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I'm saying that man wouldn't have set foot on the moon without John F. Kennedy declaring it would be so, but man would probably still have walked on the moon if
by eastbayjake 11y ago
I'm saying that man wouldn't have set foot on the moon without John F. Kennedy declaring it would be so, but man would probably still have walked on the moon if the Apollo engineering team were slightly less skilled. (Probably would have taken longer and had more deadly failures, so thank God for the highly-skilled people who worked together to make it all possible, but engineering skill adds incremental improvement because efficacy becomes more dispersed the further down the pyramid you go -- that's just the nature of human organizations, the implementers are fungible.)
- nmrm2 11y agoYou don't think a bunch of astronaut deaths and costly mission failures would've eventually eroded public will?
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoDepends on the mix. As long as there are some spectacular successes, there will be interest.
- eastbayjake 11y agoA bunch of astronauts did die at the very beginning: Apollo 1 blew up on the launch pad. There was outrage in Congress but it died down because LBJ (a huge NASA supporter) used his (in)famous strong-arm political leadership to push forward. Again: strategy and leadership were more important than implementation. LBJ was more important for pushing Apollo forward than NASA's engineering success (or lack thereof). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Political_fallout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Political_fallout