Five Management Lessons From the Apollo Moon Landing
There’s still a lot to learn from NASA’s success in sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them back safely 50 years ago
By Peter Coy
There’s something faintly embarrassing about the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk. It was just so long ago. It’s no longer “we” who put a man on the moon, it’s “they” who put a man on the moon. So why can’t “we” do it? It’s hard not to feel that for all the technological advances of the last half-century, America has lost something — the ability to unite and overcome long odds to achieve greatness.
At one level this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. The lack of fresh footprints on the lunar surface is not evidence that the U.S. has fallen into a new Dark Age.
Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. They were a shining success story of building and managing a complex, decentralized technological enterprise that accomplished an audaciously ambitious goal. In November 1968, seven months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human…
