# Questions and critizisms about the Apollo's mission **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 20, 2015, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381 "2015-01-20T14:28:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/41 "2015-01-22T01:17:39Z")
> [@kanicbird](#): > > Questions and critizisms about the Apollo’s mission I didn’t see much of the reboot, but in the original series his mission seemed mostly to talk Starbuck out of doing something stupid. As Richard Hatch is an indifferent actor you couldn’t expect much more out of him. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/42 "2015-01-22T04:39:55Z")
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton] Because there is no way to make money off it. [/QUOTE] How much money has been made exploring Antarctica? 😛 > [@](#): > > Which is also why nobody has visited the Moon since the 1970s. I don’t think that’s the reason, as the Chinese program shows. I also think that there is money to be made there once an economical lift system can be worked out. The early new world colonies weren’t exactly wildly profitable initially either, and, much as it will probably shock you to hear me say, there is more to life than simply making a profit. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 9:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/43 "2015-01-22T09:16:34Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > The moon has alot of impact craters from meteors which unlike on earth, dont get weathered away. I think if we go back we can collect alot of meteor rock which will say alot about the universe. An interesting question? (I know nothing). Are there potential scientific or commercial advantages to investigating or exploiting lunar meteorites? ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/44 "2015-01-22T13:55:20Z")
Manned space travel is not a universal dream- lots of people see it as utterly irrelevant. It’s the dream of a specific demographic who happened to hold a great deal of power in mid-century America. Basically, a lot of boys who read sci-fi as kids grew up and decided to make their hobby America’s Great Project. It was nice to have money and be in power, but America is less prosperous and power is more diverse now. Lots of people have dreams they’d like to see some true. My personal one is an end to malaria. That would be a triumph over one of our greatest foes and the end of enormous human suffering. It’s completely doable with enough resources. Anyway, my point is everyone has a childhood dream, but we are past the point where any one group has enough power to direct such massive resources toward them. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/45 "2015-01-22T14:12:34Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > My personal one is an end to malaria. That would be a triumph over one of our greatest foes and the end of enormous human suffering. It’s completely doable with enough resources. [Help](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquitofish) is on the way! ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/46 "2015-01-22T15:06:48Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Next week SpaceX is trying again for a soft landing of their 1st stage booster. If they are successful, it’s something no other private or public rocket program has accomplished. And they will be successful eventually - the last attempt was a very near miss, with a known failure cause that’s been corrected. There could still be other failures - this is a test flight programme after all, but they are very close. > If the landed rocket turns out to be easily restored to flying status, it’s going to cause a massive drop in the cost of lifting mass to orbit. SpaceX’s competitors are scared enough that they are starting their own reusable rocket programs. _If_. And even then thats presuming that actual costs turn out to be as low as projected. Which has never happened. > [@](#): > > SpaceX uses modern rocket engines of their own design. United Launch Alliance buys Russian rocket engines developed during the Soviet era. So SpaceX uses brand new and unproven engines, while ULA uses the most mature and tested kit? Got it. > [@](#): > > SpaceX’s Dragon has a unique escape system that has the escape rockets serving double duty as landing rockets, while still being much lighter than NASA’s old gantry-styled escape system - the weight of which killed the last hope for success for their poorly designed manned rocket built from a shuttle-derived solid fuel rocket. The engines are a unique design of SpaceX’s, using 3D printing to create more efficient combustion chamber shapes that were not possible before. Interesting. Has it ever been tested. > [@](#): > > SpaceX will be be flying the Falcon Heavy this year - a rocket that can carry very large payloads for a fraction of the price of the competition. Falcon Heavy is about 55 tonnes to LEO. For comparison, the Saturn V was about 130, the Energia was 100, and the STS (if orbiter is included) about 90. So they system that they have put in place is actually less capable than much older systems. > [@](#): > > I could go on. SpaceX has been innovating new technology like crazy. Well if by invent, you mean things that are still on the drawing board or in testing phases. Their actual accomplishments are quite pedestrian. For now. As it is, I really hope they succeed and if you just read the stuff released by serious aerospace types that they have working for them, its very interesting. Just ignore Elon Musk. > [@](#): > > Manned space travel is not a universal dream- lots of people see it as utterly irrelevant. It’s the dream of a specific demographic who happened to hold a great deal of power in mid-century America. Basically, a lot of boys who read sci-fi as kids grew up and decided to make their hobby America’s Great Project. > > It was nice to have money and be in power, but America is less prosperous and power is more