TV Quote of the Day (‘The Astronaut Wives Club,’ on How Prior Couples Came Back Down to Earth)

“Honey, you have orbited the earth. I’m pretty sure you can handle carpooling, meatloaf, and laundry.”— Trudy Cooper (played by Odette Annable, pictured right), to Mercury 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper (played by Bret Harrison, left), in The Astronaut Wives Club, Season 1, Episode 7, “Rendezvous,” original air date July 30, 2015, teleplay by Becky Hartman Edwards based upon the book by Lily Koppel, directed by Elodie Keene

Quote of the Day (Tom Wolfe, on When NYC Hailed Glenn’s ‘Right Stuff’)

“This horrible rat-gray city was suddenly touching, warm! You wanted to protect these poor souls who loved you so much! Huge waves of emotion rolled over you.  You couldn't hear yourself talk, but there was nothing you could have said, anyway. All you could do was let these incredible waves roll over you. Out in the middle of the intersections were the policemen, the policemen they had heard about, New York’s Finest, big tough looking men in blue greatcoats—and they were crying! They were right out in the intersections in front of everybody, bawling away—tears  streaming down their faces, saluting, then cupping their hands and yelling amazing things to John and the rest of them—‘We love you, Johnny!’—and then bawling some more, just letting it pour out. The New York cops!”—Tom Wolfe, on the ticker-tape parade held for astronaut John Glenn after orbited Earth in 1962,  in The Right Stuff (1979)

RIP, Col. John Glenn—her of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Cold War; U.S. Senator; and explorer into the “Final Frontier.”

This Day in Scientific History (Robert Noyce, Silicon Valley Titan, Born)

December 12, 1927—Robert Noyce, who co-invented the integrated chip, the tiny bit of silicon that furnished the foundation for millions of transistors, and who then re-invented American corporate practices as co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation and Intel, was born in Grinnell, Iowa.

Before Bill Gates, before Steve Jobs, there was Noyce, who, for all his fame within the world of high-tech, never enjoyed the wider public name recognition given the founders of Microsoft and Apple. But Noyce was nicknamed “the Mayor of Silicon Valley” for a reason. He received 16 patents on semiconductor methods, devices and structures—discoveries used later in robots and the Apollo manned flights to the moon, as well as for an American computer industry that has flourished while other parts of the manufacturing sector have died on the vine.

I first became aware of this high-tech pioneer when I read Tom Wolfe’s essay, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley,” in the December 1983 issue of Esquire. That mammoth special issue, commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the legendary magazine, was called “The 50 Who Made The Difference,” containing profiles of key individuals in American life in the prior half-century, including Muhammad Ali, Betty Friedan, William S. Paley, Philip Johnson, Dr. John Rock, a developer of the birth-control pill, William Levitt, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Carl Bernstein and Ralph Nader. Noyce (who died in 1990) was not anywhere near as well-known as many, if not all, the others on the list, but his influence was arguably every bit as extensive.

The Noyce piece became, in effect, Wolfe’s goodbye to the New Journalism he had begun practicing 20 years before as a young reporter. The writer was about to take up the fiction that has largely consumed his time since then. But before he was done with nonfiction, he contributed what can, in certain ways, be read as a coda to The Right Stuff.

I have never read how Wolfe became interested in Noyce’s story, but given the details about the importance of the semiconductor to the space program, it’s very possible that the fascination grew out of his research for The Right Stuff. This time, though, Wolfe paid tribute not to the astronauts, nor even to those at NASA who guided them through space, but instead to the man ultimately responsible for a major component of Apollo 8, “a miniature computer two feet long, one foot wide, and six inches thick, exactly three thousand times smaller than the old ENIAC and far faster and more reliable”—a direct outgrowth of the integrated chip created by Noyce and Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby in 1959.

There is another link between the space program chronicled by Wolfe and the origins of Silicon Valley that the writer discussed. Recall how, in The Right Stuff, Wolfe had some fun with John Glenn when the astronaut chastised several of his Mercury colleagues for tomcatting around. “In his eyes burned four centuries of Dissenting Protestant fervor,” Wolfe notes.

