2, 63, 68–9 relationship with Saudi Arabia xiv, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 relationship with the UK 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 relationship with Turkey 189, 191 resignation of Lebanese prime minister 94 Russian ‘stalking’ satellites 316–17 Sahel Alliance commitments 219, 220–1, 232 satellite-killer systems 317–18 Second World War 23 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking 306 Space Force 303, 314–16 stock-market crash (1929) 181 Strategic Petroleum Reserves 22 in the West Pacific 24–5 uranium production 227–8, 230 V V-2 rockets 303 Van Allen radiation belts 314 Vanuatu 28 Velayat-e faqih 52 Versailles Treaty (1919) 303 Victoria, Queen 15, 150 Victory, HMS 119 Vienna 176–7 Vietnam 24, 30, 32 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ 17 Vikings 110–11, 114 Visigoths 273 Vision 2030 98–9 von Braun, Wernher 303 voting rights 12–13, 50 Voulet-Chanoine expedition (1898/99) 209–10 Voulet, Paul 209–10 W Wahhab clan 79, 86 Wahhab, Muhammad ibn Abd al- 79 Wahhabism 79, 81, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 ‘walkabout,’ Australia 6–7 Wall Street Journal 231 ‘White Australia’ Policy 16–17 Whitson, Peggy 307 William the Conqueror 114–15 Wilson, Edward 12 Witiza, King 273 women’s rights 52, 65, 97, 98, 283 World Bank 219, 225 Y Yemen 44, 57, 61, 68, 69, 76, 77 Civil War 47, 93, 258 Yugoslavia x, 154, 160 Yugoslav Wars 17, 182–3 Z Zagros Mountains 39, 42, 44–5, 53 Zayed, Prince Mohammed bin 102 Zenawi, Meles 252 Ziyad, Tariq ibn 273–4 Zoroastrianism 45, 46 First published 2021 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 2 John Street London WC1N 2ES www.eandtbooks.com ISBN: 978-1-78396-538-0 Copyright © Tim Marshall 2021 The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

airport security, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, COVID-19, crew resource management, glass ceiling, human-factors engineering, index card, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking

Our after-hours antics provided a way for hardworking people to blow off steam and build camaraderie. If you took it too far, you could be dismissed. That happened to one of the pilots in a previous class. Too many pranks caused him to lose his focus and wash out of the program. The overall meat of TPS was serious and conservative. The top test pilots—such as Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, Neil Armstrong, and John Young—were focused and professional, not hotshots. Deep down, we all hoped to emulate their example. Each of us wanted to be the best test pilot we could possibly be. Everyone wanted to get the highest grades on their flights, verbal presentations, written presentations, and tests. We were so aware of our natural drive to be the best that from the outset, we made rules to keep the level of competition from becoming overwhelming.

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Humility and vulnerability were important. Too many lives were on the line if you were too proud to disclose what you learned from your errors. Another result of our mission delay was that I’d be the next-to-last person in my astronaut class to fly. On occasion, that agitated me. When it did, Jim Wetherbee reminded me that Neil Armstrong was the last person from his astronaut class to fly. The first man on the Moon! Rob Navias from NASA Public Affairs reassured me, “Your mission will go on time in January 1995.” He seemed confident, and his optimism was contagious. Both men helped me to realize that there was no use in me stewing about things over which I had no control.

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., his wife, and her sister had disappeared somewhere between New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard. Like the rest of the country, we were shocked and saddened to watch the terrible story unfold over the weekend. Despite this awful news, excitement was building for our launch early Tuesday morning. July 20 was also the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were coming to KSC for a celebration of that anniversary, and they planned to stay for our launch. I invited Lisa Reed and her training team to KSC as our guests to see us off. They were so wonderful in helping us prepare that I wanted to be sure they had a small reward for their hard work.

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Somewhere between five and ten N600-ESs were fired into space, with one or two examples flying on each of the first five Apollo missions as backups for the electronic computers that guided and controlled the spacecraft.89 “No modifications were needed for use in space,” the Smithsonian notes drily of the space-flown N600 in its collection, because, let us not forget, the twenty-two scale, double-sided, trigonometric Pickett N600-ES was scarcely more complex than an elementary school ruler.90 It is not known whether Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin ever had to break out their slide rules while aboard Apollo 11 (Pickett Corporation, who crowed mightily about their lunar rules, would certainly have let their customers know about it), but that did not stop Aldrin’s rule from fetching $77,675 at auction in 2007.91 From such dizzying heights, the slide rule had plenty of time to watch the ground rush up to meet it.

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But the final nail in the slide rule’s complimentary pleather belt holster was not that it was inaccurate, or that it could only address a limited set of mathematical functions. The real problem was that it asked too much of its user: it put them closer to the numbers, yes, but it also asked them to estimate and fudge and squint and recompute. As such, when a viable alternative arrived, the end was swift.92 Just three years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin carried their Pickett slide rules to the moon, the astronauts who flew to the Skylab space station took HP-35 electronic calculators instead. In 1976, Pickett stopped making slide rules; in 1980 their remaining inventory was sold for scrap.93 William Oughtred’s clever stick was no match for the scientific calculator

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So you would have to call up and give the astronauts some—we had two knobs, a pitch and yaw knob, but you have to give him some angles to put it at. [ . . . ] We would have to run four separate programs on this Programma 101, and then in between those programs, we’d have to get out our manuals [ . . . ] we’d have to look up trigonometric functions and input the data, which today your calculator does that. [ . . . ] Then we would read out the angles that we came up with to the crew, and they would dial them in, look at the signal strength, the signal strength there.79 Olivetti’s “supercalculator,” as Whittle called it, was a vital cog in the effort to keep Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in touch with their home planet. Shortly thereafter, the Programma 101 was pressed into the service of the other fateful American adventure of the 1960s. The same year that Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the moon, the U.S. Air Force began secret bombing operations over neutral Cambodia, seeking to dislodge North Vietnamese forces from hidden Cambodian bases.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial thriller, full employment, German hyperinflation, government statistician, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the new new thing, Tragedy of the Commons, tulip mania, women in the workforce

The fuse is burning its way toward the bomb. When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland—even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. When Iceland became a tourist in global high finance it had the same problem as Neil Armstrong. Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth—geneticists often use them for research.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

They rescued the Hubble Space Telescope from failure and prolonged its lifetime by de­cades on five dif­fer­ent missions to upgrade its instrumentation.1 The authors belong to a generation old enough to remember the Apollo lunar landings of 1969–1972; we can hardly look at the moon without being reminded of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Their exploits, which seem even more heroic as we recall their dependence on primitive computers and untested equipment, remind us that ­humans have traveled into space for more than sixty years, not from necessity but in response to our desire to send them t­ here and then bring them back to Earth. ­

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These new developments make it unclear ­whether space colonization might be funded by governments, ­either separately or in collaboration, or by im­mensely wealthy buccaneers who aim to set themselves up as the rulers of new empires. One ­factor that would affect any of ­these transitions is the certain appearance of new technologies that w ­ ill shape how h ­ umans live on Earth. Just as t­ oday’s smartphones might have seemed nearly magical to Neil Armstrong, super-­advanced computers ­will enable ­f uture transformations such as artificial intelligence and, of course, intelligent robots. Silicon chips, which have already remade our ­everyday objects and social interactions, ­w ill grow more power­f ul, creating (among many other worries) the capability to maintain constant surveillance of an entire population.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

“Spatial and Object Visualization Cognitive Styles: Validation Studies in 3800 Individuals.” Submitted to Applied Cognitive Psychology June 12, 2006. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238687967_Spatial_and_Object_Visualization_Cognitive_Styles_Validation_Studies_in_3800_Individuals. Chaiken, A. “Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit Was Made by a Bra Manufacturer.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2013. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/neil-armstrongs-spacesuit-was-made-by-a-bra-manufacturer-3652414/. Chandler, D. L. “Behind the Scenes of the Apollo Mission at M.I.T.” MIT News, July 18, 2019. Communications & Power Industries. “About Us: History.” https://www.cpii.com/history.cfm.

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Laning masterminded a relatively primitive computer system that could process the algebraic equations necessary for the lunar module to function, effectively creating a compiler that turned the equations into understandable computer language. Laning freely acknowledged that others did the programming, but it was his three-tiered processing system that prioritized tasks and thus enabled Neil Armstrong to take partial control of the module when the system was overloaded, readjust the radar to its correct setting, and disconnect it to prevent the computer from further overloading. Laning’s compiler essentially taught the computer how to read and interpret algebraic equations and then figure out how to multitask by switching between tasks in a fraction of a second.

Voyage by Stephen Baxter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, full employment, gravity well, horn antenna, hydroponic farming, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, place-making, Ronald Reagan

Annotation The book depicts a manned mission to Mars as it might have been in another timeline, one where John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt on him in 1963. Voyage is the epic saga of America’s might-have-been — a powerful, sweeping novel imaginatively created from true lives and real events. NASA, the Saturn rocket, and historical figures from Neil Armstrong to Ronald Reagan are interwoven with unforgettable characters that only a world-class novelist could bring to life: Dana, the Nazi camp survivor who achieves the dream of his hated masters; Gershon, the Vietnam fighter jock determined to be the first African-American to land on another planet; Lee, the small-scale aerospace contractor with a big dream; Priest, who gives his life so that others might live to walk on Mars.

