Astronaut Mike Massimino was six years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the Moon in 1969.
“That’s what inspired me to go into space,” Massimino says. “I remember thinking very clearly that this was the most important thing that has happened in hundreds of years.”
“I idolised those astronauts and wanted to grow up to be like Neil Armstrong,” he says, “which really wasn’t in the cards because I don’t like heights.”
After graduating with a PhD in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Massimino was selected as a Nasa astronaut in 1996. Over two missions, he spent more than 30 hours spacewalking to repair the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope (you can listen to a radio programme I made about Hubble here) with the Earth spinning some 535km (332 miles) beneath him. Not bad for someone with a fear of heights.
It’s impossible to say if Hubble – and its vast scientific achievements – would have existed without the Apollo Moon landing programme. Apollo certainly revolutionised and accelerated space technology along with our ability to live and work in space. But, perhaps more significantly, Massimino is among a generation of children who – thanks to watching astronauts walk on the Moon – were inspired to become scientists, engineers or astronomers. People who have helped develop new cancer treatments, designed the smartphone and built Hubble.
For anyone with any degree of aspiration, the Moon landing is hard to beat. If we can put a man on the Moon, we can surely cure malaria, fix the potholes in the road or nail that presentation. It’s not rocket science, after all.
But inspiration alone is probably not enough to justify the estimated $25.8bn (£20.6bn) – equivalent to around $257bn ($205bn) today – spent sending men to the Moon. A raft of inventors and entrepreneurs also owe their success to something much more tangible from the space programme of the 1960s: advances in computing.
