EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009 - 4

L e s s o ns o f A po ll o “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,” Kennedy said in his Rice University speech. The President then laid down the challenge for a generation of engineers: “We shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 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, reentering the atmos4 EE Times | Apollo | July 20, 2009 phere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun.” JFK’s words were crafted with the help of advisor Ted Sorensen, one of the sources for this special digital edition. Sorensen, who had private doubts about whether a moon landing was worth the enormous cost, today ranks Apollo among the three most significant accomplishments of the Kennedy Administration. It’s time to return to those heady days— to muster the political will and the technological might to “do the other things,” starting with an Apollo-style crash program to end our addiction to fossil fuels. America must rebuild its aging energy grid, which lacks the capacity to handle the volume of electricity generated by new energy sources such as wind power. “We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” a U.S. energy official recently told the New York Times. The development and commercializa- tion of renewable energy will go a long way toward solving the world’s climate crisis. Such a transformative program will be expensive and require sacrifice, but the potential rewards for the global economy and the Earth are incalculable. As the Apollo astronauts have observed, the moon landings heightened human awareness of the Earth as much as the moon. “The pictures of Earth [from space] don’t do it justice, because they always have a frame around them,” Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 crew told an interviewer. There’s “a lot more black and a lot more universe than ever comes through [in] a framed picture.” We owe the 400,000 engineers and technicians of Apollo a debt for having shown us that we live, as several of the astronauts have said, in the Garden of Eden. Now that we have a better understanding of the Earth’s place in the universe, we must use all of our abilities to preserve our fragile oasis in space. p
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EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009

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