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VDOI:10.1145/3292519 Thomas Haigh Historical Reflections Hey Google, What’s a Moonshot? How Silicon Valley Mocks Apollo Fifty years on, NASA’s expensive triumph is a widely misunderstood model for spectacular innovation.

HE RADIO IN my kitchen is tuned to a public station. One day it startled me by delivering a lecture, “The unexpected benefit of cel- Tebrating failure,” by the implausibly named Astro Teller who, according to his website, enjoys an equally idiosyn- cratic list of accomplishments: novel- ist, entrepreneur, scientist, inventor, speaker, business leader, and IT ex- pert. That talk concerned his day job: “Captain of Moonshots” at X (formerly Google X, now a separate subsidiary of its parent company Alphabet).a It cen- tered on the classic Silicon Valley ideal of being prepared to fail fast and use this as a learning opportunity. Teller therefore advised teams to spend the first part of any project trying to prove it could not succeed. Good advice, but maybe not so new: even 1950s “wa- terfall” methodologies began with a feasibility stage intended to identify reasons the project might be doomed. Astronaut Alan L. Bean walks from the moon-surface television camera toward the lunar Still, many of us have had the experi- module during the first of the November 1969 mission, the second lunar landing in the NASA . The mission included placing the first ence of putting months, or even years, color television camera on the surface of the moon but transmission was lost when Bean into zombie projects with no path to accidentally pointed the camera at the sun, disabling the camera. success.b The HBO television series “Silicon Valley” captured that prob- project.c Each level of management by the “moonshot captain” thing. lem, in an episode where a new execu- sugarcoated the predictions it passed Teller briefly paid homage to Presi- tive asked for the status of a troubled upward and avoided asking hard ques- dent Kennedy and the huge scope of tions of those below it. the real moonshot achieved by the To be honest, I was more intrigued Apollo program of the 1960s. By pro- a See https://bit.ly/1TTLG9n moting X as a “moonshot factory” he b Ed Yourden wrote an interesting book about suggested plans to crank out Apollo- the tenacity of doomed projects: E. Yourdon, c This incident occurs in “Server Space” (season Death March: The Complete Sofware Developer’s 2, episode 5) and, ironically, is set in the Hooli style triumphs regularly, at the inter- Guide to Surviving “Mission Impossible” Projects. XYZ “moonshot factory”—a rather crude paro- section of “huge problems, break-

Prentice Hall, 1997. dy of Google X. through technologies, and radical OF NASA COURTESY IMAGE

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solutions.”d X boasts of uniting “inven- price tag, but after the USSR checked tors, engineers, and makers” including off the first few items, by launching a aerospace engineers, fashion design- The moonshot satellite and sending a human into or- ers, military commanders, and laser was a triumph of bit, that suddenly looked like money experts. Teller’s most dramatic exam- worth spending. In 1961, Kennedy an- ple of an X moonshot that failed ad- management as nounced his intentions to Congress mirably was that staple technology of much as engineering. and won the first in a series of massive alternate worlds, an airship “with the increases for NASA’s budget. Like Ken- V potential to lower the cost, time, and nedy’s other initiatives, the moon pro- carbon footprint of shipping.” Accord- gram became more popular and politi- ing to Teller, X achieved the “clever cally secure after his death, thanks to set of breakthroughs” needed to mass Lyndon Johnson’s political arm twist- produce robust, affordable blimps, in wonder as and ing and huge congressional majorities. but had to give up when it estimated Edward Aldrin planted the Ameri- Apollo, like Medicare, was part of a cost of “$200 million to design and can flag on the moon [after] the larg- a dramatic expansion in federal gov- build the first one” which was “way too est managed research project of all ernment spending. A future of inter- expensive.” X relies on “tight feedback time…. The Saturn V rocket had a di- planetary exploration and coloniza- loops of making mistakes and learning ameter of 33 feet (three moving vans tion was already an article of faith and new designs.” Spending that much could have been driven, side by side, for American science fiction writers “to get the first data point” was not re- into the fuel tanks for the first stage) in the “golden age” of the 1940s, but motely possible. and a height of 363 feet (about the size they were better at imagining rockets At this point, I would like you to of a 36-story building). At liftoff, the than economic changes. One of Rob- imagine the record-scratching noise vehicle weighed 6.1 million pounds, ert Heinlein’s most famous stories, that TV shows use for dramatic inter- and when the five engines of the first “The Man Who Sold The Moon,” de- ruptions. That’s what played in my stage were fired … they generated 7.5 scribed a moon landing in the 1978 by head, accompanied by the thought million points of thrust ... [burning] an eccentric businessman. Described “this guy doesn’t know what the moon- three tons of fuel a second ... ”3 as the “last of the robber barons” he shot was.” Teller’s pragmatic, iterative, Those statistics tell you something funded his dream by, among other product-driven approach to innovation important: the moonshot was about do- things, promising to cancel postage is the exact opposite of what the U.S. ing something absurdly expensive and stamps in a temporary lunar post of- did after Kennedy charged it to “com- difficult once (followed by a few encore fice, sell the naming rights to craters, mit itself to achieving the goal, before performances), not doing something and engraving the names of support- this decade is out, of landing a man on useful cheaply and routinely. ers onto a plaque.e Rather than the big the moon and returning him safely to pushed a gigantic rocket though the government approach of NASA, had the earth.” Letting Silicon Valley steal atmosphere and into space, launch- Heinlein imagined a space program the term “moonshot” for projects with ing three men toward the moon at run like a Kickstarter project. The gov- quite different management styles, more than 24,000 miles an hour. Two ernment’s sudden and mobilization success criteria, scales, and styles of in- of them descended in a flimsy little of overwhelming resources for the novation hurts our collective ability to box wrapped in foil, took pictures, col- moonshot took science fiction writers understand just what NASA achieved lected rocks, and flew back into lunar by surprise. 50 years ago and why nothing remotely orbit. All three returned to Earth, or The moonshot was a triumph of comparable is actually under way today rather to sea, hurtling back through management as much as engineer- at Google, or anywhere else. the atmosphere in a tiny capsule that ing. Meeting a fixed launch deadline splashed into the ocean. meant working backward to identify The Actual Moonshot Apollo was the capstone to a series the points by which thousands of sub- As historians of technology Ruth of gigantic American technological systems had to be ready for testing and Schwartz Cowan and Matthew Hersch projects, beginning with the Manhat- integration, and further back to the tell the story: “Eight year later, on July tan Project of the 1940s and continu- dates by which they had to be designed 20, 1969, millions of people all over ing into the Cold War with the devel- and ordered. Steven Johnson’s book the world watched their televisions opment of nuclear submarines, Atlas The Secret of Apollo looked at the sys- and Minuteman missiles, and hydro- tems and techniques developed to turn d X grew out of the lab that “graduated” to be- gen bombs. It was shaped by a vision the efforts of hundreds of subcontrac- come Waymo, now a separate company suc- for the U.S. space program devised by tors into a successful moonshot.7 As he cessfully selling technology for self-driving cars. It was also the group responsible for former Nazi rocket engineer Werhner points out, NASA and its partners suc- Google Glass, whose camera/screen eyeglass- von Braun, whose heavily accented lec- ceeded in doing something apparently es went abruptly from next big thing to epic tures on space stations and manned paradoxical: bureaucratizing innova- flop in 2014, for the Loon project to deliver missions to the Moon and Mars were Internet access via high-altitude balloons, and for a fleet of experimental delivery drones. The popularized during the 1950s with the e This short story was written in 1949 and ap- most balanced portrait of its workings was all-American aid of Walt Disney. Their peared as the title story in Robert A. Heinlein, given in https://bit.ly/2gqMi8s. elaborate agenda came with a huge The Man Who Sold the Moon (Shasta, 1950).