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T minus three minutes forty seconds and counting. I am told that there are an estimated one million here with us today, the largest turnout for a launch since Apollo 11. Welcome to all of you. You might like to know that among the celebrities watching the launch today in the VIP enclosure are Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Joe Muldoon, and Michael Collins, cosmonaut Vladimir Viktorenko, along with Liza Minnelli, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, William Shatner, sci-fi authors Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov, and singer John Denver. We’re sure you aren’t going to be disappointed.

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But with men routinely being hurled into space in ballistic capsules like Mercury and Gemini, the X-20 looked too advanced for its time, and it soon ran up a bill as large as that for the entire Mercury program without delivering a single flight article. And it was canned. Now, the only way for a pilot to reach space was to transfer to NASA. Neil Armstrong was another X-15 pilot who had gone that way before. And so that was what Stone had determined to do. But first he had some unfinished business. In 1969, Stone was thirty-seven years old. “Drop minus one minute.” “One minute,” Stone said. “Rog. Data on. Emergency battery on. I’m ready when you are, buddy.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

If you want to get really depressed about success, look at what happened to the heroic astronauts of the 1960s and ’70s. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, returned home from the historic Apollo 11 mission and became an alcoholic. Severely depressed, his life unraveled. Aldrin burned through three marriages and wrote two memoirs about his misery. Neil Armstrong, the man who stepped out of Apollo 11 just ahead of Aldrin, spent his next few decades figuring out what to do with his life. He briefly taught some small classes at a university, then quit unexpectedly. He consulted a little for NASA and some random companies, and did a commercial for Chrysler, and quit all those things, too.

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That money changes how you see yourself, how you interact with people and what you do with your day and your future in very significant ways,” says Goldbart. 145 If you want to get really depressed: An excellent CNN story recapping the various journeys of former moonwalkers: Chris Chandler and Andy Rose, “After Walking on Moon, Astronauts Trod Various Paths,” CNN, July 17, 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/17/life.after.moon.landing/index.html (accessed February 17, 2014). Original reporting of Armstrong’s lawsuits can be seen at Bill Romano, “Neil Armstrong Sues over Use of Name in Ad,” Boca Raton News, February 6, 1997, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1291&dat=19970206&id=1ClUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TY4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4495,1731221 (accessed February 17, 2014). James Irwin’s ministry info can be found in his obituary at “James Irwin Was Astronaut, Minister, City Native,” Associated Press, August 10, 1991, http://news.google.com/newspapers?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

Darwin had studied to become an Anglican parson but was far more interested in geology and natural sciences than in the Bible. He jumped at the opportunity, and the rest is history. The captain spent his time on the voyage drawing military maps while Darwin collected the empirical data and formulated the insights that would eventually become the theory of evolution. On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo 11 astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities, and there is a story – or legend – describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals.

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And the European empires rose and flourished thanks also to factors other than science. Behind the meteoric rise of both science and empire lurks one particularly important force: capitalism. Were it not for businessmen seeking to make money, Columbus would not have reached America, James Cook would not have reached Australia, and Neil Armstrong would never have taken that small step on the surface of the moon. 16 The Capitalist Creed MONEY HAS BEEN ESSENTIAL BOTH FOR building empires and for promoting science. But is money the ultimate goal of these undertakings, or perhaps just a dangerous necessity? It is not easy to grasp the true role of economics in modern history.

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Did the wealth humankind accumulated over the last five centuries translate into a new-found contentment? Did the discovery of inexhaustible energy resources open before us inexhaustible stores of bliss? Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry? Historians seldom ask such questions.

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

The Laser Altimeter Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. —John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” On 13 February 1969, nine days before Mariner 6 set off for Mars and five months before Neil Armstrong was to step onto the dust of the Sea of Tranquillity, the newly inaugurated president, Richard Nixon, asked his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, to explore the options for a post-Apollo space program. Agnew became enthused. When Apollo 11 made its historic landing that July, he talked of committing the nation to the goal of sending people to Mars.

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But physical resemblance is not the whole story; this representation of Mars is ideological, as well. Since the 1960s, America has ceaselessly talked about space as a new frontier, a continuation of the nineteenth century’s expansion—and one result of this rhetoric has been an eagerness to see the landscapes of the solar system in terms of the landscapes of the American West. When Neil Armstrong told the watching world that the “stark beauty” surrounding Tranquillity Base looked “like the high desert of the United States,” he wasn’t just speaking on the basis of personal experience or of the training with which the Survey had equipped him. He was expressing the rhetorical continuity between the pioneers of the space age and the pioneers of the West on which his adventure was founded.

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Only on 12 July—eight days after the symbolically weighted date for which the first touchdown on another planet had been slated—was a site found that looked smooth to the orbiters’ eyes and sounded flat to the radar ears. Viking 1 landed about five hundred miles northwest of its original target site on 20 July 1976, the seventh anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s touchdown on the moon. A little more than six weeks later, Viking 2 landed at its second backup site in Utopia after the primary in Cydonia and the first backup had proved similarly worrying. It was a close-run thing; analysis of the rocks among which it found itself suggests that Viking 2 ran an almost one-in-three chance of coming down on a crippling boulder.

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

When Riesenfeld first read the HBS case, in 2008, the issues it presented were immediately familiar to the ex-commando. But why had Riesenfeld mentioned the case to us? What was the connection to Israel, or to its innovation economy? The Apollo 13 crisis occurred on April 15, 1970, when the spaceship had traveled three-fourths of the way to the moon. It was less than a year after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had stepped off Apollo 11. NASA was riding high. But when Apollo 13 was two days into its mission, traveling two thousand miles per hour, one of its primary oxygen tanks exploded. This led astronaut John Swigert to utter what has by now become a famous line: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

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We passed the $900 million National Defense Education Act (about $6 billion in today’s dollars), providing scholarships, student loans, and scientific equipment for schools.”1 NASA and the Apollo program were created, as was a powerful new Pentagon agency dedicated to galvanizing the civilian R&D community. A little over a decade later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. The Apollo program and the Pentagon’s related defense investments spurred a generation of new discoveries that were ultimately commercialized, with a transformative impact on the economy. This concerted research and development campaign gave birth to entirely new business sectors within avionics and telecommunications, as well as the Internet itself, and became a legacy of America’s response to Sputnik.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

But there’s a story I once heard that provides a graphic illustration of how the refrigerated neurology that showed up on Robert Hare’s brain scans can, in certain situations, confer real benefits; how the reptilian focus and crystalline detachment of neurosurgeon James Geraghty can sometimes code for greatness not just in the boardroom, the courtroom, and the operating theater. But in another world entirely. The story goes like this. On July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong and his partner Buzz Aldrin zipped across the lunar landscape looking for a place to set their module down, they came within seconds of crash-landing. The problem was geology. There was just too much of it. And fuel: too little. Rocks and boulders lay scattered all over the place, making a safe approach impossible.

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Bomb-Disposal Experts—What Makes Them Tick? This extraordinary account of incredible interplanetary insouciance epitomizes life on the horizons of possibility, where triumph and disaster share a fraught and fragile frontier and cross-border traffic flows freely. This time, however, the road to disaster was closed. And Neil Armstrong’s coolness under fire rescued from cosmological calamity one of the greatest feats ever in the history of human achievement. But there’s more. His heart rate, reports revealed later, barely broke a sweat. He might as well have been landing a job in a gas station as a spaceship on the moon. Some freakish strain of cardiovascular genius?

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Assuming they have prior knowledge of what human flag colours mean, any belligerent aliens who stop off at the Moon en route to invading Earth will assume we’ve already surrendered. The most famous flag on the Moon – the one carried by Apollo 11 and erected during the first Moon landing – is the only one not standing. Buzz Aldrin saw it being blown over by the rocket blast as he and Neil Armstrong left for home. Given the extremes of heat, cold and radiation it will have been subjected to, it’s very likely to have disintegrated. Dennis Lacarrubba, whose New Jersey-based company made the flag, has been quoted as saying, ‘I can’t believe there would be anything left.’ Conspiracy theorists who believe the Moon landings were a hoax often cite the flag in the Apollo 11 photographs and ask how it could be waving when there is no wind on the Moon.

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Only 24 humans have seen the far side of the Moon with their own eyes – and nobody has seen it since the Apollo 17 crew in 1972, over 40 years ago. Man has never landed on the far side – six probes have been deliberately crashed there, but no landing craft have touched down. On the near side of the Moon the tracks of astronauts are still visible even after four decades – the Moon has no atmosphere to wear them away. NASA has mapped Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s footprints and found they didn’t get very far: they roamed an area hardly bigger than a football pitch. Aldrin mostly stayed in one half. There are spots on the Moon that are permanently dark. Some craters at the north and south poles are so deep that sunlight never gets to the bottom of them, even when that side is lit.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown

Easter island, indoor plumbing, Kuiper Belt, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet

The father of everyone I knew—mine included—was some sort of engineer working to build the Apollo rockets to send men to the moon. For a while as a child, I thought that when you grew up you became a rocket engineer if you were a boy and you married a rocket engineer if you were a girl; few other options in the world appeared to exist. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, I was pretty sure that that was exactly what I was going to be doing eventually, too. I drew picture books of rockets blasting off, of command capsules in orbit about the moon, of lunar modules landing next to giant lunar craters, and of parachutes deployed in the moments before splashdown.

