👋 Hello friends,

Thank you for joining this week's edition of Brainwaves. I'm Drew Jackson, and today we're exploring:

The Historical Complexities of Space

Key Question: How were the original space commercialization efforts (e.g. the Space Race) rationalized?

Thesis: Many of the rationales used to explain why humans were exploring and commercializing space decades ago are still very relevant today and can provide a baseline belief for why we should or shouldn’t be commercializing space today.

Credit Fstoppers

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Time to Read: 9 minutes.

Let’s dive in!

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The presence of hindsight bias in 2025 heavily skews this discussion.

If we were debating this topic during the space race or directly afterward, we would probably come to a different conclusion.

So, to create the most unbiased viewpoint, I’ll try to use as many quotes and evidence throughout history during the time periods discussed as possible.

The Space Race - A Mixed Bag of Intentions and Explanations

There is an excellent depiction of the Apollo space program, specifically from a technological bubble standpoint, in the Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation book I recently read.

Support for Apollo traced the oscillating trajectory of a financial bubble—i.e. hype cycles.

In the beginning, public support was nearly undivided thanks to Cold War fears and compelling arguments by President Johnson and NASA director James Webb who persuaded lawmakers and citizens that a space program would generate economic, scientific, and ultimately human progress.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson stated in favor of the original Apollo program “control of space means control of the world.”

In his famous speech in 1961, President John F. Kennedy stated, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project...will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important...and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish...”

By 1963, however, many people had started to resent the opportunity costs of the projects. In July of that year, The New York Times took stock of negative public sentiment and declared the lunar program “in crisis.” It didn’t help that during the same period Mueller commissioned John Disher and Del Tischler, two veteran NASA engineers who weren’t involved with Apollo, to assess the program. Their study concluded that a “lunar landing cannot likely be attained within the decade with acceptable risk.”

Their report also estimated that the odds of reaching the Moon by 1970 were, in their opinion, around 1 in 10.

Public confidence turned around in 1964, thanks to Johnson’s relentless pro-Apollo campaign after he assumed the presidency in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. A poll published that year indicated that 69 percent of the public was favorably disposed to landing an American on the Moon, with 78 percent saying the Apollo program should maintain, or even speed up, its pace. From then on, public support decreased steadily, only to spike again in mid-1969, when an estimated 600 million people—one-fifth of the world’s population—watched or listened to the Moon landing as it was happening.

Using the hindsight of 2025, we can see that the odds of success may have been greater than 1 in 10 (or less depending on who you ask) and that the rationales used to explain the Apollo program during its time were incredibly varied.

Apollo was, for many, the peak of human accomplishment—a triumphant symbol of the drive to conquer infinite frontiers. It was a radical but concrete vision that inspired and reinforced the enthusiasm, commitment, and risk tolerance of all involved. The goal was straightforward: to put a man on the Moon. But achieving it required going where no one had ever gone, solving problems that no one even knew existed.

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin has stated that when we assess the Apollo program (especially in 2025), we shouldn’t just consider the “acceptable reasons” for it, based on rational and quantifiable cost-benefit analyses (not to mention the massive PR stunt).

Rather we need to consider the “real reason”—a drive that is unquantifiable, intuitive, compelling, and represents “inventiveness, competitiveness, and boldness.”

Prior to his Apollo mission, Neil Armstrong echoed this thought, stating “I think we’re going to the Moon because it’s in the nature of human beings to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul. We’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.”

The Continuance of Space Efforts - High Hopes, Few Results

After the successes of the Apollo missions, the sentiment for space was still decently high. One writer for Astronomy recently put it:

The mythic achievements of the Apollo program gave our civilization a jolt of self-confidence and ambition. It fueled a zeitgeist that promised even greater things. We were on our way to Mars with the Viking landers and to the outer planets and the stars with the Voyager probes. Was there anything we could not accomplish if we simply applied our will and our brains to it?

You could say that the universe was beginning to unfold in front of us. Many scientists and other visionaries of the day praised the efforts of Apollo and began to plan for the future.

