Fun Ways to Celebrate Mankind's Giant Leap and Inspire New Moonshots
July 2022 marks the 53rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the moon is back in the news. The USA, Japan, India, South Korea, the UAE, Russia, and several private companies are all slated to send missions to the moon in the coming year alone. In addition to this exciting science, NASA claims that its Artemis program will land the first woman and person of color on the moon’s surface (perhaps in 2026), and set the stage for subsequent Mars missions. It’s a great time to be a space nerd!
Here are some fun ways to celebrate the anniversary of mankind’s giant leap and to spark excitement for upcoming advances:
Explore the Google Arts & Culture site dedicated to the moon landing. It’s chock full of images, videos, and articles.
Do a multigenerational watch party of the Apollo 11 descent and touchdown, plus the first moonwalk. Did anyone see it live?
Bring the Apollo command module into your home by searching “Apollo 11” on your AR-enabled device and choose “View in 3D”. You can also do this with Neil Armstrong’s space suit!
Grab your VR headset and ride along with the astronauts in the Apollo 11 VR experience.
Set an alert for the launch of the Artemis 1 unmanned moon mission (likely late August or early September) and watch it live on NASA TV.
💡 Today the word “moonshot” is reaching cliché status in the innovation world. But let’s remember that this original moonshot required more than tenacity and vision bordering on lunacy (pun intended).
The Apollo program mobilized nation-scale amounts of money to solve a very specific goal. Yes, our tech giants could potentially match the approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars that the US government lavished on Apollo. But they’re not. Even the so-called private “moonshot factories” shy away from financial commitments on that scale. Modern “moonshots” commit orders of magnitude less money for less sharply defined (but admittedly important) goals: “cancer”, “climate”, and more.
Landing men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth was incredibly difficult and expensive. It was also inspirational, sparking not just new products and industries but new dreams. As just one example, the Apollo program motivated many thousands of people to pursue STEM careers in subsequent decades. Talk to an engineer in their 60s and beyond, and I bet that they’ll point to Apollo as a turning point in their life. I’m hopeful that climate change will similarly inspire young people around the world.
Finally, consider the Overview Effect, the profound psychological change that comes from leaving Earth and looking back on it.
💡 Beyond that frisson of delight that many of us feel from space photos and videos, the Overview Effect underscores a brutal truth: that humans are tiny and the universe is unimaginably vast. But that brutality can be fruitful. By opening ourselves to the Overview Effect, we wrestle with how we are all connected—and how our actions are impacting our rare, beautiful, and precious planet.
We have many big, important, and expensive challenges to tackle in the coming years, including the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. If you believe that you’re a “moonshot thinker”, ask yourself: will achieving my big, audacious goal fundamentally change how people think? Could my work inspire generations to make the world a better place? Those are the moonshots that the world really needs.
About Tiffany
Dr. Tiffany Vora speaks, writes, and advises on how to harness technology to build the best possible future(s). She is an expert in biotech, health, & innovation.
For a full list of topics and ways to collaborate, visit Tiffany’s Work Together webpage.
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