Find the others (E)

0:00T-minus 15 seconds. Guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence start. Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. All engine running. Liftoff. We have a liftoff. 32 minutes past the hour. Liftoff on Apollo 11. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:37Who started The Countdown? A lot of the stories in today's podcast are based on a great book called Chasing the Moon. I strongly recommend it. Who started the countdown? Maybe it was Jules Verne writing about a mythical club in Baltimore in 1865. This club, filled with people who had survived the Civil War, decided to build a gun, a really, really big gun. A gun so big that three of its members could sit in the bullet that would be shot at the moon. In 1865, a really long time ago, we knew that the moon wasn't just a shiny circle in the sky. It was a place we could go. But very few people seriously thought about going there.

1:35Sixty years later, the great film writer Thea von Harbo, author of the screenplay for Metropolis, wrote a movie called Woman in the Moon. 2 ,000 people came to its premiere in 1929. The most notable thing about the movie? She invented the countdown. Fast forward a few years later, a man in the United States named Hugo Gernsbach figured out that cheap printing would enable him to create a magazine for people who liked science fiction. There was no business model available to publish science fiction books, serious ones. But pulp fiction in a cheap nickel magazine, he could make that work. One of the people who worked for him was a young man named David Lasser.

2:28Lasser understood that space was possible. He wrote a nonfiction book called Conquest of Space. It didn't do that well in the United States, but by 1932, some copies had ended up in the United Kingdom. In the UK, one of those books was on display in a store that usually sold leftover pulp fiction from the likes of Hugo Gernsbach. And a kid, just a kid, named Archie Clark, ventured into the store, and instead of buying his usual nickel magazine, he took a chance and he bought a copy of Conquest of Space. The countdown continues. It's worth noting that very soon, the Apollo 11 mission to the moon will be closer in time to World War I than it is to today.

3:24that Neil Armstrong and the rest of his crew and the tens of thousands of people who supported the mission are closer in time to the horrors of World War I than they are to today. World War I was the first industrial war. It was about factories churning out guns and bullets that led to millions of young men facing off just feet from each other and dying. that once the power of industrialism was put to work for war, it was devastating. World War II almost ended the planet. It's because we got even better at industrialism. And between World War I and World War II, scientists were going to town thinking about what would happen if we put industrial thinking to work on things like exploration.

4:25In the 1930s, Germany had many of the best scientists in the world. It can be argued they had the best philosophers, and they certainly had many of the best engineers. After Hitler took power, most of the scientists, it turns out fortunately, were banned or left Germany and ended up throughout the rest of Europe and the United States. But many of the engineers stayed, and they worked on a secret project to build rockets, missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles that would be able to fire bombs all the way to the UK and beyond. It's only a stroke of luck that they didn't turn the tide of the war.

5:12But at the end of the war, these engineers had a decision to make. Where would they go? Wernher von Braun organized a bunch of his peers. They took a vote, and most of them decided to go to the United States. And so von Braun, a former Nazi, showed up with many of these engineers and were adopted by the military to build their missiles here. One engineer didn't go. His name, Sergei Korolev. Korolev went to the Soviet Union. The scientists and engineers that ended up there weren't treated nearly as well. They were under a huge amount of suspicion. But after a while, Stalin deemed him rehabilitated, and he went to work building rockets.

6:06Around this time, the countdown continues. Willie Lay rewrote the original book from David Lasser, Conquest of Space. And this time, instead of it selling very few copies, it was published in illustrated form by Viking, now part of Penguin, now part of Random House, and it sold a ton of copies. Not just Archie Clark was inspired by what they were reading. In 1945, Archie Clark, now known as Arthur C. Clark, invented something called the geosynchronous communication satellite. The concept is that if you put a satellite in exactly the right altitude, it can orbit the Earth in stationary position over a certain spot.

