Giant Leaps Symposium (session 1), "Apollo: Reflections and Lessons” - MIT AeroAstro

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN F. KENNEDY: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

KAYONE CHITOLIE: They just had the courage to do what they had to do and get the job done. And that's how we should try and live our lives every day as a people.

ASTRONAUT: 30 seconds and counting.

KATHERINE REILLY: Apollo 11-- when they went to the Moon, it was just a first for mankind. It takes a lot of people to make something miraculous happen.

ASTRONAUT: Three, two, one, zero. All engines running. Lift off. We have a lift off, 32 minutes past the hour.

CORAL SABINO: It's taught us so much-- knowing that we can go farther, knowing that we can learn this much more about things that we know practically nothing about.

ASTRONAUT: 60 seconds. I've gone 30 seconds [INAUDIBLE]. Okay, engine stop. There's been a quality day here. The eagle has landed.

AL WORDEN: I have to say, I was not a little kid growing up on a farm in Michigan that looked at the sky and said, I'm going to go to the Moon someday. I never thought that was a possibility.

BUZZ ALDRIN: When the option came to apply for the astronaut program, I knew that I didn't meet the test pilot trained requirement. But I thought, maybe it's a good idea to apply anyway to see what happens.

AL WORDEN: Only 24 guys got to go, but those guys never would've made it if it hadn't been for the thousands of others behind them.

DR. WILLIAM WIDNALL: When people ask me what that experience was like, I reached back to Middle Ages times when the big project that everybody could see might have been building, say, the cathedral at the chart. It was this enormous thing that the whole community was behind, and the thousands of people of various skills working on this huge project which was rising out of the fields that could be seen as far as the horizon.

RICHARD BATTIN: We were called by the spacecraft contractor. And he said, understand there's going to be a computer in here. He says, how big is it? We looked around. We saw all of this electronics stuff. What should we tell him? I said, well, and somebody said, well, tell him a cubic foot.

So that became the design principle, that you had to build a computer that would do the job but would fit inside the space of a cubic foot.

DON EYLES: We didn't have computer monitors or anything of that sort whatsoever. We basically dealt with paper, and that's what we stared at when we were trying to think about the software and the mission. So you knew that the answer was in there if you had a riddle to solve, and you had to find it, but you knew it was in there.

BUZZ ALDRIN: It taught us to approach a plan with continuity and flexibility. It inspired the world. I almost look back and seem a little naive at the time. We were pioneering, and it was exciting as hell to be a part of whatever it was.

CHUCK VEST: Apollo hit me and most people very deeply emotionally.

NEIL ARMSTRONG: It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

CHUCK VEST: But it also had a very pragmatic side, if we set a very precise, well understood goal that humans can achieve.

DON EYLES: What goal could be more universal than saying, I see that thing up there. I'd like to grasp it. I'd like to get my boots dirty on it.

AL WORDEN: To me, the legacy of Apollo has nothing do with going to the Moon. The legacy of Apollo is that we can do anything we want to if we put our minds to it.

DANIELLE WOOD: We face problems now that are harder, in a sense, than Apollo, because sometimes, there's a lot of uncertainty about what the problem actually is.

SPEAKER: You'd throw up your hands and you'd say, global warming, what can we do about it? It's too far gone.

JEFFREY HOFFMAN: When we talk about ending hunger, what would that mean? I mean, what is the requirement? How do you know if you've done it?

ERIKA WAGNER: I think to say that we need an Apollo-like program for solving the issues of, say, energy and the environment is to say that we need a coordinated effort that drives energies in a very particular direction.

WILFRIED HOFSTETTER: It will consist of many, many Apollo-like efforts in many different areas to finally solve this challenge.

CHUCK VEST: In that speech, President Kennedy also said, we choose to do these things not because they are easy--

JOHN F. KENNEDY: --but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

CHUCK VEST: We need that kind of thinking, that kind of inspiration again.

ERIKA WAGNER: There's a real need worldwide to educate a generation that can come and meet these grand challenges.

BRETT BETHKE: Developing a technology just for research sake is not enough. You really need to take that idea and allow it to improve people's lives.

CHUCK VEST: This generation coming on now is going to have enormous opportunities. If we put our faith in them, I'm absolutely confident that it will be well placed.

DANIELLE WOOD: One of the interesting things about Apollo is the idea that we were able to do something really fantastic in the '60s that we're not exactly able to do today.

