Thank you Apollo 11
For inspiring me and a generation to believe we can
On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, I look back with fond memories of an event that had a profound impact on my life, career and ambition.
Surprisingly, in this moment of reflection I realise how this formative experience combined with the later emergence of punk music was to characterise my achievements in adult life as a lifelong learner, educator, entrepreneur, inventor and maker. It made me believe that I could do almost anything, or at least try.
Recently, when helping my elderly mother move home, I came across a trove of mementos she’d kept from my childhood. It was like discovering a time capsule of my young self from the late 60s thru the 70s, little things I’d made, things I’d written, my first school report (apparently I was an intense and serious child, who knew?), and the kind of drawings that might have adorned a refrigerator.
The picture you see above was part of a collection that showed an obsessive preoccupation with the Apollo space programme and the Apollo 11 mission especially. I spent hours watching the lunar missions, courtesy of the BBC, on a black and white TV. I drew, perhaps, hundreds of these pictures to adorn my bedroom wall and all these years later I still remember drawing them.
I made models of the Saturn V rocket, command module and lunar lander from cardboard tubes and boxes. I had an Action Man astronaut replete with lunar rover that I played with for hours. I made an Airfix model of the Saturn V rocket and I became completely absorbed in this historic space programme and all of the science and engineering that was a part of it.
While other kids my age might have been writing to Santa I persisitently wrote hand-written letters, and sent them in those lightweight airmail envelopes we had back then, to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin where I received signed letters and photographs in reply.
I became so interested in space and the universe that when, at the age of 10, I started a school astronomy project, supposed to last a term, I didn’t stop writing it until I was 12 and it spanned 14 volumes (I still have them!).
I was a self-motivated and self-directed learner with a learning style that could best be described as osmosis. I used to bunk off school and, before it became a merchandising portal, spend stolen days off at the Science Museum. I gained an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of astrophysics to the extent that my science teacher in high school invited me to give a lesson to my fellow students on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram.
Much to my peers amusement I had simultaneously discovered punk fashion and music that burst into the scene from the mid-70s that inspired me in a different way but one that promoted a DIY and can-do culture. I think the intersection between these seemingly disparate influences was incredibly formative for me and set the course for my life and career.
Science, technology, art, design and making.
So here I was, a 12 year old proto-punk giving the equivalent of my first TED talk at a state comprehensive school in the home counties. Happy days!
They didn’t end well but that’s another story.
Also around the age of 12 I had my first meeting with the schools careers officer. She asked me what I would like to do when I left school.
“I want to be an astronaut”, I said.
I think she thought I was joking because she told me to stop being a smart arse and offered me a brochure for a local meat packing factory, another for a construction company making bricks and another, assuming I got my O’Level grades (high school exams at 16), working as a cashier with management opportunities at a bank that recently opened on the high street. All perfectly ace jobs I’m sure but none of them lit my fire.
By the mid-70’s the space shuttle programme was announced and I wrote again to NASA to see how I could apply. They replied with some flyers that were much better than the ones from the bank, meat packing or brick making company. But to be an astronaut in those days meant you had to have come from the military, with a minimum of 2,000 hours high performance jet flight experience, and be an American citizen. Fair enough really given that it was their tax dollars but I was bummed never-the-less. I toyed with joining the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm for a bit — ships and Harrier Jump Jets — whey hey!!
By the time I was 15 I’d discovered an interest in chemistry and entrepreneurship that wasn’t compatible with formal education and so I was invited to leave. And with that my chances for joining NASA or getting American citizenship were dashed.
But my passion for science, discovery and space didn’t end there. The space programme inspired the imagination of the media and I got lost in the worlds of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Space 1999, Kubrick’s 2001, Star Wars, David Bowie and so much more.
In turn this inspired my own interest in making the future. From my late teens, after a stint in a genetics lab at the Open University, I worked for a British computer manufacturer that specialised in education. A chance meeting with Seymour Papert encouraged me to imagine that I could profoundly transform the way we learn and teach. I set up my first company in my early 20s and, amongst other things, won a government grant to develop one of the worlds first mobile computers for kids. I called it Satchel and even managed to build a prototype that used short wave radio to transmit a page of text from a CD-ROM jukebox that my team and I designed for the British Library to its primitive screen in about 20 minutes!
Satchel was about the size of an iPad but about as thick as a shoebox. When I showed it to people and said “one day people will sit under trees and pull down anything that interests them”, they thought of me as a crazy man. But it was all inspired by science fiction and the Apollo space programme plus a guy I met along the way called Alan Kay.
Timing is everything and this was the wrong time and the wrong place but I ended up building a number of fast growth companies some of which failed spectacularly and others that were successfully sold to bigger corporations such as Philips Electronics and Virgin. Some of the tech my team and I developed during that time are probably in your phone or laptop today.
During the 90s, a particularly creative period for me when I exited the education technology sector to disrupt the entertainment world, I had the messianic vision that I would create a company so large that it would have its own campus and it’s own space programme. Delusions of grandeur, moi?
Take that Sergey, Larry and Elon!
I could wax lyrical for as long as you’ve got about the ways in which the Apollo space programme ignited my curiosity and interest not just in science but also in the arts but I think you get the picture. I know I’m not alone in this regard as I meet so many people of my generation who also dreamed of being an astronaut and were inspired to make their future. The problem was an education system that didn’t take us seriously or was even designed for this kind of ambition.
Today, I believe that we’re on the precipice of a renaissance in space travel. Multiple nations as well as private enterprises have cast their eyes upwards and towards returning to the Moon, visiting asteroids, creating a settlement on Mars and going even further. At the same time our society is finally considering the challenges of maintaining our own planet faced with supporting a rapidly growing population whilst attempting to reverse the worst excesses of climate change and environmental damage.
Whilst there is no immediate planet B for our species it is in our nature to explore, invent, create and solve problems together.
To paraphrase Dickens; these are both the best of times and the worst of times, an age of wisdom, an age of foolishness, an epoch of belief, an epoch of incredulity.
When Armstrong stepped on the Moon an entire generation was inspired and for that moment there was a belief and optimism that together we could do anything. We need to reclaim that spirit of adventure because if we can land a man on the Moon and bring them back with less computing power than a mobile phone imagine what we could do if we inspire a generation of makers, fixers and problem solvers. Because, by golly, we need them now more than ever.
Because the jobs of the future will be the ones we make ourselves.
Postscript
Of course, like me, many of my generation were children at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing and the Apollo programme. As a result were full of awe, wonder and naiveté . I stand by what I have written above about how this programme along with other formative experiences had, I believe, a direct impact on my life, ambition and career.
What, as children, we didn’t realise was the social context of the time, that included the civil rights movement as well as the cold war, in which the Apollo programme occurred. One might then hope that in our next collective human adventure we don’t forget our global social context.
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