6:55So as the Earth turns, it turns, which means it can act as a mirror in the sky, which means that instead of a radio signal only going 50 or 100 miles, if we aim it properly, it could cover an entire country. This breakthrough, published as a scholarly paper, led to the organization of the Earth not into tiny villages, but into countries and into continents, because the media could now spread further and more quickly. Around the same time, a young man named Yuri Gagarin was growing up in the Soviet Union, in a hut underground with no electricity and no running water. So let's redo the bidding here.

7:47World War I, in which millions and millions of people died because industrialism was put to work to kill people. World War II, where we narrowly escaped a cataclysm that would have changed the world forever, also demonstrated that when industrialists put their mind to it, they could create an enormous amount of destruction. After World War II, we have atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, but we also have Arthur C. Clarke in the geosynchronous communications satellite. After Clark published his paper, he started to gain notoriety in the British media as an intelligent young man able to talk about the future of space.

8:34He wrote a book called Interplanetary Flight, and reversing the journey of that original book by Lasser, the book ended up in a bookstore in the United States, and a 16-year-old named Carl Sagan read it, and his life was changed. In 1951, Collier's magazine encountered Werner von Braun, the refugee Nazi scientist who was now leading work for the army in missile technology. Well, the thing is, von Braun matched movie star looks and charisma. He was easy to write about. He was making a living as a public speaker talking about peaceful uses for space technology. Well, the article in Collier's went nuts.

9:26It went viral. It's hard to imagine today magazines that sold tens of millions of copies, but they were fairly commonplace. and Collier's was at the top of the pile. On the basis of this, Walt Disney sought out von Braun and made several episodes of a TV show about him and his work. One third of the public saw these TV shows. But no real money was getting spent on space exploration until Sergei Korolev, remember him? he's the guy who left the Nazis and went to the Soviet Union, mentioned to Khrushchev that if Khrushchev wanted to put a satellite into space, it would be no problem because he had so over-engineered the missiles he was building, missiles that would be used to deliver atomic bombs if there was a war, that adding a lightweight satellite was no problem.

10:26He wouldn't have to build much of anything. So sort of on a lark to tweak the Americans, Khrushchev shot up the Sputnik. Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, freaked out the public in the United States. It was the red menace writ large. It was a threat. What to do about it? Then we hear from a troll, S. Fred Singer, an Austrian by birth living in the United States. We'll probably talk about him in a future episode. Singer gives a speech and he says, here's what we should do. We should fire missiles at the moon and blow up part of it with atomic bombs. He said that would be a great use of our time and money.

11:13Understanding that there's a deep human emotion to want to piss on things when we see them on the side of the road. that if the United States could be the first country to land a giant crater on the moon that we would be able to see every single night, wouldn't that be great? Well, fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. And we decided, nah, we're not going to blow up part of the moon. Instead, Kennedy, recently elected, was jammed into a corner by the media. and without a lot of planning, he decided we'd go for it. Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

12:01We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. That we would counter the Soviets first by putting men into orbit and second by putting someone on the moon. It's hard to describe how difficult this project was. The entire computing power of the United States at the time was smaller than the computer in your pocket that's playing you this podcast. What it was about was finding the others, that the seeds that were planted by Hugo Gernsbach and Thea von Harbaugh and Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke needed to come together with a community of people who understood that some people wouldn't get it, that some people couldn't believe, that some people didn't want to spend the money.

13:08But if they could organize the people who wanted to, they could do something that was impossible. Just to give you a hint about how difficult this was. Sure, you could use a slide rule to figure out the best day to launch a rocket so you'd have the shortest, most efficient path. But how, for example, to put enough fuel on the rocket to shoot it up So it goes all the way to the moon, lands on the moon, then has enough fuel to take off from the moon and come back safely. Turns out the physics of that just don't work. And it wasn't until years into it that someone proposed that we'd add a tiny little ship to the top of the rocket.

13:55and that what would happen when it got to the orbit of the moon is that two members of the crew would take the tiny little ship down with just enough fuel to get back, while the bigger ship waited for them in orbit. This would require docking in space, something that had never even been done before. And it had to be done perfectly the first time, or else you would run out of time and you would run out of fuel. So back to finding the others. Back to the infinite number of coincidences and lucky breaks that lined up to make all this work. It turned out that the mission to the moon, at one point, was using up more than 4 % of the entire budget of the federal government of the United States.

