July 20 marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The New York Times has a nifty little interactive piece which gives a short account of the recollections of the landing by 24 different people. All the people are either famous (Tom Seaver, Gloria Steinem, Barney Frank) or otherwise involved with space, physics, and NASA. The recollections are interesting because they range from awe to anger — large amounts of money being spent to send someone into space when there are so many problems on Earth.
There are lots of justifications for the space program, manned, and un-manned space travel. The normal ones revolve around scientific justification; the technology from the space program filters its way down to the rest of the world, and we get to benefit. I am pretty sure that this is how we got Teflon. There are probably other technologies from the space program, but I have never seen a credible cost-benefit analysis of the Apollo Program that says we received anything close to a positive return on sending men to the moon. Perhaps Tom Wolfe’s royalties on The Right Stuff serve to make it all worthwhile.
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