I meant to expand on this. Yes, spacecraft have always actually been designed/built by private companies, but NASA hardly had a hands-off approach in the process.
No, of course not. Their astronauts are sitting on top of a potentially very explosive device built by the lowest bidder.
And Virgin Galactic killed a test pilot.
One of the few times I ever agreed with a Republican political platform-plank was George Bush (the elder) and his idea of government funding for “pre-competitive” science. Government grants and funding is good for the really basic abstract stuff – but once it gets to the point where a product might be built, and competition for business, it should fall to private enterprise.
The Apollo project was a special case: in the abstract ideal, it would have been a private corporate project…except that there weren’t any corporations big enough to take it on. It had to be a government project, or else left undone entirely.
They are STILL doing science from the moon landings, so not sure where you got this idea from.
Of course. We did surveys both from orbit and on the surface, took samples, left behind monitoring equipment. This leaves aside the bit about the engineering that went into actually getting there AND coming back, which people seem to think is easy yet even robotic probes from other countries haven’t had an easy time of it…even recent ones, like the Chinese.
They were on the surface over a day in the early missions, and 3 days in the later ones. They didn’t spend all their time singing, golfing and screwing around. 
This is just the parts that were broadcast and that have stuck. There were hours and hours of boring science that the public basically didn’t want to watch on TV.
Yeah, we were. But we were more interested in getting the astronauts there and bringing them home. The science was more a bonus. Again, they are still analyzing data today, as well as still using some of the instruments left behind (Mythbusters did a show on the moon hoax and they showed one of the laser reflectors left on the moon still in use). The US gave away a lot of samples to other countries which were and are still there and still being analyzed.
Well, today we’d be looking for water, something that the Apollo guys didn’t really know about. That and helium 3. But a mission today would probably be similar, in that it would still be about the engineering, though perhaps it would be about longer duration stays, allowing for more surveying than the Apollo guys got. But for what it was, we did a hell of a lot back then, and the key was we brought all that data and samples back to real scientists here on Earth to analyze. The only way to do it better would have been to go there to stay, giving humans longer than a couple of days in which to explore. That’s something that I don’t think was really feasible in the Apollo days…hell, it would be difficult today (note that no one else has been able to do it, and even we haven’t been back), and that’s with decades of further study and development of technologies to allow for how hostile the environment is.
“Hey Orville and Wilbur! What was the point of building the Wright Flyer? Hell, it can only carry a person for a couple of hundred feet. Total waste of time and money. You should be ashamed of spending so much effort on a gimmick. We should invest in better bridles for our horses instead. At least those are useful.”
Anyway, to answer your question about what science learned from the missions, you might like to read these:
Apollo 11 Initial Science Report
Apollo 12 Initial Science Report
Apollo 14 Initial Science Report
Apollo 15 Initial Science Report
Apollo 16 Initial Science Report
Apollo 17 Initial Science Report
That’s over 2000 pages of initial results from the missions, in summary form. And as was mentioned, new science is still being done using that data. For example, recently samples of lunar regolith have been used to figure out how to 3D print structures on the moon.
As to whether robots could do a good job - certainly not then. Some of the most interesting discoveries were made by Astronauts who spotted minerals and went out of their way to retrieve them. The robotic missions of the time would not have had anything like the capability to remotely identify interesting things and fetch them back to Earth.
In any event, I totally reject the notion that space should be just about the science. To me the Apollo missions were probably the best money the government ever spent. The effect it had on science and engineering education is incalculable - I was in grade school during the Apollo era, and half the boys in class wanted to grow up to be astronauts. That made them pay attention to science. Apollo raised America’s stature in the world during a period when both sides of the cold war were jockeying for allies.
Apollo also made the people more confident and willing to take on other challenges. When I was young, it was common to hear people say, “If we can put a man on the Moon, surely you can do X”. Or if someone would balk at a challenge, the response they might get was, “You’re telling me we can put a man on the moon, but you can’t do Y?” Apollo infused the psyche of the world with a sense of the possible, that great things can be achieved if you work hard.
Nowadays you’re more likely to hear, “Why do you think that can be done? Hell, we can’t even put a man on the moon any more.”