14:49That's an insane amount of money, given how big the budget was, particularly since we were also ramping up the foolish war in Vietnam. In 1960, Kennedy decided to appoint a man named Newton Minow to head the newly formed FCC. He understood that TV was becoming a powerful force. TV, aided by Arthur C. Clarke's telecommunications satellites, I might add, was becoming a powerful force. So he brought in an egghead, a man who had worked for Adlai Stevenson on his campaign. Minow shows up his first day of work, and one of his aides asked him what he knew about communication satellites. He admitted he knew nothing.

15:33His aide gave him books by Arthur C. Clarke. And so the cycle continued. Shortly after that, Alan Shepard was at the White House being honored by the Kennedys for his bravery in going into orbit. And Kennedy turned to Minow. They were both scheduled to speak to the National Association of Broadcasters in a little bit and said, what do you think if we bring Alan Shepard along? What Kennedy figured out was that the space program became a method for him to change the country. We could have spent the money we spent going to the moon doing things like integrating Rice University, developing new ways to build computers, helping industrial entities focus not on building weapons, but on building things that made things better for others.

16:31That we could change the culture with all of this money. But instead, what we were able to do is change the culture precisely because we were going to the moon. Bobby Kennedy called up Curtis LeMay, yes, the same Curtis LeMay that was lampooned in Dr. Strangelove. Hey, what about Major Kong?

17:00As the crazy general who wanted to end the world. Curtis LeMay called up Chuck Yeager, who ran the flight training school, and said, we need a black astronaut. Well, Chuck Yeager may or may not have been a racist, but Chuck Yeager didn't like being told what to do. And so he did everything in his power to make sure that there wasn't going to be a black astronaut until he was eventually overruled. Just a few years earlier, Martin Caden, you remember him. He's the guy who wrote the book that became The Six Million Dollar Man. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man.

17:50Wrote a story ridiculing the idea that there would ever be a female astronaut. Well, he was wrong, too. And my last riff on all of this finding the others and the lucky breaks involves a man named Julian Scheer. Here's what the Soviets did. They didn't announce anything regarding their space exploits until after it had happened, after Sputnik went up, after Yuri Gagarin went up. The idea was simple. If it didn't work, it didn't happen. If it did work, they would brag about it. Well, the United States had a dilemma, many dilemmas. Dilemmas about the gender or race of the people in the space program.

18:35Dilemmas about whether the space program would be part of a military-industrial complex or separate from that. And one of the dilemmas was, what do you do when you're exploring the world in a world where you want to stand for the free press? Do you let broadcasters broadcast it live? What do you control? When you need 4 % of the entire government's budget, how do you tell a story that people want to hear, that people want to believe, that's true? And what do you do if tragedy strikes and it's all on live TV? Well, Julian Scheer did something brave and foolhardy. He opened up the entire program, that the idea from the beginning is, this is going to be good ratings.

19:30This is going to make a difference in our culture. You should feel free to talk about it freely, because the main purpose of this exploration during the 1960s was fueled by our fear, by the Cold War, by the idea of a race, a race to the moon against a competitor that we didn't really understand but that we were truly afraid of, against a competitor that had no free press. And what Julian did was he put all the chips on the table and he said, there are others out there. There are others out there that believe in the stars and potential and connection, and we are going to narrate for them. Space, the final frontier.

20:23These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Their ongoing mission, to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life forms and new civilizations. to boldly go where no one has gone before. This narrative is really personal for me, not just because I met Neil Armstrong, because I worked with Arthur C. Clarke toward the end of his career, because I created a product with Isaac Asimov. All of those things are thrilling. But because the future that we decided to build in pop culture around exploration around connection, around the possibility of what happens when humanity and technology work together, I'm just thrilled by that.