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These days I realize that the artists would have had no idea what Pluto looked like and probably felt the need to make the surface look like something interesting, but as a first grader I was thoroughly convinced that Pluto was covered in icy spires and that they would shatter at the slightest touch by a future Neil Armstrong. Clearly Pluto was different and mysterious and potentially very fragile. It would take another thirty-five years for me to learn just how fragile it really was. In third grade we finally learned about planets in school. Most people I know memorized their order by learning some variant of the mnemonic “My very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas” for “Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto,” but for some reason, in my school we learned one that I have never heard since: “Martha visits every Monday and just stays until noon.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

The existence of a frontier does not guarantee that it will be a destination, and past civilizations have given up on exploration for essentially internal reasons, even when new horizons were very much in reach. (The abandonment of major sea voyages by China’s Ming dynasty, in the same era as Columbus, did not come about because the world’s oceans were too wide but because of the empire’s changing intellectual fashions and political priorities.) Already when Neil Armstrong took his first small step, there were many voices making the case for the wastefulness of NASA’s voyages, for the pointlessness of “whitey on the moon,” and some of the turn toward pessimism preceded the realization that we would not be sending astronauts to Jupiter by the year 2001. A great deal of post-1960s thought—postcolonial, environmentalist—is premised on the idea that Western expansion was mostly cancerous, and this critique has been extended even to the idea of galactic colonization, with the exact same sort of ideological language applied.

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All of this could happen on a scale that would be world altering without having the truly utopian scenarios come to pass. Terraforming Mars and becoming a multiplanetary species may be unattainable for now—but just going to Mars would be a bigger leap for mankind than anything we’ve accomplished since Neil Armstrong. The hard problem of consciousness probably isn’t solvable by brain scans and increases in processing power, and so you and I probably won’t actually be uploading our very selves to the cloud—but that doesn’t mean that forms of artificial intelligence can’t radically transform the economy and render many if not most human forms of labor obsolete.

Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations With Today's Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks

Bernie Madoff, Columbine, David Sedaris, Dr. Strangelove, fake it until you make it, hive mind, index card, iterative process, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, period drama, Peter Pan Syndrome, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live, Upton Sinclair

There was an episode that took place in the Hamptons, where George has a girlfriend he hasn’t slept with yet [“The Hamptons,” May 12, 1994]. George goes off to buy tomatoes, and while he’s doing so, this woman goes topless in front of Elaine, Kramer, and Jerry. When George returns, he’s upset that he was the only one who didn’t get to see the breasts. Jerry then wrote a line where George says, “It’s like I’m Neil Armstrong. I turn around for a sip of Tang and you just jump out first!” Jerry’s synapses work really well on analogies. He was really big on analogies. It’s a great line, but jokey. And Larry just didn’t write jokey lines. All his jokes were funny because of the situation. As an example, he once wrote a line for George: “I’ve never had a meeting where I really wanted the other person to show up.”

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I think he had a summer place near Boston, where we were based, and he submitted a couple of scripts, but we didn’t actually meet him until years later, when Ray and I played characters in a TV special [1972’s Between Time and Timbuktu] that Kurt had written based on a few of his stories. Then we would see each other often. In that TV special, you played an ex-astronaut who visited Mars. You described it as looking just like your driveway back in Dallas. You also forgot Neil Armstrong’s famous line when he first set foot on the moon. You remembered it as being, quite wrongly: “One step for man, two steps for mankind.” [Laughs] That was really a takeoff on the countless hours of live TV devoted to space exploration. Most of the hours were filled with people just trying to fill the hours.

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I don’t know why. You really had to earn it. It was a smallish studio, and I think audiences were different. Whenever I see a late-night talk show now, the audience seems so ramped up. They’ve been conditioned to behave differently. Or in Leno’s case, instructed to run up and shake his hand. Like he was Neil Armstrong or something. First day back from the moon. Were you involved with the Marlon Brando character that Chris performed on the show? I was. That came out of Chris and me hanging out and talking about Brando and how nuts he was and how terrible his later movies were, like [1980’s] The Formula.

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

More than a decade earlier Tom Gleed had acted as senior director in sacking George Keck from the chairman’s position and bringing in his friend Eddie Carlson from Western Hotels (the chain had since been rechristened Westin). In his capacity as senior director Luce asked Ferris to excuse himself from the room. Among the first to speak up was retired astronaut Neil Armstrong, one of the board’s most venerated members. Armstrong was quiet but of stubbornly determined integrity. He had just been through the drama of a major takeover as a director of Marathon Oil, which U.S. Steel had rescued from Mobil. The United directors, Armstrong said, should not have their judgment clouded by the fact that it was their own chairman who was proposing the leveraged buyout.

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Olson and a group of Hertz executives negotiated to buy Hertz for themselves for $1.3 billion with financing provided by Ford Motor Company. (The price received by United was more than twice what Ferris had paid.) Olson declined Armstrong’s offer, but he was not yet out of the soup. A permanent CEO still had to be found. Although Neil Armstrong remained the chairman of the board’s search committee, Olson decided to take command of the search himself. Although the candidates themselves would never realize the full scope of the search of which they were a part, Olson’s mission would bring him into contact with the leading protagonists of the global airline world in the twilight of the 1980s.

…

“I thought very seriously about it,” he would say of Olson’s offer. “But I thought it would be very difficult to transfer my allegiance [from American]. I’d been here a long time.” Disappointed and eager to restore his full attention to Hertz, Olson threw the search for a new United chairman back into the lap of fellow board member Neil Armstrong. They would go the conventional route of using an executive-search consultant. But, really, how many candidates existed for the job of saving United from Bob Crandall? Few executives in aviation had played a greater diversity of roles than Stephen Wolf. Fifteen years at American, followed by one at Pan Am—followed by a traumatic year under Frank Lorenzo as the president of Continental.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

Her psychologist had told her this was a medical necessity, and it also helped that so many of her colleagues were working mothers. She turned to Helen, Barbara, and the recently returned Merrilyn Gilchrist when she needed support. While Sue was regaining her sanity and her life in the lab, men were about to walk on the moon. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to tread on another planetary body. The computers’ fingerprints were all over the historic mission. Their legacy began with the rocket that flew the men up there. It blasted off in stages, a technique made possible by the women’s computations for the world’s first two-stage rocket, JPL’s Bumper WAC.

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A special propellant that needed no ignition fueled the Apollo rocket. The computers had helped develop this novel substance, called hypergolic fuel, when working on liquid propellants for the Corporal. Of course, the Ranger and Surveyor missions they had recently launched were key in determining landing sites for the Apollo missions. And when Neil Armstrong stood on the surface of the moon and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” the voice transmission back to Earth was received because of tracking stations in California and Australia, part of the Deep Space Network that the computers had worked on so faithfully. Apollo 11 was the culmination of a thousand successes, each one building on the next, stretching up into the beyond.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

The event sparked widespread U.S. public anxiety about perceived Soviet technological superiority, with Americans following the satellite across the night sky and tuning in to Sputnik’s radio transmissions. It triggered the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), fueled major government subsidies for math and science education, and effectively launched the space race. That nationwide American mobilization bore fruit twelve years later when Neil Armstrong became the first person ever to set foot on the moon. AlphaGo scored its first high-profile victory in March 2016 during a five-game series against the legendary Korean player Lee Sedol, winning four to one. While barely noticed by most Americans, the five games drew more than 280 million Chinese viewers.

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The data “trains” the program to recognize patterns by giving it many examples, and the computing power lets the program parse those examples at high speeds. Both data and computing power were in short supply at the dawn of the field in the 1950s. But in the intervening decades, all that has changed. Today, your smartphone holds millions of times more processing power than the leading cutting-edge computers that NASA used to send Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969. And the internet has led to an explosion of all kinds of digital data: text, images, videos, clicks, purchases, Tweets, and so on. Taken together, all of this has given researchers copious amounts of rich data on which to train their networks, as well as plenty of cheap computing power for that training.

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

The Mach-6 X-15, which first flew in 1959, had a computer to help translate the pilot’s control-stick motions into suitable actions from the control surfaces, but the computer would not fly the plane itself. Similarly, the Mercury Seven astronauts, all of whom had been test pilots, insisted that they have the ability to fly their space vehicles. The Apollo flight computer was designed not to exert autonomous control but rather to augment the astronaut’s actions, as Neil Armstrong famously demonstrated when he took over the controls to land the Eagle on the moon. It did not hurt that American politicians at the height of the Cold War liked to compare heroic, individualistic American pilots to the supposed automatons of the Soviet space program. Test pilots were the cowboys of the twentieth century, from X-15 pilot “Cowboy” Joe Walker to Tom Cruise in Top Gun (call sign: Maverick).1 Today’s drone aircraft have diverged from the tradition favoring skilled pilots over computers.