Often attributed to Carl Sagan, Sharon Begley in a 1977 Newsweek profile of Sagan captured his essence in the phrase, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

President Carter made a very similar statement during his presidency, “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

President George H.W. Bush’s statement on July 20, 1989, the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing characterized the high hopes people had for the future of space:

In 1961, it took a crisis -- the space race -- to speed things up. Today we don't have a crisis; we have an opportunity. To seize this opportunity, I'm not proposing a ten-year plan like Apollo; I'm proposing a long-range continuing commitment. First, for the coming decade, for the 1990's: Space Station Freedom, our critical next step in all our space endeavors. And next, for the new century: Back to the Moon; back to the future. And this time, to stay. And then a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet: a manned mission to Mars.

However, the support was far from unanimous. You can see in survey results from the General Social Survey by the National Academies of Sciences that a large portion of Americans surveyed believed that we were spending too much on space during this time:

In 1977, for instance, Richard Nelson, an economics Professor at Yale University wrote in his book, “If we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we solve the problems of the ghetto?”

This characterizes a large portion of the dissent of this era, specifically that the governments of the world had gone too far to the extreme when it came to space.

By focusing so much on space, these critics argue, the governments were failing to address more immediate concerns plaguing a large portion of their citizens (e.g. poverty, unemployment, mental health).

Neil Maher in his 2017 book Apollo in the Age of Aquarius stated, “There was a debate about what America was at the time.” The Apollo space program divided Americans into those who thought it would energize a country that had gotten lost and those who believed that it represented a huge waste of money that should instead go to solving societal problems.

President Nixon, during a 1970 speech echoed this dichotomy in his words, “We must build on the successes of the past, always reaching out for new achievements. But we must also recognize that many critical problems here on this planet make high-priority demands on our attention and our resources.”

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 posed its own difficulties. President Ronald Reagan in his presidential address that night stated:

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

He continued, summarizing this era well, “I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.”

A Widespread Acknowledgement of Spirituality and Religion

Religious and spiritual themes are interwoven throughout the space story, specifically during the Apollo missions. One expert argued that the enchantment of space flight is inextricably linked to the ascent to Heaven—space exploration shatters the bonds of Earth and brings you into the “next”, the “great beyond”, leaving behind the “fallen” parts of Earth.

Wernher von Braun named the first project for a manned space mission Project Adam after the biblical Adam & Eve. He envisioned manned space exploration as a millennial “new beginning”—human’s divinely ordained destiny.

As he stated in 1959, the proposed year for [Project Adam’s] first manned mission, “It is profoundly important for religious reasons that [mankind] travel to other worlds, other galaxies; for it may be Man’s destiny to assure immortality, not only of his race but even of the life spark itself.”

He wasn’t the only one. Many of the astronauts read from the Bible in space, left Bibles or biblical messages on the Moon, and had other religious and spiritual activities and intentions during their space voyages. Edgar Mitchell, lunar module pilot of Apollo 14 in 1971 who spent 9 hours walking the surface of the moon, stated “My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.”

Gene Cernan, the 11th person to walk on the moon during Apollo 17, stated:

There I was, and there you are, the Earth – dynamic, overwhelming and I felt that the world has just, there’s too much purpose, too much logic, it was just too beautiful to happen by accident. There has to be somebody bigger than you and bigger than me. And I mean this in a spiritual sense, not a religious sense. There has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we ourselves create to govern our lives.

James Fletcher, NASA administrator during Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17, stated that space exploration represented a “frontier of expanding knowledge and the progress of understanding about nature and, by extension, about divinity.”

In our modern times, this religiosity and spirituality persists. Elon Musk, CEO and founder of SpaceX, has tweeted that “we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization.”

(Part 6 of the Space Commercialization series coming next week)...

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That’s all for today. I’ll be back in your inbox on Saturday with The Saturday Morning Newsletter.

Thanks for reading,

Drew Jackson

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