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tion. Rather than attempt to do lots of an explosion in space, “each of us” was new things at once, an approach that haunted by “indelible memories of had produced problems for the early Project management that awful day three years earlier” when U.S. space program, von Braun en- tools may have “we had failed our crew.” forced a careful step-by-step approach. In the end the astronauts These techniques built on those devel- improved, but were fine, but the space program was oped for other Cold War projects, de- human nature not. Diminishing political returns led scribed by historian Thomas Hughes to Apollo’s early cancellation, like a in his book Rescuing Prometheus.6 For continues to undercut briefly buzzy TV show that lost its au- example, the PERT project manage- best practices. dience and thus its reason to exist. ment tool, now a crucial part of project No human has been further than 400 management software, was developed miles from Earth since 1972. With in the 1950s to support the U.S. Navy’s the Soviets defeated in the moon race Polaris nuclear submarine project. there was no need to increase spend- So was MRP (Materials Requirements ing still further to tackle the remaining Planning), which evolved into the technologies to levels of performance, items on von Braun’s to-do list: moon foundation for the enterprise software reliability, or miniaturization that bases, space stations, manned Mars packages that run almost all modern would not otherwise be economically missions, and so on. Facing shrinking corporations. practical. Given a choice of two tech- budgets and diminished political will, NASA management placed a se- nologically workable ways to do some- NASA instead delivered disconnected ries of milestones along the road to thing, NASA would take the better- fragments of the plan—a space shuttle the moon landing, paralleling some proven and more expensive way. to assemble large structures in orbit aspects of the incremental approach Despite this technological conser- and, many years later, a space station practiced by modern technology lead- vatism, the focus on fixed deadlines to give the shuttle something to do. ers. That is why the moon landing was still caused deadly trade-offs. After the Twenty-first century America is not Apollo 11: previous flights had tested crew died when fire engulfed without enemies, but ISIS and the Tal- the rockets, the command module, their capsule in a ground test in Janu- iban never developed space programs. the docking capabilities, and so on. ary 1967, manned flights were halted Generations of American politicians , for example, flew a crew into for 20 months. A review identified have nevertheless tried to prove their lunar orbit and back, giving an inte- several management failures that had visionary leadership by ordering new grated test of many of the key system contributed to the accident, including space missions. None committed components. Before those flights came a flawed escape system, poor wiring, anything like the funds needed for a a series of Gemini missions flown dur- and the use of pure oxygen instead of a true moonshot effort. George W. Bush ing the mid-1960s to test technologies less dangerous air-like mixture. After- dusted off von Braun’s old dreams in and develop techniques for challenges ward, mission controller Gene Kranz 2004, terminating the space shuttle such as orbital rendezvous and space- confessed to his team that “We were and directing NASA to restart manned walks. Systematic ground tests focused too gung-ho about the schedule and moon missions by 2020 as a stepping- on space suits, engines, and other new we locked out all of the problems we stone to Mars. This set a leisurely 16- technologies in isolation before inte- saw every day in our work. Every ele- year schedule for a moon landing, grating them into larger systems. ment of the program was in trouble … but a progress review five years later Teller stressed the need to prototype Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dam- concluded that the program was al- rapidly and cheaply and to be ready to mit, stop!’”9 Half a century later, the ready so underfunded, overbudget, kill any “moonshot” in its early stages, same words could be applied to many and behind schedule as to be unsal- but NASA agreed to non-negotiable of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile proj- vageable. In 2012, Newt Gingrich, en- goals for time (by the end of 1969) ects, from Tesla’s spectacularly hu- joying a brief surge in support for his and scope (landing and returning a bristic attempt reinvent the assembly presidential candidacy, promised vot- man) without building testable pro- line to Uber’s lethally ambitious self- ers he could build a permanent moon totypes. When Kennedy announced driving car program. Project manage- base and launch a manned Mars mis- those objectives in 1961, NASA had ment tools may have improved, but sion by 2020 while still slashing gov- achieved just 15 minutes of manned human nature continues to undercut ernment spending and cutting taxes. flight in space and its managers had best practices. Rather than prove Gingrich’s gravitas not even decided whether to launch a Although Teller, as “Captain of on a trip to the White House, the moon single integrated spacecraft or send up Moonshots,” wants to celebrate failure base express took him straight back to modules to assemble in Earth orbit. that is not how NASA reacted when it the political fringes. More recently, One cannot plan out a schedule that lost , , and Robert President Trump held a ceremony to depends on fundamental scientific B. Chaffee. Kranz named his memoir sign a policy directive directing NASA breakthroughs, since those do not oc- , after “the creed to head back to the moon and then on- cur on a fixed timescale. A project of we all lived by.” Explaining the title, he ward to Mars. Cynics noted the direc- that kind is about spending money wrote that in 1970, as his team strug- tive made no mention of new funding to mitigate risk, by pushing existing gled to save the crew of Apollo 13 after and set no timeline.