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As one F-117 test pilot put it, “I don&t think you’ll find any of us that are complete set-your-hair-on-fire-and-let’s-go kind of guys. We’re pretty methodical, risk-averse guys.”26 The younger ones, especially, represented a gradual shift within the test pilot fraternity, from barnstormers to engineers, from cowboys to calculators—in short, from Chuck Yeager to Neil Armstrong.27 Many of these younger pilots had advanced engineering degrees, which helped in two ways: they had a solid technical understanding of the aircraft, and they took an engineer’s rational approach to risk, analyzing and minimizing it. That’s not to say they were dull. Dry, maybe. Park in particular had a sardonic side.

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

Readers were having it thrown at them from all sides, and as his audience expanded, he began to look for other ways of approaching the same material. He had hoped to edit a technical magazine for years, and an opportunity arose in the form of Air Trails Pictorial, a model aircraft periodical devoured by hobbyists—including a teenage Neil Armstrong—who built miniature planes that flew on gasoline or rubber bands. As the model business went downhill after the war, the title grew less profitable, and it was relaunched as a science monthly with an emphasis on aviation. Campbell had pushed hard for the change, and he landed the editorship of Air Trails in the summer of 1946.

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Campbell called it “the greatest show ever staged,” observing that no writer had ever predicted that it would be televised, and told readers, “There’s [a] considerable sense of fulfillment for someone who, like myself, has been discussing, considering, imagining, and visualizing this event for some forty years.” On July 24, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins returned to Earth. The following day, as the papers carried coverage of the splashdown, Charles Manson ordered three of his followers to rob Gary Hinman, a California drug dealer, whom they stabbed to death. On August 9, the actress Sharon Tate—who was married to Roman Polanski—was killed by the Manson Family, along with four other victims.

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other ways of approaching the same material Some of the best stories on atomic themes were written by women, including “In Hiding” by Wilmar R. Shiras, about a mutant child prodigy reminiscent of the young JWC—he reads his textbooks from cover to cover and sells fiction to the pulps. a teenage Neil Armstrong Wagener, One Giant Leap, 35. John Michel Knight, The Futurians, 156. “It is up to each of us” JWC, “Air Trails and New Frontiers,” Air Trails Pictorial, September 1946, 22. “We can already control atomic weapons” JWC, “The Greatest Power,” Air Trails Pictorial, December 1946, 26. L. Jerome Stanton Smith, Worlds of George O., 67–68.

Godforsaken Sea by Derek Lundy

Apollo 11, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, the scientific method, William Langewiesche, Winter of Discontent

The Apollo astronauts, graduating from their warplanes to little capsules that were catapulted with negligible safety margins into orbit or to the barren wilderness of the moon, are the only humans who have been farther from the planet earth than sailors on the planet ocean. I remember reading that as the landing module from Apollo 11 was rising from the moon’s surface to dock with the mother ship the pulse rate of the mission commander, Neil Armstrong, rose to only ninety beats a minute. Even allowing for the calming effects of experience and preparation, this was the reaction of a man whose emotional and physiological response to danger is quite different from mine. In Dispatches, his book about the Vietnam War, Michael Herr describes what he often encountered among the soldiers who fought there.

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It’s what makes us feel pleasure, and we try to repeat the actions that trigger its secretion. For some of us, however, getting enough dopamine may require more extreme activities. My brain may get more than enough of it when I spend four hours crossing Lake Ontario in a small boat on a blustery day. Tony Bullimore may need to sail a Vendée Globe to get his share. Neil Armstrong may need to fly to the moon. Moitessier’s inspiration, Saint-Exupéry, also thrived on life-threatening mishaps. Indeed, says his biographer Stacy Schiff, he made a cult of adversity. According to one of the mechanics who flew with him on the early, hazardous Saharan mail routes, “In those moments when it would have been normal to give in to despair he seemed to experience extreme exaltation, intense happiness.”

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Looking back now at the twenty-year period of the space race we can see how it captivated people around the world and set up what would be the greatest shared arrival at the “future” ever known to humanity. First Sputnik, then America’s answer: tens of millions watching the Apollo lunar landing on live TV (this, coming only twenty years after the introduction of television as a mainstream commodity in the United States and elsewhere, itself can be considered a futuristic moment). And when Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words, there was a sense of both commonality and exceptionalism. “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Future was still a collective project, something aspired to by the entire human race (though some countries—most notably the United States, would of course do future better and get there first).

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President Kennedy and his administration thought it was the moon. Clearly many Americans disagreed, but no one was saying: Let’s just let the rich fund the future. Let’s just get out of the way and let people fight amongst themselves for the chance to own progress. It wasn’t necessarily the optimism about future we imagine those living in the age of Neil Armstrong to have had, but it was a pervasive attitude, a general agreement that the future could only be reached together, individuals collectively part of an overall march toward progress, leaders up front, showing the way. Matt Novak’s Paleofuture archive reminds me just how much the future-as-national project narrative was advanced by the prevailing popular culture of the time.

Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon

Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, placebo effect, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

Shepard was grounded and given a desk job at NASA, where he soon gained a reputation as the most bad-tempered official at the agency. As his colleagues made one space voyage after another, Shepard heard of a new, experimental operation that might be able to help him. The surgeon was fully convinced that it would work. A few months before Neil Armstrong flew to the Moon, Shepard was operated on in Los Angeles by ear, nose and throat specialist William House. House inserted a tiny silicone tube through the petrous part of the temporal bone and into the inner ear to drain the excess endolymph fluid. This procedure is known as an endolymphatic shunt.

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Hobbling to a private orthopaedic clinic to have your worn-out knee looked at now seems little different from taking a good slug of Lourdes water, lighting a candle at the statue of the Virgin in ’s-Hertogenbosch, or going to the barber to be bled. All you have to do is believe in it. * * * Twelve men have stood on the Moon – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan B. Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan. Of them all, Shepard was the oldest. Imagine that, despite his endolymphatic-shunt operation, he had experienced symptoms of his disease while he was up there.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

Charles Lindbergh, Louis Blériot, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, NetJets, safety bicycle

Ever the perfect gentleman to the end, “polite almost to a fault,” as said, always neatly dressed, his shoes always shined, Orville was also known to drive his automobile at such high speed that the police of Oakwood would close their eyes and hold their breath until he passed by on the way to his laboratory downtown. On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, another American born and raised in southwestern Ohio, stepped onto the moon, he carried with him, in tribute to the Wright brothers, a small swatch of the muslin from a wing of their 1903 Flyer. 1. Bishop Milton Wright at age 60. 2. Susan Koerner Wright at age 27. 3. Reuchlin at age 11. 4.

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Louis Post-Dispatch, November 7, 1943; Jakab and Young, eds., The Published Writings of Wilbur and Orville Wright, 261–62; Miller, Wright Reminiscences, 65–66. “polite almost to a fault”: Crouch, The Bishop’s Boys, 196. Orville was also known to drive: Miller, ed., Wright Reminiscences, 16–17; Crouch, The Bishop’s Boys, 513. On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong: Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, 527. BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscript and Archival Sources Collections of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, Dayton, Ohio. Local History Division, Dayton Metropolitan Library, Dayton, Ohio. Benson Ford Research Library, Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan.

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centralized clearinghouse, clean tech, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, Easter island, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

That said, there is no silver bullet; no one person who can get this job done. John F. Kennedy’s call to land an American on the moon within ten years could not have been carried out by words alone. It took a motivated organization, money, family sacrifices, real national leadership, and, yes, cold war competition to put Neil Armstrong’s boots on Tranquility Base. Sparking a new industrial revolution is not going to be any easier, and likely it will be considerably more difficult. There are many, many small steps that need to be taken by many, many people to reach that Mission Zero summit. Recall that when I issued that challenge in 1994 I had no idea how to turn my vision into reality.

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He dared America not only to dream the impossible, but to achieve it. The Russians had launched their Sputnik into orbit first, sent a man into space first. So when President Kennedy committed our nation to landing a man on the moon and bringing him back safely in ten years, many people doubted we could accomplish it. But less than seven years later Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto Tranquility Base. From the moment the forty-fourth president of the United States takes office in 2009, America—and the rest of the world—will be watching to see if this new leader can also “organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” Not to put an American on the moon, but to meet another generational challenge: steering a course through the triple storms of a climate crisis, a security crisis, and an economic crisis, all striking at the same time.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

* The fourth, Vattenfall, is 100 percent owned by the Swedish state. 14 The Curse of Intermittency As we look at engineering breakthroughs selected by the National Academy of Engineering, we can see that if any one of them were removed, our world would be a very different—and much less hospitable place. Neil Armstrong, 20001 There is no other choice: government either abstains from limited interference with the market forces, or it assumes total control over production and distribution. Either capitalism or socialism; there is no middle of the road. Ludwig von Mises2 At the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on February 22, 2000, the first man to ever walk on the moon declared, “I am and ever will be a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer born under the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”3 “Science is about what is.

