In 1961, John F. Kennedy charged the United States with going to the Moon by the end of the decade. Against all odds, the US surpassed the Soviets and Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. The Apollo missions continued until 1972, but since then no manned space mission has ventured past near-Earth orbit. Far from ushering in an era of Moon bases and manned missions to Mars, Apollo’s legacy has left space enthusiasts disappointed. Fifty years after the Moon landing, what do we have to show for it? To answer that question and more, I’m joined today by Charles Fishman.

Charles is a journalist and author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon as well as The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, among other works.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: You write in One Giant Leap, and I’m going to quote you here, “Apollo was an unqualified success and it wasn’t — judged on its performance — a waste of money, nor was it a use of money that the United States simply couldn’t afford.” An unqualified success. Is that a contrarian judgment among people who are disappointed that Apollo did not lead to further exploration, did not lead to Moon colonies and humans on Mars? Or is that not a contrarian conclusion?

Fishman: I think it’s a contrarian conclusion that I am trying to shift into the mainstream, and here’s why. Very briefly, of course, we can say it was an unqualified success in that President John Kennedy charged America and NASA with landing people on the Moon by the end of the decade, returning them safely to home. And we did it.

We did it.

Yes. On May 25th, 1961, as I discovered in incredible, bemusing detail, when Kennedy said, “Let’s go to the Moon,” it was literally impossible. They didn’t have the rocket, the spaceship, the space food, the computer. They didn’t have a trajectory. They could not have plotted a course to the Moon. We didn’t know how to get there in a million different ways. It was impossible when he said, “Let’s do it.” And literally 100 months later, it was done. That’s stunning in and of itself. An incredible engineering achievement. An incredible scientific achievement. An incredible manufacturing achievement.

Often the incredible high-tech developments that the engineers and scientists came up with — there was no way to manufacture them. And so the interiors of the computers were woven by hand, by former textile workers hired from textile plants in Massachusetts. The spacesuits were sewn by hand on black Singer sewing machines. So the technology was advanced so far that we didn’t actually have the ability to make it. That was a stunning achievement. But the real achievement was that NASA and Apollo really ushered in the Digital Age that we all live in. [Apollo] was a stunning success in that it unleashed the world that we’ve become accustomed to and rely on every minute of every day. You can trace the quality and innovation and speed and robustness of your iPhone or your laptop computer, in terms of heritage, directly back to the computers that flew to the Moon.

NASA was the first organization of any kind to use integrated circuits, to use computer chips. NASA drove the price down 98 percent. And then having done that, it drove the price down 78 percent again. NASA bought almost all the computer chips in the world three or four years in a row for Apollo. And most important, those computer chips were so important to going to the Moon that NASA had this really elaborate acceptance procedure. When a batch of 1000 chips came in, there were 12 tests that every chip went through. Vibration, heat, cold — they immersed them in liquid nitrogen to make sure they were adequately sealed. If one of the 1000 chips failed one of the 12 tests, they stopped the test and sent the whole batch back to Fairchild or Texas Instruments. And they said, “These chips are no good. Send us good chips.”

And until that moment, computer chips weren’t particularly reliable. And the computer companies at that time said, “We had to set up separate manufacturing lines for NASA. NASA taught us to make chips, that when you press two plus two, you always get four. And when you ask for your phone app, you get the phone app and not the weather app.” And so NASA literally created the market and the understanding of computer chips in going to the Moon, and then we stepped up and adopted those computer chips for every function on Earth.

I think that story is really underappreciated, but space enthusiasts don’t see that as enough. We stopped the Apollo program and no one has gone beyond near-Earth orbit since. They view that as a failure of the last 50 years. Is that fair?

Right. So in 1972, the last time we went to the Moon, we flew 240,000 miles to the Moon. And literally since 1972, which is 49 years now, no human being has been further than about 240 miles from Earth. That’s where the space station orbits and where the Chinese now orbit. So if success means that Apollo opened the solar system to exploration and settlement by human beings — if that’s what you mean by success — then there is no question that Apollo didn’t accomplish that. You know the joke as well as I do, “What did we get from going to the Moon? We got Tang and Velcro. Just pure silliness.” No, we got the digital revolution that transformed the world.

