Ed Catmull, the cofounder and longtime president of Pixar, was watching the General Magic documentary with David Epstein when he headed to the bookshelf, Epstein explains (in Inside the Box):
When Catmull returns from the shelf, he’s holding a laptop-size book with giant red letters splashed across the cover: By Space Ship to the Moon, published in 1952.
The text is clearly targeted at adolescents, but it gives meticulous summaries of the state of 1952 technology — everything from space fuel to space food — and the distance between the current state of the art and how far it needs to go for a trip to the Moon.
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Nearly two decades before the actual Moon landing, scientists and engineers were thinking slow, breaking a giant challenge into tiny pieces. “It goes through chapter by chapter the things that have to be solved,” Catmull explains. “The supplies; the fuel; how do you get up into space; what’s it like to actually be there; landing; food; the process of getting back. It’s a step-by-step of what it takes to get to the Moon.” His point is that even literal Moon shots aren’t “moonshots” in the way they’re often mythologized — just give bright people an inspiring vision and tons of money and the rest will fall into place. General Magic, he suggests, went the mythical moonshot route.
Returning to the documentary:
“The greatest people are self-managing,” the man says. “They don’t need to be managed. What they need is a common vision. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it.”
Catmull looks like he just opened a carton of sour milk. The man on screen was his longtime Pixar business partner, Steve Jobs. It doesn’t sound like the person Catmull knew, the one who obsessed over the number and placement of bathrooms in the Pixar office such that people would be forced to bump into one another and talk. “That is not how Steve ended up working,” he tells me. He concludes that Jobs was either just very young in that clip, or in “mythmaking” mode, providing inspirational soundbites for the media.
I managed to find some scanned pages from the book:
Crewman wheels fuel tank from cave, as moon-to-earth missile is readied for firing.
The station on the moon would be pretty safe against any kind of attack from earth…and guided missiles fired from the moon against a target on earth would be almost impossible to stop. So the first trip to the moon will be made to explore for a place where a military base can be set up.
Base ship will be dismantled to build moon-base. Observatory will be re-erected on mountain top,
Battery-powered, tractor-mounted drill at work. Gravity one-sixth that of earth makes handling of heavy equipment easy
There is nobody on earth rich enough to pay for a rocket that would go to the moon. The big business corporations might possibly find the money, but they would want to see some way of getting it back. At present, it is believed that many valuable minerals are to be found on the moon, but nobody knows for sure. It is not very likely that the big corporations will risk their money. So it appears that the moon rocket will have to be a government project
Sun’s rays are focused by large reflector on mercury boiler. Vapor will drive engines to furnish electric power.