Apollo 11 Moon program was the greatest combined exploration & technology event in the history of the world!

If we could understand what fundamentally drove Apollo, we might glimpse our future in space. And yet, as we discovered again last July during celebrations of the Moon landing’s 40th anniversary, we still can’t agree on why Apollo moonwalking ended in 1972. For example, Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe believes “the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers,” such as Saturn V developer Wernher von Braun, to explain the real meaning of Apollo to the public. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Heavens and the Earth (1985), Walter McDougall explains that

"the bold lunar goal … encouraged Congress and the nation to believe that Apollo was the space program … Once the space race was over and won, Americans could turn back to their selfish pursuits"

Formerly with CNN, Miles O’Brien dismisses the most obvious manned space challenge — cost.

"If you don’t want to mention the cost of the wars, if you would rather not get into Wall Street or Detroit bailouts, or if you don’t want to tell them the money we spend on the space program is about the same as our annual expenditure on coffee — why not mention India?…Calcutta can afford it — and Cleveland can’t?"

This is an important clue. Apollo cost about $ 150 B (in 2007 USD). Imagine the Apollo-level manned space programs we could have funded with only a fraction of Obama’s initial $ 800+ B stimulus package. But although the money magically appeared, Americans did not spontaneously demand Moonbases or manned Mars missions. So the availability of money, by itself, does not fundamentally drive big space programs.

Wolfe alludes to powerful. but short-lived forces permeating Apollo: “

"Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all"

This included the quintessential media figure of the time, Walter Cronkite, who predicted that after Apollo 11, “everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk.”

And O’Brien concludes that.

"Truth is, we have done nothing to equal (much less top) the accomplishments of Apollo. And even worse, we haven’t tried. We did someting truly great, but then walked away from it"

This emotional component — and its rapid demise in the late 1960s — explains why money is not enough. The people also have to feel good.

This is reminiscent of a Keynesian concept called “animal spirits,” used to explain why investors become either irrationally exhuberant or unnecessarily discouraged by business conditions during a boom or a bust. However, public support for Apollo was not primarily driven by the promise of profits from space, nor in the end, even by beating the Soviets to the Moon.

Instead the unprecedented, widespread affluence from the Kennedy boom momentarily catapulted many average citizens to elevated levels of Maslow’s hierarchy where their expanded worldviews made the Apollo program seem not only intriguing, but almost irresistible — as reflected in 1960s opinion polls.

Indeed, the strong connection between manned planetary exploration and Maslow-related values was emphasized in 1961 by the National Academy of Science’s Space Science Board, chaired by Lloyd Berkner, in their influential report to President Kennedy.

"Man’s exploration of the Moon and planets (is) potentially the greatest inspirational venture of this century and one in which the whole world can share; inherent here are great and fundamental philosophical and spiritual values which find a response in man’s questing spirit and his intellectual self-realization"

But the Maslow effect was short-lived. As early as 1966, growing distress over Vietnam and budget issues began to erode affluence-induced “ebullience,” and this 1960s Apollo “Maslow Window” rapidly closed, as evidenced by Nixon’s cancellation of the last three Apollo Moon missions.

As recently as Memorial Day weekend in Chicago at the International Space Development Conference 2010, distinguished physicist and space scientist Freeman Dyson lamented that “we have been stuck in LEO for 40 years.” In the context of Apollo, this is consistent with the absence — since the 1960s — of a post-World War II-style long boom culminating in widespread, Camelot-style ebullience.

We almost got one started in 2007 when Fortune magazine (7/12/07) celebrated the “greatest economic boom ever.” But it was interrupted by the financial Panic of 2008 and our subsequent great recession. Will 2007′s great boom be revived? And how soon?

Intriguing parallels with Apollo go back at least 200 years to Lewis and Clark, but the last century is particularly revealing. For example, the financial Panic of 1893 and the great 1890s recession may have more parallels with our current circumstances than the Apollo-related decades from 1950-70. The 1890s featured a double-dip recession and unemployment above 10%, as well as a political realignment that led to a stunning 1960s-style economic boom after 1899. The resulting early 20th century Maslow Window featured extraordinary ebullience, including “Panama fever” as the new canal split the continent and transformed America into a global power, “pole mania” as heroic international teams risked death to be the first to the poles, the civilization-altering Wright brothers’ first flights, and perhaps the most ebullient U.S. president ever: Theodore Roosevelt.

The History Of Moon Exploration!

The Earth’s Moon has had a profound effect on the entire history and development of human civilization. Many cultures used the cycle of the Moon’s phases to measure time. The Moon has been venerated in various forms throughout history. The Greeks worshiped the Moon goddess Artemis. The Romans called her Diana. The Celts called her Arianrod. The Egyptians considered Isis a goddess of the Moon. Indeed, in virtually every culture, the deity associated with the Moon has always been female, possibly because of associations of the lunar phase cycle with the female menstrual cycle.

Galileo first discovered, through his telescope, that the Moon was a world, with mountains and dark areas that he called “Mare” or “Seas” which we now know are relatively flat areas that are nevertheless drier than the most arid Earthly desert. Nineteenth century astronomers thought that the Moon might be an abode of life, much like the Earth.

Journeys to the Moon have been the subject of literature for centuries. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote of traveling to the Moon, buoyed up by jars of dew. In the 19th Century, Jules Verne wrote of Civil War era astronauts flying to the Moon in a ship fired by a massive cannon. H. G. Wells has his explorers travel to the Moon in a ship built of an impossible gravity shielding material he called Cavorite.

With the advent of motion pictures, voyages to the Moon became the subject of film as well. The very first was the French film, Le Voyage dans la Lune. Others included the German film, Frau im Mond, and the George Pal classic, Destination Moon.

Rocket pioneer Robert Goddard made one of the first serious suggestions for sending rockets to the Moon. He was attacked by the New York Times for this idea in 1920. The Times loftily explained that space travel was impossible, since without atmosphere to push against, a rocket could not move so much as an inch. Professor Goddard, it was clear, lacked "the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." Nearly fifty years later, the Times published a retraction and an apology soon after men actually did travel to the Moon.

After the end of the Second World War, as rocket technology advanced and the Cold War began to rage, the United States and the Soviet Union turned their attentions heavenward. It was only natural that space would become a venue for super power competition and that the Moon would be a destination. Fleets of probes, Soviet Lunas and Zonds and American Rangers, Lunar Orbiters, Surveyors, and Apollos, were sent to the Moon between 1959 and 1976 during the first great age of lunar exploration.

The History of the Moon!

The Moon may seem like a lifeless and unchanging place, but it actually has a fascinating history. The driving factor behind the lunar history is the fact that because the moon is small, it cooled quickly and formed a thick, rigid crust.

The Moon solidified about 4.1 to 4.6 billion years ago. Though there is little iron in the lunar composition, what there was sunk to the core and solidified. The lower density material floated to the top and formed the crust.

The next stage in the moon's history involved extensive cratering. Cratering in the highlands shows that impacts were at a peak during the moon's first 0.5 billion years. At this time, there was a great deal of debris floating around in the solar system that was left over from planet formation.

Giant crater basins were formed by the largest impacts, some of the craters being hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The Imbrium basin was formed by an impact from a body the size of the state of Delaware. The impact threw ejecta 1400 km away from the site. This site is about 4 billion years old.

The third stage in lunar history is lava floods. By this time, the anorthosite crust had been cracked many times from impacts. The subsurface material had been heated, probably by radioactive decay in the rocks. Lava then flowed up through the cracks and flooded the basins with successive lava flows. Flooding ceased about 3.2 billion years ago.