Wolfe discovered a similar motif in the background of Noyce and other pioneers of Silicon Valley, who thought they had shed their old mores after World War II, only to find out differently. The founder of Noyce’s hometown, Josiah Grinnell, was a 19^th-century Congregationalist minister who founded public schools in the Heartland, and was a benefactor of the college in Iowa that now bears his surname. Noyce and other key engineers in the rise of Silicon Valley didn’t have the cachet of graduates back East, but they brought a similar moral fervor to their endeavor of changing the world.

Noyce did so not just with the science itself, but with the way of business life he evangelized. His departure from the fold of his boss, transistor inventor William Shockley—and then, subsequently, the departure of those who worked for Noyce himself, at Fairchild and Intel—became a kind of career template for getting ahead in Silicon Valley.

Even more important was the corporate environment Noyce created. At Intel, Wolfe writes, Noyce not only insisted on “no executive suites, no pinstripe set, no reserved parking places, or other symbols of the hierarchy,” but he also created a common space for all employees—an end to “the eastern corporate protocol of small metal desks for underlings and large wooden desks for overlords.”

Making all of this possible was Noyce’s personal charisma—itself, Wolfe seems to waggishly suggest, in his choice of metaphor, a kind of secular outgrowth of the inventor’s religious background:

“With his strong face, his athlete's build, and the Gary Cooper manner, Bob Noyce projected what psychologists call the halo effect.  People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they're doing and moreover make you want to admire them for it.  They make you see the halos over their heads."

Quote of the Day (JFK, on the Race to the Moon)

“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. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations--explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon--if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”—President John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” May 25, 1961

In 1992, historian Michael Hart wrote a history in which he ranked the 100 most important people in history. John F. Kennedy made it to #81--something that probably astonished American historians of the last few decades, who have tended to consider him a good but not great chief executive. (They would have been especially surprised that Abraham Lincoln, long at #1 or #2 in all the Presidential polls, well ahead of JFK, did not make the elite 100 people worldwide.)

Hart named JFK to his list not because of his civil-rights advocacy, or for steering the U.S. past nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, or for becoming the first non-Protestant to become President. No, JFK earned the ranking for pushing through the manned space program.

In an age of greater fiscal austerity and of fading memories of the Cold War, Kennedy’s call for a manned landing on the moon has lost considerable luster. Historian John Logsdon, whose new book on Kennedy and the space program was featured prominently in John Noble Wilford’s New York Times article on the anniversary of this event yesterday, conceded in the article that the “impact of Apollo on the space program has on balance been negative.” Even the liberals who formed the core of Kennedy’s political base came to feel, a decade after his rallying message to Congress, that the money might have been better spent on matters close to earth--notably, anti-poverty programs.

I’m somewhere halfway between Professors Hart and Logsdon in how I consider Kennedy’s clarion call. On the one hand, the manned lunar landing undoubtedly did divert federal money from more cost-effective, unmanned space efforts, not to mention social programs. On the other hand, only a project so audacious--and one with underlying tensions with the Soviet Union very much in play--could have engaged the public’s attention so tenaciously.

In the end, I think, we celebrate the lunar landing--and Kennedy’s part in pushing for it--for a reason from anything related to something as mundane as scientific results. No, this might have been the last time, for the last several decades, that Americans would see that their country could a) conquer a challenge once it had been identified, or b) lead other nations in an area that, for more than a century, had been a strength: technological know-how.

Quote of the Day (Horace, Demonstrating Why the Ancients Would Have Been Stunned by Man Walking on the Moon)

“No barrier is too high for mortals;
In our foolhardiness we try
To escalade the very sky.
Still we presumptuously aspire,
And still with unabated fire
Jove hurls his thunderbolts of fire.”—Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace), The Odes of Horace, translated by James Michie (1987)

The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC) would not have glimpsed kindred spirits in the Apollo 11 crew that journeyed to the moon on July 20, 1969. Where they were physically fit, he cheerfully admitted to being chubby; where they had ventured far from home, he was content to live on his farm; where they were willing to risk their lives in a vulnerable capsule dwarfed by the immense universe they were penetrating, he was careful to avoid even the suspicion of offending his patron, the Emperor Augustus.

In “One Giant Leap to Nowhere,” a New York Times op-ed yesterday about declining interest in space following the lunar mission, Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe alludes to the “Promethean” nature of the voyage undertaken by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. The Promethean myth is also at the center of Horace’s concern here.

