Yes, it is a cliché, but with meaning: “If we are able to go to the moon, why cannot we…?” Fill within the blank together with your favorite want-to-have.
While landing humans on the moon was indeed historic and the boot-kicked lunar dust has settled, perhaps that achievement had more of an impact on society than we realized. The twentieth century reverberations from the Apollo program within the proceed to waft through our twenty first century society — in a way that heralds striving for the once thought unattainable.
So use of the term “moonshot” is in every single place. Seemingly it is a word anchored in an earlier turn of phrase, “shoot for the moon.” Collectively, these Apollo-esque idioms imply aspiring for a lofty goal. For example, underway at Stanford University there may be a “moonshot effort” that goals to 3D print a human heart.
Then there’s the Moonshot Museum in Pennsylvania, operated by the Astrobotic Foundation. Its focus is exclusively on career-plus-community readiness for the twenty first century space industry. From the hunt for cancer cures to latest strides in artificial intelligence, these are revolutionary ways to make something unexpected occur.
Related: Returning astronauts to the moon is NASA’s biggest challenge, but not its just one: report
Radical solution
Today’s use of a moonshot also connotes an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project.
In 2010, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to form a brand new division of the corporate to work on moonshots.
Ten years in, the Google X “moonshot factory” has incubated a whole lot of various ideas, be it driverless cars, robots for manufacturing purposes, even life extension. They define moonshot as a task or concept that addresses an enormous problem, proposes a radical solution, and makes use of breakthrough technology.
In keeping with Google X, anyone in any field can take a moonshot. “Not all moonshots should include a science or technology breakthrough; that is just what we all know best at X. Each of our moonshots sits on the intersection of those three ingredients: an enormous problem on the planet that affects tens of millions or billions of individuals; a radical, sci-fi sounding solution that could appear unimaginable today; a technology breakthrough that provides us a glimmer of hope that the answer might be possible in the subsequent 5-10 years.”
Others, just like the National Cancer Institute on the National Institutes of Health are engaged within the “Cancer Moonshot” to speed up cancer study and make more therapies available to more patients, while also advancing the capability to stop cancer and detect it at an early stage.
“With our understanding of human biology and cancer biology, and our ability to harness latest modalities of medication, and the truth that machine learning and AI are going to make for higher medicines more quickly, we’re at a critical moment where the Cancer Moonshot goal could be realized if we come together,” said David Epstein, CEO of Seagen a worldwide biotechnology company, during a discussion on cancer recently held by POLITICO.
Improbable advances
Then there’s the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine launched into “Science Breakthroughs 2030: A Strategy for Food and Agricultural Research.”
This year-long project was likened to a moonshot as it can discover ambitious scientific opportunities in food and agriculture made possible by incorporating knowledge and tools from across the science and engineering spectrum.
The Aspen Institute in Colorado produces the Aspen Ideas Festival. It too has noted that we live in an age when improbable advances are actually happening. What once seemed unworkable now appears reachable.
A cancer cure will not be the one moonshot, they are saying. “With the proper commitments, we are able to create a planet without AIDS, eliminate maternal mortality, vanquish pandemics and supply health coverage for all,” the Ideas Festival proclaimed. “At this moment in time, we’re also seeing artificial intelligence and precision medicine leapfrog forward, with visionaries lighting the way in which.”
Intangible effects
Richard Jurek has enjoyed an extended profession working as a marketing and public relations executive and is co-author of the seminal book, “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program” (MIT Press 2014).
While the “If we are able to go to the moon, why cannot we…?” strikes some as cliché, I feel it will not be only a nuanced query, but in addition a posh one and worthy of discussing,” Jurek said. “I feel the largest thing, though, is that the query risks obfuscating each cause and effect at work once we try to do big things, collectively,” he told Space.com.
If we are only talking about going to the moon, we were successful at that after, at great national cost, but it surely was of limited impact on the time, Jurek said.
The best thing about large public-private partnerships — just like the unprecedented considered one of Apollo — is that the consequences are sometimes intangible to the direct driver/cause event, said Jurek, and infrequently take a few years or many years after the very fact to come back into full fruition.
Fourth wave
“With an event like Apollo, billions of dollars were plowed into basic research and development, spurring on a large explosion in technology hardware, software development, etc., which, unlike the usually touted direct ‘spin-off products’ comparable to distant medical monitoring and other key technologies, laid the foundational basis for the fourth wave of the commercial revolution, the tech explosion of the last couple of many years,” advised Jurek.
In some ways, we’re still to this present day reaping the advantages of the Apollo project, greater than 50 years into the long run, though we’ve not been back to the moon with humans since, said Jurek.
“So it was a ripple effect through the economy and world that continues to wave out,” Jurek said, “like waves cresting out from a pebble dropped right into a body of water.”
Political and mass will
Normally, “moonshot” projects often take an existential crisis to achieve the inertia needed to get the eye and commitment from people, industry and governments to act.
“Today, we’re beginning to see that with generative AI, autonomous driving, mRNA science and applications — comparable to the cure for some cancers — carbon capture, the sustainable energy transition and others, major ‘global/big-thing’ movements which might be attempting the seemingly unimaginable,” said Jurek.
While they have not taken on global moonshot status, in lots of cases all of them have similar seeds of becoming ones, Jurek added.
“The imperative is there. We just need the political and mass will to have interaction moderately than judge,” said Jurek, but in addition added that the power to generate a mass movement for a moonshot becomes harder and harder, “not to start out, but to sustain and to grow beyond the confines of its own special interest groups, tribes, and enthusiasts.”