How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Author:Daniel Immerwahr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

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In 1969 the United States achieved what was probably its most technically difficult goal since the Second World War: the moon landing. The most powerful rocket engines in history had to blast the spacecraft into the sky, where the whole thing would progressively dismantle itself mid-flight, shooting a smaller module safely into the lunar gravity well. There is a reason that “rocket science” became the proverbial way to refer to the hardest intellectual challenges out there.

Yet it wasn’t all jets and orbits. The moon landing was a triumph of chemical engineering, too. NASA needed light materials that could endure extreme temperatures and micrometeoroid strikes, yet keep pressurized air in. This meant synthetics. The moon suits that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore had twenty-one layers, and twenty either contained or were made entirely of materials manufactured by DuPont. There were familiar inventions—nylon, neoprene, Mylar, and Teflon—and new ones such as Kapton and Nomex. What was harder to find up in space was anything that might once have grown in a colony.

Raw materials just weren’t as important as they’d once been. The fifty-star flag that the astronauts planted, marking humankind’s highest ambition, was sewn of DuPont nylon.

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