50 Year Apollo Anniversary

Hard to believe that it’s been 50 years since the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon. It’s a long time ago, before my time when all that action went down.

The Apollo mission was created and launched with teams of inexperienced kids who were hired right out of college at the age of 21 and 22 mostly and were on average around 26 years old by the time NASA finally landed on the moon in 1969. With strong motivation and the ambition of youth even the most challenging problems were overcome.

Apollo was an expensive program at the time, but it is also up there with the best investments the US government have made – along with the interstate highways.

Today, after 50 years of productivity growth access to the moon is within the reach of private enterprise. The next ten years promise a flurry of activity to get back there.

The people who went to the moon 50 years ago or were part of the effort or were just alive to witness it are now seniors. “We” didn’t get to the moon, they did, and the reasons, and technology they used is lost to us today.

It’s exciting to see this generation make their own mark and out-do things their parents or grand-parents achieved.