I read something once some years ago by an author I don’t remember… the speculation went like this:
As a species, the human race took wild chances in getting to the moon by 1969 due to the space race. Our success was an overachievment for a species with minimal computing power and only fifty years of experience in flight. The speculation continued that if we had not had a space race, we quite likely would not have gone to the moon until the 1990’s.
In retrospect, the Apollo missions do seem to have been done at a pace which is unimaginable today. Firsts followed by firsts at an incredbile rate.
Did we overachieve in getting to the moon by 1969?
As a species? Nonsense. The “space race” never involved more than a vanishingly small percentage of the world population.
I am prepared to argue that it was an unsustainable stunt, and if there were any money to be made on the Moon we would have been back thirty years ago. I have gotten old enough to not be a huge real-world fan of manned space flight, especially since we have gotten so much better with robot probes.
If we find anything worth sending people to see, we will again develop the means to do so.
Getting to the moon was nothing more spectacular than a concentration of political will. This is a rarity, sure. But it’s hardly a triumph- it’s more of a indictment.
There are a number of amazing things we could do, with no need for additional scientific breakthroughs, right now. You know how we eliminated smallpox, and that was one of the most amazing things humanity has ever done? Well, there are a half dozen horrific, massively deadly diseases that we are perfectly capable of eradicating over the course of a few years, if we felt like getting our shit together and doing it. There are probably a dozen more that we could easily eradicate with just a bit of effort. Guineas Worm (a horrible parasite that eats its way out of your flesh, causing excruciating pain and hundreds of millions in lost economic activity), is on it’s way to be eradicated in a few years, pretty much entirely thanks to a bit of political will on the part of the Carter center. It was just one organization, in the course of a decade or so, that will soon achieve something humanity has only ever managed once. Imagine what we could do with some actual heavy weights.
Actually, it’s not too hard to imagine. After a relatively half-assed try, everyone just gave up on eradicated malaria. It’s not until a few years ago that the Gates Foundation decided to give it another shot, and started building the political will to do it. The results are spectacular. Malaria deaths in Africa have dropped 20% since 2000. This is a disease that kills on the scale of AIDS, and it really didn’t take that much to make that huge of a dent in it.
In fact, economists can put a fairly exact dollar amount and timeline to how much it would take to eliminate extreme poverty from this planet. It’s not even that much- it’s around 0.7% of the developed worlds GDP over the course of maybe 20 years. While it may be a bit more complicated than that, the point is, it’s totally doable. It’d be nothing more than a matter of deciding to do it.
In that sense, it’s kind of amazing that the last time we put together our formidable political will to make a lasting difference on the planet we used that to…thumb our nose at the Russians? What a way to squander a rare resource!
The key issue in getting to the Moon is rocket science. It was there in 1969 so I see nothing peculiar in doing it 1969. The problem with manned space travel is that we still have essentially the same rockets. So if it was an overachievement then it should be judged as such today, if we ever go back.
(To me , “overachievement” means something different than meant here. I think “over-” means excessive, perhaps in the sense that the Moon landing was a wasteful overreach. OP seems to use it in the sense of singularly impressive achievement.)
The Apollo program cost $25 billion (or a few million man-years?) in 1960’s dollars; it was the political will to spend this money that was most impressive. Some credit the charisma of one man, J. F. Kennedy. Without him it may be an understatement to say that the landing would have been delayed to the 1990’s: can anyone imagine such a useless expensive undertaking in today’s political climate?
I agree with even sven that it would be inspiring to see mankind set and achieve big goals, in imitation of the Great Pyramids, the Moon Landing, or the Eradication of Smallpox.
Though it was about political motive rather than economic cost, an opportunity was missed ten years ago. The world was horrified by terrorism; I think the right leader could have worked the moment into a great World Peace Conference, e.g. with India giving up Kashmir in return for Pakistan denouncing Taliban.
It was an amazing accomplishment that ranks up with the very top of anything done by man throughout history. When the USA is gone, this is the one thing that you shall be remembered by, and if I was American I’d be very satisfied that our finest hour was one of exploration rather than the more common: war. Kennedy shall be forgotten. Armstrong shall be remembered with Columbus. It was one of a number of feats of the same period that seems to have come in advance of its time. Another, smaller one is the Concorde airplane.