We just have been looking in the wrong place. And when you look at the evidence, that’s unequivocal. We did not get “Star Trek.” We did not get “The Jetsons.” We did not get “Lost in Space.” We don’t all fly around with our robots and go where we want to go. I think we’re about to get it. You yourself are very interested in this and have explored it, and I think the key is economics. We went to space funded and motivated by a kind of national and global imperative. You can’t understand going to the Moon in the 1960s without understanding the geopolitics.

We would not have gone to the Moon without the Cold War. We were racing the Russians. And for five years, the Russians were beating the crap out of us. They did everything first. They appeared to have mastery of space in a way that we didn’t. They launched a person into orbit on their first effort to launch a person into space. And literally three weeks later, we launched a person in a pop fly. We couldn’t even match them coming later. We often did less well, two or three or four months after they had done something.

And so the problem with geopolitics as a motivator is, in 1972 when Richard Nixon looked out across the world, when the leaders of the Soviet Union looked out across the world, space wasn’t an important arena anymore. And it is expensive to go to space, and you need a clear mission, and you need a clear goal. And so if you’re a space person and you think Apollo failed because it didn’t pull us along, I guess what I would say is the economics weren’t there for companies and non-governmental organizations of all kinds to jump into space at that moment.

This is my sense of it: I’ve been a space reporter since 1986, and I don’t think the leadership of NASA was clear on where we should go next and how we should get there. And that muddle led to literally 30 or 40 years of compromises and poor missions — over promising and under delivering. I love the Space Shuttle. I love the Space Station. I don’t think they have been good custodians of our space money, to be honest. The robotic exploration missions have been brilliant and pioneering compared to what we’ve gotten from the human space flight program. But that’s not necessarily the fault of the frontline people at NASA. That’s a leadership failure.

Well, one bit of evidence that NASA and its leaders did not do a great job explaining the point of sending people into space after they landed on the Moon, is that now — when we seem to be in this new era of space exploration and thinking about a space economy and we have the billionaire space race — the criticisms of the 1960s Space Race are just being repeated today. These are 50-year-old critiques: How can we go to the space when we have inequality on Earth? That this is just about some vague sense of national prestige. Why are we really doing it? Those are the exact same criticisms we hear today. Apparently a lot of people feel like NASA never answered that. And it sounds like they really didn’t.

It was astonishing to read newspaper stories and journal articles from 1964. It was like, wait a minute, these criticisms were there then.

I don’t know if you saw the movie First Man about Neil Armstrong?

Yes, I did.

In the movie they played the song “Whitey on the Moon.” Again, very relevant today in the kind of criticisms I hear: inequality and disparities in this country. Before it was, “How can the government do it?” Now it’s, “How can these billionaires be spending their money going into the space? Why aren’t they being taxed for spending money on other things?”

Okay. So very briefly, the United States is a big country. We’re capable of doing even three or four things at once, not just one.

We’re very wealthy.

And we’re very wealthy. And in the ‘60s, going to the Moon cost about $20 billion. There are three individual years of the Vietnam War, each of which cost more than the entire race to the Moon. So we could clearly afford to go to the Moon. That’s not a question. Whether it was the right use of money is a separate question to whether we could afford it. So in the ‘60s, we tackled poverty, women’s rights, civil rights, voting rights — in dramatic ways. Economic inequality and gender inequality fell dramatically. The number of black Americans who voted for Lyndon Johnson compared to voting in the election of Kennedy and Nixon, I believe it was two times the number because of the passage of civil rights and voting rights. So we actually made progress on all those things. We didn’t fix them, and those problems still dog us.

What’s happening now is completely different. I think it is completely misleading to call what Elon Musk at SpaceX and Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin and, to some degree, Richard Branson at Virgin Galactic are doing a “billionaire space race.” Musk and Bezos are in business to change the business of space, to create a space economy. Just the way that Bezos created Amazon, their goal is very simple: They want to take something that has historically cost $100 million and bring the cost down to a $1 million. What used to cost $100 million to launch to space will now cost $1 million. And when you do that, as you know, you completely change what’s possible.