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Ludwig von Mises2 At the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on February 22, 2000, the first man to ever walk on the moon declared, “I am and ever will be a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer born under the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”3 “Science is about what is. Engineering is about what can be,” Neil Armstrong told the gathering organized around the National Academy of Engineering’s top 20 engineering achievements of the twentieth century. The automobile took second place and the airplane third (the innovations spawned by space exploration twelfth). The internet (13), air conditioning and refrigeration (10), television and radio (6), and electronics all rely on the greatest achievement of all—“the vast networks of electricity that power the developed world.”4 According to Armstrong, the maturity of the other 19 achievements would not have been possible without electricity.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

For Maria and Catherine For Will And for my grandson, Nicholas Sheehan Bruno FOREWORD When the Space Age is mentioned, most people think of Sputnik, the launching into orbit of the first man-made satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, or the race between Russia and the United States to land men on the moon. Sputnik was a psychological thunderclap. It set off a paroxysm of fear that the Soviet Union had gained a commanding technological lead over the United States. The moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on July 20, 1969, was its reverse: a spectacular feat of American technology with little in the way of practical benefits. This book is concerned with a quite different space race. This other race initiated America’s exploration and exploitation of space and was for the highest stakes—preventing the Soviet Union from acquiring an overwhelming nuclear superiority that could tempt Soviet leaders into international blackmail and adventurism with calamitous results for human civilization.

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“Congratulations on fathering the most significant single missile and space event of the decade,” the telegram said. “I thought of you as your brain child roared to life at Cape Canaveral.” Phillips’s reward was the star of a brigadier, the youngest general in the armed forces at forty years of age. He was subsequently loaned to NASA to run the Apollo program, which put astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969, and then took on a series of senior Air Force commands, including the Space and Missile Systems Organization in Los Angeles, a later successor to Schriever’s original WDD, which were to bring him the four stars of a full general. Yet nothing that Ed Hall and Sam Phillips had ever done or would ever do would be more important than bringing Minuteman into existence.

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Von Braun was appointed director of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, which NASA formed in nearby Huntsville, Alabama, and remained its chief until 1970. The ambition he had held while building V-2 vengeance rockets for Adolf Hitler had been realized happily at last. The huge Saturn V rocket that transported Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin to the moon in 1969, much changed and improved over the original model ten years earlier, was von Braun’s masterpiece. Medaris left the Army, took holy orders, and spent his retirement years as an Episcopal priest. Ed Hall forgave his younger brother, Ted, for committing treason.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

If it all suddenly disappeared they would notice, but its omnipresence has become unremarkable, like air. The most obvious example is your smartphone. It is probably the last inanimate thing you touch before you go to sleep at night and the first thing you touch in the morning. It has more processing power than the computers that NASA used to send Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969. It uses AI algorithms to offer predictive text and speech recognition services, and these features improve year by year as the algorithms are improved. Many of the apps we download to our phones also employ AI to make themselves useful to us. The AI in our phones becomes more powerful with each generation of phone as their processing power increases, the bandwidth of the phone networks improve, cloud storage becomes better and cheaper, and we become more relaxed about sharing enough of our personal data for the AIs to “understand” us better.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

However, during the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, and rise of the counterculture all commingled with the arrival of microprocessors, personal computing, and computer networking.5 In a handful of insular computer laboratories, hackers and engineers found shelter from a fractious world. By 1969, the year Richard Nixon was inaugurated president, Seymour Hersh reported the My Lai massacre, and astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Americans had for the first time traveled to another world, but the nation was at the same time mired in disastrous foreign conflict. The year 1968 had seen the premiere of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey painting a stark view of both the potential and pitfalls of artificial intelligence.

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The political battle over the human in the loop was waged over two divergent narratives: that of the heroic astronauts landing on the surface of the moon and that of the specter of a catastrophic accident culminating in the deaths of the astronauts—and potentially, as a consequence, the death of the agency. The issue, however, was at least temporarily settled when during the first human moon landing Neil Armstrong heroically took command after a computer malfunction and piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft safely to the lunar surface. The moon landing and other similar feats of courage, such as Wally Schirra’s decision not to abort the earlier Gemini flight, have firmly established a view of human-machine interaction that elevates human decision-making beyond the fallible machines of our mythology.

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

By the time the Apollo missions began, the NASA-Hasselblad connection was functioning smoothly; it continues to this day, and the near-mythical status of Hasselblad in medium format (the negatives are two and a quarter inches square), forever enhanced by the images from space, is rivalled only by that of Leica in 35 mm. The camera that Neil Armstrong and his team took to the moon was a customized but perfectly recognizable version of the commercial Hasselblad; the trim was stripped away, the controls were made chunkier for gloved hands, and any lubricants—not a good idea in zero gravity—had been replaced by graphite. Conspiracy nuts, inspecting the results, have declared that the lunar photographs are so good that they could never have been taken by amateurs under such testing conditions; they must therefore have been rigged under studio lights, probably by the same people who killed President Kennedy.

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Cunningham himself, snoozing in Earth’s orbit, is hardly a pretty sight: with his rounded black shades, and his stubble even thicker than Schirra’s, he makes all too clear the physical strains imposed by the Apollo enterprise. Nobly into the unknown goes the fine flower of American manhood, and back comes Lou Reed. The most celebrated photograph—the full-length color portrait of Buzz Aldrin by Neil Armstrong—does not appear here, and you can see why. It has become the Mona Lisa of the moon gallery: repeated on a million posters, at once thinned and overburdened by familiarity. The lunar explorers were fed and sustained by fresh imagery as if it were oxygen, and the point of this exhibit is to recapture the shock of the new.

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The astronauts knew full well that they were pioneering on behalf of a planet, and it was in the very ordinariness of their reactions that they carried the human voice—always impressionable, never free from caution, resting on dependable words when fancy ones sound too rich—across 240,000 miles. “It’s big, and bright, and beautiful,” Neil Armstrong said as Eagle settled onto the surface. “Beautiful view,” agreed Aldrin a while later, as he followed down the steps. “Isn’t that something?” Armstrong said, as if they were stretching their legs at the end of an August picnic. When he went to the launchpad, Armstrong had in his pockets a roll of LifeSavers and a comb.

Tools a Visual History: The Hardware That Built, Measured and Repaired the World by Dominic Chinea

Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, The Spirit Level

A heavier head also has the major benefit of minimizing the “axe head stuck in the wood” situation, which is annoying when you’re trying to get through something repetitive quickly. Although having said that, a lot of folk love splitting wood! Estwing is well-known for the quality of its hammers (I’ve got three of them and they’re lovely things), but it also makes fine axes and specialist geological tools too. Neil Armstrong used an Estwing geologist’s pick axe when he was training for the mission to the Moon. The company’s origins go back to 1923 and the town of Rockford in the far north of the state of Illinois. It was set up by a young Swedish immigrant called Ernest Estwing, who’d moved to the USA in 1900. He bought himself a set of books about the machinist’s trade and managed to both learn English and get himself a profession.

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by Marshall Brain

Amazon Web Services, basic income, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, digital map, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Garrett Hardin, income inequality, job automation, knowledge worker, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Stephen Hawking, Tragedy of the Commons, working poor

You essentially disconnect your brain from your real body and plug it into a virtual body in the game's virtual world. Then people started creating virtual worlds simply for the sake of creating them. You can experience just about anything in virtual space now, and you can do it alone or with a million friends. You can be Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, or a cowboy in the old west or whatever." "What else can Vertebrane do?" I asked. "You access the network through it. Basically you can access any fact, image, movie, song. You can also experience what someone else is experiencing -- a person streams all their sensory data to you, and you both experience it simultaneously.

How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings From One Depressive to Another by Jacqueline Novak

David Sedaris, Neil Armstrong, placebo effect, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Skype

They fuck someone’s aunt, withhold someone’s pension, or refuse to validate your parking ticket, based entirely on the fact that they dislike your ascot. But you? You may be slumped on your carpet, but for that, my friend, you are a radical. You have dared to hit pause, and now you are just sitting there inside the pause, floating in space like Neil Armstrong. In your own weak way, you are one of the heroic explorers of our time. You might be thinking, Hmm, I don’t feel proud. Well, then, outsource your self-esteem to me, and let me be proud on your behalf. By not even pretending to be a person and, instead, scurrying away from your responsibilities, you are willing to go where others aren’t.

