…Because they are hard
The moonwalkers show at Lightroom made me think about what it means to do hard things
Last Saturday I went to the Moonwalkers show at Lightroom. It’s a projection show narrated (and co-written) by Tom Hanks about the Apollo mission, the people who got to walk on the moon, and the new Artemis mission which hopes to get more people onto the moon in the second half of 2025. But honestly, this relatively dry description undersells the crazy footage and access the project got including interviews with past astronauts, photo archives and access to the current teams working on Artemis.
While I was excited to go, I was surprised at how deeply moving and impactful I found it to be. Over the last few days I had been struggling to pinpoint exactly why I found it so powerful, so I’ve written about it; in particular, I think I’ve landed on 3 things from the show that will have a lasting impression on me.
1. The shared sense of mission & purpose
Early on in the show - they play the majority of Kennedy’s famous address on the space mission. At around 20 mins and despite the hazy footage, it’s among the best political speeches ever made. But what struck me, listening to it again for the first time since I was a teenager in an English lesson on speeches, was how determined and optimistic it sounds.
The speech offered a positive vision of a world where there is a responsibility for mankind to make progress and push the boundaries:
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
Kennedy also communicates a deep sense of urgency. An impatience to progress:
It is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.
Listening to the speech, I found it hard to not feel a sense of pride in the eventual success of the moon landing. But it’s worth remembering that this speech took place around six and a half years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually made it to the moon - at the time it was far from a certainty that they would ever make it there. In fact, the speech was a response to complaints about the costs and timelines and feasibility of the Apollo programme; familiar political complaints about any ambitious project. Yet in retrospect these complaints feel small and insignificant compared to the achievements of the Apollo programme.
The strength of the mission and the determination of the leadership felt energising and hopeful. Leaders cast a long shadow over their organisations. The speech by JFK represents a perfect example of how words can drive behavioural change - the speech generated enough political capital and goodwill to keep the moon mission alive and well-funded, it acted as a call-to-arms for the teams delivering the moon mission to work with urgency, and it drove a deep sense of national (and international) purpose.
We have many challenges that we face today that would benefit from the equivalent level of focus and drive: Climate change, public health crises, children’s mental health. Politically, it feels like we are struggling to galvanise the same sense of urgency and relentless focus as the Apollo programme - a mission that (let’s be honest) didn’t serve any of humanity’s immediate needs. But, famously JFK said “we choose to go to the moon” - and perhaps it’s the choice of that crazy idea that’s part of the appeal.
Regardless the reasons why the US could mobilise the political will and the urgency and resources to get to the moon, we should be grateful - they needed to have drive and determination because (somewhat famously) the work they were doing was insanely hard…
2. The scale of the challenge
Getting to the moon was hard - almost unfathomably hard.
Early on in the show there’s a quote from astronaut Victor Glover (who will be going to the moon as part of Artemis II in 2025) where he says “working on really hard things brings people together”. We’re lucky that he’s correct because we needed an estimated 400,000-500,000 scientists, engineers and technical staff to directly work on the Apollo project. And it wasn’t just people; the project involved cutting edge science, new materials, new procurement approaches, risks with human life and approximately $260 billion dollars.
As an illustration of how immensely difficult the mission was - here is a list of inventions that were made just to solve small problems they faced in the process of getting people to the moon:
CAT scanners, invented to scan components of the space shuttles
Modern microchips originated from integrated circuits used in the Apollo Guidance Computer
Cordless tools, invented so astronauts could drill into rocks on the moon
Household water filters use technology designed to kill bacteria going into space
Memory foam, designed for test pilot seats
Joystick controllers, originally used to navigate the lunar rover
Adjustable smoke detectors, used to avoid false alarms slowing down development work
Ceramic “invisible” dental braces use NASA designed ceramics
There are countless more, but just think, these inventions were not the goal of Apollo - they were simply the best solutions to interim problems the Apollo team faced in pursuit of the BIG problem they cared about.
The difficulty of the mission is not something that anyone shied away from. In fact the most iconic line from the JFK speech is about the administration embracing the fact that it was nearly impossible:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, 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 which we intend to win, and the others, too.
