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Lessons in virtue from Apollo 11

The tendency to remember Project Apollo as mere technological wizardry, albeit of a very high order, should be resisted.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon. (Wikipedia)

Fifty years ago this week, the crew of Apollo 11, the world’s latest heroes, were doing decidedly unheroic things: napping, drinking beer, playing cards, reading magazines, and otherwise killing time in the Manned Spacecraft Center’s “Lunar Receiving Facility,” where they were quarantined to ensure that no lethal bugs had been brought back from the Moon’s surface by Neil Armstrong (who saved the mission to taking personal control of  Eagle and landing it safely after overflying a vast field of lunar boulders), Buzz Aldrin (who memorably described the moonscape as one of “magnificent desolation”), and Michael Collins (who, orbiting the Moon in Columbia while Armstrong and Aldrin were on its  surface, was more alone than any human being since Genesis 2:22). The Lab was perhaps the least glamorous (and, as things turned out, least necessary) of NASA’s Apollonian inventions. For as Charles Fishman vividly illustrates in One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon (Simon and Schuster), just about everything involved in effecting that “one small step….[and] one giant leap” had to be imagined, and then fabricated, from scratch.

When President John F. Kennedy verbally committed the country in April 1961 to “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” before the decade was out, no one knew how to do that. No one. NASA chief James Webb, who hadn’t been given advance warning of Kennedy’s pledge, asked his senior staff whether we can “do this.” An uncomfortable silence followed. No one knew for sure.

About what? About everything.

No one knew the appropriate mission architecture: One enormous spacecraft that would go out and back? Or a “stack” of different spacecraft that would do different jobs — en route to the Moon, while there, and on the way home?

No one knew how to maneuver in space: Orbital mechanics weren’t entirely understood and orbital navigation was therefore in its infancy. Nor were there computers capable of making the instant calculations necessary to rendezvous two spacecraft in orbit (around the Earth or the Moon) — which was essential when the “stack” scheme was  adopted as the basic mission architecture, with a command module and a lunar module (itself consisting of two parts) having different functions but requiring assembly by “rendezvous and docking” in Earth orbit, and a later, similar maneuver in lunar orbit.

Was it possible to build and program a computer light enough to install on a spacecraft but powerful enough to do the necessary navigational calculations and guaranteed to get everything right every time (the consequence of slight computer failure often being mission catastrophe)? No one knew, because no one had ever done it before.

Nor did anyone know exactly what the Moon was like: Would a lander sink into the lunar dust? And if not (as soon became fairly clear), how many legs should a lunar lander have: Five for optimal balance? Would four do? (Four would.)

What about the rockets necessary for launch from Earth, for course-adjustment in flight, and from the Moon’s surface? In 1961, American rockets had a disconcerting tendency to blow up on the launch pad or explode shortly after ignition. Could booster rockets and spacecraft engines be built that would work all the time: here, in space, and in the Moon’s environment?

Yet in less than eight years, NASA and its academic and industry associates resolved every one of these questions — and solved some 10,000 more conceptual and technical problems. It was an extraordinary exercise in creativity and cooperation involving some 400,000 people. How did it happen? Answering that question, as Mr. Fishman does with panache, tells us a lot about what genuine national greatness involves: commitment to a grand goal; a willingness to think outside the conventions; the courage to face failure, examine its causes without prejudice, and change what needs changing to get things right; self-sacrifice to the common good; solidarity, expressed as esprit de corps; and no cutting the corners of excellence for the sake of identity politics, political correctness, or partisan advantage.

The tendency to remember Project Apollo as mere technological wizardry, albeit of a very high order, should be resisted. There were great virtues involved in this remarkable adventure, and without those virtues there wouldn’t be six American flags planted on the Moon by a dozen American citizens. Whether those virtues exist in sufficient measure today is an important question to ponder on this golden anniversary.


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About George Weigel 483 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

1 Comment

  1. In addition to VIRTUE, there was also HIERARCHY. . . It was the military and industrial hierarchies that ended World War II. So too it was hierarchies that steered 400,000 personal efforts into the successful Apollo 11 completion. Coordinated breadth of vision combined with attention to significant details.

    Likewise, the Second Vatican Council and the Magisterium hold that the totally unique but analogous-enough Church is a “HIERARCHICAL COMMUNION”—within the Apostolic Succession rooted in the historic Christ, and indwelled by the Holy Spirit (Lumen Gentium, Chapter 3, with the Prefatory Note).

    WHAT THEN OF THE CHURCH’S DISTINCT APOLLO 11 MISSION IF WE:

    Replace personal responsibility of individual bishops (for their dioceses) with subservience to bureaucratic national bishops conferences?

    Deconstruct a curial presence and defer to marionette-synodality under the Secretariat of State?

    Replace integral sacramental ordination of alter Christus with married and less single-hearted, truncated and seminary-exempt (?) Amazonian elders (with totems)?

    Leave in place the infestation by active homosexuals and their enablers and compromised/ blackmailed sympathizers? (No grievance here about the celibate/inactive; rather, appreciation.)

    Revert to pre-literate symbolic expressions over written and accountable language—as with the accepted hammer-and-sickle crucifix in Bolivia, the unwitting Wiccan-stang shepherd’s staff at the Youth Synod, the kissing of feet and soles rather than, say, the ground and souls (St. John Paul II) of Middle East dignitaries, usurper-archbishop (JP II Institute) Paglia’s unchallenged homoerotic cathedral artwork, and the conceded podium-prominence of Fr. Martin?

    Alloy sound moral theology with secular-journal publication privileges as at the redefined John Paul II Institute? (For the functionally attentive, the 1967 Apollo 1 command module mixed pure oxygen with an errant electric spark in a fatal and instructive launchpad disaster.)

    Divide the laity from the much-discredited—but not totally!—hierarchy? (Is this possibly-engineered betrayal to be the irreversible and immeasurably tragic outcome from past infiltration by the Sexual-Revolution and from past management mistakes/incompetence?)

    SO, WHAT ABOUT THIS “HIERARCHICAL COMMUNION” OF THE CHURCH, AND THE BROAD APOLLO LESSON ABOUT BOTH VIRTUE AND HIERARCHIES?

    Why totally dismiss credible whistle-blowers attentive to significant details, as with the dubia, Vigano, et. al?

    Even where Apollo 13 later blew up and headed for deep space, it was the Houston command center—an intelligent hierarchy!—that kept its head and figured things out. “Failure is not an option.”

    But from the new-paradigm Church we see that schism IS an option.

    In Apollo 11, lead-astronaut Armstrong overruled (another hierarchy!) an dysfunctional landing-craft computer. The mission did NOT go silently in the night to crash unheard in the Sea of Tranquility.

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