Automated missions do not harness the sense of adventure in children like manned missions do. They don’t give nations a sense of shared accomplishment or purpose. Geeks love them; the average person in the public yawns.
From my reading of Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff”, I get the impression that the test pilot killed in that Virgin Galactic incident was not, in fact, the first pilot ever to die while flying an untested aircraft.
This is wrong on so many levels
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We don’t have to compare the benefits of a manned lunar mission, versus robotic ones, We actually had both. TheSoviet Luna programme sent robotic probes to the Moon around the same time as the Apollo missions.. They even brought samples back, in the last three missions, The total amount of material? 600g. Compared with nearly half a tonne from Apollo. How much science came out Apollo and how much out of (the admittedly technically impressive) LUna. Other posters have already shown how much scientific data came out from Apollo. Suffice to say, the robotic exploration, the one time it has gone up with manned exploration, stank to high heaven.
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SpaceX and Elon Musk? Pray do tell what they have done (not claimed), done which merist such excitement. They have built a medium sized booster, and a less powerful version of the ATV. Their “innovations” consist of using Soviet style procedures (like horizontal integration) to reduce costs.
They have grand plans to do… Mars? Thats like hoping to go to LEO with 18th century balloons. Reusable rockets stages. Interesting. But, frankly the Shuttle SRB were also reusable, alongwith the Orbiter itself, and we all know how that turned out.
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.
Nonsense. Humans have known that flight was useful since we first observed the migration of birds. The difficulty was in achieving mastery of flight, not in finding a use for it. The same is not true of manned flight to other worlds. Imagine Mars wasn’t a hundred million miles away, and you could go there as easily as you go to the corner shop down the street. Would you go? Would you keep going, once the spectacle wore off? I don’t think you would. If Australia was just down the street, it would revolutionise the transport industry. But Mars? If you really want to visit a cold, dry wasteland, you don’t need to head off-world for that.
I don’t like security theater, and I don’t like science theater either. If you want a shared national purpose, at least let it be a purpose worth reaching for and not just nationalistic dick-waving. I’d much rather the government spend our money on exterminating another infectious disease than sending half a dozen men to another worthless wasteland.
We don’t know it’s a “worthless wasteland”, and we can’t know until we go. There could be plenty of interesting stuff there, under the surface beyond the reach of our current rovers.
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.
SpaceX uses modern rocket engines of their own design. United Launch Alliance buys Russian rocket engines developed during the Soviet era.
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.
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.
I could go on. SpaceX has been innovating new technology like crazy.
Well, I dunno. Once you’re out of Earth’s gravity well, once you’ve reached orbit, you’re already halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. If you want to go to Mars, why not just go straight to Mars, why stop over on the Moon? A Moonbase only helps if the spaceships are built there, out of Lunar materials; and, although it is easier to get a ship out of the Moon’s gravity well than Earth’s, it is still probably cheaper to build the ships on Earth and launch them from Earth.
That warrants more scientific exploration, but it won’t excite potential investors until something is found that can be profitably exploited in the short term.
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I don’t like security theater, and I don’t like science theater either. If you want a shared national purpose, at least let it be a purpose worth reaching for and not just nationalistic dick-waving. I’d much rather the government spend our money on exterminating another infectious disease than sending half a dozen men to another worthless wasteland.
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How is an entire world, a world that may once have harbored life and may still do so ‘another worthless wasteland’?? I really don’t get this attitude. It’s about exploring our universe, not ‘nationalistic dick-waving’. With your attitude we’d have never explored anything even on Earth…I mean, why go to the bottom of the sea or to Antarctica or the Sahara or the Atacama? Nothing to see there but wasteland, right? :dubious:
I’ll give you a hint: it’s the opposite of “Sure! Let’s spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars because there may once have been bacteria living somewhere in this desert!”
You’re entitled to your opinion. I swam in that sea for decades with the space fan crowd, who could color anything rose, dismiss any hurdle and wish-believe any version of reality they chose.
Our manned spaceflight record is dismal, when you add it up, because we started down the wrong path, on the wrong foot, for the wrong goals, and built a controlling agency with every possible flaw resulting from those wrongities. Our real accomplishments beyond the 100km mark have come from unmanned craft.
