Episode 4: With New York Times Best-Selling Author Charles Fishman
On the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings and Jeff Bezos's flight to space, we talk about human history's most successful government-funded technology project.
1960s. 1 government deep-science tech project was launched. 24 billion USD budget. Coordinating 410,000 people across 20,000 different companies. On-time, on-budget, and a success. It unleashed 1300 spinoff technologies and had tremendously fundamental impacts on hardware and software we do today.
In the same decade, the proportion of Americans who lived in poverty fell by 40 percent from 1964 to 1973. Median income for Americans, in constant dollars, rose by 40 percent between 1960 and 1975. The GDP of the United States, in constant dollars, rose by 50 percent just between 1960 and 1970. University enrollment doubled during the 1960s, and the number of women enrolled in universities rose 145 percent. The number of women in the U.S. workforce grew at twice the rate of men in the workforce, and the number of women in white-collar jobs grew even faster than that.
How did the 60s generation do all this whilst also making Apollo a success? It was ordinary people who did it. Ordinary folks just like you and me.
To talk about the story and lessons from this amazing epoch of time, at Empasco we welcomed Charles Fishman (@cfishman), who wrote the book 'One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that flew us to the moon’.
We talk about:
- the factors that led to the success of one of the largest government-funded deep-science technology projects.
- spinoff technologies and effects of Apollo on hardware and software we do today
- communist management style vs democratic leadership
- privatization of space economy, decreasing costs, similarities to internet economy and opportunity for emerging market countries.
- climate change, poverty vs space investment priorities?
You can listen to it by clicking on your favorite podcast platform of choice as below:
Here are the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players, you should be able to click the timestamp for the episode.
(00:00) - Intro
(09:08) - Key factors that made a major technology project like Apollo successful
(17:25) Evolution of Soviet centralized vs American decentralized management systems
(23:12) - Apollos systemic impact on software
(28:35) - Apollo as a global trust-building exercise for software
(29:02) - Some of the defining spinoff technologies from Apollo
(37:52) - How the context of 50s and 60s defined America and the Apollo mission
(43:03) - Is space travel affordable?
(44:39) - Investing in space technologies vs investing in climate change and poverty
(47:06) - How does space science reinforce climate science?
(48:00) - Is there a new space race on the horizon?
(53:29) - Opportunities for developing nations in the space domain
(58:02) - Space applications within the local context
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