Page 8 - Apollo Programme News Today

Facing us as a species today are not so easy for people to understand. but, you know, beating the russians wasnt easy either. so my point is not, because that would be foolish, to copy and paste the apollo mission on our social problems. the point is, if we begin with our challenges today, which i believe are the sustainable development goals, because every country in the world has signed up to them, these are the 17 sustainable development goals with 169 targets beneath them that the un led on,...

Are the wrong missions? well, its a great point. and in fact, you know, what we need to avoid is that these missions just become pet projects that continue to move along even when theyre not working. so again, the reason i look at the apollo programme is that the agility and flexibility that nasa also had to impose on itself, it transformed itself after the apollo i fire. one of the astronauts, gus grissom, yelled out, "how the hell are we going to get to the moon if we cant even talk between 2�...

Because problems have those different dimensions. we have city—level problems, regional problems, national problems and huge global problems. like, our ocean is filled of plastic, so no one country can solve a plastic—free ocean mission, but surely, you can have cities, for example, that really strive for, you know, carbon neutrality. in london, we could have a knife—crime mission, zero knife crime amongst teenagers. so the real idea behind the mission�*s framework is to learn from the a...

Cross—sectoral innovation and investment. indeed, and all of that is much more complicated. so im wondering if there truly is very much we can learn, take away, from the moon—landing experience. because as i said already, it was akin to a sort of war mission. it was presented byjfk and others to the us public as something that mattered to the very future and security of the united states of america. easy for people to understand. some of the stuff youve just outlined about the challenges fac...

Of fraudulent claims made by businesses seeking relief. and money was given away. yeah, and the best quote — or i like this quote because it really goes to the centre of the problem — lord agnew, a tory lord, in the middle of the pandemic, i think it was a year ago, said that the uk state, the british state, was weak. why? because it had become infantilized due to all this over—outsourcing that its done to, for example, consulting companies, to the big four, but also to the circas and the ...

People to understand. but, you know, beating the russians wasnt easy either. so my point is not, because that would be foolish, to copy and paste the apollo mission on our social problems. the point is, if we begin with our challenges today, which i believe are the sustainable development goals, because every country in the world has signed up to them, these are the 17 sustainable development goals with 169 targets beneath them that the un led on, but actually, they came about through huge stake...

Officials make the wrong call, get things wrong? i mean, you know, for example, just a couple off the top of my head. you could argue that the us government, under nixon, spent billions in a war on cancer, which they completely failed to win. it was misguided. yeah. right now, i believe youve offered advice to the german government, at least through your eu connections, youve been involved a little bit with their so—called energy transition, in which theyve abandoned nuclear and poured vast re...

Over—outsourcing that its done to, for example, consulting companies, to the big four, but also to the circas and the gas—s. what he meant was not to blame those consulting companies, but when the state no longer invests within its own brain, it doesnt do too well. and the nasa folks knew that. i mean, this is why i look at apollo, �*cause theres so many interesting parallels. there was the head of procurement, ernest brackett. let me just tell this story �*cause i find it fascinating. h...

Of proactive and strategic governments, civil servants, officials make the wrong call, get things wrong? i mean, you know, for example, just a couple off the top of my head. you could argue that the us government, under nixon, spent billions in a war on cancer, which they completely failed to win. it was misguided. yeah. right now, i believe you�*ve offered advice to the german government, at least through your eu connections, you�*ve been involved a little bit with their so—called energy ...

And in particular, from the moonshot, the massive effort made to get men on the moon in the late 1960s. because it seems to me the driving force behind that was in no way about global cooperation, it was about nationalism, it was about the united states seeing the space race as an elemental part of the cold war with the soviet union. right. so first of all, my notion of missions isnt either international or national or local. it has to be for all of those because problems have those different di...