On September 12, 1962, John Fitzgerald Kennedy promised Americans the Moon. In front of 40,000 people gathered at Rice University in Houston, he will give a decisive impetus to the so-called generation of baby boomthe one born between 1945 and 1965.
JFK exegetes emphasize the effectiveness of the message: it is simple (“We choose to go to the Moon”), it sets a date (“before the end of the decade”) and carries a formidable mobilizing dimension with a project history for the country, when he asserts: “We choose to do this and many other things, not because they are easy, but because they are difficult; because it will allow us to deploy the best of our energy and talent.” If the impetus given to the generation of boomers had to be reduced to a key moment, it would undoubtedly be the Rice’s speech.
In terms of technical challenge, the objective set by JFK is not exactly the Flamanville EPR. At that time, the United States had, in all and for all, fifteen minutes of experience in spaceflight. The term “flight” is also exaggerated since it is a ballistic trajectory aboard a tiny aluminum cockpit. It is also called capsule by NASA, where astronauts want to see a spaceship (spatialship) ; they’ll threaten to go on strike if it doesn’t have a tiny window, so they don’t feel like lab rats and can say they’ve seen the Earth from up there.
Boomers, pillars of innovation
To say that scientists are skeptical of this crazy idea is an understatement. Shortly after JFK’s speech, Pierre Tardi, then professor of physics and astronomy at the Ecole Polytechnique, “demonstrates” that it is impossible to send a man to the Moon, recounts with amusement one of his former students. Not only would Kennedy’s vision come to fruition in the space of just eight years, but the optimism and confidence that she carried would lead to one of the most prolific periods of innovation in history, whose boomers were going to be the artisans.
The effort involved 400,000 people in 20,000 companies and mobilized all the university research at the time. The benefits are innumerable: the microprocessor (invented in 1971), digital imaging, countless new materials, alloys and even textiles, dehydrated foods and even Velcro are the result of the space adventure… The effort of research will spread well beyond the space sector with inventions such as the medical scanner (1972), or the personal computer in the early 1970s.
Illustrious boomers mark the history of innovation. In his book Outliers (Penguin ed.), Canadian Malcolm Gladwell even theorized being born “at the right time”. Between 1952 and 1955 were born Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy (founder of Sun Microsystems, which transformed computing and simulation capabilities), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) or even Eric Schmidt, without whom Google would be probably remained an engineering fad.
interdependent eras
During the period 1975-2005 – which corresponds to the intellectual maturity of the boomers – more than 100,000 patents were filed in the United States, twice as many as for the entire preceding century. And this momentum has accelerated under the effect of the dumpsters of private funding, of chosen immigration, of the take-off of the digital giants driven by their formidable investments in research and development (Google spends more on R&D than all research French public). Consequences: between 2005 and today, 300,000 patents have been registered, three times the volume of the boomers’ golden age.
For Dennis Allison, professor of computer science at Stanford (California), the two eras are in fact interdependent: “Major technological, scientific and industrial projects such as the Apollo program have made it possible to learn how to mobilize and coordinate vast human resources over a short period of time and with specific objectives. It is certain that this ability has played an essential role in the emergence of large technology companies such as Amazon or Google.”
Is Europe’s backwardness in terms of tech explained by the absence of excessive ambitions? Possible. But the United States has also benefited from a historically integrated and homogeneous market. If Europe manages to develop its own, then its future is assured. Because subjects with epic dimensions are not lacking.