Apollo, or, the Rise of the Machines

There is a joke in aviation circles that says that the airliner of the future will have a crew consisting of one pilot and a dog. The pilot's job will be to stand by the door in his spiffy uniform and greet the passengers, while the dog's job will be to bite the pilot if he tries to turn off the autopilot.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of man's first steps on the Moon, and so everyone feels compelled to give their take on what it means. To many, it marks the end of the age of exploration, one last great adventure undertaken in the waning hours of our unity and innocence as a nation. To me, it represents something else--the inflection point between the Age of Man and the Age of Machines.

Stretching back to the mists of antiquity, all of our great voyages as a race had been guided not only by the minds but by the very hands of individuals. From Alexander's chariots, to Magellan's galleons, the Wright brothers' Flyer, and even the ferociously fast and unforgiving X-planes that preceded Apollo, all had men directly at the controls, independent of outside influence, utterly alone as they tore forward into the great unknown. Moreover, even to the degree that they relied on the work of engineers, astronomers, and shipbuilders, all of it was the direct work of hands and minds of men, whether working with chisel or slide rule.

But with Apollo all of that began to change. It is a simple matter of fact that navigating a rocket out of Earth orbit and to the surface of the Moon is not something one can eyeball; mistakes happen too fast at 25,000 miles per hour. Where sea captains of old used the sextant in one hand to guide the wheel in another, now the rudder obeyed the commands of the computer directly, which got to decide when, and if, it would acknowledge the requests of the pilot. To the teams of programmers (working just outside of Kendall Square at the Draper Laboratory--real, not proverbial rocket scientists) who built the software and hardware that guided the ship the humans in the capsule were more cargo than crew.

Likewise, the machinery of Apollo in many ways shows the transition between the handmade and the machine-made. The most critical mechanical parts of the ship--such as the navigational gyroscopes--were made by machinists, working by hand, because the robots of that era were only just beginning to approach the precision that a master tradesman could achieve. The critical guidance computers were equally hand-crafted, picking up many of the same precision assembly skills that first came to prominence when Waltham was a world capital of watchmaking in the late 19th century.

But the real heart of Apollo was the thousands of integrated circuits--computer chips--that could be made only by machines. In the decade and some that followed, "handmade" would come to mean something quaint, like "homemade apple pie," rather than representing the acme of precision and quality. While Apollo alone did not directly create all of the tools and processes that are today commonplace, the virtually limitless budget and urgency allotted to the project arguably accelerated their advance by a decade or more.

All told, Apollo represented a vast leap forward for technology--and no less an advocate of the supremacy of the human mind than Ayn Rand said that Armstrong's first words on the Moon should have been "What hath man wrought?" But the individual drama--the spirit of Lewis and Clark, of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hilary--was ceasing to be the center of it all. It took less than one lifetime--a mere 66 years--to go from the first takeoff at Kitty Hawk to the first landing on the Sea of Tranquility. I do not think it a coincidence that there, for 4o years since, has remained our farthest reach as a people.