diverse now. Lots of people have dreams they’d like to see some true. My personal one is an end to malaria. That would be a triumph over one of our greatest foes and the end of enormous human suffering. It’s completely doable with enough resources. > > Anyway, my point is everyone has a childhood dream, but we are past the point where any one group has enough power to direct such massive resources toward them. :rolleyes::dubious: Oh would you get off. Enough with the gender studies based nonsense. Even at the height of the misnamed “Space race” the NASA budget was only a small fraction of US government spending. Ditto for the USSR. And manned space flights are going to continue, whether the US is involved or not. China, India, Russia, even Iran all have or plan to have active manned spaceflight programmes and unless the US wants to become the Portugal of the space era, it will need to continue. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/47 "2015-01-22T15:18:41Z")
Martin Hyde - your reply would take forever to quote and answer point by point. I’ll just say that from my perspective - and meant in all good humor - you have drunk way too much USA/NASA/Rah-Rah kool-aid about the US space program. Go back and reread your reply with this one thought foremost: Point by point, you have good points… but ALL of them are based on the idea that the Apollo program was a good thing (because, because, because). My contention is that it was an utterly wrong choice to get us on a long-term successful path to manned presence in space. Yes, the SatV was the only way to get to the Moon in a few years… but we shouldn’t have had that as a goal. Yes, the pols determined spending… but we shouldn’t have been in a pointless “space race” to begin with. Each step of the solution involved brilliant engineering and spectacular accomplishment… to very little purpose and point, in the end. (We didn’t even retain, in an archival or legacy sense, much of the results of that engineering!) (ETA: most of our current heavy-lift capability was developed by the military, not NASA.) As for Elon Musk and “success” and “profitability” and so forth… list all the entities that have successfully launched craft to ISS. Now strike NASA - they’re basically out of the game until If and When and Orion. Strike the Russians - they’re broke and Not Our Friends right now. That leaves… SpaceX, and whether they are profitable in any reaonable term or running on Musk’s fat wallet is pretty much irrelevant given that their accomplishments are solid, and genuine, and repeatable, and forward-looking, and most importantly… not built on scrapyard Soviet missile engines and the like. (ETA2: Nor built on the equivalent “on hand tech” to lowest dollar like STS.) I have an Alan Bean painting on the wall signed by something like 30 astronauts. I am not blind to the glory of the US space program, especially 1960-1974 or so. But it was like a Fourth of July fireworks show: when the last fuse was lit, it essentially vanished into thin air. Time for a real advance on space. Musk is in the vanguard of that, and he’s the first figure in the field I honestly and completely admire, without reservations about his purpose and ability. ---
**Author:** ![Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aji_de_gallina/32/260_2.png) [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aji_de_Gallina)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/48 "2015-01-22T15:55:12Z")
> [@XT](#): > > I’ll give YOU a hint…all of the shit you use in your everyday life is due to the fact that someone decided to look into something that seemed silly or idiotic or off the wall. Most of the drugs you use are due to someone looking for ‘bacteria living somewhere’, and they have probably saved your life at sometime in the past. > > Finding a bacteria or even a fossil bacteria on, say, Mars would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time. The fact you can’t see it and put down basic scientific research says all there really needs to be said about your opinion on this subject. What you say is true, but many of the discoveries were made with people using their own money and time. “_We should spend 100 billion dollars because it might lead to a great discovery_” can be used to justify anyhting, especially since 100 billions dollars could provide clean water, sewage, vaccines, and micronutrients to several hundrerds of millions of people today. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/49 "2015-01-22T21:36:03Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Manned space travel is not a universal dream- lots of people see it as utterly irrelevant. It’s the dream of a specific demographic who happened to hold a great deal of power in mid-century America. Basically, a lot of boys who read sci-fi as kids grew up and decided to make their hobby America’s Great Project. . . . we are past the point where any one group has enough power to direct such massive resources toward them. The same could have been said of the Civil Rights movement, or the War in Vietnam. Every major undertaking a nation engages in is led by an inspired minority. We certainly aren’t past that point: look at the Affordable Care Act and its push-back, or military strikes against ISIS. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/50 "2015-01-22T21:48:16Z")
Manned spaceflight capability will bring its own rewards, some of which will be “great discoveries” and most of which will be on a par with those brought by building highways into a new region. Eventually, within the lives of many now here, we will have an “interstate highway system” around the Earth/Moon pair and amid the solar system. It will bring vast benefits to every living person, just as our current feeble unmanned orbiting efforts have so far, and anyone who tries to wonder how we ever lived without it will find it as difficult as imagining life with nothing but donkey paths and two-lane roads across the continents. Anyone who doesn’t understand that needs to stay off the goddamn highway or suffer the fate of all turtles. 🙂 \<- polite smiley only. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/51 "2015-01-22T21:50:07Z")