ASTRONAUT: Descending standby for [INAUDIBLE].

DANIELLE WOOD: And people in my generation really feel that that should be corrected, that we shouldn't have gone backwards.

EMMI TRAN: I'd like to see people living on the Moon. That'd be so cool.

KAYONE CHITOLIE: It's a whole new world out there, and to actually set up and live there and have a regular lifestyle like on Earth-- that would be incredible.

KATHERINE REILLY: Beyond our solar system, we don't really know what it's like out there. We don't know if there's another planet like ours. We don't know if there's really life out there, whatever kind of life it might be.

LARRY YOUNG: The giant leap that we should be making now is not do we send humans back to the Moon or onto Mars, but how do we send them there?

WILLIAM GERSTENMAIER: We're going to move on to the next challenge, which is to go back to the Moon. And it's not to go there and touch the Moon like we did before, but this time we're going to go to the Moon with the intent of staying.

ERIKA WAGNER: Going to the Moon is what my parents' generation did and what we should do again. But it's really saying, how do we go beyond that?

BUZZ ALDRIN: Time's a-wasting. I think we've been marking time a little bit in low Earth orbit. The objective is to get to the surface of Mars in a stepping stone way.

DR. WILLIAM WIDNALL: One of the lasting contributions of Apollo, I think, was that picture that was sent back that Christmas Eve of Earthrise over the Moon's horizon.

ASTRONAUT: In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void.

DR. WILLIAM WIDNALL: Here was this blue planet with white clouds looking very fragile, and indeed, it is.

ASTRONAUT: And God said, let there be light, and there was light.

ERIKA WAGNER: By standing outside of the Earth and looking back, we learn new things. These first pictures coming back from Apollo really drove Earth Day and the environmental movement.

CORAL SABINO: Knowledge is power. Knowing certain things can help you to go on to learn even more things, and it's just a never ending chain of learning and just collecting this information and intellect. And it's just amazing.

WILLIAM GERSTENMAIER: So my challenge to all of us is, how do we take that spirit of Apollo, that excitement we felt during Apollo, and now have that same excitement, that same spirit to keep us moving forward to solve problems we don't even know about today?

EUGENE CERNAN: Here man completed his first exploration of the Moon. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.

[APPLAUSE]

PRESENTER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ian Waitz [INAUDIBLE].

IAN WAITZ: It's my pleasure to welcome all of you and to open this symposium on behalf of MIT, the School of Engineering, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, our faculty, staff, and students, and our sponsors, Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences Corporation, and the Boeing Company.

The video that we just saw captured many of the themes of this event, but I'd like to open by providing a little bit more context for the discussions that we've planned for today and more context for some of the events that have happened over the last several months this spring and events that will continue after these events end today.

Behind me is an image of a telegram that represents a special milestone for MIT, and it's printed in the program guides so that you can read it for yourself. It was sent on August 9, 1961, shortly after President Kennedy's famous speech that we saw a bit of. It was sent to the person who, at the time, held my position as head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. That was Charles Stark Draper, also known by most people as Doc Draper.

The telegram announces that MIT has been selected as the first team member for Apollo, and that we're given the challenging task of designing the guidance control and computer systems that will get us from Earth to the Moon. We were given $4 million for the first year. In today's dollars, that's equivalent of about $30 million. So it was a very sizable sum.

However, this wasn't the start of MIT's relationship with Apollo. It was only an important milestone. At that same time, a former student and professor, Robert Seamans, who we had a commemoration of yesterday, was serving as NASA's Deputy Administrator.

And there were many other activities that we'll hear about today that led up to that point. And we will also hear today about what happened after this milestone. And our connection to Apollo was extensive, and it included educating 12 of the Apollo astronauts, including four of those who walked on the surface of the Moon.

Given MIT's very special relationship to Apollo, we saw the coming anniversary of the 40th anniversary of the Lunar Landing as a great occasion to look back on the history of Apollo and to try and extract lessons from that as we look forward to future challenges in aerospace.

And the visual metaphor that we adopted for that here is the Earthrise image from Apollo 8, taken by Bill Anders, that we just heard discussed in the video as well. And we use this as a visual metaphor, along with the idea that perspective was everything.

And I think we all understand that when the world vicariously stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth and out to the heavens, our perspectives of all three of those things changed. And likewise, we hope today, as we look back on history and we stand here today and we then look out to the future, that our perspectives will change.

