Instant Genius - Why is the Moon landing still relevant 50 years on? – Kevin Fong

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

If you were to picture the Moon landing in your head right now, you could probably conjure up images of Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps, accompanied by his inspirational (and often misquoted) speech, despite it happening many years before most of us were even born. But this remarkable achievement did not come easily, and the decade-long mission culminated in the final nerve wracking 13 minutes it took the Moon lander to arrive safely on the surface.  This moment, and the people who contributed to this landmark occasion in our quest to explore space, are the subject of a new BBC podcast series, 13 Minutes To The Moon. We caught up with the show’s host, Kevin Fong, about the show, and he tells us why the Moon landing still inspires us today, what it was like speaking to the people who ran mission control, and where our next Moon shot will be. Remember, if you like what you hear then please rate and review the episode wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps get the show out there, which means we can bring you even more interviews with the people at the forefront of science. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: The mindset behind the Moon landing – Richard Wiseman What asteroids can tell us about our Solar System – Natalie Starkey What NASA's InSight will tell us about Mars – Bruce Banerdt There is no Plan B for planet Earth – Lord Martin Rees The most mysterious objects in the Universe – Colin Stuart What if the Earth’s magnetic field died? – Jim Al-Khalili Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. If I were to ask you to picture the moon landing in your head right now, all of you could probably conjure up images of Neil Armstrong's famous first steps, accompanied by his inspirational and often misquoted speech, despite it happening many years before most of us were even born. But this remarkable achievement did not come easy, and the decade-long mission culminated in the final nerve-wracking 13 minutes it took the

moonlander to arrive safely on the surface. This moment, and the people who contributed to this landmark occasion in our quest to explore space, are the subject of a new BBC podcast series, 13 Minutes to the Moon. We caught up with the show's host, Kevin Fong, about the show, and he tells us why the moon landing still inspires us today, what it was like speaking to the people who ran mission control and where our next moonshot will be. Remember, if you like what you hear, then please rate and review the episode wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps get the show out there,

which means we can bring you even more interviews with the people at the forefront of science. And now here's Alexander McNamara talking to Kevin Fong. I will just kick things off by asking you if you could sort of explain what your new podcast is and why you've created it now. Well, it's the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the moon during Project Apollo by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. And to commemorate that, we wanted to do something for World Service.

And initially we started out with thinking, well, we'll do a two or four part series. We rapidly realized there was so much story in this whole thing. We had to focus down. and we chose to focus down really on the unique final 13 minutes of descent from orbit above the moon down to the lunar surface. And we chose that because when Apollo 11 did that, that's the unique element of that mission. No one before them, despite they had a few flights of the vehicles before that, no one had tried to descend to the surface. And in that 13 minutes, you know, everyone knows that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. And everyone knows the, you know, one small step for man and one giant leap, et cetera, et cetera.

But very, very few people know the full details of the drama of that 13 minutes, you know, as they're coming through. And it starts with them being a bit long on target, so they're going to miss their landing site. Then they have problems with communication. They can't communicate with Earth, which is something they haven't really banked on. And then, very critically, they have problems with the onboard computer. And they absolutely depend upon that computer. And finally, as they get within almost touching distance of the moon, they're perilously close to being out of fuel. And all of that drama speaks to this crazy short decade of extraordinary effort where they're just about get this technology ready to do the job that Kennedy promised it would do in his speech to Congress in 1961.

And so that was the motivation. We wanted to take the most dramatic 13 minutes, really, I guess, almost the entire Apollo program and play it out in this podcast series. It's the, you know, it focuses on these 13 minutes, but obviously when JFK made his speech, it was 10 years before. So, you know, how do you go about wrapping up that 13 minute event taking in the whole of the decade before that led up to it? So we focused on the 13 minutes. But in that 30 minutes, you can hear the mission audio, and it's unmistakable, isn't it? You know exactly what it is. As soon as you hear it, you know, it's astronauts talking to mission control.