[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina] What you say is true, but many of the discoveries were made with people using their own money and time. [/QUOTE] Wasn’t the point I was making, which was that you never know what piece of information or engineering process will be important down the line, and sometimes just doing science or engineering on seemingly unrelated lines gives you huge unexpected benefits. Maxwell is always my favorite example of this. But even if we got nothing more out of the moon landings, it’s still a remarkable achievement and still worth what we spent. Of course, we DID get a lot more out of it, and are still analyzing the data to this day…that is, if that science stuff is important, which obviously it wasn’t to either the OP or the guy I was responding too. > [@](#): > > “We should spend 100 billion dollars because it might lead to a great discovery” can be used to justify anyhting, especially since 100 billions dollars could provide clean water, sewage, vaccines, and micronutrients to several hundrerds of millions of people today. We SPEND hundreds of billions of dollars on clean water, sewage, vaccines and other things already. But we also need to push the frontiers and boundaries both of science and of engineering to move forward. That’s why we (the collective ‘we’) spend money on things like sending robotic probes to visit comets or other planets, build particle accelerators to smash particles together to see what will happen and the myriad other things we do to explore the universe, even if the short term economic gain isn’t always apparent. People thought like the guy I was responding to about the entire space program back in the 50’s…some of those same people are probably reading this while watching their satellite TV right now and wondering why we should continue to waste money on all this silly science stuff when they just want to watch their Survivor or Dancing with the Stars. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/52 "2015-01-22T22:03:52Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Manned space travel is not a universal dream- lots of people see it as utterly irrelevant. It’s the dream of a specific demographic who happened to hold a great deal of power in mid-century America. Basically, a lot of boys who read sci-fi as kids grew up and decided to make their hobby America’s Great Project. Huh. Surprisingly sexist! > [@](#): > > It was nice to have money and be in power, but America is less prosperous and power is more diverse now. Lots of people have dreams they’d like to see some true. My personal one is an end to malaria. That would be a triumph over one of our greatest foes and the end of enormous human suffering. It’s completely doable with enough resources. We could save twice as much money by doing neither, and when the inevitable giant space rock hits the Earth and wipes out the human race, it’ll likely take care of the malaria, too. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/53 "2015-01-22T22:49:18Z")
I should clarify that there will probably be a time to invest in manned space flight at some point, but we have some serious leaps to make before then. Look at the history of flight- we’ve tried for centuries to design flying machines. A few examples had some limited success. But there were a few key things that needed to happen before we could come up with airplanes-- and the Wright Brothers were not the only ones to bridge that gap-- it would have happened even without them. It was time for that technology. As soon as we were at a point where it made sense, it all matured spectacularly quickly. Soon we had an enormous global air transport industry and it was a part of our everyday lives. Manned space travel may hit that point. But not now-- which is pretty obvious from the extreme lack of interest. The work we put in to this will be basically spinning our wheels, and there are much more effective places to innovate right now. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/54 "2015-01-22T22:57:47Z")
[QUOTE=even sven] Look at the history of flight- we’ve tried for centuries to design flying machines. A few examples had some limited success. But there were a few key things that needed to happen before we could come up with airplanes-- and the Wright Brothers were not the only ones to bridge that gap-- it would have happened even without them. It was time for that technology. As soon as we were at a point where it made sense, it all matured spectacularly quickly. Soon we had an enormous global air transport industry and it was a part of our everyday lives. [/QUOTE] I disagree. Things didn’t just happen because it was time, they happened because people kept tinkering with things, some unrelated to flight, and then those things came together and were accelerate once manned flight happened. Even early on no one thought it was worth all that much, but again, progress was pushed because some just thought it was cool. Note that, though the Wright brothers were American’s, they couldn’t interest the US military in doing much with the technology and we had to buy planes built in other countries initially when we entered the first world war, because, you know, that flight stuff was pretty worthless and why should we spend money developing something that was useless except for the coolness factor? 😛 I think that the same thing is happening with manned space flight. A lot of folks in threads like this like to say it’s not worth while at all, or that it’s time just isn’t here and we should just wait until that time is right. But we need to keep developing in order to push the envelop forward…which is what’s happening right now. Costs are coming down already, and the more we develop the more that’s going to happen. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/55 "2015-01-22T23:01:57Z")
