It really was a Giant Leap for Mankind

Iwrote this article for the Daily Telegraph on July 20, 2009, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, to show how the mission brought back great treasures to Earth: EXACTLY 40 years ago, I was sitting in a press room the size of a football field at Nasa headquarters in Houston, Texas, watching a grainy black and white TV screen that would show Neil Armstrong climbing down a ladder to step on to the Moon. The spaceship Eagle had landed, with its three huge legs standing securely on the lunar surface, but apart from that absolutely nothing was happening.
All we could see on the screen was the empty, rugged lunar landscape in the Sea of Tranquillity (the Moon has some picturesque place names) with a horizon only half as far away as a horizon on Earth. For the 400 or so journalists in the room this was just a story. A big and wonderful story, it is true, but still just a story. No one present, as far as I know, had any idea that what was about to happen would change human society, creating an utterly different world. We didn't understand what was really going on, not because anything was being kept secret from us, but because we hadn't read the technical parts of our press releases which were, admittedly, voluminous. Meanwhile the excitement in the room was terrific. But there was also great frustration. What were the astronauts doing? Why did they not emerge? Deadlines were looming and some people were frantic. My Telegraph colleague Anthony Michaelis bit through his cigar, scattering ash and sparks all over our table. Somebody got up in search of the bathroom, blocking our view of the screen (there were TV screens all over the room, all with the same picture.) There was a howl of fury from people behind him. ``Sit down!'' ``Do you think we're here just to see your f*****g head!'' The offender sat down hurriedly. A worried German reporter tapped me on the shoulder. ``My editor is asking: how high above the Moon is the mother ship?'' The mother ship, or ``command module'', carrying astronaut Michael Collins, was in an orbit about 60 miles above the lunar surface. I told the German this, but it only made him unhappy. ``About 60,'' he said gloomily. ``That's no good. A German editor always wants orbits correct to at least two decimal places!'' At last, the picture changed. The door of Eagle had opened. A human foot, then a leg appeared on top of the ladder. It was Armstrong. Very slowly, he started to climb down backwards. Now the excitement in the press room was at fever pitch. Scarcely anyone breathed. Nobody knew what would happen. Perhaps, as in science fiction, the claw of some alien monster was going to seize him! For he was doing something unique in history. People had existed for more than 100,000 years, but this was the first time that one of them had walked on another world. What actually happened was less crude but just as exciting. Armstrong and his colleague Buzz Aldrin, and the 10 who came after them in later missions, found many great treasures on the surface of the Moon. Priceless substances were present, forged in the depths of time. Ilmenite, a rock with easily extractable oxygen for future Moon colonies; helium-3, rare on Earth but plentiful in the lunar dust, that would drive future spaceships and power terrestrial nuclear power stations; and many other valuable materials that can be used both to build lunar bases and improve life on Earth. But these remain future dreams. It was gradually realised that treasures just as valuable were not just on the Moon but inside the ships that flew there. They were discovered like this. In the minutes before landing, Eagle very nearly crashed into a lunar boulder. Its navigation system had failed. It was overloaded with data. Someone, either at Mission Control or on television - I've never been able to discover who - cried out the fateful words that were to change humanity: ``The computer's in a dither!'' This statement produced astonishment. What computer was in a dither? Eagle carried its own onboard computer. Nasa's press releases had told us this many times, but in technical language that few troubled to read. The need for this machine was obvious. The Moon is a quarter of a million miles away. It therefore takes a radio signal two and a half seconds to get from Moon to Earth and back. Too long to rely on Houston for life-or-death calculations about height and speed if one is hurtling round the Moon at 20 feet per second! The computer was perhaps one of the smallest ever made. It had to be, to fit into a ship whose living quarters were barely the size of a telephone booth. It had less than a thousandth of the processing power of a small electronic toy of today. Yet it was no mere calculator. Bring programmable, it was a fully-fledged computer. I say this because at that time many people did not understand the difference.
Until that moment, few had dreamed of a computer so small. The whole trend of technology lay in the opposite direction. Computers of the day filled entire rooms and were getting larger. Isaac Asimov wrote fiction about a future computer called Multivac that would be the size of a small country. Note its title. It would work by a myriad vacuum tubes instead of today's microchips. Even these were a great advance on the earliest machines. In 1944 John von Neumann built a machine at Princeton called ENIAC (short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) to calculate missile trajectories.
One cynic thought it ought to have been called MANIAC. As an observer said: ``It was worse than big, it was colossal, a veritable dinosaur of tubes and wiring. It had over 100,000 parts, including 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 toggle switches. Just keeping it going was like fighting the Battle of the Bulge every day. Every time it was turned on the lights dimmed all over town.''
Within eight years of the first Moon landing, home computers began to appear. They would seem very primitive today. They worked with tape cassettes and it took 20 minutes to load a program or save data. When used in offices they first aroused contempt from the staffs of computer departments who, like high priests, tended huge machines of the pre-Moon era. ``They're just silly toys,'' one such important person told me.
But then contempt turned to anger, and anger to fear, when it was realised that the silly toys could talk to each other. And the toys were getting less silly all the time as their software proliferated and their power, speed and memory storage capacity increased with terrific rapidity. Then the Cold War intervened for the second time - another boost for the little computers - for it had been a desire to compete with Soviet rocketry that led President Kennedy to go for the Moon in the first place. This time the Pentagon feared the Russians might create a ``nuclear pulse explosion'', a hydrogen bomb high over the United States that might, without killing anyone, fry every electronic device (the plot of the 1995 James Bond film Goldeneye.) ``How can we preserve our communication system in the event of war?'' senior commanders asked. At the time, all messages went through a central hub, so that destruction of the hub would paralyse military activity. The answer was to abolish the central hub and let messages travel by countless different routes. This led to the invention of the internet by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, followed soon afterwards by the creation by Timothy Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web. Almost everyone uses it. Back in 1942 the head of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, predicted a world market for just five computers. Today there are believed to be more than 1,000 million of them. Today there are firm plans for an interplanetary internet, to link Earth with all the spacecraft we have sent out. Earth's nervous system will expand outwards across the solar system and beyond. There is perhaps somewhere a parallel universe in which we didn't land on the Moon and where there was never any need to miniaturise computers. It's a much poorer world and much less desirable to live in. It's true that we didn't go to the Moon to invent the internet. But without Neil Armstrong's mission the internet and all its benefits would have come much later or not all.  A most benign example of the law of unintended consequences.