Sarika Bansal
BRIGHT Magazine
Published in
9 min readJun 21, 2018

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The AX3 Spacesuit 1977. Photograph courtesy of NASA/Ames Research Center.

HHow do we solve the biggest issues facing the world today? I’m talking huge ones like hunger, homelessness, air pollution, illiteracy. Those big, hairy problems that have perplexed humans for centuries.

You solve them with a moonshot, of course. Or that’s what much of the elite world of social change — the TEDs, the larger-than-life philanthropists, the Skolls — would have you believe. Don’t think about how to make the problem 10 percent better, the thinking goes, but 10 times better. Bring together the world’s geniuses from a variety of disciplines, unite them under a common purpose, and they’ll design their way to a radical new solution to end poverty or halt climate change. The money will follow, the idea will gain hold, and soon enough, we’ll be waving at the problem through a rearview mirror.

The metaphor originated in the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy famously said the United States would go to the moon in that decade “not because [it] is easy but because [it] is hard.” The term has resurfaced in the last decade or so, and it moonshotted (sorry) after Google created a “moonshot factory” in 2010 called Google X — now just known as X.

Astro Teller, the company’s “Captain of Moonshots,” says that X sits at the nexus of huge problems…

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