Was Apollo a mistake?

True progress is sustained progress

In his keynote session at the Progress Conference, Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom Aerospace, called both the Apollo and Concorde programs “mistakes.”

The Roots of Progress published the session on YouTube, and helpfully put part of his Apollo/Concorde comments in the intro, so you can easily see for yourself.

His full comments start about 21 minutes in.

Here’s the gist of the argument:

The purpose of the Apollo mission was for the US to demonstrate technological and economic superiority over the Soviet Union. Similarly, Concorde was primarily pursued as a joint program by the UK and France to demonstrate their technological prowess.

Neither project was designed for economic viability (at its peak, Apollo represented nearly 7% of federal discretionary spending!). To sustain space launches or supersonic travel, we needed an economic base that could justify continuous investment and innovation over time. Lacking that economic footing, both programs eventually faded out.

When NASA stepped back to humbler missions in the wake of Apollo, the dreams of a “space age” faded. Similarly, after Concorde failed, supersonic travel was seen as wishful thinking, or fantasy. This disillusionment was famously summed up by Peter Thiel, who quipped, “We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 characters.”

Thiel’s quote is a hell of a zinger, but fundamentally silly. It’s true that we haven’t quite gotten flying cars (although we’re getting close!). But the Internet is a marvel of civilization-wide engineering, giving us capabilities that would have been “indistinguishable from magic” to earlier generations. In fact, the development of the Internet is an excellent counter-example to the Apollo and Concorde programs.

The research that laid the foundation for the Internet ramped up in the 1960’s. That research led to the development of the ARPANET, an early computer network, funded by DARPA, to connect computers at major universities and research labs. In 1969 — the same year Apollo 11 landed on the moon — the first four nodes of the ARPANET were connected (UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah). Other computer networks soon followed.

By the 1970s, the value of these computer networks had been well-established, and the next obvious step was to enable connections between them. To solve this, a working groupof researchers developed protocols that every network could follow, and thus allow traffic to flow between them. At first this meant domestic networks could connect to each other, but during the in 1980’s the Internet went global, as the networks of Europe and Asia connected to the networks of North America. By 1993, the foundation was ready for Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction of the World Wide Web — the thing we think of as the Internet today.

Sustained Progress is an abstraction over the possible.

At each step in the development of early computers and the networks connecting them, very hard problems had to be solved; and at each step, the previous set of problems needed to be sufficiently well-solved that the solution could be assumed, so that people could concentrate their effort on the next challenge.

• The first pioneers could assume the existence of telephone lines, and focus on overcoming the limitations of circuit-switching and develop packet-switching networks.

• Once computer networks were established, researchers could assume their existence and viability, and focus on developing the Internet Protocol to integrate them.

• Once national networks existed, companies could justify building global telecommunications links to bridge them.

• Once he could assume that the world was already connected by a global computer network, Tim Berners-Lee could introduce the World Wide Web for the whole of humanity to build on.

• And now we live in a world of hypermedia, where information is instantaneously available everywhere, on ubiquitous devices that we carry with us at all times, easily produced and distributed by anyone, at any time, on demand.

There’s a paradox here. Human nature being what it is, the ultimate accomplishment of progress is to be taken for granted. And I would argue that, if the broad public can’t take it for granted, it isn’t really Progress at all! But, because true Progress must be something people can take for granted, it’s easy for us to misunderstand the nature of Progress itself.

When I was drafting this essay I came across another by the University of Washington’s Hans Jochen Scholl, who put it this way:

At the core of Thiel’s narrative lies a romantic expectation that innovation should appear as discrete, dramatic breakthroughs—visible, monumental, and physical. Yet history and philosophy suggest otherwise. As Hegelian dialectics reminds us, quantity and quality are interdependent: Cumulative incremental changes often precipitate qualitative leaps. What appears slow and marginal in the short term can, over time, cross a threshold and reorder entire systems.

…

Thiel also misses a core insight from modern innovation theory: most breakthroughs are recombinations of existing components. Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction” and Brian Arthur’s work on technology evolution both underscore that novelty rarely emerges fully formed. The airplane synthesized engines, aerodynamics, and lightweight materials; the smartphone combined telephony, microprocessors, GPS, and the internet. The same holds for AI: No single eureka moment, but decades of recombination reaching critical mass.

To privilege spectacular, stand-alone inventions as the only metric of progress is to misunderstand how transformation actually occurs.

Returning to Blake Scholl’s point: Apollo and Concorde were remarkable, inspiring demonstrations of the uppermost limits of the technology of their time. But in a sense, they did not represent true Progress, because they could not be sustained.

Perhaps ironically, today we see sustained progress in space technology, as SpaceX is pushing down the cost curve of space access, and monetizing it via Starlink, an Internet Service Provider.

So is Blake Scholl right? Was Apollo a mistake?

I wouldn’t go so far as to say we should never take “moonshots.” But I think we need to know, going in, what it is we’re trying to achieve. Tech demos can push the limits of our knowledge, but they don’t automatically lead to sustained progress. Each increment of progress “stands on the shoulders” of what came before, and true progress only comes when there’s a sustainable foundation underneath it to build upon.

Thanks to

Benedict Springbett

and

Kevin Kohler

for their feedback on this essay.