I’m not sure how the ancient Romans or Greeks could have even begun to surmount the bounds of earth. But the Romans, practical engineers par excellence, did have the kind of interest in arenas, infrastructure, and defenses against enemies that underlay America at mid-century. Maybe Horace’s verses here represented a veiled warning to his countrymen on the perils of such impulses.

John F. Kennedy’s bold statement in 1961 that America would put a man on the moon within the decade required eight years and an expenditure of $25 billion. Such a venture today, in a country financially hard-pressed, would be absolutely inconceivable.

In 1978, historian Michael Hart wrote a book called The Hundred: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. He put JFK on the list (#81) solely because the President fired up Americans’ interest in going to the moon.

Ironically, however, we know now that Kennedy, as rational and cautious a man (in his policies, anyway) as any who ever occupied the White House, was not interested in the scientific aspects of space, according to Craig Nelson’s new history, Rocket Men. He came to his full-throated advocacy of the cause at least partly for the same reason that he did the civil-rights movement: because of its link to the Cold War.

Increasingly as his administration went on, Kennedy grasped the complications of persuading newly decolonized nations to join “the long twilight struggle” against the Soviet Union when America allowed a substantial amount of its residents to live without the rights they deserved.

Similarly, as he assumed office, even while listened to the best scientific minds in the country, he did not find anything intrinsically valuable about exploring the stars. But he became convinced that, by losing the “space race,” the Third World would wonder if America really enjoyed the superiority it claimed over the Soviet bloc.

Ironically, the man who persuaded the President about the necessity of the space program was his Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson. I wrote “ironically” for a couple of reasons:

* If the President’s brother Bobby had had his way, Johnson would not have been able to catch JFK’s ear on even this matter, but would have been entirely consigned to attending funerals for world leaders.

* When LBJ became president, he could have diminished funds for the space program. Instead, he maintained them at full strength.

* In both the book and film adaptation of The Right Stuff, LBJ comes across as a hysterically egocentric politico—someone who tells associates that the Russians “have our peckers in their pockets” and who fumes in his limo as shy astronaut wife Annie Glenn refuses to admit him, his entourage and his media circus into her home—rather than as a shrewd, forceful and effective proponent of the space program.

While we commemorate the space program today, a few other points:

* I’ve always been fascinated by autographs and their historical and financial value. Since 1994, Neil Armstrong’s, according to a Boston Globe article last week, has risen to the point where his signature is now the most sought-after by a living human being. The former astronaut spurred this upsurge because, after 1994, he stopped signing autographs out of concern over forgeries.

* Armstrong’s hometown is Wapakoneta, Ohio, which now maintains in his honor the Armstrong Air and Space Museum. I myself had occasion to visit this site on my passage through the town more than 20 years ago, when another resident married my oldest brother. I’m sure that Armstrong regarded his lunar mission as the great adventure of his life, but for sheer daring I doubt it can match my sister-in-law’s decision to become a part of our family.

* Perhaps as good a reason as any to journey back to the stars—not just to the moon, but to Mars, the next logical destination—is not what it teaches about other heavenly bodies but about what it shows about the beauty and fragility of our own planet. The image accompanying today’s post shows, from the lunar surface, the "earthrise." Breathtaking, right? A similar picture taken during the Apollo 8 mission gave tremendous impetus to the environmental movement, according to an NPR story. It can’t hurt to have another such reminder today.

The fear that Horace expressed in his poem concerned the tendency toward hubris, the belief that human beings can solve all things, that the laws of nature and history don’t apply, or at least that they can be bent to our will. The Vietnam War—a conflict catastrophically widened by a liberal Democratic administration—was an example of how ignoring limits courts catastrophe. The lunar landing—a triumph of ingenuity and daring conducted under the same administration—likewise sought to surmount limits.

Perhaps the American mission in space succeeded in the 1960s because, virtually every step of the way, we wanted to know every possible danger so we would not be unprepared, alone and in the vast darkness of space.

After all, it sometimes gets lost, in the triumphalistic narratives and commentaries of the past week commemorating this epochal event, that the moon looked, according to Apollo 11 pilot Collins, like a “withered, sun-seared peach pit.” "There is no comfort to it," the atronaut continued; "it is too stark and barren; its invitation is monotonous and meant for geologists only.”