Moonshot management
s+b Blogs
Today’s leaders can learn valuable lessons from James Webb, the NASA administrator who met John F. Kennedy’s lunar challenge.
Photograph by Jeremy Horner
NASA has set its sights on Mars. In April, the space agency flew a solar-powered drone on the red planet the first powered flight on another world. A month earlier, it successfully fired up the four engines of its most powerful rocket since the Apollo era. If the funding and political will can be sustained, this will be the rocket that lifts humans to Mars. James Edwin Webb would surely be delighted.
Sixty years ago, on May 5, 1961, a Redstone rocket hurled Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule,
Freedom 7, 116 miles (187 km) high and 302 miles (486 km) downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Freedom 7 parachuted into the Atlantic just 15 minutes and 22 seconds later, after attaining a maximum velocity of 5,180 mph (8,336 km/h). Shepard, a Navy test pilot and NASA astronaut, became the first American to fly in space.
Shepard’s flight was a triumph, not least because it had been conducted live on national television and in front of the world press. It was a notable contrast to the secretive ways of the Communist-led Soviet Union. But 25 days earlier on April 12, 1961, Soviet Air Force pilot Yuri Gagarin had made a single orbit of the Earth, becoming the first human to travel beyond the atmosphere. It was just the latest Soviet space first, going back to Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, in October 1957. Gagarin’s flight was yet another stunning propaganda success i
April 5th, 2021, 4:15PM / BY Emily A. Margolis
Christina Koch (left) poses for a portrait with Jessica Meir while preparing for their first spacewalk together. (Image courtesy of NASA)
Much has changed since the first American spaceflight in 1961: NASA has explored new places with new programs, new people, and new technologies. Yet some of the language popularly used to describe these activities has not kept pace with the evolution of America’s space program. Specifically, the adjectives “manned” and “unmanned,” early NASA mission classifications that designated the participation or absence of astronauts (at first, only men), persist in writing and discussions of spaceflight today. What’s the problem with using this outdated terminology?