But in that 13 minutes, you know, every word, every sentence, every phrase, every pause, every silence is a moment of drama. And we wanted to unpack those. And you can only do that, really, by going right back to the start of the program and understanding the decisions that were made about the people and the technology and then how that all reassembles. in that final critical 13 minutes to produce that, you know, that extraordinary moment. So it's kind of, we're using the 13 minutes really as a launch pad to all of these stories and all of these adventures. And actually, it was perfect. It's exactly how we should have done it. And, you know, it was lovely, even for me, I mean, I'm a proper all-up space geek. And even I, you know, learning things for the first time and coming to that audio, you know,

after this entire process. The idea is that by the end, you'll hear that audio. Again, I think episode 12 or thereabouts, we play the audio uninterrupted for 13 minutes. And if you've been following the series, when you hear that audio at the end, you kind of will come to it with a new understanding, hearing it for all the subtleties and all the inflections,

and that's kind of what we wanted. It's incredible. So obviously, we know, we've all heard, we all know about the moon landing and we we have an idea of what happens at the end they land on the moon but we don't really get to to hear that story of like the 30 minutes before um is that what really makes the show different to anything else well i i think i would like to think this shows different for a number of reasons first of all we we this is a proper definitive account where it's podcast so we spread it over 12 episodes and it needed that depth you know 12 episodes of 40 45

minutes an episode, really because, you know, to do any less would be to do it a disservice. And even then, you're struggling to know what to include and what to leave out. But the second thing is, I mean, I grew up, you know, in the afterglow of Apollo, and later went on to study astrophysics, then medicine. And then I worked at Johnson Space Center as a doctor with NASA. And so my relationship with this story and with human spaceflight is pretty close. And so, you know, I think that helped us when we were talking to our contributors. You know, there were people who had worked in the places.

Oh, I had worked in the places that they had worked. And we understood the organization well. And so I think there was that intimacy that was, you know, for me, was an important thing. And finally, I think, you know, that narrow focus on the 13 minutes is the right place to be. Because I think that Neil Armstrong himself said this was the bit of the mission that he was most. worried about, this 13 minute, which was, as he said, rampant with unknowns. And it really did nearly trip them up. So for all those reasons, there's going to be a lot on about Apollo this, you know, this year, particularly this summer. But this, this, this epic road trip through

America looking for the people who, after they'd been to the moon, fell to Earth. I mean, not just the astronauts. I mean, the mission controllers, flight controllers, the engineers, the factory workers, all of them. I mean, it was a great privilege and a thing of great joy. It must have been quite an inspiration to meet, meet these people that you'd, that had done such an inspirational thing in your life. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in many ways, Apollo, well, my parents using Apollo as a vehicle to inspire me, sort of, sort of set the path of my life, set all the, you know, the things I chose to pursue as a career and all the adventures I had afterwards. So to have a chance to sit in the same room as people who I

I'd read about all my life, knowing their stories really well, and to talk to them and to, you know, and to say, what was it really like? What was it really like sitting in there? And the one that really stands out in my mind for all of that is a guy called Steve Bales, because, you know, it was fantastic sitting in the living rooms of the astronauts with people who'd walked on the moon or flown to the moon. But the interview with Stephen Bales, who was a flight controller for Apollo and for Apollo 11, for the landing, sat behind one of the most important decks, sat behind one of the most important desks, the guidance officer's desk. That was great because Bales is fascinating. He was 26, 26 years old when he sat in Michigan troll to assist with the landing. And he finds himself on the end of one of the most dramatic decisions in the entire Apollo program. And, you know, I don't know about you. When I was 26, I was barely capable of working out how it's going to get dressed in the morning. So let alone telling Neil Armstrong that he should land on the moon. But that's exactly, exactly what Bales does. And I love his story because he is like the loop skywalker of the Apollo

program. He grows up in Iowa, part of the farming community. At night, he walks outside and looks up at the vast skies and dreams of space and then takes himself off to Houston as a young man in search of an adventure and goes to the hustle and bustle of the city. He works sort of a coffee boy at Mission Control giving tools to VIP guests as an intern, but works his way up and proves himself until finally, you know, it's not an accident. They choose him, of all the people, they choose him to be on that desk, that critical responsibility at the age of 26. And we spent a lovely evening in his house talking to him.

And 50 years on from that event, you know, he can barely believe he was there. You know, he's still, I mean, he must be in his, I guess, he's in his late. 70s now. And he's sort of wide-eyed and sort of he tells it to you and he says, you know, you know, here I was a 26-year-old kid, a kid who could stop the space mission. And it's just amazing listening to him talk about that. But he took his task absolutely, you know, seriously. He was this sort of irrepressible, you know, young man overbrimming with enthusiasm, but he was also utterly, utterly dependable in the moment. And so someone somewhere in Michigan I'll say, you're going to sit in that seat.

