We like to tell stories—often in blockbuster films and children’s books—that dramatize a direct path from the initial spark of an idea to its realization. Decades of hard work and failed attempts are condensed into a brief montage that concludes with triumph. Thomas Edison thought electricity could illuminate the world, so he developed the lightbulb. John Atanasoff was frustrated by the limitations of late-twenties calculators, so he devised his own and soon followed it up with the first electronic digital computer. President Kennedy said we’d go to the moon, so we poured money and manpower into a rocket, and Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind.
Except, we know, the actual narrative is more complicated. Take that last example. When Kennedy gave his speech in May 1961, the genius rocket engineer Wernher von Braun and his team, which eventually found a home at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Alabama, had been investigating, for several years, how to get a man on the moon. The problem: the two main approaches weren’t working. The first method, a direct ascent from the Earth to the moon, would require a gigantic vehicle—bigger than the Saturn V—hardly the type of thing that could launch or land nimbly. In the second design, NASA would send several components of a spacecraft into Earth’s orbit, where they would have to be assembled by astronauts before launching to the moon.