And we've sought to extend the metaphor yet further for aerospace, not only looking out at the future of aerospace exploration, but also looking at Earth and air transportation and some of the challenges of energy and environment and the role that aerospace plays in connecting our world and in providing Earth sensing to better understand our world.

Finally, one of the greatest and perhaps the greatest outcome of Apollo was the role that it had in inspiring people-- not just engineers and scientists, but all people around the world. And we sought today to look back on the leaders of Apollo and to share with luminaries of today and who we hope will be our future leaders, many of the students here at MIT, this inspiration.

So throughout the spring, there have been a series of events. We started with a women in aerospace symposium where we brought some top doctoral students to MIT to exchange views about their research and interact with one another and others. And that was jointly hosted with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

As part of that, we had Yvonne Brill, who's a pioneer in space propulsion of 60 years in the industry, and she presented our Lester D. Gardner Lecture. We hosted Sally Ride for the Cambridge Science Festival and had 1,000 middle school kids come and interact with faculty, staff, and students at MIT to get engaged in engineering and science activities.

And we also hosted an aerospace program in the Saturday Engineering Enrichment and Discovery Academy, which is run out of our School of Engineering outreach office, and that's for Cambridge and Boston area high schools. And yesterday, of course, we had the special commemoration of Bob Seamans.

Tomorrow, we have opportunities for lab tours and research to look at some of the great things happening now at MIT. And there's posters and demonstrations set up in the reception area. Finally, we've teamed with the MIT Museum and the Boston Museum of Science and developed a set of traveling exhibitions which will go and be moved around to high schools long after this event ends.

So there's been a series of events, of which this is the main piece. I'd like now to turn to today's agenda. We'll begin the morning with a look back at Apollo through the eyes and words of those who made it a reality. Then in the afternoon, we'll focus on the future of air transportation and space exploration.

And finally, tonight, we have a wonderful celebration at Symphony Hall, produced by Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops, and it is standing room only. It should be a very great show, and I look forward to seeing you there. The image I'd like to leave you with is a little bit different, and that's this one.

Apollo has inspired many people in many different ways. One of the ways that inspiration's expressed at MIT is through a tradition of what we call hacks, where interesting things are staged by unnamed students in the dark of night. And because of its prominence, the Great Dome features frequently in those hacks.

And also because accessing the roof at night and installing a large piece of equipment involves some degree of engineering and organizational challenge, these are regarded with a sense of pride by many at MIT. And this picture shows a recent hack that was put on the Dome two weeks ago, again by some unnamed students.

And it's some evidence of the continuing and lasting impact and the excitement that our students and faculty and staff still hold for Apollo. And it's with this MIT tradition that I'm pleased to introduce our president, Susan Hockfield.

[APPLAUSE]

SUSAN HOCKFIELD: Thank you, Ian, for a stirring introduction to today's events, but I want to thank Ian and his colleagues most emphatically for their genius in bringing us all together to celebrate a marvelous achievement of human discovery and invention.

I want to welcome this wonderful crowd of Apollo fans to MIT. And I want to offer special thanks to our remarkable array of speakers. Some of you have traveled very great distances to join us, and each of you participating today adds a deep, personal resonance to the importance of the events we're here to celebrate.

Ian acknowledged our generous sponsors, but I want to add my own personal and institutional thank you to Jim Shields and all of our colleagues at the Draper Lab. Doc Draper, as most of you know, stands in the very first rank of MIT legends, along with the MIT instrumentation lab that he founded.

Since his lab spun out from MIT in the early 1970s as the Draper Laboratory, MIT and the Draper Lab have remained deeply linked in spirit through a shared commitment to first class engineering, to national service, and to educating the next generation of pioneering engineers.

The Draper Lab's support for education takes a whole host of forms, but not least among them is their sponsorship of 50 fellowships a year which fund graduate students enrolled in MIT programs.

And as many of you understand, graduate students play the important binding function. They carry information and insights between labs, and they knit the cross-institutional collaborations that are so critical for innovation. For all that and more, thank you to Jim and the Draper Lab.

Ian introduced the idea that perspective is everything. So let me talk about what the Apollo program means from our perspective here at MIT. In fact and in spirit, the Apollo program expresses exactly what we do here-- discovery and invention.

