Charles Fishman > Quotes

“What NASA did for semiconductor companies was teach them to make chips of near-perfect quality, to make them fast, in huge volumes, and to make them cheaper, faster, and better with each year.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Reihm wasn’t thrilled by the Moon walk that he and his colleagues had worked for years to make possible; he was thrilled by its being over,”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Every time you see the Wal-Mart smiley face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach. - Sherrie Ford”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“Three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Wal-Mart can't seem to grasp an essential fact: in 2006, the company has exactly the reputation it has earned. No, we don't give the company adequate credit for low prices. But the broken covenant Sam Walton had with how to treat store employees, the relentless pressure that hollows out companies and dilutes the quality of their products, the bullying of suppliers and communities, the corrosive secrecy, the way Wal-Mart has changed our own perception of price and quality, of value and durability--none of these is imaginary, or trivial, or easily changed with a fresh set of bullet points, an impassioned speech, and a website heavy with "Wal-Mart facts".

If Wal-Mart does in fact double the gas mileage of its truck fleet, and thereby double the gas mileage of every long-haul truck in America, that will be huge. It will change gas consumption in the United States in a single stroke. But it hasn't happened yet. And even if it does, it will not make Wal-Mart a good company or a good corporate partner or a good corporate citizen.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“didn’t usher in the Space Age; it ushered in the Digital Age. And that is as valuable a legacy as the imagined Space Age might have been. Probably more valuable.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The small stuff matters. The company that became the largest and most powerful in history isn't a military contractor or a car company. It isn't the result of savvy lobbyists in Washington, or the happenstance of controlling the supply of petroleum, or some kind of cabal that is beyond the understanding of ordinary people. The largest and most powerful company in history is built by each of us handing over three single dollar bills over and over again.”
― Charles Fishman

“Out of frustration and political necessity, he concluded that the only way to reassert American leadership in space wasn’t with individual launches or steadily matching Soviet achievements or patient explanations of the sophistication of American satellite technology. Kennedy wanted a single leap that was distinctly American in ambition.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The Apollo spacecraft computers contained memory composed of 1s and 0s, like all modern computer memory. For Apollo, the fixed memory that contained the programs was composed of exactly 589,824 1s and 0s.64”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“In fact, the point of saying “If we can put a man on the Moon” is to conclude the conversation on a subject. It’s a way not just of finishing but of winning an argument and declaring victory. It must be inarguable that if we can send a man to the Moon, we can deal with our garbage, our racism, our poverty, our missing salmon. Case closed.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“We want clean air, clean water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world. Yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“Wal-Mart's business in the United States is stagnating, growing only because the company continues to relentlessly open new stores. But if Wal-Mart takes environmental responsibility seriously, if its stores become models for energy conservation and for doing minimal environmental harm (they are known for the opposite right now), that will be pioneering, and it might also be attractive to some Americans who have avoided Wal-Mart. If those stores are filled with products made by factory workers who are treated in a civilized fashion, products that do not damage the environment in the course of being made, products made in sustainable ways with minimal packaging,
that will represent a pivot point, not just for Wal-Mart, or for retailing, but for capitalism. Nothing could do more to jump-start Wal-Mart's business than for Wal-Mart to find its soul.

And of course, Wal-Mart's scale means that if it starts to take the design of its buildings and the impact of its products seriously, all its competitors will have no choice but to do the same. The virtuous Wal-Mart effect would ripple widely. It would ripple around the world.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“The rover camera was operated from Mission Control by Ed Fendell, who managed to record the entire liftoff, sending commands to angle the camera up in sync with the LM’s swift ascent. Fendell started sending commands three seconds before the astronauts gave the blastoff command, to account for the time it took the radio signals to reach the Moon (still from video).”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“How many companies can say that the amount of customers who use their services second most often, and spend the second most amount of money with them, are “very negative”?”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“Instrumentation Lab software engineer Margaret Hamilton, who graduated from college in 1958, joined the MIT Apollo project in 1963, and by 1969, just 11 years out of college, was overseeing software for the command module, and is often credited with popularizing the phrase “software engineering.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“The New York Times had it exactly right, and Mailer had it exactly wrong: the boredom was a measure of NASA’s success. The first splitting of the atom is a milestone event in human history, but every minute of every day, nuclear power runs everything from alarm clocks and coffeepots to aircraft carriers, and the only people watching are the people in charge of the nuclear reactors. The first time a Boeing 747 took off and landed successfully, carrying 350 people, having been christened by the first lady of the United States, it was front-page news. But every day for decades there were hundreds of 747s in routine service, and their comings and goings attracted notice only if something went wrong.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Some parts of the lunar module couldn’t be tested at all. The batteries that supplied power throughout the lunar landing and the surface stay were specially made for Grumman; they were high capacity, but they could not be recharged.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Please go back up”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Kennedy had vowed to do something that, at that moment, couldn’t be done. Eight years later—eight years and two months—one astronaut was orbiting the Moon, and two were bouncing around on the surface. In eight years the spaceships were imagined, designed, constructed, tested, and then test-flown. The astronauts were chosen and learned to fly those spaceships, practicing so relentlessly that the routine procedures became instinctive. The spacesuits were designed and sewn; the problem of flying back through the atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour without burning up was solved; a small group of determined engineers managed to get an electric car designed, built, and added to the flight manifest.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“One of the quiet triumphs of the Apollo era for NASA was the construction of a worldwide space tracking network with astonishing capacity and resilience; it had 14 tracking stations on land, two satellites in geosynchronous orbit, four tracking ships at sea during missions, and, during reentry, eight planes in the air.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“A single AGC like the one on Eagle that Armstrong and Aldrin were using had 3,840 bytes of erasable memory, what we call random access memory (RAM) today. It had 69,120 bytes of fixed memory, or read-only memory (ROM).”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“No human being has left low Earth orbit—from the U.S. or any country—since December 7, 1972, when Ron Evans, Harrison Schmitt, and Gene Cernan fired the engine of their Apollo 17 ship America to head for the Moon.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“One thing made the Polaris missiles and subs possible: precision inertial navigation, provided by the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Each submarine had to have an inertial navigation system so it knew where it was. And each missile also had an inertial navigation unit to guide it from its submerged launch platform to its target.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“shaking Richard Nixon’s hand, he declined. Not long after Apollo 14 returned to Earth, Rolling Stone magazine sent Tim Crouse to profile Eyles. He’s pictured with his hand on the abort button on MIT’s lunar module simulator. The headline: “EXTRA! Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14!”89”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Sometimes cheap is inexpensive. Sometimes it's cheap.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“Wal-mart has done such a superb job of austerity, from start to finish, that austerity is all that's left.”
― Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works - and How It's Transforming the American Economy

“First, NASA used integrated circuits—the first computer chips—in the computers that flew the Apollo command module and the Apollo lunar module. Except for the U.S. Air Force, NASA was the first significant customer for integrated circuits, and for years in the 1960s NASA was the largest customer for them, buying most of the chips made in the country.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Kennedy’s press conferences were full-dress affairs. He prepared the night before with briefing books laying out 20 to 30 likely questions and their answers, and did a practice run-through with senior staff the following morning. The press conferences were either in late afternoon or early evening, and Kennedy typically took a nap beforehand. So many reporters wanted to cover them that they were held at the auditorium at the U.S. State Department. The smallest gathering for the first eight was 297 reporters.8”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon

“Wal-Mart benefits from the impression that globalization is some kind of unmanageable economic weather system out of the control of everyone, affecting all players with indifference, benefiting those who happened to be properly prepared.”
― Charles Fishman

“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon. . . . We choose to go to the Moon, in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
― Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon