Why I love the Apollo Mission: The Real Legacy of the Lunar Landing
I remember being 13, growing up with my sister and mother in a two-room apartment in Kolkata, India. No home computers, no cell phones — but we had just subscribed to cable TV. It was a window to a world I had never seen before. I was fascinated by what exists under other skies faraway lands. Like many kids, I was enchanted by the Discovery Channel. There were the answers to my young, curious mind’s many questions about the world and universe, an escape from the narrow alleys my life was confined to. What had the most profound impact, however, was a documentary on the Apollo Mission, though it took me many years to fully realize. Two decades later I am a tech startup founder in Silicon Valley, after my Ph.D. at MIT- and yet the story of this extraordinary path from an ordinary girl in India to who I am today goes back to that documentary I watched as a thirteen-year-old.
In the last fifty years, there have been numerous important engineering achievements that changed the course of humanity. Space exploration, microchips, personal computers, the internet… the list is long. But my favorite project in engineering history is the Apollo Mission to the Moon. It is the one I feel personally connected to, that was foundational in defining who I chose to be. Apollo was an incredible feat: putting a human on another planetary body, and doing so back when computing was so limited compared to today. But it was much more than that.
First, let me highlight the importance of the Apollo Mission to the moon that is far beyond creating a historical milestone. Yes, it was part of the Cold War, a side effect of the US-Soviet competition for space supremacy. And yet it unified us. It was celebrated around the world as an achievement of the human race. It fundamentally changed what all of us, not just Americans, perceive as possible. Our worship of celebrities, and super-rich CEOs, was interrupted by NASA, where individuals mattered but were part of a whole, and everyone took pride in what they accomplished together. The low retention rates in so many technology companies today is a counterexample: people lack a sense of belonging, a sense of being crucial to something that is greater than any individual.
I often hear critics on funding fundamental research, NASA, or academia in general. We forget the technology that spun off from Apollo, the depth of knowledge we have from academia, and how much we rely on them. Kalman Filters and other estimation algorithms for self-driving cars; “fly by wire” for modern aircraft, technology for freezing food, fire-resistant textiles — the list is endless. NASA’s work enabled today’s commercial space companies which can now skip the fundamental research and reinventing multistage launch vehicles from scratch.
But important as all that is, it is nothing compared to the real impact the Apollo mission had. It inspired generations of kids to dream of doing the impossible — to figuratively reach for the moon because it could be done.
“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, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept”.
You can be unaware of President Kennedy’s words and yet know the feeling.
Even kids like me, born long after the Apollo program shut down, growing up on the other side of the planet, were drawn to science and engineering by the success of Apollo. The desire for wealth and fame, or just a comfortable life, doesn’t go away. But you think about more than just your own little life. You think about how far humanity has come on the shoulders of those who willingly took the challenge of doing what is hard. And you want to be one of those who change the course of humanity. It inspires you to explore, and invent, and build. All that just from watching old videos. It inspired today’s entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers to be who they are. It inspired me, a young woman in a small college in India, to study astrophysics at the Planetarium in Kolkata, apply for an internship in America to work on understanding the universe at Fermilab. And, eventually, to work at NASA — the place she dreamed of. It gave me the courage to take on hard projects: new safe nuclear reactors, or ocean mapping drones, or a Silicon Valley startup to build technology with a lasting impact.
Looking beyond the direct impact on technology, to the impact on those who create technology — the ROI of Apollo mission is so massive that it is perhaps impossible to compute. When I was wrapping up my Ph.D. at MIT in Mechanical Engineering, I had to decide between continuing foundational technical research that eventually led to my startup or taking up a job at the big tech corporations. I was working on things esoteric to the world outside, a potential apparent to only a few working on the frontier of technology. I remember one of my Professors telling me,
“Most people live their lives wondering how to spend their time and waiting to be entertained. You’re fortunate to have the power to build, invent, and mold the world around you to your imagination. You went through the years of rigor and the training to develop that ability. If you don’t build the audacious future that calls you, who will?”
Apollo was fifty years ago. It was not easy. It involved failures, grit, and a vision. People devoted their lives, and some gave their lives, to make it happen. In return, it reminded us to dream of a future that’s exciting and inspiring. I still remember my visit to the Kennedy Space Center for the first time, many years ago — staring at the Saturn V with awe and tears, feeling like it was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. Watching documentaries celebrating the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing gave me chills. I had nostalgic memories of me at 13. I remembered the girl with wide sparkling eyes filled with the wonder of the universe to explore, hoping one day she too would build history. The girl who escaped the traditional path of becoming a housewife, maybe taking a desk job — of doing what was expected. Instead, she chose to chase the almost impossible dream in a foreign land.
The Apollo missions inspired me, and tens of thousands of others, to push ourselves into doing the impossible, and to work on things that matter. Now, today more than ever, we need another audacious mission to inspire generations of builders, entrepreneurs, and scientists who feel compelled to push human civilization forward, and not just work on the next social media network, or online shopping website, or viral video platform. As we look forward to the new decade, I am challenging the global community to focus on solving seemingly insurmountable hurdles, both to develop great technologies that will proliferate and benefit all humankind, but also to inspire the 13-year-old boys and girls in places like Lagos, São Paulo, Riga, and Nur-Sultan, as well as San Francisco, London, Moscow, and Beijing.
In a time where the world stands so divided, a mission like this can again unify us, as another great accomplishment of humankind, truly embodying our greatest attribute:
To answer the call to be bold and accept challenges that enable giant leaps for humankind. To not settle for just incremental progress. To do what is hard cause at the end that is what leads us to manifest our greatest potential.
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