The ambition to reach the Moon and beyond reflects the same impulse that has driven every scientist since the beginning of time-- the drive for discovery through exploration-- same force that inspires all of us. It inspires a powerhouse like Professor Maria Zuber in her own quest to reveal the secrets embedded in the Moon's gravitational fields.

The intellectual rocket of discovery is powered by disciplined human curiosity. Getting to the Moon married the ambition of discovery with the pinnacle of invention, the capacity of human minds to define a problem, design a solution, and using the great lever of engineering, irrevocably shift the definition of impossible.

For those of a certain generation, the Moon landing completed a suspense-filled saga that began more than a decade before. When I took on the presidency of MIT, I said at the time that I got here by way of Sputnik. I expect others here may also owe their lifelong interest in science and engineering to that first little satellite.

I was six years old at the launch of Sputnik 1, and I, to this day, vividly remember the thrill of it-- not the threat of Soviet supremacy, but the excitement of knowing that through sheer hard work and ingenuity, human beings would one day get to the Moon.

As we all know, Sputnik revolutionized American attitudes about science and engineering. The nation decided that it needed more scientists and engineers, and the National Defense Education Act was born-- a massive commitment to expand science and engineering education. And we needed NASA and the Apollo program.

And those commitments inspired a generation of students who embraced mathematics, engineering, and science, who raced to MIT and other schools, where they prepared themselves to do great things in service to the nation and the world-- great things like inventing the route to the Moon and beyond.

Now, I'm hardly the first to suggest that America could use a galvanizing cause like the race to the Moon today. The intertwined crises of energy and the environment represent the defining challenges of this generation-- challenges that could offer a powerful impetus to action-- and I believe that they must.

But it's important to acknowledge some of the many ways that the combined challenges of rapidly increasing energy demand, energy security, environmental degradation, and climate change do not resemble the Apollo mission.

While the Moon landing was an engineering problem with clear boundaries, today's challenges seem literally boundless and extend far beyond engineering into the less clear-cut universe of policy and politics. Apollo relied on a tight team of experts. Today's challenges involve changing the behavior of billions of human beings.

At President Kennedy's behest, we would accomplish the mission to put people on the Moon within a decade, and we would recognize with certainty when it succeeded. But no matter how brilliantly we address today's challenges, they will last for the rest of our lives and beyond.

Clearly, the boundaries for today's problems are different and daunting, yet their potential to inspire is very real. At MIT, we see it in many ways. We see it in the students behind our Vehicle Design Summit who united with their peers from other universities around the planet to design a car for the developing world that gets 200 miles to the gallon.

We see the spark of inspiration in the 1,500 members of our student-led Energy Club, which launched what is now one of the country's premier conferences on energy issues, and which, I should point out, was started by one of our speakers today, David Danielson, now the founding program director of ARPA-E.

And we see it in the extraordinary inventiveness of our faculty, for advising everything from novel battery materials and solar cells to next generation nuclear power and sustainable approaches to air transportation.

I take great encouragement from our new administration in Washington and our president's commitment to restore science to its rightful place. He's already restored the Office of Science Advisor to the President to its rightful stature, and it's a great honor to have John Holdren among our speakers today, an MIT Aero Astro alumnus.

With creative minds in high places, the odds of success increase dramatically. Ultimately, as a nation, we'll need to see today's challenges not through the dreary, gray lens of impending diminishment and compromise, but rather illuminated by the powerful beacon of American ingenuity.

If we unleash the same engine of innovation that took us to the Moon and powered the computer and the biotech revolutions, energy and its environmental consequences could become a driving force for economic growth and a unifying national inspiration.

As educators and scientists, policymakers and engineers, we need to help more young people see these problems as theirs and to feel in these great challenges the kind of inspiration my generation experienced in the race to the Moon-- the kind of inspiration that made science and engineering feel exciting and important, that made us believe that the sky was no longer the limit-- the kind of inspiration that will drive young people today to reach for the sun.

Thank you for joining us for Giant Leaps, a celebration of the Apollo mission to the Moon and beyond. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

IAN WAITZ: Thank you, President Hockfield. It's now my pleasure to introduce Jim Shields. Jim is the president and CEO of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and is the host for this morning's session reflecting on the lessons of Apollo. And as you heard from Susan and will hear more from Jim, we have a shared history-- our department and the Draper Laboratories-- that started back with Apollo.