“We want to do it because it is hard” is such a different mindset to the one that many of us typically use to approach big problems. Since watching the show I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about why I find this mindset so compelling. Part of me thinks that I’m romanticising the past and assessing the comments with the retrospective knowledge of the success of the moon mission. But, I also do think the ability to embrace the sheer challenge of the mission feels different to the behaviour of policy makers and many leaders today. Think about the scrapping of HS2 or the inability for any political party to tackle social care issues or our challenges in addressing climate change - it feels like few people want to work on the hard things.
But that’s not true everywhere. In discovery work I’ve carried out with one UK company, several individuals brought up, unprompted, the scale of the challenge they were facing in what their company was hoping to achieve. At the time this felt like a simple acknowledgement of the complexity of the problems they were trying to solve - but in retrospect, it feels like more important shared realisation. The understanding that what they were doing was hard means the smaller things should matter less, as long as they’re making clear progress towards the big goal. For instance, a lot of the organisational challenges I was helping them identify and address are more like the “cordless drill” problem - small issues that they need to solve to get to the big, difficult problem. You might think this made my work feel somewhat small and insignificant, but it is actually comforting to think that I was helping them (in a very small way) to achieve the really hard stuff they were doing.
Ultimately doing anything really impactful and meaningful is probably going to be hard. There is some interesting research which suggests optimism is adaptive in domains like entrepreneurship. This isn’t too surprising. We have a negative salience bias - we like to think of what might go wrong and what risks we’ll be facing along the way. This tendency was build to protect our hunter-gatherer ancestors from danger. But, the same tendency can be debilitating when starting a new unfamiliar challenge. Optimism pushes us in the other direction - if we assume things are fine, we’re more likely to actually get started. It’s clear that the Apollo team were deeply optimistic despite (or maybe because) what they were doing was hard and important.
3. The wonder that was felt by the moonwalkers
Beyond my professionally and personally interest in the organisational aspects of the show, I also found it beautiful. The show does a wonderful job of showing a small piece of what it must have felt like to get into space and eventually get to the moon. It was hard to leave without a deep sense of perspective: seeing close up images of the Earth which looked utterly massive as the shuttle orbited; and moments later seeing that massive expanse transform into the tiny blue dot in the photos taken from the surface of the moon.
I felt small but not insignificant.
It’s so rare that we take time to zoom out and get perspective on what really matters, yet here was all of human history in space of a few cm of a printed photo - truly the most zoomed out you can get.
This sense of perspective also came with a sense of wonder at the beauty of the whole thing. Frank Keil has a beautiful book “Wonder” about the way that children learn about the world through a process of discovery and exploration. He also talks about how adults typically stop asking “why” and “how” questions in the same way as they did when they were children.
But seeing the astronauts behave - they acted like children. There was a joy to the way that all the moonwalkers had to learn how to move in the lower gravity environment (somethings that’s very difficult to simulate before you get there). They were very clearly having fun - taking photos, laughing, joy riding in a lunar rover, throwing things super far in the low gravity. The show had a striking segment where Tom Hanks spoke about asking astronauts what they did in the limited “free time” they had on the moon. I won’t spoil it, but even the concept of free time on the moon felt deeply joyful in a way that I hadn’t expected from a documentary.
This lightness felt in stark contrast to the (pardon the pun) gravity of the earlier parts of the documentary. We weren’t talking about grant speeches or complex engineering projects - we were watching grown men throwing things around for fun. [Note: Artemis is planning on fixing the fact that the Apollo astronauts were all men]. Yet, that was part of the point. We chose to go to the moon - and it felt right that those who got to go there enjoyed it on behalf of all of us.
Final thoughts
As I said early on, I strongly recommend you go see the show. I wasn’t a space-nerd as a child but it still really affected me.
I also left feeling hopeful and optimistic.
Nobody has stepped foot on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. But work is well underway to make sure we get to the moon again (and pretty soon). We’re making progress fast: in August of last year India landed the unmanned lunar lander Chandrayaan-3 in the South Pole region of the moon; in March of this year, Space X’s Starship had a succesful test launch; and Artemis hopes to have people back on the moon in the latter part of the next year - with the eventual plan to set up a permanent moon base similar to the international space station.
I really hope we find the political drive to solve similarly important and hard problems here on Earth as well.