Chandrayaan 1 is going round the moon now, it set me thinking, its been more than 30 years since the last man stepped on the moon. lot of things have changed. i remember one of the moon astronauts saying that "It was a Bold and Dangerous move, it was a risky decision but then it was the time when bold decisions were made". I think he knew what he was talking about. we live in a meek world. We are so scared of even stepping out of the norm, doing some thing different.
We have more than doubled the population of the world, technologically the stuff that exists today makes the moon lander look like telephone booths with attached oxygen canisters. But compared to the fifties to seventies era, when all the technological advancements where giant leaps of human endeavour, today we are just moving forward at a pace even a snail would blush at.The Europeans came up with the Concord, Lockheed Martin with skunk works that produced technological marvels like the U2 and F14 the culmination of which was the SR71 Blackbird. We sent probes roving the solar system, the Voyager missions are still working and transmitting data far away from the solar system. We built submarines that could disappear into the sea for years and we landed on the moon. the Space Shuttle was a step back and costlier than the big Saturn rockets that took us to the moon, so was every other air liner built after the Concord. We still don't have any thing to even compare with the BlackBird let alone surpass it. socially to we were making big advances too, being a hippie was acceptable, people were getting involved in the main stream. we had visionaries like JFK, Martin Luther King, Indira Gandhi who changed the world with their vision, broke down barriers with the sheer force of their persona and leadership. When they said some thing the world listened. Today the political leadership takes credit for every small achievement. We forget that most of the times we are only trying to make up all the backsteps we took.
I'm not trying to downgrade or down play the advancements of the today's generation, but every time we celebrate any small improvement on the International Space Station, i cant help feeling that all those people who worked on the moon mission would feel cheated. Every time we talk about fifth generation aircraft and their super cruise abilities, Kelly Johnson and his SR 71 are still untouchable. Similarly the Concorde sits in a class of its own in toady's plethora of Airbus mammoths and Dream-liners. Where has the will to take steps over the edge of the known, to step into the dark and strive to create light gone. The ability to take bold decisions seems to be lacking in today's generation. James Quinn at Wharton called the baby boom generation as "Shallowest Generation" i would add the Least Imaginative generation epithet to that too. These people who created marvels did so with imaginative and one line briefs, and in Kelly Johnson's' and the moon teams case, with slide-rulers, most often than not they were called into an office of some one who did not care about waht conventional wisdom said, what challenges these people faced and told them to create some thing never seen before, most probably in one line. I can think of only two people today who would dare to do such a thing today, Mr Ratan Tata who called his team of engineers and asked them to create a Car with all the basic modern trappings in Rs. 100,000(Nano) and the former Volkswagen boss Mr. Ferdinand Peich who gave one set of engineers the challenge to make a car with 1000 bhp (Veyron) that could do 400 kph and a second set of people the challenge of creating 100mpl car(1 Litre Car). All three of these creations are a realty today, two in or nearing production the third a working prototype that formed the basis of VW's brilliant Blue Motion engines.
These two men weren't dreaming or smoking weird stuff they understood technology and they understood where those limitations lay. They also knew when pushed, envelops tends to tear, and everything beyond becomes achievable. They weren't scared to dream and more over were ready to back the dreams with their resources. Tata gobbled up Land Rover and Jaguar, and when the entire worlds auto industry is in trouble, tiny Porsche(headed by Ferdinand peich) is slowly but steadily gobbling VW who is also in the rudest of health. These two have had to keep up with famous ancestors too, Ratan Tata is the nephew of JRD Tata, visionary extraordinaire and the founding father of Indian Industry, Piech is the grandson for Ferdinand Prosche who had a hand in every great car to emerge from Pre WWII Germany, so may be its in the blood.It is said that during 400 hundred years of Dark Ages Europe produced geniuses like Rembrandt, Galileo, Michelangelo, and many others and Switzerland in the same period isolated from all the turmoil gave us the Cuckoo Clock. Times are bad and we need similar visionaries. We meed people who can step up and proclaim that "I have a dream..." and then follow it up. We need to go to the Moon again and beyond.