And it's thus particularly fitting that Jim is in this role of host for this session. So thank you, Jim. Jim joined Draper Labs in 2001, and he's been president and CEO there for the past three years. Prior to that, he was their vice president for programs. And prior to joining Draper, he had a 28 year career at the Analytic Sciences Corporation.

He's an expert in integrated multi-sensor navigation analysis, weapon system performance analysis, and information management systems development and logistics management. And I'm pleased to share that he earned his graduate and undergraduate degrees from our sister department in electrical engineering and computer science here at MIT. Welcome, Jim.

[APPLAUSE]

JAMES SHIELDS: President Hockfield, Professor Waitz, distinguished panelists, special guests, on behalf of Draper Laboratory, it's a real pleasure to welcome you in introducing the session that focuses on the history and lessons of Apollo. It's appropriate for Draper Laboratory and MIT's aero and astro department to collaborate on this symposium, since as Ian mentioned, at the time of Apollo, we were the same organization.

The laboratory was founded in the 1930s as the instrumentation laboratory within the department by the legendary Professor Charles Stark Doc Draper. Doc is generally acknowledged as the father of inertial navigation, and he believed that engineering education needed a hands-on component.

And therefore, he established the Contract Research Instrumentation Laboratory to provide opportunities for students of the department to see and work on real world problems. So our shared commitment to education is a longstanding one.

By the time that the Apollo journey began nearly 50 years ago, Doc, MIT, and the Instrumentation Laboratory were well established as the nation's thought leader in guidance, navigation, and control. In early 1961, NASA turned to MIT to determine if lunar missions were possible.

Three months later, President Kennedy made his famous speech that we just heard where he declared that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

The first contract awarded by NASA for the Apollo program was to the Instrumentation Laboratory. And Ian showed you the telegram announcing that. To let you know how things have changed, this contract was only one page long, a situation we would never see today.

Three weeks into the contract, in his first meeting at the lab, James Webb, the NASA administrator, wanted to know how long it would take to develop the guidance, navigation, and control system. With his usual aplomb, Doc's enthusiastic reply was, you will have it when you need it.

[LAUGHTER]

Then to demonstrate his confidence that the system would work, Doc volunteered to fly on the first mission and run the system himself. Doc was serious. In a reasoned letter to Bob Seamans, he laid out the rationale for why he should be one of the first astronauts. He would know the GN and C system inside and out, and would be the best person to do the in-flight troubleshooting and repair.

He wrote, quote, "If I am willing to hang my life on our equipment, the whole project will surely have the strongest possible motivation," unquote.

[LAUGHTER]

Of course, it's important to realize that Doc was already 60 years old and not nearly in as good of shape as the existing cadre of NASA astronauts. Ultimately, the laboratory designed and built the guidance system, the flight computer, and wrote the software that took the lunar module to the Moon and back. The GN and C system performed flawlessly in all missions, and there was not a single failure.

In 1973, MIT divested the Instrumentation Laboratory to create the independent, not-for-profit Draper Laboratory that was established to do R&D in the national interest by demonstrating first of a kind solutions to some of the country's hardest technical problems, including defense, intelligence, space, and today, bioengineering, and energy.

Draper has maintained an active role in space, playing a major role in every human spaceflight program since Apollo. We have also continued the commitment to advance technical education that was the reason for our creation. Susan mentioned the fact that we support significant numbers of graduate fellowships, and we also support research projects at leading universities.

Draper Fellows-- our graduate education program-- take classes on a campus near to a Draper facility, and they do their thesis research on the Draper project supervised jointly by a Draper staff member and an academic advisor. Through these programs, the laboratory maintains a very close working relationship with the aero and astro department here at MIT.

Over the years, the majority of the Draper Fellows and much of the sponsored research has been with the department. This past year, 17 Draper Fellows studied in the department.

We have an exciting day ahead of us, so let's get into it. Our first session, entitled Apollo-- Reflections and Lessons-- we will be hearing from the luminaries who made this important accomplishment happen. One of the speakers in this session will be Dick Battin, who was a close associate of Doc. And he'll tell us how MIT and the Instrumentation Laboratory were in position to be awarded the first contract of the Apollo program.

It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, who'll be the moderate for the session. Dr. Hoffman is Professor of Aerospace Engineering at MIT and a former NASA astronaut who has made five space flights, becoming the first astronaut to log 1,000 hours of flight time aboard the space shuttle.