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A Moonshot Is Awesome people doubted that at the time to ilton, who led its software team, even- and Pointless make Apollo the most obvious symbol tually won the Presidential Medal of In 1962, Kennedy campaigned for his of the failure of technology to make the Freedom her work on the project. plan by saying “We choose to go to the world a better place. “If they can put a There were some significant tech- Moon in this decade and do the other man on the moon,” asked critics, “why nology spin-offs from Apollo, though things, not because they are easy, but be- can’t they do [X].” Common values for contrary to popular belief, the pow- cause they are hard.” His moonshot was X were “cure the common cold,” “end dered drink Tang was developed pre- about spending a $25 billion fortune urban poverty” and “fix traffic prob- viously, as were Velcro and Teflon. to do something absurdly difficult with lems.” The modern version of that Space technology improved freeze- no direct economic return. It showed might be “If Elon Musk can launch a dried food, microelectronics, scratch- America’s technological capabilities, Tesla at Mars, why can’t his car fac- resistant sunglass lenses, and light- political will, and economic might in tory come close to production metrics weight foil blankets. Most notably, the its long struggle with the Soviet Union for quantity and quality that other car- need for reliable, miniaturized control (or, as Kennedy put it, “to organize and makers hit routinely.” Sometimes the electronics drove the emergence of a measure the best of our energies and rocket science is the easy part. commercial market for microchips, skills … ”). Nothing economically vi- The Apollo program did little to di- years before they were competitive able or practical deserves to be called a rectly advance scientific understand- for ground-based applications. Each moonshot. Scaled up for the size of the ing. The decision to meet arbitrary Apollo guidance computer used ap- U.S. economy, a similarly impressive in- deadlines by rushing special purpose proximately 5,000 simple chips of a vestment today would be approximately hardware, rather than maximizing the standard design, providing enough $600 billion. Apollo was a monumental scientific value of the missions or their demand to drop the cost per chip for accomplishment, like the construction contribution to longer term goals, around $1,000 down to $20 or so.2 The of the Pyramids. For Google to emulate caused tensions within NASA at the technique of using redundant control that might mean erecting a 10-mile- time.g Apollo did more to push tech- computers, now a standard approach high earthquake-resistant skyscraper, nology and build engineering capabili- for “fly by wire” commercial airlin- to literally overshadow Apple and pro- ties. Apollo created good jobs for scien- ers, was pioneered by IBM in its work vide an object of public marvel. Does tists, mathematicians, programmers, on the Saturn V control systems. One that sound like something Google man- and engineers, at NASA itself and with of the most popular database man- agement would authorize a massive contractors. Political considerations agement packages of the early 1970s, bond issue for? No, it does not—even spread the work out to facilities around IBM’s Information Management Sys- though the project would surely spur the country, rather than concentrating tem (IMS), had its roots in a system advances in architectural engineering, it in a handful of urban areas. It is easy built with North American Rockwell improvements in materials science, to decry that spending as corporate in 1965 to handle the proliferation of and create a lot of engineering and con- welfare or help for the already privi- Apollo parts.5 Despite those accom- struction jobs. leged but, as the recent movie Hidden plishments, the moonshot was not a In his talk, Teller explained the true Figures showed, the beneficiaries were cost-effective way to boost technology. goal of his moonshot factory was “mak- not all white men with easy lives. The Giving a quarter of the money on the ing the world a radically better place.” I Apollo program also contributed to the National Science Foundation would was a little surprised to hear that cliché development of software engineering surely have accomplished more, as used in earnest, several years after “Sili- techniques—the guidance code had to would directing NASA to spend it on con Valley” skewered it in a montage of work reliably first time. Margaret Ham- satellites and unmanned space probes. fake TechCrunch pitches centered on But would politicians ever have made phrases like “making the world a bet- g The scientific side of the Apollo program is those choices? Spending the money the focus of W.D. Compton, Where No Man Has ter place though scalable fault tolerant Gone Before: A History of the Apollo Lunar Explo- to drop more napalm on Vietnam or f databases with ACID transactions.” I ration Missions. U.S. Government Printing Of- stockpile more nuclear weapons would suppose that is why he had to promise fice, Washington, D.C., 1989. have accomplished less than nothing. “radical” global betterment. If the moonshot made the world a I am having a hard time imagining “radically better place” it was by redi- Kennedy’s famous speech working as a The Apollo program recting history in subtle ways. Like me- TechCrunch pitch