Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American--almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.On the contrary, massive technological achievement in the face of the enemy is peculiarly American. Just look at history. As we committed to World War II, our entire colossal economy quickly reorganized into a machine of war. We took rations, our women worked in factories, and our engineers designed fighters and bombers equal (or superior) to anything else in the field.
Then after the war, the race for control of atomic energy led us to harness and perfect the splitting of the atom, and within a decade we had enough nuclear weaponry to annihilate any threat, and turn the Earth into a lifeless rock. Then, as is alluded to here with the Apollo program, our rocket engineers once again pushed past all competitors as we achieved dominance in space.
If anything, the economist article undervalues Apollo. It only cost $150 billion, which I have mentioned before on this blog, is less than the current R&D cost America has put into the Joint Strike Fighter. That level of spending would barely keep NASA funded 8 years...which was the length from inception of Apollo to the first moon landing.
So while it pains me to say this...but the current "stagnance" of American innovation surely is not caused by our collective engineering but rather the fact that we don't have a clear enemy to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at in a single program. Oh wait.
More on Apollo in the next post.
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