Jeff was the payload commander for STS-46, the first flight of the US/Italian Tethered Satellite System, coordinating both the scientific and operational teams working on this project. He's performed four spacewalks, including the first unplanned contingency spacewalk in NASA's history STS-51-D in April, 1985, and the initial repair rescue mission for the Hubble Space Telescope in December, 1993.

He worked for several years as the astronaut office representative for extravehicular activity, working on tests of advanced, high-pressure spacesuit designs and of new tools and procedures needed for the assembly of the International Space Station. Dr. Hoffman spent four years as NASA's European representative before joining the MIT faculty in 2001, where he teaches courses on space operations and space systems design.

He's also director of the Massachusetts Space Grant Alliance, responsible for statewide space-related educational activities, designed to increase public understanding of space and to attract students into aerospace careers. I'd like to invite Jeff and all our panelists to come up to the stage, and we'll get into the session.

[APPLAUSE]

JEFFREY HOFFMAN: Well, while everybody is taking their seats, and I believe Mr. Sorensen is going to be coming in, I'll just give a brief introduction. As you all know, this afternoon, we're going to be looking ahead towards the future-- giant leaps that face us-- but this morning is devoted to looking back and celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo and the role that MIT played in this.

The way we've organized the panel-- you have the listing of the panel members in alphabetical order-- we've tried to organize it thematically so that we will start with Theodore Sorensen, who saw from the unique perspective of inside the Kennedy administration how the US as a nation got involved in Apollo. And then Richard Battin will talk about how MIT got involved in Apollo.

After that, we're going to look at two of the critical vehicles. I think you're next, and then Aaron and Joe, Jack and Chris. We'll look at two of the critical vehicles with Aaron Cohen and Joe Gavin, who were responsible for the developments of the command and service module and the lunar module, respectively.

And then finally, we will look at the operations with Jack Schmidt and Chris Kraft, who have unique perspectives of operations on the surface of the Moon and, of course, the surface of the Earth in mission control.

So that's the plan. Alex, if you could help Mr. Sorensen up. And while we're getting ready for Mr. Sorenson's remark, I just have two other things-- a special word of thanks to Professor David Mandel, who founded and heads our space policy group. And he played a critical role in the early organization of this panel. Thank you, David.

And then, just a note to all of the audience that there will be an opportunity for questions and answers after the break. And what we're going to ask you to do in order to speed things up is at the end of the first session with everybody talking, we will be making available four by six cards. And we'll ask you to write out your questions, hand them in, and then we'll organize the answers during the break, which will take place right outside.

I'm not going to give extensive introductions, because in the interest of time, we have all of the biographies, as you know, printed in the program. So with that, Mr. Sorensen, we'll turn it over to you, and thank you very much for being with us.

THEODORE SORENSEN: Well, thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. That's very kind. I want to thank everyone for being here. I want to also thank all those participating in this program who participated in America's exploration of space. What you did for our country and its national security will remain paramount for centuries to come.

In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his race for re-election said in a speech, sometimes those who participate in government ask whether it's worth the cost. And the answer is that what is most important is this-- the biggest reward is the sense of sharing and participating in what is important to their generation.

Those of you in this program and otherwise who participated in America's space effort participated in something of the utmost importance to our country and our generation. I am able to, in the old southern expression, make a claim of kinship at MIT and have that claim recognized.

When I think of MIT, I think of Jerry Wiesner, who was my very close friend and colleague in the Kennedy White House, and whose contribution to this country, as well as this Constitution, is recognized by all.

Less known publicly is the fact that MIT's Paul Samuelson was a quiet, informal, confidential advisor to President Kennedy on the economy, and met frequently with the president and me without those meetings being publicized in the first year or more of the Kennedy administration.

That Department of Economics also produced my son-in-law, a rising star in the economics field, who I'm happy to tell you is going to be here this fall as a visiting professor. And I urge you all to get to know him. Ben Jones is his name, and he's a wonderful human being as well as economist.

I also was asked by MIT Press 40 years ago or so to deliver a series of lectures, which I did give here. They were published by MIT Press as a book, entitled Watchmen in the Night-- Presidential Accountability After Watergate.

So for all those reasons, I have a special place in my heart for MIT. And I'm very proud to be here today, very lucky, because I am not a scientist and don't claim to have the expertise that all those participating in this conference will have.

But I did read some years ago about a United States senator, a lady who had agreed to give a speech to the American Petroleum Association for $50,000, and said that she would not only provide the speech, but for the question and answer period, she would provide both the questions and the answers.

