I’m not sure why I was thinking of this, maybe it had something to do with those Kennedy tapes about Apollo that were released, anyway I was reminded of something I heard in junior high. My business ed. teacher told the class that back in the 60’s Kennedy could’ve given all the baby boomers a free college education, or we could’ve gone to the moon.
Is there any truth to this? I would’ve thought that sending an entire generation to college would have served the country much better, but what do I know? Now that I’m older, it seems kind of far fetched. If this is some kind of stupid myth, please rid me of this ignorance.
not engage in further research into nuclear weapons
not fund other Great Society programs, like Medicare
If there is an optimal way for a government to spend its money, please send the plan to the proper authorities as they would like to have such info.
Census Bureau stats on people who completed 4 or more years of college state that 9.4 %of the population had done that by 1965. By 1970, it was up to 10.7%. In 1999, it was 25.2% of the population.
In another table, the population of people between the ages of 35 and 54 (not exactly the Baby Boom, but that’s the way the figures are broken down), about 18% of them have a bachelor’s degree (it’s probably a slightly different figure, but it’s too late to do all the necessary calculations).
I had heard a statistic that American women spent the same amount of money in the same time frame as Apollo buying cosmetics. Even if the money somehow became available for such mass education does anyone think the government wouldn’t have found something else to justify taking the money away?
If the gov’t paid for everyones college would that many people really benefit? I think those people who would benefit would have gone anyway (and paid themselves) with some exceptions.
If you crammed everybody and his brother into gov’t paid colleges you would be doing a great disservice to those people who wanted to learn by overcrowding the classes and since everyone is not equally smart the classes will have to be dumbed down so the people who really have no bussiness being there can actually understand what’s going on.
My wag is we would be worse off putting everyone in college (by gov’t paying for it) then if we just took all that money and held a big bon fire and burnt it all.
And http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/cph-l-160h.txt gives the baby boomer population at 1990 as 76,542,735. I’ll round this up to 100 million to compensate for deaths. That means that the Apollo program cost $250 per baby boomer. Now, I’m not sure what college cost back in 1969, but I’m guessing that it was bit more than $250.
I might point that Bush’s increase in funding for the Department of Education for one year amounts to almost half of what the entire Apollo program cost.
As big government spending programs goes, Apollo was a trifle. There are half a dozen big government agencies that spend more money than that every year.
If everyone went to college, who would work at McDonald’s, or in the factories, or even in much more skilled professions such as machining precision equipment that require years of experience rather than a college education. It would have been a vast waste of resources.
Another statistic I’ve heard was that instead of fighting the Vietnam War, it would have been cheaper to give each family in Vietnam a Cadillac if they all promised to stay capitalist. Sure, they might not have kept the promise, but they went communist anyway, so we’d still end up ahead.
The figures I found were slightly different than the ones The Ryan found. One website said that $23.6 billion was spent on all U.S. manned spaceflight from 1959 (the beginning of the space race) to 1973 (the end of Apollo). That’s close enough to The Ryan’s figure of $25 billion. In any case, that’s worth somewhere around $120 to $150 billion in today’s money. The Ryan was figuring on sending all the Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) to college. I would say that what was probably meant was to send all those who would have entered college in the U.S. between 1959 and 1973 (which means that they were born between 1941 and 1955). I figure that there were about 2 to 3 million people in each of those years who lived to be 18, so we’re talking about somewhere between 30 and 45 million people. Say that we only have to educate 80% of them, since perhaps 20% went to college anyway. So that’s between 24 and 36 million people.
So we have somewhere between $120 and $150 billion in today’s terms to split among a group that’s somewhere between 24 and 36 million. That’s at least $3333 per person and at most $6250 per person (in today’s money). This might conceivably pay for two years of tuition at a junior college.
Without having any real cites at hand, I can nonetheless assure you that the intense drive for miniaturization that the moon race propagated is in large part responsible for the huge strides in microelectronics that so many of us benefit from today. Without the space program we might all still be using vacuum tubes by comparison.
A second, and much less recognized effect is how important it was that America incontrovertibly demonstrate to the entire world that our technology had no equal on earth. The string of initial successes that the Soviets enjoyed posed grave implications for many emerging new countries and their choice of political orientation. Because of the iron curtain and information control, the world did not see the significant loss of life and intense industrial pollution that the USSR left in the wake of its space program.
Our landing on the moon remains as a benchmark for all other scientific societies to meet or exceed. So far, none has and it is highly doubtful any single national space program will ever again be able to duplicate such an astounding feat. America’s proving that a nation of “capitalistic wage slaves” could and did outdo the “scientifically planned society” of the Communists served as an enormous lever in who bought arms from what country and thusly how a significant portion of the cold war’s political landscape was configured.
The moon landing program was one of the cheapest and most productive efforts ever undertaken by mankind in all of history. If only for the photos of our fragile blue-green planet floating amongst the stars, it was worth it in spades.
Obviously I meant to say “When American women bought Apollo.” No, no, no! Make that “When NASA bought American women.” No, wait. How about “When American women spent time…” Damn! Maybe NASA did buy it for their press releases?
Robert Heinlein makes Zenster’s case for the space program’s effect on miniaturization and advances in the health field in an essay in “Expanded Universe.”