A hundred million dollars is the kind of decision that even big companies would hesitate to make. “Do we need to do this? Is it the only way to do this? What if it blows up?” There are individual news organizations to this day — the networks, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post — that can spend $1 million a year to keep a correspondent in a dangerous place. A million dollars to go to space completely changes the landscape. Those people may be in an ego race. They may think of each other as rivals in that way, but this isn’t philanthropy and it isn’t indulgence. Bezos expects Blue Origin to become a going business. I’ve been to Blue Origin, and I’ve interviewed Bezos a bunch of times on this topic. He expects there to be a Thursday afternoon launch to orbit on a Blue Origin rocket before too long. If you miss this Thursday, they’re going to launch again next Thursday, just like the Southwest Airlines 3:00 flight from Dallas to LaGuardia.

Elon Musk is five years ahead of Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk and SpaceX and that crew are doing something as a company that only three nations in the world have done: send human beings successfully to space, flawlessly fly rockets to orbit, to the Space Station and back. So I think, and I sometimes sound a little too enthusiastic, that we are absolutely creating a space economy. We’re creating a new kind of economic platform. And we don’t know, just like in 1998 it wasn’t clear what the internet was going to unleash. But it has literally reached into everything from real estate to now we see these rocket launches from the perspective of the rocket as they’re going up. Everything is touched by it. I think 10 years from now, there will be dozens of people living and working in space and they will be creating economic value. Some will be paying their own bills. And I think 20 and 30 years from now, this moment that we’re living in now will look like the beginning of this remarkable transformation in which space becomes a much more tangible economy.

I had Sara Seager on the podcast earlier this year and I expected her to say that as a scientist she would prefer for NASA to take the lead. But she was thrilled at the advances being made by the private sector. So even people who are doing pure research are glad Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have decided to invest in space.

Absolutely! And I think NASA is doing the wrong thing right now. The paperback of my book has a new chapter, and I make this argument in that new concluding chapter. This is a most exciting moment in space, but Musk and Bezos are showing that the private sector can handle the operational aspects. It’s not simple or easy or low risk to fly a United 757 from JFK to Heathrow. It’s demanding and complicated and dangerous, but the government creates a structure to support that, and then the private companies do it every day. And it’s very clear that the operational aspects of space can be done by the private sector, and we’re just at the beginning of that. I think NASA should be doing today, exactly what it was doing in the 1960s.

We need spaceships that have artificial gravity. Every space ship in a TV show or a movie has artificial gravity, right? But we could have spaceships with artificial gravity. It’s “just” an engineering problem. (Just in quotes.) That’s what I want NASA to be paying attention to. Something no one talks about: If you’re going to Mars, those people who go to Mars are going to be 100 percent autonomous. The quickest radio exchange between here and Mars is nine minutes in each direction. There’s no mission control for a mission to Mars. The mission control is in the spaceship. It’s those six or eight or ten people solving their own problems and occasionally consulting mission control for some guidance. But we’ve never had an autonomous space mission.

I did a story on life on the International Space Station when they’d only been up there 18 years. I was curious what it was like to live and work in space. When those astronauts wake up every morning, there’s a spreadsheet on their laptop from Houston telling them what they’re going to spend the day doing in six-minute increments. Well, teaching astronauts to be autonomous, to make their own decisions, take their own risks, have all their own information, 3D printers for spare parts — all that stuff, and teaching NASA to let go: those are hard problems. I want NASA working on those kind of breakthrough problems.

We need to figure out how to pick crews that are going to get along. The astronauts keep diaries, and some of them that are mailed to an industrial psychologist confidentially. The number one complaint the astronauts have about life on the space station is too much meddling from Houston. “They don’t know what our life is like.” The number two complaint is about their fellow crew members. So there’s a lot that NASA could be doing. And I don’t need NASA to be developing the SLS launch system and the Orion capsule. It’s pretty clear we have big problems, and I’d like them to tackle those.

Do you see that changing all over the next five to 10 years?