[LAUGHTER]

And I decided that was a system that I could usefully employ. And so I have, if I am able to read it-- if I can find them-- provided my own questions. And I will provide those questions and answers to you. Mr. Sorensen--

[LAUGHTER]

You can call me Ted. Number one-- why is it that you, as a non-scientist, was selected by President-- were selected by President Kennedy to organize the response to the Yuri Gagarin flight-- first Soviet cosmonaut-- which was the opening round, so to speak, in the global competition in space, which was part of the competition between the American and Soviet systems in the Cold War at that time?

Why Sorensen, who was not a scientist? I think the answer to the question is that the president relied upon me in so many areas as a skeptic, as a questioner, as a lawyer and Unitarian who was raised asking questions. And a lot of questions had to be asked.

And that was exactly the role I played two days after the Gagarin flight when I gathered in my office-- not many steps down the hall in the West Wing from the Oval Office-- I gathered the best experts on that question in my office to see if we could provide an answer.

Number two-- would you consider the tens of billions that were then spent ultimately to send a man to the Moon and to bring him back safely to Earth-- would not that money have been better spent to fight poverty or to advance health and education and less spectacular scientific projects in this country?

The answer is perhaps that money would have been better spent on those other objectives, but I do not believe for a minute that in the context of that time, the height of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, the Congress would have appropriated those billions for health and education and less dramatic scientific projects.

And it was only because of the drama, so to speak, of the lunar landing that the president was able to galvanize and unite a space effort that up to that time had not only been lagging in scientific accomplishment, but had become something of a joke, with late night television comics repeatedly showing pictures of space US space rockets after a countdown fizzling or blowing up on the launching pads.

So yes, the money-- it did cost an enormous amount of money, but I still believe that money was well spent.

Number three-- it is often said that the space race and the lunar landing in particular were a matter of Cold War competition with the Soviets and greater prestige for the United States. Is not the prestige-- it sounds a little bit like face-- a rather thin basis for such an enormous effort and expenditure?

Again, one must cast your mind back to that particular time and the peculiar nature of that particular national security challenge. The Soviet Union and its communist allies around the world were intent not only on expanding that every opportunity, their influence, and their borders, but also of winning the world, especially the so-called third world of new and developing countries to their cause, to their banner, whether in the United Nations or in other councils of the world.

And they believed that one way of doing that was to demonstrate that they had superior scientific, technical, industrial, and other means of advancement, and the Gagarin flight in itself. And President Kennedy knew that, and he said a message of congratulations to Soviet chairman Khrushchev.

The Gagarin flight in itself was an important point in convincing neutrals and undecided leaders of the third world that communism must really have something to it if it could accomplish this marvelous feat. And Kennedy knew the United States had to have an answer.

Number four-- why did the Kennedy team not reduce the cost and risk by putting a robot on the Moon instead of a man? That question was raised at the time by Jerry Wiesner and his committee on science and technology.

It was considered, and the recommendation was made that while every effort had to be made to reduce the risk to the life of the man or men sent to the Moon, that nevertheless, a human being is still the greatest computer ever invented. It has powers of observation and judgment that no robot containing a computer could possibly match.

And I'm sorry that I wasn't here for the presentation by Neil Armstrong and others, but I still think that that is correct, that the drama as well as the findings of humans on the Moon were an important part of the project and of Kennedy's accomplishment.

Number five-- when President Kennedy declared his intentions to a joint session of Congress, what was the congressional reaction? Huh?

[LAUGHTER]

That was about it.

[APPLAUSE]

I was there in the House. It was a joint session. And Congress reacted with stunned disbelief. And the president, as a good speaker can, sensed that his audience was not with him. And it was the only time in his presidency or major career that I know about that he deviated from the written text before him and began to extemporaneously remind the Congress that it had a major role-- that it had to provide the money and the authority and the support.

And he gave a little riff, which you will find in that speech, or in the films of that speech, where he said it's not just we're going to put a man. All of us will be on that trip to the Moon. It's going to require the participation and the work and the support of all of us.

And he even talked a little bit about contractors and labor unions and educators and others must take part. And you in the Congress also must do that part. And that initial disbelief in time gave way to support from Congress, which-- yes, it waxed and waned depending on how the program was doing, but ultimately, Congress went along.