SpaceX, and to a lesser extent Boeing and the other private company (whose stuff keeps failing) have made space-capable craft (1) from scratch (2) reproducibly (3) successfully and (4) with a long-view plan to keep ramping up the capabilities to very useful commercial/technical levels.
You ARE aware that the last several supply missions to ISS were on SpaceX and other private craft? You ARE aware that at least two SpaceX launches had serious, almost crippling failures… and the team just shrugged, corrected, and got the capsule there anyway?
In this they differ from 40 years of predecessors who were (1) more on the deluded space-fan end of things than practical engineer/entrepreneurs (2) working with half-assed, half-engineered designs that “would be fixed in v2.0” and (3) used junkyard tech for all the hard parts like engines, tanks, pumps and guidance, meaning (4) when they ran out of junked Chevy 350s to blow up they were screwed.
SpaceX could get humanity back into space on a solid, continuing, evolving, successful and appropriately safe basis all on their lonesome, without no help from nobody else. THAT’s the difference.
You can go back to your L-5/NSS/Whatever-it’s-called-this-week meeting and whine about how I don’t appreciate all the Heinlein-is-god dreaming of the last 40 years. I won’t mind. Musk and most of the rest of the private spaceflight consortium that doesn’t come from retired NASA hacks are the real bearers of the Heinleinesque torch.
You probably don’t want to hear the very good theory about how the one key man who put us on the Moon was… Lee Harvey Oswald.
I love the irony of the username and posts in this Apollo mission thread. 
I can’t really agree–politicians decide how we spend our money, end of story. They wouldn’t have funded space travel to 1/10th the degree they did without the politicized atmosphere and the mostly mythical “race to the moon.” I say mythical because years before we launched the Russians had seen it was just simply too expensive and weren’t seriously competing with us for a manned mission, although they did have an extremely ill-advised rocket system in the N1 which rolled around for awhile after it should have been shut down.
I share a lot of your frustrations with the space program, but to me it was a choice between doing what we did or doing…essentially nothing. Maybe if I thought the money would’ve gone somewhere worthwhile I’d have preferred it not be spent on NASA at all, but the reality is it’d probably just get poured into some boondoggle Department of Defense program had we not been spending on Apollo.
But it was the first rocket we built that could deliver a payload of significant size beyond low earth orbit, I think it’s probably a bit fantasy to think the first of anything is going to be built efficiently, cheaply, or be particularly impressive given 50 years of retrospect.
This is an exaggeration, almost all the information from the Apollo program still exists. A lot of it can’t be meaningfully applied to any modern programs, but the idea that mountains of information existed that disappeared with the engineers is false.
Again, public interest only existed in the political climate of its time. Public interest was never going to be there for what you’re talking about–it still isn’t today, actually. The only reason any money gets spent on this stuff at all by the government is because it’s such a small portion of the budget even Republicans tend not to care that much, and it creates a lot of projects that congressmen can spread around their districts as pork, plus the vague “national prestige” that comes from being able to launch stuff into space.
I doubt it, to be honest. Elon Musk must be applauded for creating a profitable private space company–at least we’re told it’s profitable (it’s privately held so does not have to actually disclose its financial information.) A profitable space flight business can indeed build over time. But, Musk has grand designs to build a Mars colony in 20-30 years. I don’t much care what process improvements come there is simply no way SpaceX or Elon Musk personally will ever be able to finance such a mission, and it certainly can never be done at a profit using anything close to real-world technology in this generation or even the next dozen I’d guess.
I think there is room with the huge demand for satellite launches to support a robust private space industry. Also with the supply requirements for ISS there are government contracts to be had and NASA will always want to do unmanned missions all over the solar system which private concerns can certainly profit from, but the ISS will be shut down soonish after which there is virtually no way to make money at all from manned spaceflight.
If you aren’t making a profit moving people into space then you’re not really doing anything that notable by being a profitable cargo company. Aerospace companies have made money for years building rockets used by the government or communications companies, nothing new there.
Maybe, simply not going to happen, though.
False, and any student of history knows better. The first, no matter how stupid and ill advised, to get something is always remembered. No one has forgotten who Christopher Columbus is, and there are poor decisions and idiocy involved in his journey to the New World.
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.
Because there is no way to make money off it.
Which is also why nobody has visited the Moon since the 1970s.