Thread by @cfishman

Landing on the Moon was the opposite of useless. @mattyglesias lives in the world Apollo created. That's not hyperbole, it's the overlooked reality. Going to the Moon didn't create the 'space age' we imagined. It did something better: It laid the foundation of the digital age. 1/

(thread) The idea that going to the Moon was expensive, a big show that led nowhere, gave us nothing but Tang and Velcro — that's all silliness, even if it is the conventional wisdom. We misunderstand Apollo, almost completely.

2/ In terms of cost, Apollo was pretty cheap for what we got: In actual dollars spend, in the years they were spend, the total is $19 billion. There were two years — two individual years! — in which Vietnam cost more than $19 billion, each of those years.

3/ So....

—Apollo: $19 billion
—Vietnam: $111 billion
(1968, 1969 were years Vietnam cost more than $19b each year)

—Apollo: 100% success
—Vietnam: 100% failure

And dollars don't account for the devastating human & political cost of Vietnam, at home & abroad.
@mattyglesias

4/ What did Apollo get us? The computer that flew Apollo spaceships to the Moon was a marvel—smallest, fastest, most nimble, most able computer ever. It fit in a box you could carry. Designed & programmed at MIT—by people using room-sized computers that required punch cards.

5/ The Apollo computer was the first to use something called…integrated circuits. NASA & MIT drove the creation of the microchip world — the culture, the standards, the continuous improvement, the pricing.
(@mattyglesias )

6/ When everyone else — including computer giant @IBM — dismissed integrated circuits as too risky, too unreliable, too expensive, NASA and MIT used them for the hardest project ever: Flying people to the Moon.

7/ Of all integrated circuit manufacturing in the US, here were NASA's purchases, by percent of total:

— 1963: 94%
— 1964: 85%
— 1965: 72%

In his 1965 essay outlining 'Moore's Law,' Gordon Moore only mentions one pioneering user of computer chips by name: NASA.

8/ We utterly fail to understand the impact Apollo had back on Earth. I know, because I've spent the last three years reporting & writing, 'One Giant Leap.' It's a rollicking ride through the adventure of Apollo. But it also re-frames the impact of Apollo.

9/ When Kennedy said, 'Let's go to the Moon' — that rallying cry was impossible. We had...5 minutes of spaceflight experience. 304 seconds. Eight years later, Armstrong and Aldrin were bounding around on the Moon.

10/ During that 8 years, Americans and people around the world completely changed how they thought about 'technology' — the idea of it, and the word. No one used that word in 1960 or 1961 the way we do now. 'Technology' was weaponry — it was 'Dr. Strangelove.'
(@mattyglesias )

11/ By 1969, we'd spent most of a decade watching people use computers to fly to the Moon. And by the way, it may seem silly, but 'Star Trek' and 'Lost in Space' and 'The Jetsons' picked up on that and created a whole new cultural landscape. Computers as everyday tools.

12/ As for Tang and Velcro, well... Tang was invented in 1957. Velcro was invented in 1948. Tang was a marketing triumph. But the Apollo 11 astronauts — Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins — declined to take it to the Moon. Aldrin (later) famously said: 'Tang sucks.'

13/ And you couldn't fly in zero-gravity without Velcro. It's indispensable. • @NASA finds the 'all we got from the Moon was Tang & Velcro' line so consistently irritating that the agency has a web-page to debunk that.
(@adamdavidson )
nasa.gov/offices/ipp/ho…

-30-/ The idea that going to the Moon was an expensive waste of time is pure mythology. And also sad. We've got big problems to solve today. There's lots to learn about how to tackle them from understanding how we got to the Moon.
#OneGiantLeap
amazon.com/One-Giant-Leap…

That's John Young, commander of Apollo 16, jumping and saluting the flag, alongside lunar module Orion, with the Moon car (designed by General Motors), parked & ready.