21:18I saw the Apollo 11 documentary. I can't recommend it strongly enough. And it got me choked up because we are capable of doing something other than blowing up craters on the moon and arguing with each other about how to win. Instead, I think we have the chance to find the others, to weave together a different kind of future, and to build a world we're proud of. So yes, that's where we got the idea of Walter Cronkite and James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock. That's where we got the idea that it's possible to have a shiny future that's more egalitarian, in which individuals like Arthur C. Clarke, who later became famous working with Stanley Kubrick and defining our vision of what a shiny future might look like, all of it coming around because the others found each other.

22:19Because culture is what we do when people like us do things like this. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

22:54A postscript. I got lots of great feedback about this episode, but since it aired, people have also pointed out two errors that I made, and I'd like to clear them up now so they don't linger. The first one is Alan Shepard did not orbit the Earth. His heroic journey was suborbital. And second, Sergei Korolev, the Soviet rocket scientist. He wasn't a Nazi. He never fought in World War II with the Germans. In fact, he was imprisoned by Stalin in trumped-up charges, despite the fact that he was a loyal citizen of the Soviet republics to the end. Thanks for listening. I look forward to getting your questions every week.

23:38I hope you will visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K and press the appropriate button. Don't forget, there are show notes there as well as links to the previous episodes. Okay, on to the question. Hi, Seth. This is Allie in New Orleans. Thank you for the work that you do. I follow every single bit of it. The question I have is about art and anonymity. Do you see any value in creating or using a platform that could help introverted artists introduce their art to the world anonymously, or at least at first, without revealing their identities? What issues would that raise? I know that you advise us to blog anonymously if that makes us actually do it.

24:30So I just wanted to ask you your thoughts around anonymous artists. Thanks so much. Thank you, Ali. There are a couple things I want to deconstruct here. The first is that most of the creators I know, whatever kind of art they make, would rather be creating than promoting. Van Morrison doesn't look forward to playing moon dance one more time. And you mentioned this idea of introverts. I think most people are introverts. That's why they serve cocktails at cocktail parties. That most people don't show up saying, how can I go around, meet strangers, and maybe even bump into some criticism. That the work of going into the world to talk about our art, it's work.

25:19It's unfortunate. I wish I could just sit there and write. But the work of going out into the world where people don't know your work yet, representing it, sharing it, bringing it to the others, that's part of the work. And I'm not sure there are many people who would define themselves as extroverts, who are eagerly going around glad-handing all day and then begrudgingly going home to make their art. But back to your question about being anonymous. There is a benefit to being anonymous, which is that it forces you to be generous, that there can't be an upside for you personally in creating art, a contribution, if you're not getting any credit at all for it.

26:06The only upside is the way it makes you feel. So if you want to do that kind of art, I applaud it. This idea, this Maimonides-like idea of contributing without credit, fantastic. But it's pretty unlikely that you can do that and be a professional and make a living at it. Because if you are doing it anonymously, you have no reputation. Anonymous has written thousands and thousands of books. But of course, there are lots of different Anonymouses, not just one Anonymous. And therefore, we can consider the alternative, which is to be pseudonymous. That when you have a pseudonym, it's yours. Richard Bachman belonged to Stephen King.

26:50Richard Bachman could write as often as he wanted with impunity. without worrying about whether or not it would impact Stephen King. The idea that you can have a pseudonym, it's fantastic. Ellery Queen wrote many, many books, but there, of course, was no one named Ellery Queen. For a long time, Steely Dan was famous, not Walter Becker. You get the idea. If having a pseudonym helps you take responsibility for the work without conflating your life as an artist with your life as a human, I say go for it. It will get harder and harder in our ever more personal world of social media to keep the two separate, but people before you have done so.

27:39And if this idea frees you up to make your contribution, I think it's a great place to start. You can always do what Stephen King did and say, oh yeah, I was just kidding. I am Richard Bachman. But in the meantime, create. That's first, second, and third. Do the work that matters. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.