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

It would, of course, be wrong to completely outlaw crackpots and quacks, but we seem to have reached a point where, if the moon landings happened today, producers would feel compelled to give people claiming the footage was filmed in an aircraft hangar in Kentucky the same prominence in discussions as Neil Armstrong. Soon after climate change opened the door to this peculiar ‘false equivalence’, vaccinating children against measles, mumps and rubella became a debate due to the intervention of a single, soon-discredited doctor and a raft of self-appointed campaigners. In August 2018, Italy’s recently installed ‘popu-list’ government removed mandatory vaccination for children, while in Britain crowds of ignoramuses have taken to gathering at the gates of hospitals in protest because they believe they know better than the doctors inside how chronically ill children with incredibly complicated conditions should be treated.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

The name comes from the recognition that certain stories serve as “hieroglyphs” or symbols—like Isaac Asimov’s robot—that activate the minds of engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists around how an innovation can come to be. In other words, the platform fosters an appetite among innovators to bring science fiction “hieroglyphs” into reality. When astronaut Neil Armstrong returned from the moon as part of the Apollo 11 expedition, he referenced Verne’s novel in a television broadcast before reflecting on his own time in space. Without Poe and Verne creating the imaginative possibility of traveling to the moon, Armstrong might never have gone. In this way, art is a powerful tool in opening up our consciousness to new possibilities.

Grand: A Memoir by Sara Schaefer

fake news, index card, Neil Armstrong, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, TED Talk

Upon arrival, they discovered they did not have enough cash to cover the ceremony. Defeated, they began the drive back to Long Beach, where Dad was stationed with the Navy. But right before they slipped into the pitch-black desert, they saw a wedding chapel with a sign flickering: MASTERCARD ACCEPTED. The next day, they watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon as newlyweds. Dad started going by Bill, and they eventually moved back to Virginia, had four kids. He became a lawyer and built a successful business. She retired from nursing to raise us and make things look nice. In Salisbury, Mom developed a taste for the high life, and she liked to show it off.

Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origins of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier

Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

Purdue hit a home run when in 1966 it acquired a line of antiseptic products sold under the brand name Betadine, one of which was the orange-colored disinfectant hospitals used to scrub down patients prior to surgery. For Purdue, it was an ideal product, with its low production costs and high profit margins. In 1969, Betadine even enjoyed a fleeting moment of fame when astronaut Neil Armstrong used the solution to decontaminate the Apollo landing module after his historic moonwalk. The Sacklers’ business operations had expanded overseas by the 1970s, and Mortimer and Raymond Sackler were living on different sides of the Atlantic. Raymond, who remained in Connecticut, became most closely associated with Purdue Frederick, the company’s American arm.

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets by Alan Boss

Albert Einstein, Dava Sobel, diversified portfolio, full employment, Gregor Mendel, if you build it, they will come, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, Silicon Valley, space junk, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

The fact that deposing Saddam Hussein had turned into a disaster of unprecedented proportions for the Iraqi people did not bode well for the success of the new Mars initiative: the Bush administration did not have a good track record for knowing what to do after the missiles were launched. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Pasadena, California, had landed the first Viking spacecraft on Mars on July 20, 1976 (exactly 7 years after Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon), thus beginning a search for life on Mars that went well beyond looking for canals and interstates. In the 30-odd years since Viking, astrobiologists had realized that, rather than searching directly for Martian microbes, as Viking had done, it made more sense to look first for habitable regions on Mars, just as astronomers were planning to do in the search for habitable planets.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

So why not collect solar energy using giant mirrors and beam energy back to Earth using orbiting lasers or microwave beams. Fringe thinking? At the moment yes, but one day it may become mainstream. “Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten.” Neil Armstrong, test pilot and astronaut (1969) It’s highly likely that we’ll all be worshipping the Sun in the not-too-distant future. All we’ll need to do is capture 1 part in 10,000 of the sunlight that reaches our planet to meet 100 percent of our planetary energy needs. One way to do this is to use nanoengineered solar panels and fuel cells.

Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies (Academic Edition) by Bo Bennett

Black Swan, book value, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, side project, statistical model, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method

Explanation: Although more of a comedy skit than anything else, this demonstrates the fallacious reasoning by the tour guide in her assumption that the dates given to her were precise to the year. Example #2: The difference between first and second in many cases is negligible, statistically, yet we give those differences artificial meaning. Who was the second person to walk on the moon... just minutes after Neil Armstrong? Does anyone remember who the second fastest man in the world is, even though he might come in .01 seconds after the first place winner? Explanation: We often artificially assign significant meaning to tiny statistical differences. It is a fallacy when we infer that the first place runner is “much faster” than the second place runner, even though the difference is .01 seconds.

Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Passengers were reading newspapers filled not only with the continuing threat of the cold war but the successful NASA mission of the Apollo 11 manned flight to the moon. A feat so extraordinary it had involved twenty thousand contractors employing three hundred thousand skilled workers. It was capped by Neil Armstrong planting his size 9½ boot on the lunar surface and pronouncing, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Stepping off the train to continue her journey to her first day at work in Leconfield House on Curzon Street, Stella Rimington could well have echoed Armstrong’s words.

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Until then, the United States was accepted as the birthplace of postwar scientific innovation: from the atom bomb to the Salk vaccine, from keyhole brain surgery to mind-healing drugs, in hundreds of ways American scientists had set the bar higher. Now Moscow had gone one dramatic step further; it wouldn’t be until twelve years later that astronaut Neil Armstrong would step onto the moon and deliver his memorable words about taking one big step for mankind. The beep-beep in space on October 4, 1957, had shown that the Soviet Union had already achieved the conquest of space with its Sputnik, literally a fellow traveler. Johnson told the cookout gathering he had a piece of news that once more put the United States ahead.

Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome) by Gavin Francis

Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stem cell, traveling salesman

Rachel Labanovska had a more fitting, mythic end: some part of her lives on, and is even now whirling through the sky as a turbine, or orbiting high over the planet she once explored. 18 Feet & Toes: Footsteps in the Basement That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. Neil Armstrong OCTOBER IN GRANADA: the old Arab quarter of the Albaysín turns its face south, towards the heat of Africa. The narrow streets and architecture still echo the glory of Moorish Spain. I’ve come to stay with a friend who lives there in a traditional house – a carmen granadino. The walls follow the contours of the hillside: we enter from a door at street level onto an upper floor at the head of the house, then descend by wooden staircases to a living area at its foot.

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

What’s more, the ice near Antarctic mountain ranges is exposed to ferce polar winds, so it sublimates, leaving the meteorites behind, which pile up over tens of thousands of years. The vast majority of them consist of extremely old, primitive materials—samples from the earliest days of the solar system. A small fraction comes from the Moon, Mars, or big asteroids that broke up in collisions. As an eight-year-old, Harvey watched Neil Armstrong take those historic frst steps on the Moon, and imagined himself as a space cadet with a jet pack and a ray gun. Having grown up in Wisconsin, he was used to snow and ice, but he wasn’t a mountaineer. At Beloit College, he did an undergraduate thesis on tektites, tiny glassy rocks thought to have formed during big meteorite impacts on Earth.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Neil Armstrong, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Suez canal 1869

THE VIEW FROM THE MOON HAD ANY GEOLOGIST been able to look down at the planet in its entirety on 18th April, 1906, and had been able to see what then took place, he would at the very least have been utterly amazed by the physical context of the event, even if the event itself, when seen from on high, seemed less than overwhelming. For as context, the planet would have been memorably beautiful. Had he been standing on the moon, say—had he been a 1906 version of Neil Armstrong, scanning with a hugely powerful telescope the surface of the blue and green and white ball that was hanging in his ink-black sky—he would have seen illuminated in front of him (assuming that the cloud cover was not too dense) a tract of the world that extended from what some of mankind called India to what others called the Rocky Mountains, and all of which was bathed in the brilliant white light of sunshine.

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Virgin Galactic

Then I tell you I was just kidding. The rock doesn’t come from the Berlin Wall—it’s even more exceptional than that. The rock you have in 08/08/2009 10:45 74 of 83 file:///D:/000004/Buy__ology.html your hand is an authentic moon rock, a chunk of the roughly six ounces of lunar detritus that Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts brought back home with them during their 1969 Apollo 11 mission. A moon rock is pretty special. There are a limited number of them in the world. And after all, it comes from the moon. What an exquisite present, you think. You’re shocked, genuinely overcome. The fact of the matter is that I found the rock by the side of the road, put it in my pocket, and threw it into a box.

In Patagonia: by Bruce Chatwin

British Empire, Ford Model T, Haight Ashbury, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong

The risk merely increased his appetite for life. The wind had polished his nose and coloured it pale lilac. I found him at lunch ladling the bortsch into the ivory orb of his head. He had made his room cheerful, in the Baltic way, with flowered curtains, geraniums, diplomas for stunt flying and a signed photograph of Neil Armstrong. All his books were in Lithuanian, the aristocrat of Indo-European languages, and concerned his country’s plans for independence. His wife had died and he had adopted a young Indian couple, out of kindness and for company. The girl sat against the white wall, suckling her baby, devouring visitors with mica-shining eyes.

