Fifty years ago, the Apollo programme put a man on the Moon. Alongside the Manhattan Project, which had delivered the atomic bomb, it was probably the most complex and ambitious mobilisation of state and science the world has ever seen. It was a vast overreach of effort: achieving the aspiration required the invention and mastery of new technologies, alongside the systems of scheduling and control to use them. From project management to computer simulation, new disciplines emerged, and all of them in remarkably short order.