Number six-- was this JFK's greatest and proudest achievement? In terms of permanent effect on America and the world, probably it was. As he said, we must sail on this ocean of space. And we will, and we have ever since, and we will be forever after.

But whether it ranked with the fact that his very cool leadership in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which historians still call the 13 most dangerous days in the history of mankind, his leadership prevented the world from being blown up or poisoned into extinction. That was an accomplishment which, were it not for that, you and I wouldn't be here talking about it today.

And the fact that he declared on June 11, 1963, to the entire country via television that centuries of discrimination and segregation on the basis of race which treated black Americans as second class citizens were to end and were to be prohibited by law, turned around after all those centuries-- America's principles, I'm sorry to say-- policies, practices on race.

And surely in moral terms, that was an even greater contribution to the role and history of this country than space and the lunar landing, as important as they were.

Number seven-- what would JFK think about US activities in space today? He of course would be gratified that so much is taken for granted. And so many direct and indirect benefits are common today. Everybody has a cell phone based on satellites. Everybody reads weather reports based on the whole new meteorology equipment.

And there are medical findings. There are transportation possibilities. The range of benefits from space are enormous, and he would find some gratification in that.

But he would be disturbed, frankly, that his plea from the very beginning that outer space be a preserve of peace is now being endangered-- that the militarization of space, which was one of the very reasons he set out to assure American mastery of space was to prevent its military occupation by the Soviet Union, which would have been a nightmare had the Soviets been able to use their lead in space exploration to not only colonize but establish military bases in outer space.

And the fact that the United States has, in the last decade, talked more and more of the military uses of space, I think, would discourage him greatly. And he would be hoping to renew that effort on space as an area of scientific discovery and advancement not for the US alone, but to be shared with others.

He wanted US to succeed in space in part that we could cooperate with the Soviets in space. Their lead was clear. They dismissed his suggestion that we explore space together, because the United States at the time had no bargaining chips, no cards on the table, no reason to pay any attention. And that changed only after the US space effort began in serious as a result of Kennedy's speech in April, 1961.

Number eight-- should the United States soon return to the Moon or go to the planets? I am not an expert today on either the cost of such programs or our ability to afford them, given the trillion dollar hit that the budget has taken as a result of means to counter the collapse of the economy in this country and all over the world.

I do know that President Kennedy felt comfortable in proceeding with the space program, in part because we were at that time reducing unemployment in this country. He was increasing the minimum wage for those at the very bottom of the economic ladder.

And he felt that such an expenditure in terms of the national interest would in time justify itself and could be afforded. And whether that is possible today when wages are stagnant and unemployment is rising and the budget is deeply in the red makes quite a different context.

Number nine-- is the Apollo model the vest for some other new massive project in space or science?

Again, for the same reasons, I would ask, is the Apollo model applicable today, bearing in mind that competition with the Soviets, identification of the space effort as a national security priority of the justification for bringing together the most and the best of the scientific and engineering talent in this country on that one project because of those national security implications as well as the difference in the economic context that I mentioned make it unlikely that the same approach to a scientific project today would work.

There has been some talk about returning to the Moon as well as exploration of the planets. There was an apocryphal story that President Bush at one time had said, well, that was nothing, Kennedy going to the Moon. Now we're going to go to the Sun.

And someone said to him, Mr. President, you can't do that. The sun is a burning ball. You can't land men on the sun. And he said, no, we thought of that. We're going to go at night.

[LAUGHTER]

Number 10-- this is not my question, but a question-- if you haven't heard it, you're going to hear it, because we heard it a lot. If the United States could put a man on the Moon in eight years, why can it not solve world poverty or cancer in four? Or why did my plane from New York to make a 44 minute trip yesterday sit on the runway for 44 minutes before it even took off?

Scientists are accustomed, I am certain, to arguments by wrong analogy. Before it was space, it was the Manhattan Project. Scientific genius collaborated at an intense rate on the Manhattan Project to produce the first breakthroughs on nuclear weapons.

And I'm sure those scientists who worked on that project-- one of them happened to be a friend of mine-- wearied of hearing for thereafter, well, you did all that in a few years. Why can't you solve problem x or problem y in a few years? The answer is because it's totally different, because different projects require different timetables.

And in the political economic sphere, the Marshall Plan saved West Europe from communism in the years after World War II. And in my time in Washington in the early 1960s especially, we grew weary of people saying, well, let's have another Marshall Plan. Do this the Marshall Plan way.