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Lunar-Landing Conspiracy and Other Legends of Area 51 Two hundred and fifty thousand miles from the Nevada Test Site, on July 20, 1969, with less than ninety-four seconds of fuel remaining, Neil Armstrong and copilot Buzz Aldrin were facing almost certain death as they approached the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon. The autotargeting on their lunar landing module, famously called the Eagle, was taking them down onto a football-field-size crater laden with jagged boulders. To have crash-landed there would have meant death. The autotargeting was burning precious fuel with each passing second; the quick-thinking Neil Armstrong turned it off, took manual control of the Eagle, and, as he would tell NASA officials at Mission Control in Houston, Texas, only moments later, began “flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area” to land.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Carolus Linnaeus may be credited with inventing the first taxonomic system to classify the planet’s life forms, but he depended on an extensive network of patrons, colleagues, and students to collect samples far from his native Sweden and its limited biodiversity. Without their help in creating this vast catalog, Linnaeus could not have made his argument that each species had unique characteristics and an “allotted place” in nature—concepts that directly led to the theory of evolution. The moon landing required not just one Neil Armstrong stepping into the powdery lunar dust or the staff at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission control center commanding the launch of the Apollo spacecraft. It also required more than 300,000 mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, engineers, and mechanics spread across dozens of labs, each playing his or her own small part, from developing a menu of foods to sustain people in zero gravity to setting up a communications link between the lunar module, mission control, and the White House to crafting the parachute that safely brought the astronauts home to the blue marble of Earth.

The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World's Most Mysterious Air Disasters by Christine Negroni

Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, flag carrier, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, South China Sea, Tenerife airport disaster, Thomas Bayes, US Airways Flight 1549

The Hudson River was “long enough, wide enough and on that day, smooth enough to land a jetliner.” So he did. Worrying about whether the Qantas A380 might also turn into a 550-ton glider, de Crespigny calculated just how much altitude he would need to get back to Changi Airport. He wasn’t thinking about Sullenberger, he was thinking about the astronaut Neil Armstrong, remembering that when Armstrong was a test pilot flying the X-15 at NASA in the 1960s, he helped develop a technique for gliding the rocket-powered plane back to earth once its fuel was spent. Armstrong reached altitudes as high as two hundred thousand feet, then glided back to Edwards Air Force Base in California, harnessing gravity to descend in an ever-diminishing spiral.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

He believes that the effect of Moore's Law is substantially muted by regulatory and social frictions which slow down the adoption of new technologies, and he also argues that many technological advances simply don't translate into tangible improvements in the real world. For instance he accepts that his current computer is a thousand times faster than the one he used a few years ago, but he suspects it only makes him 20% more productive. It may be true, he teases, that a new washing machine has more processing power than NASA used to send Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969, but the washing machine is still not going to the moon. He derides some of the heralded achievements of AI researchers, arguing for instance that self-driving cars do not emulate human drivers, but instead rely on precise maps of the terrain which have to be prepared before the journey starts.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But just three years later, as John Kao points out in his book Innovation Nation, “America had a hundred aircraft carriers fully armed with new planes, pilots, tactics, and escort ships, backed by new approaches to logistics, training methods, aircraft plants, shipyards, and women workers” along with “such game changing innovations as the B-29 … and nuclear fission.”1 We had a similar reaction to the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik.2 “We responded with massive funding for education,” writes Kao, “revamped school curricula in science and math, and launched a flurry of federal initiatives that eventually put Neil Armstrong in position to make his ‘giant leap for mankind.’ ” President Obama captured this essential part of the American character when he announced the kickoff of his Educate to Innovate campaign—a nationwide effort to move American students back to the top in science and math education.3 “This nation wasn’t built on greed,” he said.

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

The artist Jasper Johns has devoted much of his career to depicting it on canvas, in pencil, with bronze, and superimposing it on many other surfaces. For him it is not an icon to promote or denigrate, but the sheer power it projects and the emotion it arouses fascinates him as an artist. Andy Warhol also picked up the banner and took it forward, hinting at it in his visual commentary on America and Americana. For example, he took Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin next to the flag on the moon, fused it with other photos from the epoch-making trip, and coloured it, including the flag, in pinks and blues. Warhol was not overtly political in his art, but he recognized not only an amazing moment in history, but also the time in which it took place.

A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea by Richard Phillips, Stephan Talty

Bernie Sanders, friendly fire, Neil Armstrong, two and twenty

Some were addressed to “Captain Phillips, Vermont.” I laughed about that, like I was Lindbergh or Abraham Lincoln—or Santa Claus at the North Pole! But I didn’t feel different. I was a regular guy. Truly an ordinary person. And now people were using the word that I’d reserved for people like Audie Murphy and Neil Armstrong. “You’re my hero.” It brought tears to my eyes. But they weren’t tears of happiness. Honestly, I felt like an imposter, a phony. I didn’t do anything special, I thought. I don’t deserve all this. I don’t want all this. I really don’t take compliments well. It goes back to being raised with seven brothers and sisters in an Irish-Catholic home.

Alan Partridge: Nomad: Nomad by Alan Partridge

Apollo 11, cuban missile crisis, glass ceiling, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, rolodex, Skype, TED Talk, University of East Anglia

You wanna look inside of me?’ Quite camp but maybe that’s the tinsel. ‘No,’ I say, for some reason out loud. I’m tired and irritated – what is wrong with me? I pry the torch from my now sore lips, switch it off, and then climb down the loft ladder, jumping the last two steps (as I always do) so I look like Neil Armstrong dismounting the steps of Eagle, the Apollo 11 lunar module – not so much a moon landing, as my landing (my emphasis). I nod appreciatively. ‘Nice line, Alan.’ I don’t even bother slinking back to bed. I shower up and get ready for work. *** ‘Like the name of a cartoon Belgian detective said in a Scottish accent, it’s 10:10.’11 It’s later that morning and I’m ten minutes into my daily radio show Mid Morning Matters.12 ‘The song you just heard was “Midnight Train to Georgia”.

The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg) by Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy low sell high, call centre, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, low interest rates, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, urban sprawl

They were the instrument that underlined everything that I traded … I was obsessed.” 6 The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World’s Most Important Number By Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch © 2017 Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch Chapter 3 Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts I n 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Richard Nixon became president of the United States and 400,000 hippies descended on a sleepy farm near Woodstock. On the other side of the Atlantic, on a winter’s day in London, a mustachioed Greek banker named Minos Zombanakis was taking his own small step into the history books.

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

The case for political equality in the voting booth cannot be based on equal voter competence or even on nearly-equal voter competence. The much-less-educated in Italy are much less likely to know the name of the prime minister, and the much-less-educated in the Netherlands are much more likely to believe that the first human to step on the moon, Neil Armstrong, was a liar and a fraud.¹² Nearly-equal voter competence is a lie we should stop telling each other. Balancing Alleged Human Rights The right to vote [in a free state] is enough to impose on me the duty to learn about public affairs, regardless of how weak might be the influence of my voice on them.

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

Once I find Him, I’m going to tie him up and make him a home-cooked meal and force Him to sit and eat with me and appreciate the amount of work I’ve gone to on his behalf. Non-smoker preferred.” Ad two: “Hi. I’m always sad—should I be trying to conceal this from a potential mate? Also, I hate exercise. The astronaut Neil Armstrong once said, ‘God gave us a finite number of heartbeats, and I’m not about to waste mine running down some street.’ I love animals, but not those dogs that have Star Trek Ferengi foreheads.” Ad three: “Hello, potential mate. At the moment I’m a prisoner in a Level-4 disease containment facility, where I’m fed strange cubes of food and denied any form of culture or media for reasons of which I’m still unclear.

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

As the cloud moves away, there is a greater distance for the sound and light to travel, but the light is almost a million times faster, so there is an increasing delay between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder. We can also ask what would happen if light had a much slower speed. If light only covered 1m (about 3ft) in a few seconds, then we could look at the Moon now and see Neil Armstrong taking his first steps for humankind. It sounds fantastical, but it is this property that we are exploiting on cosmological scales. We are building a telescope to observe signals that have taken a whopping 13 billion years to arrive at Earth. This is one way in which we are searching for the first ever stars, by looking back in time to watch them form, live and die

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

The ARPANET was different: a child of the spit-and-polish space age, nurtured and shaped by a bunch of temperamentally anarchic professors and long-haired graduate students at the tail end of the tumultuous 1960s. It was a product of the military-industrial complex that had a countercultural soul. * * * — Richard Nixon was seven months into his Presidency when Neil Armstrong’s boot made its imprint on the lunar surface in July 1969, achieving the grand goal John Kennedy had set eight years before. The “missile gap” about which the Gaither Report had warned so darkly turned out to have been a mirage, based on bad intelligence. But the ensuing flurry had produced real results.

…

The American push to catch up with the Soviets had accelerated all sorts of electronics innovation, further enlarged the computer industry, and turned the U.S. higher education system into the wealthiest and foremost in the world. Three months and nine days after the moon landing, the ARPANET went live. The network was a tiny blip on the expansive and expensive landscape of America’s space program. Of the $24 billion spent on the space race between Kennedy’s declaration and Neil Armstrong’s “giant step for mankind,” only about $1 million went to build the ARPANET. Only a few academic scientists and government bureaucrats knew of its existence. Its launch didn’t earn a mention in any of the national newspapers. Yet looking backward from a half century on, the network the ARPANET became—the Internet—had a more consequential effect on the globe’s political and economic evolution than all the rocket launches and orbiting satellites and moon landings put together.

