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What Every Engineer and Coder Owes to Apollo 8
The space mission that saved tech innovation and the spirit of adventure
There comes a point in every discovery where it seems like time stops and the scale ever so slightly tips toward victory.
That moment is like riding an old wooden roller coaster, the train of carts slowly clicking up that first, massive hill until the car you’re sitting in reaches the crest. Right then, for one slow second, there is quiet. There is stillness. Then the car tips over the edge and all bets are off. Rushing down. Into the unknown. Faster and faster. This is the moment of breakthrough.
For technology and science in the last century, that roller coaster crest moment came on the cold winter morning of December 24, 1968. On that Christmas Eve, the people of the world collectively experienced the rareness of tipping over the peak as the crew of Apollo 8 went to the moon and then came back home.
As Robert Kurson describes in his book Rocket Men, the impact of this mission went far beyond the exploration of another celestial body. Because of where this mission fell within the timeline of the space race of the 1960s, and the way that technology was advancing both in the private and public sectors of the United States and the world, there has perhaps been no greater moment that defined the extent of possibility and the positive effects of advancing technologies in reaching that great new horizon.
More than any other event in the last 50 years, the Apollo 8 mission and its success changed the public opinion of technology in a way that we are still experiencing today.
As the 1960s began, the United States found itself in a cold war with the Soviet Union. Though allied with the United States during World War II, the USSR had risen from the ashes of Stalingrad to become a global superpower, backed by its prestige in rocketry and space exploration.
The 1950s saw the rise of batteries, microwave ovens, remote controls for televisions, and satellites.
While the USSR grew, the United States found itself with trouble on the home front. President John F. Kennedy knew that the American…