to “make the world dieval jousting, the space race offered a better place by spending billions dol- did little to directly a non-lethal, and proudly phallic, sub- lars to harvest 381 kilos of rocks.” Was advance scientific stitute for real military clashes. Despite the Apollo program’s goal to make the the flag waving, people across the world world a radically better place? Enough understanding. thrilled to the spectacle and took col- lective pride in the accomplishments f “Silicon Valley”’s relationship to real Silicon of our species. The “Earthrise” pho- Valley culture is discussed in A. Marantz, “How tograph of a gibbous Earth rising over ‘Silicon Valley’ nails Silicon Valley” The New Yorker (June 9, 2016) which reports that Teller the lunar horizon, was taken in 1968 by was not amused when the show parodied his the first humans to venture beyond low “moonshot factory.” Earth orbit. It has been credited with

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able to guide themselves stably back to earth. The same advancements have greatly decreased the minimum size of useful satellites, reducing the mass that needs to be launched into space. (NASA itself anticipated some of this in the “faster, better, cheap- er” push of the 1990s that produced the Mars Pathfinder rover). Starting with the smallest useful rockets and a modular architecture, they have been working incrementally to larger and more powerful models. Since the Obama administration, U.S. policy has shifted toward contracting with space companies to purchase the use of privately developed rockets, rather than the traditional government pro- curement model where companies are given up-front development contracts to supply equipment to government specifications. Musk and Bezos hope that incre- mentally developing efficient and economically viable space systems will eventually lead to moon colonies, NASA astronauts Neil A. Armstrong (right), Michael Collins (center), and Edwin E. (“Buzz”) Aldrin Jr. received a ticker-tape parade in New York City after returning from the Apollo 11 asteroid mining, and Mars missions. mission to the Moon. Like Delos D. Harriman, Heinlein’s space fairing businessman, Musk inspiring the modern environmental ate far more reliable and affordable dreams of dying on another world. Yet movement. The similarly iconic “Blue rockets.”h Rather than the moonshot the new approach has its limits. The Marble” photograph of a tiny, fragile, approach of launching gigantic rock- $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE, for and complete planet floating in space, ets as political performance art, these the first private landing of a robot on was taken by the crew of in companies have focused on bringing the moon, recently expired unclaimed 1972 just as the short era of manned down the cost of launches to make 11 years after its announcement. The space exploration closed. That im- spaceflight viable for more purposes. documentary commissioned to cel- age inspired the Whole Earth Catalog, Instead of tech firms becoming more ebrate the competition was, of course, and hence the utopian aspirations of like NASA, space exploration has be- called “Moon Shot.” Private-sector in- today’s tech culture.10 So in the end, come more like information system genuity proved unable to deliver new moon rocks were not the only thing the development. They have exploited Apollo on a shoestring budget, despite astronauts carried back for us. developments in computer hardware the considerable advantages of a lon- and software to build reusable rockets ger timescale, 50 years of technologi- New Models of Space Flight cal improvement, and an easier task The master-planned monumentality h https://bit.ly/2qCT9QY (one way robot transport vs. round trip of the moonshot is unfashionable to- travel for humans). day, even in space development. New space companies like Space X and The master-planned Apollo vs. ARPANET Blue Origin were founded by Inter- A few months after Neil Armstrong’s net commerce pioneers (Elon Musk monumentality short step down to the lunar service, and Jeff Bezos respectively) to apply of the moonshot data packets started making longer Silicon Valley approaches to space hops up and down the West Coast. development. When the Bush-era is unfashionable ARPANET’s first four nodes had gone Constellation moon program, which today, even in space live. Both were government projects, NASA had promoted as ‘Apollo on funded as part of the broader Cold War Steroids’ was canceled, Musk repur- development. effort but not directly military. Apollo posed the description as an insult landed a total of 12 men on the moon, writing that the “new plan is to har- the last in 1972. By then ARPA had in- ness our nation’s unparalleled system terconnected around 30 sites. By the of free enterprise (as we have done in time Apollo was officially shut down,

all other modes of transport), to cre- after flying a final joint USA-USSR mis- OF NASA COURTESY IMAGE

