“We don’t fail from lack of ideas. We fail from distraction.”
That line landed with weight during the closing session of Space Day at Bath Digital Festival. This wasn’t a nostalgic look back at the golden age of space exploration—it was a forensic account of what Apollo achieved, how it was built, and what today’s space race risks forgetting.
Apollo didn’t just aim for the Moon. It had to invent the means to get there.
In the early 1960s, there were no rockets powerful enough, no deep space global tracking networks, and no computers small enough, capable enough or fast enough to guide a spacecraft 250,000 miles from Earth. There was no “book” to refer to, on how to achieve this. So they built it all, they wrote the book, to do something in a timescale less than some modern road repairs take. “Not because it is easy, but because it is hard” as JFK famously stated in his world famous speech at Rice Stadium.
Whilst it started with a vision in the mind of a brilliant German scientist, it began in earnest, with trying to solve all these intractable problems.
Take the Apollo Guidance Computer, the first contract awarded under Apollo. This initially had just 2 kilobytes of RAM and 34 kilobytes of ROM (growing to 72Kb). It was hand-wired using steel thread and tiny magnetic rings, each bit physically threaded by expert seamstresses in what became known as “core rope memory.” The code, written by people, literally inventing the term “software engineering”
“The Apollo guidance computer could handle 40,000 calculations at a push. Your phone or most modern laptops, can do 35 trillion per second.”
Despite those constraints, it worked. Flawlessly. Across six lunar landings, as well as three missions that circled the moon, even when shut down and restarted for Apollo 13.
Scale wasn’t just ambition, it was engineering discipline.
To build the Saturn V rocket, something the size of a small navy destroyer, weighing in at close to 3 million Kg, and having to launch and escape Earth’s gravity at over 40,000 KM/hr, NASA constructed the world’s largest single-storey building. To move it to the launch pad, they built the largest vehicle ever assembled. To launch it, they poured millions of gallons of water onto the pad to suppress upwards of 220 decibels of sound at the launch site — enough to shatter concrete, enough to kill a human and still louder than any rock concert in history, even 6 miles away from the launch, where people watched it all unfold.
The launch’s energy output?
The 5 gigantic F1 engines, still the largest ever build, between then generated 66 gigawatts—which for the first two minutes of launch, was enough to power the entire UK on a Saturday night.
The risks we face now are different—but no less real.
Today’s challenge isn’t distance. It’s a combination of factors, one being human arrogance, believing that we can do this faster and cheaper. Whilst this may be the case, it’s notable that not one Saturn V failed, not one blew up, not one didn’t complete its mission objectives. Apollo 13, was the service module, not the launch vehicle. Should we lear lessons from those who did it so perfectly, over half a century ago?
Another factor is congestion. Low Earth orbit is crowded with over 130 million fragments of space debris, from flecks of paint to derelict satellites. At orbital speeds, even a millimetre-wide object can cause catastrophic damage.
As Starship, China, Amazon, and others, begin in the coming years, to launch hundreds and even thousands of satellites at a time, the question isn’t just about capability—but consequence.
Starship is bigger. But it hasn’t yet worked.
In contrast to Apollo’s flawless track record, SpaceX’s Starship has yet to complete a full mission. Its early launch—attempted without water suppression—destroyed the pad and scattered debris for miles. Saturn V’s designers solved that problem in the 1960s. So why did SpaceX initially choose to ignore their brilliance in solving a simple but fundamental problem?
Behind every system, a story.
Wernher von Braun, recruited with his team via Operation Paperclip, brought with him both rocket expertise and a shadowed past, but achieved something nobody in human history has yet matched. Margaret Hamilton, who went on from being “just a coder” to lead a large part of the software effort, coined that term “software engineering” and with her team, wrote code so resilient it could override astronaut error, and manage overloads and prioritisation in a way that is still being used in modern computing.
There was no AI, no version control, no safety net—just slide rules, pencils, and months of hand-debugging.
“Exploration isn’t inherently virtuous. It’s what we do with it that matters.”
Apollo was born out of Cold War rivalry. But its legacy reshaped how the world thought about engineering, collaboration, and possibility. It inspired a generation to pursue science and technology—not through spectacle, but through systems that worked. Its is still NASA’s finest hour, and something everyone alive at the time, remembers precisely where they were when “One Giant Leap” happened. Much like the “Kennedy” moment, Apollo is remembered as the day the world truly united in a common celebration of what humanity can do when we think positively.
Today’s commercial race to orbit carries different incentives. The risks—monopolised infrastructure, uncontrolled debris, extractive thinking—are cultural as much as technical, but also, driven by commercial gains, something Apollo didn’t do, but yet gave us so many technical spin offs, that save lives, and assist us every day. The phone in your pocket, is there thanks to the computing leaps made in developing the Apollo computer.
Since 1972, no one has travelled further than 450 miles from Earth.
The last human to walk on another celestial body was Gene Cernan, in December 1972. His voice, along with those of fellow Apollo astronauts, closed the session. Their message wasn’t one of conquest—but of care. The Moon landing was never just a stunt. It was a systems achievement, made possible by the work of over 400,000 individuals, from the people sweeping the floors, to the astronauts who flew the missions. Human spaceflight is one of the only areas in science, that we have regressed over the past 60 years, in terms of true exploration.
The legacy of Apollo is not just that it worked—but that it changed how we build.
The technologies may have aged. The thinking hasn’t. Apollo created a model for focused, mission-driven innovation—across hardware, software, and teams. Yes, it started as a geopolitical quest, to beat the Russians, but ended as a masterpiece of scientific achievement and is, without doubt, the greatest scientific and explorative endeavor in human history thus far. As we return to the Moon, the question isn’t simply “how soon?” but “on what terms, and for what purpose?” Are we just heading back to mine, pillage and grab resources, or are we going back to truly explore new frontiers? Apollo didn’t serve any individual ego, it was achieved “for all humankind”
What kind of innovation are we making space for now?
Thank you to Invest Bristol & Bath for sponsoring Space Day and supporting this event.
