The media continues to reverberate today with profound thoughts about Apollo 11′s 40th anniversary. For example, The Wall Street Journal is struck by how different things are now versus the 1960s.

The First Man had and still has “the right stuff.” Click .

It took eight years from the time John Kennedy declared we would go to the Moon to the day an American landed on it, 40 years ago this week. It was also eight years ago this September that terrorists struck the World Trade Center, the site of which continues to be a hole in the ground and a national disgrace. (Wall Street Journal, 7/21/09)

Messy New York politics aside, and using their version of, “If they can send a man to the Moon, why can’t they…”, the Journal wonders,

How much harder can it be to fill a hole in the ground with buildings of any kind than to master the ground-breaking science and mechanics of space travel over the same number of years?

We’ve long resisted the notion of American decline … But it’s hard not to see in the contrast between the Moon program and … Ground Zero a warning about America’s national will.

The issue is largely one of timing and program type. Over the last 200 years, there are brief, exceptional intervals — called Maslow Windows — when the public is momentarily very supportive of great explorations and large technology projects. Maslow Windows are ebullient, transformative times generally separated by about 56 years, that are fundamentally driven by major economic booms during upswings in the long wave. The last one was in the 1960s during Apollo. Despite our current global recession, which is like other major contractions that have preceded nearly all other Maslow Windows of the last 200 years, our next ebullient, camelot-style interval is expected between 2015 and 2025. Not surprisingly, timing and economic conditions have not aided Ground Zero.

Program type is also important. Apollo was a Great Exploration that for the first time took humans to another world. Apollo was also a $ 150 B macro-engineering project (MEP) that captured the imagination of this world; no one who ever saw (or felt!) a Saturn V launch ever forgot it. Although there had been Great Explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark) and MEPs (e.g., Panama Canal) before, this was the first time they were ever unified in one grand project. Ground Zero is associated with a surprise terrorist attack on the U.S. in which 3000 people died. Given Ground Zero’s timing and history, it seems that Apollo is not a fair comparison.

On the next page (WSJ, 7/21/09), Bret Stephens compares “the right stuff” of the astronauts to our current celebrity culture and sees great disparity.

I detest anti-Americanism but I’ll concede this: It’s hard to watch American celebrity culture at work and not feel revolted … We make a fetish of uninteresting, detestable, loud or unaccomplished people: Paris Hilton, Princess Di, Keith Olberman, Michael Jackson.

By contrast, the 1960s Apollo astronauts were modest, private, patriotic, etc. For example, Neil Armstrong — the first man on the Moon — “never fails to mention the 400,000 people who worked to get him there,” and Gene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17 the last lunar mission, marvels that, “One day you’re just Gene Cernan, young naval aviator, whatever…And the next day you’re an American hero. Literally. And you have done nothing.”

Stephens wonders if America makes men like Cernan and Armstrong anymore. And of course America still does — in the military, fire-fighters, police and others who often risk their lives so that ours can go on relatively unthreatened.

It reminds me again of Sarkar’s social cycles that I first read about in a book by SMU economist Ravi Batra. Sarkar believed there are 4 types of people and social classes: 1) Adventurer/Warriors, who are strong physically and mentally and willing to take risks, 2) Intellectuals, who are interested in ideas, 3) Acquisitors, who have a nose for money and enjoy accumulating it, and 4) Laborers, who lack the skills of the first 3 groups and who, while essential to society, are sometimes exploited by them.

At any time in history, society as-a-whole takes on the characteristics of one of these 4 groups. You can tell which group is ascendant by the types of people that are most celebrated. For example, the 1960s were a brief throwback to Adventure/Warrior times because Apollo astronauts were globally admired for their courage and explorations. But over most of the 20th century, according to Batra, society has been dominated by the Acquisitor mindset, as evidenced by the types of celebrities mentioned by Stephens above.

In Cordell (1996), I speculated that a major episode of social change might soon result in a sociopolitical climate favoring grand explorations.

Although seemingly farfetched, this is exactly what economist Ravi Batra expects based on Indian scholar P.R. Sarkar’s law of social cycles. Batra sees our current social malaise as leading to a social revolution in which wealth ‘acquisitors’ will be replaced by ‘adventurer/warriors’ as the dominant group in society. The adventurer/warrior spirit is what led the USA to send people to the Moon and could be expected to focus on the endless space frontier again. Based on the timing of Sarkar’s cycles over the last 2000 years, this revolution could occur sometime between now and 2010.”

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