It would take somebody bold, but I think a new leader for NASA could do that. We’re about to launch the James Webb Telescope finally. I think that’s going to be great. Right now there’s a company which I’m sure you’ve heard of called Planet Labs that photographs the entire surface of the planet every day. Every backyard, every shopping center, every desert, every coastline: the central courtyard of the Vatican, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Every part of the world is photographed every day to one square meter resolution using their satellites. And I think that company has only had $500 or $600 million in total funding. And they are using just what you said, these incredible technological developments, and they’re making money. They sell their understanding of the planet to people.

And so I think the companies, I hope, will show NASA how unnecessary it is for NASA to do everything. We don’t have the government run airlines. And so I hope that the dawn of this era of — we call it private, but the corporate space economy, will prod NASA to say, “You know what? We need a bigger reach.” Now, I think going back to the Moon and thinking about going to Mars is helping NASA do that. But NASA needs a shakeup. There was a report a month ago about NASA’s effort to design and fabricate new space suits. They have spent $420 million in the last nine years, and they don’t have any space suits. They don’t have a design. They don’t have a contractor, and they’re expected to spend another $600+ million to get one test spacesuit and two operational suits. They will have spent $1 billion to get two space suits. That’s not even 1960s Apollo era. That’s sort of Space Shuttle-style thinking. Elon Musk, when that report came out, simply tweeted at NASA, “Would you like help with this problem?”

The example you just gave is the kind of thing which will result in another 50 years of some of these dreams not coming true — of not having colonies on Mars, colonies on the Moon. How do we avoid that? And do you think that we will, and that over the coming decades we will be on the Moon and we will be on Mars and have a substantive presence in those places?

So let’s make a distinction. I think the space economy that I imagined is literally driven by economics. People can do things in space, get information, make products that can’t be made on Earth and send them down. I think that will become a going enterprise in the next 10 to 20 years. It won’t need government support beyond the kind of government support that the railroads need or the airlines need or the highways need. There’ll be a structure in which that’s done, but private companies will be doing that. That may not seem that glamorous. If we’re making super fast optical fiber in orbit and jetting it or parachuting it back to Earth, how sexy is that? If it increases internet speeds 100 times, it’ll be nice. If it’s all done robotically, it may be a burst of attention and then just do what it does.

I don’t think there’s any economic reason to go to the Moon or go to Mars. Whatever resources those places have, those resources are only good for going further out in space. It will always be easier to get all kinds of valuable minerals right here on Earth than to go harness an asteroid and tow it this way and mine it and send the stuff down. The question of whether we’re going to establish permanent bases on the Moon with an eye to going to Mars, to me, is a question of exactly the kind of leadership and sort of clarity of vision and mission that we haven’t had between 1972 and 2010. Lots of presidents have announced lots of programs that didn’t happen. “We’re going to go to the Moon. Here’s why.” “We’re going to go to Mars. Here’s why. Here’s what we’re going to get from that.” And what I would say is I hope we do it.

No one said in 1961, “If we go to the Moon, we will create a kind of computer technology and an attitude toward computer technology that you cannot imagine, but that will come along five or 10 years quicker than it otherwise would have.” The economic benefit of that was huge. It was completely unexpected. I think if we go to Mars, we will learn things and we will develop tools that will be incredibly valuable back on Earth. I don’t think there’s going to be an economically thrilling reason to go to Mars that will make that self-sustaining. But I think that kind of aspirational mission is great for human beings. It’s part of being alive and we, as a society, can afford it.

We spend more on the Pentagon budget every year, $750 billion, that we have spent total in space since the last Moon landing. So one year’s Pentagon spending can buy you 20 or 30 years of dramatic space exploration. So again, we can afford it. And you know what? We have big problems: climate change, economic inequality, a sense of fading opportunity in some parts of the United States, the sense of being American. I think these big missions remind us what we can do. And I think when you look back at what it took to go to the Moon, if we want to tackle those big problems, we can tackle them. And so I hope, I truly hope, that we will have a permanent presence on the Moon that we will use that to teach ourselves to go to Mars, just because I think the benefits of that will be surprising and well worth the relatively modest cost compared to other things we spend money on.

My guest today has been Charles Fishman, author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. Charles, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.”  This article was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute. 

Image: Reuters.