When we consider in retrospect the paucity of the computing power of the Apollo missions, it blows our minds that such a thing could have been achieved.
But the computers being used were state of the art at the time. And, astonishingly complex though the calculations were, the computing power required was not actually that great. The physics was Newtonian, well known and could have been done on a slide rule (and indeed calculations coming out of the computers were actually double-checked with this method). Furthermore the hardware wasn’t that different from what we have available today.
The sheer danger of the mission should not be understated, and it is well-nigh incredible that so many individuals made it there and back without a single death - almost inconceivable, in fact. But despite our faults, we humans are an amazing species: we went from the Wright brothers to the first commercial airline in just over a decade. As for the depths of courage and the limits of endurance, just read the stories of Shackleton or Hilary.
Rather than overreaching I’d say it was the single most astonishing feat of ingenuity, bravery, and curiosity in the history of mankind.
I remember in 1975 holding a handheld calculator that would perform all the required calculus. (Ok, the first one I saw was a prototype, my step dad was a Texas Instruments engineer at the time.) The computing power didn’t NEED to be massive. I distinctly recall my step dad wowing us at the time by telling us that we were holding more computing power than we used to get to the moon.
I suppose today I’d ask more detailed questions about what he meant by “more computing power,” but that opportunity is long gone.
It’s certainly one of them, up there with the like of Magellan and Cabot. I was awake to see the first landing, according to my dad, but I was only one year old, so…
I still sometimes see a beautiful full moon, and boggle at the fact that people actually went there.
There were deaths in the Apollo program, most notably Astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire. Other, less famous, people died in the line of their Space Race duties as well.
The Moon landing was all the things mentioned upthread: a daring engineering program, an historic achievement to be remembered when all of us are dust, a less military means of taking on our Cold War enemy/rival the Soviet Union. It was also a demonstration of the capabilities of our missiles, as well as a giant welfare program for large defense contractors.
JFK was presented with a list of big projects, including going after poverty in Appalachia. He chose to go to the Moon not because it was hard, but because it was achievable. Had he not been assassinated he would almost certainly have seen Americans as the first people to walk on the Moon by 12/31/1969. With what we know of his health issues, JFK may not have been alive to see the last poor person in Appalachia get a job in 1989 or even 1979. Thinking about the naivety and hubris demonstrated in the anti-poverty projects that happened in the 60s and 70s, a Manhattan Project sized program to end poverty in one region would likely have made a major mess.
Was the Moon Shot program an over-reach? No, it was known to be technically feasible all along. The Soviets might have beaten us there with inferior technology, but their moon rocket development program literally blew up on them. I think the over-reach was sticking with von Braun’s vision of space exploration even when it became clear that there were no viable economic or military gains, and darn few scientific gains, from manned space missions.
We made the money in the space race itself, not in any of the individual accomplishments that have come of it. Consider the advancements in computers, satellites and communication that we use today. We’re now carrying phones around that are capable of navigating to withing feet of any location and then displaying satellite images of that location as well as access to a worldwide network of information.
From a sheer brute force effort of will I’d rate the Giza pyramids or the Great Wall of China a greater achievement. Landing on the Moon seems within bounds of the technological advancements of the 20th century. In the span of 66 years we went from the first powered 3-axis flight to landing on the moon as well as the first flights of both the 747 and Concorde.
The OP seems to find this “overachievement” as troubling somehow, as if it should not have been attempted. I don’t see the downside. The only reason to be troubled, or depressed, about the Apollo missions is how they made apparent that humans have no immediate practical or profitable use of any kind for the Moon. At best, it will be like Antarctica – scientifically interesting, but only scientists ever go there.
People so often talk about how amazing it was that we went to the moon with computers so much less advanced than we have today; but, as you say, the math wasn’t that big a deal. Newton largely figured that out.
It was the engineering that was the real achievement. Self contained wearable environments that made it possible to survive and walk around in an environment consisting of vacuum, radiation, and extreme temperatures were an impressive achievement, for example.
A hugely impressive thing about the whole space program was that many companies rose to the challenge (or took the government dollar, depends how you see it I guess). The subsidiaries of International Latex, for example, ended up making bras and space suits.