And when Armstrong asks the question, you're the guy we're going to go to. And he did. And that decision effectively saves the mission. It's just such a young age for it to happen as well. Well, they were all young, and that was one of the things we unpacked in the episode in this podcast series about mission control, is that although, again, you see the astronauts, but they are the tip of the spear. They're just the most visible part of this gargantuan iceberg. And the mission controllers particularly were young.

Their average age, I think, was 26, 27 years old. And that was seen by NASA as an asset because they needed people who weren't going to say, well, we can't do it. And they weren't going to, they needed people who weren't going to say, I think that's a bad idea. They needed people who were, in some sense, fearless. And one of the interviews we did with Jerry Griffin, who was a very famous flight director during Apollo, he told us that, you know, it wasn't that they didn't understand. risk. They knew it was risky, but they weren't afraid. And that was a quality that you really

needed. And so, you know, that really impressed me. And in fact, they laughed because some of these guys said, look, we go and give talks to big corporations. And they ask us how we should train our staff. And we turn around to them and say, well, you're wasting your time most of the time, because most of these people are capable of the job you want them to do when they're in their 20s. And you put artificial obstacles in their ways and ladders of promotion. And you wait until they're in their late 30s before you actually let them do anything useful. And actually, we showed in Apollo these people could do this very early on in their life if you just give them the chance. And so, you know, that was fascinating anthropology of mission control.

It's quite inspirational as well. I think, you know, it's the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Do we still need to hear these stories to continue to inspire us about the moon landing? Or is, you know, the fact that we landed on the moon enough? Well, look, it is, I think it stands out in the current era as the most, the most. most spectacular feat of exploration in the history of the human species. I don't think that is overstating it. No one has been further.

No one has been faster. No one has achieved more in terms of throwing themselves into the unknown than those crews. And it should be a start and not unfinished. That shouldn't be an end to it. We should continue. And yes, we should retell these stories because otherwise they're lost in time. and understanding how this thing was made possible is important.

It's important for all sorts of industries. It's a real moment in history. I remember someone saying, you know, of Neil Armstrong here, he's one of the few people of the 20th century who has a chance of being remembered in the 30th century. And you sort of think about what he achieved and you think about the other characters of the 20th century. And you think that's true. If you're going to remember anyone, you're going to remember him. It just seems like for that as well.

So that mission was 50 years ago. and after the Apollo mission stopped, we haven't really gone on to explore the moon in the same way, but there are rumblings now that we'll be going back to the moon that we're going to be having new missions. What do you think that these people that you spoke to, they would think about how we progress the missions to the moon and what we're doing now and what might be happening in the future?

Well, it's interesting because, of course, at that time, there was massive enthusiasm and this attitude that if we want to do it, it can be done, and why wouldn't you think that, your president to turn around and says, no one's been further than 250 miles from the earth in the history of human kind in 61. And we're going to go 250,000 miles to the surface of the moon inside the next eight or nine years. And so once you've achieved that, you must think that anything at all is possible. And indeed, NASA had plans to go to Mars. They had hard launch opportunities labeled out throughout the 1980s.

You know, when I worked there as a visiting researcher, one of the things we looked at was the medical problems going to Mars, and people have always thought that we're just about to get there with humans. The truth is that actually Apollo went the way of all spectacular feats of exploration. If you look back through history, that's what happens. Wherever we go, whether you circumnavigate the globe in a ship or whether you go to Antarctica, you go once at very high risks of the individuals at great expense, and then kind of no one tries to do it. for about half a century. And then the next time you go back, it's with more mature technology, where it's cheaper and safer. And that's the way you do the real stuff of science and exploration. And so this is about the right time. 50 years later, this is exactly the same gap as between the first Antarctic missions and the first polar exploration, you know, international polar

explorations bases in Antarctica. And so with better technology, more reliable technology, perhaps now is the right opportunity to extend back to the moon and possibly onto Mars. And so obviously that 50 years ago we got there. What do you think we'll learn on our next sort of round of missions to the moon? Well, I mean, I guess the point is we don't know. We don't know what lies in wait for us on the moon in terms of knowledge. And that's the reason to go and explore it. There's a lovely line from a friend and colleague of mine,