But why manned? We have plenty to develop with unmanned space travel- which is more efficient, will have more useful returns, and ultimately will still do the “envelope pushing” needed to make manned space flight useful. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/56 "2015-01-22T23:38:25Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Huh. Surprisingly sexist! Oh, I’m sure girls read SF **now,** but . . . ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2015, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/57 "2015-01-23T00:01:43Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > But why manned? We have plenty to develop with unmanned space travel- which is more efficient, will have more useful returns, and ultimately will still do the “envelope pushing” needed to make manned space flight useful. Because it’s a continuum, not an either or, and both things push the envelop in different ways and teach us different things. This very thread kind of shows that. Consider…both the Soviets and Chinese have sent probes to the Moon. How much data have they brought back from those? Compared to our manned missions, which, as pointed out in this thread, are STILL giving us data that’s expanding our understanding. Or, to put it another way, it’s like saying that someone in the US doesn’t need to go to Europe, since everything they can see is online. Sometimes you just gotta go and see for yourself. As a species, I think that sometimes a representative of humanity just needs to go and look for themselves. We learn more both scientifically and engineering wise by doing that than by just sending out robotic probes…just like the converse is also the case, as we learn more by sending out probes than we would be just doing manned missions. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2015, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/58 "2015-01-23T00:23:47Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > But why manned? > [@](#): > > John Glenn: You know, I wonder how the press is going to feel about this. > > German Scientist #2: The press? What does the press have to say about this? > > German Scientist #1: Yeah, what do they have to say about it? > > Gordon Cooper: You boys know what makes this bird go up? Funding makes this bird go up. > > Gus Grissom: That’s right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. > > Gordon Cooper: And, uh, the press over there, they want to see Buck Rogers. > > Deke Slayton: And that’s us. Buck Rogers. > > John Glenn: You see, those fellas over there, they’ve been making us out as the seven finest, and bravest pilots in all America. And if a story were to come out in the press that we were not being allowed to fly as pilots… > > Alan Shepard: We want a window. – _The Right Stuff_ ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2015, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/59 "2015-01-23T00:51:05Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > Martin Hyde - your reply would take forever to quote and answer point by point. I’ll just say that from my perspective - and meant in all good humor - you have drunk way too much USA/NASA/Rah-Rah kool-aid about the US space program. Go back and reread your reply with this one thought foremost: Point by point, you have good points… but ALL of them are based on the idea that the Apollo program was a good thing (because, because, because). My first few lines was that it was the only thing likely to get funded at that level. I’m actually skeptical of manned spaceflight being of much value at all to be frank. To me the only real potential reason for manned spaceflight would be to either make money at it or in some science fiction scenario in which humans have to flee Earth. The first, if money can be made from deep space resource extraction then almost certainly it would be done more profitably by robots. Take the movie Moon, say you can profitably harvest H3 from the moon like they do in that movie. Their idea is that you need a human (literally one human) to man this huge resource extraction station. The reality is a society that could put such a big operation on the moon absolutely could put automated systems that would make human presence unnecessary. The second, “escape from Earth”, I simply don’t believe that, given the energy requirements and duration of the journey, there is ever any real way we can move humans out of the solar system in to live elsewhere. Maybe as a stunt we could someday send people out to the edge of the solar system/interstellar space and back, it would be massively expensive and serve little purpose. But a ship of significant size to transport say a “lifeboat” of humanity to some other star? First getting it to speed where it would make the trip in anything approaching a reasonable time (even assuming the “generation ship” concept) I think requires more energy than we’re going to be able to generate at any point of scientific development, second all the closest stars that are feasible destinations do not harbor planets we would be able to move to, certainly no more habitable than Mars. > [@](#): > > My contention is that it was an utterly wrong choice to get us on a long-term successful path to manned presence in space. Yes, the SatV was the only way to get to the Moon in a few years… but we shouldn’t have had that as a goal. Yes, the pols determined spending… but we shouldn’t have been in a pointless “space race” to begin with. I understand my post was long, but I would ask that you at least acknowledge what I said in it–I didn’t defend the space race, I just noted the political realities of it and why the path we took was the only one that would have seen significant investment. My guess is sans politics and the “space race” we’d have gotten something like the shuttle program a bit earlier instead of Apollo. A program I