Don't Fall For It

CHAPTER 12Fooled by Intelligence

I guarantee that in every great blow-up there has been at least one big name investor involved all the way down.

—Jim Chanos

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before Congress with an audacious goal, proclaiming, “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

NASA analysts put those chances at 1 in 10 of ever happening. Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission would never have achieved that goal in 1969 had it not been for the crew of the Apollo 8. This less well-known mission occurred during Christmas time in 1968 and included the crew who were the first to ever orbit the moon. Armstrong’s famous first steps on the moon have overshadowed the first lunar orbit but, in many ways, this earlier mission may have been more impressive and riskier. Not only had it never been done before, but NASA was racing against the Russians to get there first, had little time to fully test all of their systems, and had no idea if their plans and calculations would actually hold up if the spaceship ever got there.

The crew on the spaceship – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell (the astronaut Tom Hanks played in the movie Apollo 13), and Bill Anders – faced daunting odds. The Apollo 8 spacecraft was built using 5.6 million parts and 1.5 million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Assuming a 99.9% effective rate, that would mean they ...