Ian Crawford, who's a professor of planetary science, really, at, well, he's a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck College. And he says, look, people ask what was the point of going to the moon and what knowledge did you get? He said, if you took a textbook of modern geology, modern planetary geology, and you tore out all the pages that wouldn't be there if we hadn't gone to the moon, you wouldn't have a very big book left. He says, is that fundamental to our understanding of the solar system, our place in the solar system, and where we came from and where we're going to, in a cosmic sense. And you don't know what you're going to get. That's what exploration is all about. When we went to Antarctica in 1912, if you and I were

having this conversation in 1912, we'll be saying, well, you know, what are we going to get out of further exploration of Antarctica? It's, you know, it's just rock and ice. But by the end of the same century, we're pulling out ice cores with knowledge that the climate is changing because of the carbon dioxide, and that's knowledge that literally is going to save the planet. So, of course, we should continue. And so what do you think is the next moonshot we have available to us? Well, it's difficult to know. I mean, you know, the thing that we learned in 13 minutes was just how edgy, just how difficult

that whole mission was. And so it's not nothing. It's not a case of we've just done it before, so we'll easily do it again. So, you know, in the podcast series, it was very clear that this extraordinary thing, didn't arise easily and it didn't arise by accident. So I'm pretty sure we'll get back to the moon. I'm fairly sure we'll do it relatively soon. We're already slating up missions to fly around the moon in the next few years.

And I would hope we will see that happen in that time frame. But I think that this time it will be to turn it from a place that we once visited to a place where we stay and then to a place where we stay and we work. So obviously the climate around the Apollo program in itself was quite a difficult and highly charged. You had the Cold War going on and then there was the battle with Russia's who would make it there first.

What can we learn from that sort of era that might help us go back to the moon with a more sure footing? Well, you know, we tell that story actually this episode one is the origins of of Project Apollo and of course it has very dark origins. It's you know it's the shadow of the Cold

War, it's nuclear proliferation and you're kidnapping the rocket scientists from former Nazi Germany to build the vehicles by which you'll send yourselves to the moon. And so none, you know, although it's a very romantic tale of exploration, it has dark

beginnings and I guess that's true of again a lot of other exploration of the past. So I think that's what we learn here is that those early motivations aren't as pure as one might imagine. I mean, you know, we talked a lot about Vernon von Brown and his role. He's a very inspirational in some ways, but very ambiguous character and, you know, it's a very checkered past during World War II. And that was something we were keen to explore in the first episode because I think that it's easy to say all of this is a great romantic adventure. And it was

ultimately, but it's interesting that journey from darkness into light, you know, across the space of that decade, really, you know, out of the, out of the, I guess, the embers of World War II and rocket technology and at the height of a Cold War and a nuclear crisis into, you know, the beginnings of what was set the path for a peaceful cooperation in space, you know, and look at where we are today in space. We are an international space-faring world. We have the International Space Station with 16 member states. And that has all stemmed from Apollo. That has stemmed, you know, very directly from that 13 minutes of descent to the lunar surface, from Armstrong's first steps on the moon. And that idea of space as being there, you know, for all humankind as a place for peace and peaceful

cooperation. So in essence, that 13 minutes was much bigger than just 13 minutes in the space of the Apollo program, but as, you know, as future history would go on to say. Well, that 13 minutes was so full of knife-edge moments that you have to ask yourself how, I mean, it's impossible to do the counterfactual, but, you know, you have to ask yourself how things would have worked out had the Americans lost the race to the moon, had Armstrong and children failed? Had they been killed during that attempt, would NASA have continued forwards? I mean, you know, in one of the episodes, we talk about the Apollo 1 fire, which was a catastrophe for NASA. And it happens in 1967. So the first fatalities they have in the human spaceflight program

at the United States is during the Apollo 1 fire while they're preparing for the journey to the moon. And it's quite late on. It's in 1967. And there is at that moment a chance that everyone says, are we doing this ludicrous thing why don't we stop right now and so um it is interesting to think about you know how important the mission became and and how it became important to everybody not just americans and that's michael collins says that and when we interviewed him he talked about how it wasn't about america and the greatness of america it was for everybody when he did the world tour afterwards with neil armstrong and buzz ordra so so michael collins of course was the command module pilot for Apollo 11 and people don't always remember him because he was orbiting the moon while

