Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

My childhood was defined by moon landings. Every kid wanted to be an astronaut, and science ruled in schools. That simple footprint in the lunar dust created a generation of engineers; an otherwise tough, unrecognized, poorly remunerated, but incredibly important field. It wasn't just the idea of space travel that captured our attention, it was the youth of the whole thing: Controllers at the time of the first lunar landing had an average age of 26, and the average age of NASA engineers on Apollo 11 was 28. In comparison, the average age of a Google employee is 29, similar to other tech companies, but for some reason the moon landings seems so virile while database management is simply effeminate. I think, in retrospect, moon landings were about men: "spaceman," "first man on the moon," "leap for mankind;" the language was rife with masculinity.

No one has been to the moon since, the inspiration is gone. What happened? Was it for the same reason the world's oceans are mostly unexplored, there just isn't anything that captures people's imaginations? Or is it something bigger than that? It's no coincidence that social & political metamorphoses has simultaneously changed the nature of society's ambitions, and that testosterone-based national goals are no longer en vogue. In fact, a quarter of Americans think we spend too much on space exploration, and a third of Republicans & Independents think the moon landing was a hoax. With numbers like that, there will never be another footprint.