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

Permanently sidetracked, because my father liked to play a game he called After the Fact, where in the middle of whatever I was doing, he’d show me a well-known historical photo and ask, “So what happened next?” We’d be at the Bruins game, and during an important time-out he’d flip the snapshot of Neil Armstrong’s footprint in the lunar dust in front of my face. So what happened next? I’d shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know. He did those Chrysler commercials on television.” “Wrong. He became an alcoholic.” “Dad, I think that was Buzz Aldrin…” “In fact, many historians think he was wasted when he first set foot on the moon.

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

He settled on the latter, and in May 1961 delivered a speech to Congress in which he stated that the US ‘should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’. The race was on! The following years saw various achievements – and, sadly, casualties – on both sides. The race came to a head in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, stepped out on to the lunar Sea of Tranquillity, becoming the first human to set foot on not only the Moon, but any rock other than Earth. While the Space Race is often thought of in terms of a desperate battle over the Moon, it also drove a number of missions destined for other targets – most prominently, Mars.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

The report concludes with recommendations in nine areas to remedy engineering faults, procedural flaws, and political pressures on NASA. It is easy to see why this report is held in such high regard. The commission was headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers and included generals, physicists (including Richard Feynman), astronauts (including Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong), test pilots (Chuck Yeager), and rocket scientists. It took a broad look at the causes of the failure and produced an evidence-based document that led to needed improvements in NASA’s processes. The report saved lives. And it did so by embodying the very best of traditional expertise: A relative handful of highly trained and credentialed experts came together, followed a careful process, agreed on conclusions, wrote them down, and published them.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

In the history of political optics, Buzz Aldrin resurfaces here, too. For the Flat Earth community, he is a particularly vocal fly in the ointment, always ready to ‘take to Twitter’ to challenge their claims. He posts photographs of his dusty footprint on the moon’s surface, or his drifting exit from Apollo, making sure not to lock the hatch on his way out. Neil Armstrong may have been the first person to walk on the moon, but he was also its first cameraman. As a result, Aldrin held centre stage. With a 70-millimetre Hasselblad camera, Armstrong took these pictures of his pilot, as well as the famous, hesitant photograph of Aldrin standing in the Sea of Tranquillity, Armstrong himself reflected as a tiny highlight in Aldrin’s visor.

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The first human launch thus became known as Apollo 4, giving us the niche bit of trivia that Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 never existed. More than just O-rings When the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch on 28 January 1986, killing all seven people onboard, a Presidential Commission was formed to investigate the disaster. As well as including Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride (the first American woman in space), the commission also featured Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The Challenger exploded because of a leak from one of the solid rocket boosters. For take-off, the space shuttle had two of these boosters, each of which weighed over 500 tonnes and, amazingly, used metal as fuel: they burned aluminium.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

One reaction is that this would be an incredible waste of resources. It would, by today’s standards. But when technology becomes quick, easy, and cheap, we find new uses for it. Those uses are wasteful and self-indulgent (say the older generation). The phone in my pocket is a more powerful computer than those that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon. Most of the time I use it for completely frivolous things. There could be serious uses for ancestor simulations. Historians might want to explore simulated pasts for research. What would have happened if Truman had not dropped the atomic bombs on Japan? Thousands of simulations could reveal how large and small changes to initial conditions lead to different outcomes.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

The tablet computer was the most discredited category of consumer electronics in the world. Entrepreneurs had been trying to build tablet computers since before the invention of the PC. They had tried so many times that the conventional wisdom was that it couldn’t be done. Alan Kay, who is to certain geeks what Neil Armstrong is to the space program, drew up plans for the Dynabook in 1968 and laid out those plans in a 1972 paper titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages.” It never got built, though Kay went on to do something arguably even more important. He became one of the inventors of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC.

Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

One that has been extinct for deep geological time—ten times as long as the dinosaurs—but that has left relics that work.” His voice is trembling with emotion. “We humans, we’ve barely scratched the surface! The longest lasting of our relics? All our buildings will be dust in twenty thousand years, even the pyramids. Neil Armstrong’s footprints in the Sea of Tranquility will crumble under micrometeoroid bombardment in a mere half million years or so. The emptied oil fields will refill over ten million years, methane percollating up through the mantle: continental drift will erase everything. But these people . . ! They built to last.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The song was Simon’s tribute to what David Wills, the author of Hollywood in Kodachrome, described as the “spectacular” Kodak color film first introduced in 1935, a stock, Wills says, “synonymous with sharp detail and brilliant color” that produced “crisp” images and had “minimal grain.”9 For seventy years, Kodachrome accurately captured the world’s moments. It was used to take many of the twentieth century’s most detailed and memorable pictures—from Neil Armstrong’s 1968 snaps of the lunar landscape to the official images of many Hollywood stars.10 But Simon’s lyrics could equally apply to Rochester, where Kodak’s control of the global picture business had enriched the city with the brightest colors of all: a thriving local economy and tens of thousands of well-paying jobs.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

If we ran out of water we would siphon salt from the seas and make more; if nature was broken we could fix it. If not, we could always move to another planet. That vision no longer seems quite so enchanting. No doubt our expectations were unreasonable—for science and for ourselves. We also began to recognize the unintended consequences of our undeniable success. About a month before Neil Armstrong made his large step on the moon, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River erupted in flames near Cleveland, creating an indelible image of industry at war with nature. A few years later, in 1976, Karen Ann Quinlan was removed from life support, igniting the first horrific battle of the modern era over how we live and die.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

But what about the invention of fire, agriculture, the printing press, electricity? Haven’t many technological “singularities” already occurred? Disruptive technological change is nothing new, but no one felt compelled to come up with fancy names for its occurrences. My grandmother was born before automobiles were widely used, and lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Her name for it was the twentieth century. What makes Vinge’s transition so special? “The secret sauce is intelligence,” Vinge told me. His voice is a rapid-fire tenor, given to laughter. “Intelligence is what makes it different, and the defining operational feature is that the prior folk can’t understand.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

As the first manmade object to touch down on another celestial body, it demonstrated to the world Moscow’s unrivalled technical and military prowess, even though it broke into pieces on impact, scattering its remnants across the lunar surface. A decade later, in 1969, the US re-took the lead in the race for the future when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the Moon. A popular Soviet joke summarizes how this Cold War contest turned out. At a certain point, Soviet cosmonauts call Moscow to report proudly that they have not only reached the lunar surface but have painted it red so the world will understand that mankind’s future is in communist hands.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

Rogers, who had served as attorney general and secretary of state in Republican, administrations; Major General Donald J. Kutyna, who had headed shuttle operations for the Department of Defense; several NASA consultants and executives of aerospace contractors; Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon; Chuck Yeager, a famous former test pilot; and, a last-minute choice, Richard Feynman, a professor who brought to the next day’s newspaper accounts the tag “Nobel Prize winner.” Armstrong said on the day of his appointment that he did not understand why an independent commission was necessary.

…

As a life-size cross section of the joint was passed along for the commissioners to examine, Kutyna saw Feynman take the clamp and pliers from his pocket and pull a piece of the O-ring rubber from the model. He knew what Feynman meant to do. When Feynman reached for the red button on his microphone, Kutyna held him back—the television cameras were focused elsewhere. Rogers called a short break and, in the men’s room, standing next to Neil Armstrong, he was overheard saying, “Feynman is becoming a real pain in the ass.” When the hearing resumed, the moment finally arrived. CHAIRMAN ROGERS: Dr. Feynman has one or two comments he would like to make. Dr. Feynman. DR. FEYNMAN: This is a comment for Mr. Mulloy. I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it it doesn’t stretch back.

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book. To my dear children, Sydney and Miles: On May 25, 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy proclaimed, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong with the Apollo 11 crew fought to land the lunar module before it ran out of fuel. Armstrong eventually took that first step on the moon. The average age of the remarkable team at Mission Control in Houston was twenty-six years old. That means the scientists and engineers in Mission Control were just eighteen years old when Kennedy made his 1961 statement.

Artemis by Andy Weir

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Apollo 11, centre right, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme

A small amount of regolith dust was added to darken it. Otherwise the sunlight from outside would be blinding.” He gestured to the landing site. “The Eagle, named after the national bird of the United States, landed July twentieth, 1969. What you see here is the Eagle’s Descent Stage. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the Ascent Stage back into lunar orbit at the end of their mission.” The tourists pressed against the windows, entranced at what they saw. I took a long look myself. Hey, I’m not made of stone. I love my city and its history. The Eagle is a big part of that. “Every Apollo mission planted an American flag,” Gunter said.

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, deliberate practice, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, lifelogging, mental accounting, Neil Armstrong, patient HM, pattern recognition, Rubik’s Cube, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

He pressed a button on a remote control, and the overhead lights dimmed. A series of slides began to blink across a projection screen at the front of the room, each lingering for less than half a second. There was a slide of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over Sonny Liston. Then a slide of barbells. Then Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon. Then the cover of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. And a red rose. There were thirty such pictures, each appearing and disappearing so quickly that it was hard to imagine we’d ever be able to recall any of them, much less all of them. But I tried my hardest to capture some detail from each, and to make a quick mental note of what I was looking at.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test