they were walking on it but he was at least as important as Armstrong and Aldrin in the success of that mission and he when we went to interview him which was a great joy he talked to us about how actually it's not about nationalism space exploration but at least for him it was about everybody and the endeavor for everybody and when they went around the world they felt that and it was a very warm feeling that they got this is incredible they actually managed to speak to these people who have been there and done that. With all that in mind and everything that you've learned from doing the show, if someone offered you a ticket to go to the moon, would you take it? Oh yeah. I think in a heartbeat, I don't think I'd think about it very hard. I mean, you know,

why wouldn't you the journey to the surface of another world? But, you know, I mean, it's risky. That's, you know, it's a risky thing. But the astronauts who fly know that. And, you know, when we were out there when I worked out there, when shuttle was flying, the shuttle's failure rate was given as 1 in 25 or 1 in 50, which is an enormous risk, but they still flew. And if that's your thing, then it seems like an obvious choice. There must have been an incredible mindset and mentality of these people who are willing to go into space and also to be the ones in the command modules and in control.

Yeah, it's interesting when you talk to them, Because one of the things we discovered through the podcast, you know, and as I say, this was this epic road trip across America in search of all these people, particularly with the astronauts. You talk about mindset, but actually when you ask them how they'd like to be remembered, they would say almost, and all of them said this. How do you identify? Do you identify as an Apollo astronaut, as an astronaut, you know, or as the job that you did before you retired? and they would all say, I'm a pilot. That was their master status. That was the thing that they identified as.

And so their mindset was actually as a test pilot. And so this was the ultimate, for them, it was the ultimate test pilot job, the most complicated flying machine ever built, going to the most ambitious destination ever thought about. And so that was their mindset. And it was fascinating talking to them about that. Because actually, in the episode where we explored the Apollo One fire, and you talked to them about how that was,

these people who died, Gus Grism, Roger Chaffee, Ed White, who died were the friends and neighbors of the rest of the astronauts in the Corps. And you say to them, what was that like for you, that the people who you trained with, who were your friends, who were, you know, closer than family in some cases. How was it? How did you feel when that accident happened? And they said, look, you're a test pilot and you expect losses. No one expected to fly the Apollo missions without losing anybody, we just never thought we'd lose them on the ground. And to them, that was the biggest, biggest insult. That's actually that they would lose colleagues in a test pilot program without ever having flown the vehicle.

So that was their mindset. Their mindset was already one that was willing to embrace risk and pursuit of greater goals. And so in some ways, the shift into space exploration for them, in terms of risk to their, themselves wasn't as bigger mental leap as you might think. Do they know how much of an inspiration they are to the world? I think so. I don't think they can help see that. And

I don't think that's a false narrative. I mean, I, you know, people often say what is the the most important spinoff of the Apollo era. And I think, oh, spin-off's a bad word, but I think the most important a legacy of Project Apollo is the generation of people inspired to, you know, like me, to pursue science

as a career, to study science, and to go out into the world and continue that sense with that sense of adventure and that sense that anything but anything at all might be possible. And there are, you know, you could argue in no small part but the generation, the crop of, you know, technologists that have arrived now, many, many of them seem to have been inspired by Project Apollo. So it is the generation of people who they carried forward. And yes, I'm pretty sure the astronauts understand their part in that.

And do you think in another 50 years' time it will still be so important to the world and science and technology? It's, you know what, it's impossible to say. I mean, look how much the world has changed since 1969, and look at how much you couldn't predict along the way between then and now. So if the next 50 years was different, you know, if 50 years' time is as different from now as 1969 is different from 2019, then all bets are off.

You just don't know. You just don't know. Will this feat of exploration, this landing on the moon, this thing that was achieved in that dramatic 13 minutes of descent to the moon by Armstrong and Orrin, will that continue to be important? Yes. Will there be a feat of exploration that has superseded it?

I don't know, but it's a hard one to beat. That was Kevin Fong, whose new podcast series, 13 Minutes to the Moon, is available to download now. You can also listen to the show live on the BBC World Service. If you're thirsty for more science, the latest issue of BBC Science Focus is packed full of features, news and interviews to help you make sense of the world around you. In the June 2019 issue, we go on the hunt for Paines-on-off switch, discover the clever creatures using tools, to eat food and ask, is there really life on Mars? Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly, available in print and in several

digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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