28 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | JANUARY 2019 | VOL. 62 | NO. 1 viewpoints sion with spare hardware, the ARPA- around 1970, just as the focus of tech- NET had received less than one-thou- nological innovation shifted toward sandth of its funding. Tech companies computers and networks.4 These have The ARPANET was immediately use- have not always not produced anything like the broad ful and soon became more useful when and sustained productivity gains cre- network email, rather than the remote been so wary of ated by electricity or assembly lines. logins used to justify its construction, moonshot-scale Widespread adoption of the Internet provided an unexpected “killer appli- gave productivity growth a significant cation.” It evolved continually, in re- projects. jolt a decade ago, but that has already sponse to the needs of its users. The faded away. Apollo program, in contrast, had ac- It is inaccurate to blame this slow- complished its objective by the time down on public reluctance to fund the Apollo 11 astronauts rode in their moonshot-sized projects without di- tickertape parade down Broadway in Tech companies have not always rect economic returns. More likely, the New York City. been so wary of moonshot-scale proj- end of rapid American growth and the Since then the divergence of the ects. In my January 2018 column I end of moonshot projects are two con- moonshot and ARPANET approaches mentioned IBM’s System/360 devel- sequences of a political and ideologi- has been rather dramatic. As of this opment project in the 1960s, which cal shift away from long-term public writing, only four of the planet’s sev- reportedly required a commitment and corporate investment in a range en billion human inhabitants have of twice the firm’s annual revenues of areas, from infrastructure to educa- walked on the moon. The youngest when the project was launched. For tion. At the height of the Apollo proj- of them is now 83 years old, so that Alphabet today, two years of revenue ect, federal spending on research and number seems more likely to fall would be over $200 billion. Yet its development was more than twice its than rise. In contrast, approximately “moonshot captain” had to kill what level in recent decades. A decades-long half of the world’s population uses he claims was a highly promising push for tax cuts, combined with rising the Internet, the direct descendent project, just because an initial invest- government spending on healthcare of ARPANET, and millions more con- ment of $200 million was unworkable. and social security, has hollowed out nect to it every day. The incremen- Poor Astro was three zeros and one investment in research and infrastruc- tal, exploratory development of the comma away from being able to live ture and left massive deficit. ARPANET provided the modern tech up to that ridiculous job title. (Talk- Companies are likewise more fo- firms with their model of innovation ing of absurd job titles, X recently lost cused than ever on quarterly earnings as well as the Internet infrastructure its ‘Head of Mad Science’ to a sexual and shareholder value. Alphabet has they rely on. harassment scandal.) the money to fund something close Perhaps that is a good thing. Apol- to a real moonshot, if its investors The End of Innovation? lo’s politically driven, money-no-ob- allowed it. In 2015 its total spending I am glad Google still spends some ject pushing of technology toward a on non-core business, not just the money exploring new product oppor- fixed goal made for great television but “moonshot factory” but potentially tunities outside its core businesses, did not bring us closer to routine space vast emerging business areas like fi- unlike many other modern firms, but flight. Like the Concorde supersonic ber-optic Internet service, life scienc- do not forget that is something big jetliner, sponsored by the French and es, home automation, venture capital, companies used to do routinely with- British governments, it was a techno- and self-driving cars, accounted for out blathering about “moonshots.” logical marvel but an economic dead only approximately 5% of its revenues. Fifty years ago Ford, General Electric, end. On the other hand, the Silicon Even that was viewed by investors as ir- Kodak, Xerox, RCA, AT&T, Kodak, Valley model has not delivered nearly responsible, given that they generated Dow Chemical, 3M, and a host of as much economic growth as all the less than 1% of its income, and in early aerospace firms were investing heav- talk about innovation and disruption 2017 Alphabet reportedly launched an ily in such projects. Consulting firm might lead to you believe. Notwith- “apparent bloodbath,” killing ambi- Arthur D. Little specialized in helping standing all the amazing things your tious plans for delivery drones, modu- companies apply newly developed cellphone does, technological change lar cellphones, and the rollout of fiber- materials, with stunts like turning a in the developed world has slowed to a optic Internet access to more cities.i sow’s ear into a silk purse.8 Many of fraction of its former rate. The 1960s Subsequent reports tied a transition those firms also supported labs do- were a highwater mark for confidence in which “futurism has taken a back ing basic research in relevant areas of in the effectiveness of investment seat to more pressing concerns” to the science, which Google and its peers in bold technological projects like withdrawal of Google co-founder Larry do not attempt. Today’s leading tech Apollo, System/360, or ARPANET. In Page from hands-on management.1 companies are not short of cash, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, What would modern tech compa- but their focus is on minor improve- economist Robert Gordon suggested nies do with a windfall big enough to ments and the development of new a century of spectacular growth in liv- fund an actual moonshot? Thanks to features and applications within their ing standards, life expectancy, and existing platforms. economic productivity began to stall i https://bit.ly/2PLDigV