think was even more ill-advised than Apollo (but thankfully in inflation adjusted terms didn’t cost as much.) > [@](#): > > As for Elon Musk and “success” and “profitability” and so forth… list all the entities that have successfully launched craft to ISS. Now strike NASA - they’re basically out of the game until If and When and Orion. Strike the Russians - they’re broke and Not Our Friends right now. That leaves… SpaceX, and whether they are profitable in any reaonable term or running on Musk’s fat wallet is pretty much irrelevant given that their accomplishments are solid, and genuine, and repeatable, and forward-looking, and most importantly… not built on scrapyard Soviet missile engines and the like. (ETA2: Nor built on the equivalent “on hand tech” to lowest dollar like STS.) It’s absolutely important–private spaceflight isn’t sustainable unprofitably. Right now governments are willing to pay a really high payload cost to supply ISS and maybe later take people up on private flights (we already pay the Russians something like $50m/seat for our guys to ride on available seats on their rockets.) When ISS is gone in the 2020s SpaceX’s only real profitable avenue is commercial satellite launches or scientific launches for NASA. They could make money doing that stuff, but I don’t see that ever building to a legitimate “Mars colony”, which is what Musk wants (not a Mars mission, a Mars colony–that’s an extremely audacious goal.) ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2015, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381/60 "2015-01-23T03:00:54Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > My first few lines was that it was the only thing likely to get funded at that level. I’m actually skeptical of manned spaceflight being of much value at all to be frank. To me the only real potential reason for manned spaceflight would be to either make money at it or in some science fiction scenario in which humans have to flee Earth. > > The first, if money can be made from deep space resource extraction then almost certainly it would be done more profitably by robots. Take the movie Moon, say you can profitably harvest H3 from the moon like they do in that movie. Their idea is that you need a human (literally one human) to man this huge resource extraction station. The reality is a society that could put such a big operation on the moon absolutely could put automated systems that would make human presence unnecessary. > > The second, “escape from Earth”, I simply don’t believe that, given the energy requirements and duration of the journey, there is ever any real way we can move humans out of the solar system in to live elsewhere. Maybe as a stunt we could someday send people out to the edge of the solar system/interstellar space and back, it would be massively expensive and serve little purpose. But a ship of significant size to transport say a “lifeboat” of humanity to some other star? First getting it to speed where it would make the trip in anything approaching a reasonable time (even assuming the “generation ship” concept) I think requires more energy than we’re going to be able to generate at any point of scientific development, second all the closest stars that are feasible destinations do not harbor planets we would be able to move to, certainly no more habitable than Mars. > > I understand my post was long, but I would ask that you at least acknowledge what I said in it–I didn’t defend the space race, I just noted the political realities of it and why the path we took was the only one that would have seen significant investment. My guess is sans politics and the “space race” we’d have gotten something like the shuttle program a bit earlier instead of Apollo. A program I think was even more ill-advised than Apollo (but thankfully in inflation adjusted terms didn’t cost as much.) > > It’s absolutely important–private spaceflight isn’t sustainable unprofitably. Right now governments are willing to pay a really high payload cost to supply ISS and maybe later take people up on private flights (we already pay the Russians something like $50m/seat for our guys to ride on available seats on their rockets.) When ISS is gone in the 2020s SpaceX’s only real profitable avenue is commercial satellite launches or scientific launches for NASA. They could make money doing that stuff, but I don’t see that ever building to a legitimate “Mars colony”, which is what Musk wants (not a Mars mission, a Mars colony–that’s an extremely audacious goal.) It’s funny…you talk about how only sci-fi reasons would put man in space, then you talk about magic sci-fi robots that will do it all and be it all out in the solar system. 😛 Robots are limited, and that’s not going to change in the near future…or, perhaps even in the far future. Most of the robots that do any sort of useful planetary exploration require a human in the loop, and they are very limited in what they can do. It’s going to be a lot longer for us to get magic mining robots to extract and return H3 from the moon (or anywhere else) than it would be for us to basically send humans there to do the work, assuming it’s ever economical regardless of whether you send humans or robots. To me what’s really funny in these discussions is that people downplay what humans can and have achieved in space while emphasizing the large costs and over-emphasizing both the cost savings of robotics and their abilities and capabilities. The 6 human landings on the moon got us more data than all the robots sent since then…and probably all the rest that would or could be sent in the next century, based on what’s been collected from the Soviet and Chinese rovers on the moon. All this while the costs for humans in space are starting to show a promise of coming down and new technologies are being developed to allow for more manned exploration. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-and-critizisms-about-the-apollos-mission/710381.md?page=4)