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of “moonshots” over a far less-inspiring reality. You have probably heard the If you expect to live comment, “we were promised flying to see anything cars, but we got 140 characters” (a dis- missive reference to Twitter). That is as intoxicatingly true, but let’s not forget that anyone old implausible as enough to have been promised a flying AACCMM Confeerreennccee car, back in the 1950s when Ford pro- a moon landing moted the idea heavily, was also prom- PPrrooceediinnggss was in 1969, ised a moon rocket by Disney. They got one too, but only because they were col- NNooww AAvailaabbllee v viiaa you will have lectively willing to pay for it. PPrriinntt--oon-Deemmaanndd!! to pay for it too. Many people now believe the moon- shots were faked. Manned lunar flight remains prohibitively challenging Did you know that you can today. Was it really achieved 50 years now order many popular ago, before microprocessors and Twit- ter were invented? Yes, but if you hope ACM conference proceedings the recent corporate tax-cut bonanza to live to see anything as intoxicatingly via print-on-demand? this is not a hypothetical question. implausible as a moon landing was Rather than investing in new projects in 1969, perhaps something to ad- they purchased their own stock, to re- dress the challenge posed by climate Institutions, libraries and turn surplus money to shareholders. change, you will have to pay for it too. individuals can choose In the first quarter of 2018, Alphabet Otherwise—and I’m looking at you from more than 100 titles announced a $8 billion buyback. Cisco Google—please show some respect for spent $25 billion. Apple more recently the inspiringly unprofitable lunacy of on a continually updated launched a $100 billion stock pur- the real moonshot by finding a differ- list through Amazon, Barnes chase program. Moves of this kind re- ent name for whatever Astro Teller and flect a belief by management that they his colleagues are up to. “Research and & Noble, Baker & Taylor, have no untapped opportunities, in- development” has a nice ring to it. Ingram and NACSCORP: cluding new product development, to make better use of the money. (Thanks References CHI, KDD, Multimedia, 1. Bergen M. and Carr, A. Where in the world is Larry in part to those same tax cuts, the U.S. Page? Bloomberg Businessweek, (Sept. 17, 2018). SIGIR, SIGCOMM, SIGCSE, 2. Ceruzzi, P.E. A History of Modern Computing. MIT government deficit is expected to bal- Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998, 189. SIGMOD/PODS, loon to approximately $1 trillion dol- 3. Cowan, R.S. and Hersch, M.H. A Social History of lars this year, forestalling any possibil- American Technology (2nd edition). Johns Hopkins and many more. University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2017, 243. ity of new public investment). 4. Gordon, R.J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. The Internet approach of scaling Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2016. For available titles and up incrementally from a working pro- 5. Haigh, T. How data got its base: Information storage software in the 1950s and 60s. IEEE Annals of the ordering info, visit: totype based on the needs of users has History of Computing 31, 4 (Oct.–Dec. 2009), 6–25. beaten out the centrally planned, all-or- 6. Hughes, T.P. Rescuing Prometheus. Pantheon Books, New York, 1998. librarians.acm.org/pod nothing moonshot approach. Invest- 7. Johnson, S.B. The Secret of Apollo: Systems ment funds flow to companies with al- Management in American and European Space Programs. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, ready viable prototypes in hot fields, as MD, 2002. evidenced by the vivid but potentially 8. Kahn, Jr., E.J. The Problem Solvers: A History of Arthur D. Little, Inc. Boston, MA, 1986. baffling news headline “Bird races to 9. Kranz, E. Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from become first scooter unicorn.”j (Trans- Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009. lation: urban scooter rental company 10. Turner, F. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Bird was about to pin down a new round Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, of venture capital funding valuing it at Chicago, 2006. more than a billion dollars, making it a “unicorn.”) Silicon Valley is trying to Thomas Haigh ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of stop us from noticing the difference be- Wisconsin—Milwaukee and Comenius Visiting Professor tween the Apollo program and scooter for the History of Computing at Siegen University. Read more at www.tomandmaria.com/tom. unicorns by draping the heroic rhetoric Thanks to Paul Ceruzzi of the National Air and Space j The headline, originally attached to a story Museum and Matthew Hersch of Harvard University posted by Bloomberg.com on May 29, 2018, for checking the discussion of the Apollo program for has since been replaced with the less-evocative historical accuracy and making valuable suggestions. title “Sequoia Said to Value Scooter Company Bird at $1 Billion.” Copyright held by author.

30 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | JANUARY 2019 | VOL. 62 | NO. 1