I am in the middle of thinking about buying this book and whilst criticised for its inaccuracies and strawman attacks, I was wondering whether this polemic had any weight in regards to the value of the Apollo programme?
Was it all just a waste of money?
If nothing else, we had a period in world history where engineers and scientists were the heroes everyone looked up to. Where exploration and scientific achievement was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. This would’ve inspired countless young people to pursue careers in scientific and engineering fields which would’ve enhanced the incredible pace of economic expansion, scientific discovery, increases in productivity, and quality of life. I suspect that it probably paid for itself several times over just for that.
Some things hold such immense psychological value that they are worth their price. Bear in mind that China and Russia spent $44 billion and $50 billion hosting the Beijing and Sochi Olympics, for instance, in the name of pride and face. (Not that those were necessarily good things, but it puts Apollo’s price tag in perspective)
Landing men on the Moon is such a historically significant feat that if the U.S. hadn’t done it in the 1960s-1970s, some other nation would have done it, or maybe we would have just done it later.
There are a lot of people who think that unmanned space exploration has more bang for the buck in terms of scientific knowledge gained than does manned space exploration.
Sure, but for psychological effect there’s nothing like human astronauts. Landing the first men on Mars will get 1000x more attention than Sojourner or any other unmanned rover ever could or will.
Well, measuring the impact as a pure money ROI, then I suppose many endeavors fall short. Was WWII worth the money? Are Presidential campaigns worth the money?
Once you accept that a pure money ROI is not the correct measure for everything in life, then the answer is easier to reach.
That’s some negative reviews for something I’d have to pay money for.
Landing men (and women) on the Moon again will get 1000x more attention than these unmanned probes. It’s not always about raw scientific data. You get interest and involvement with people not machines.
I was at Kennedy Space Center in 2005 after Bush announced that a man would be on Mars in the mid 2030s. The tour director pointed at some youngsters on the tour and told them that one of them could be the first person on Mars. They squealed with delight.
You can’t capture that shit with probes.
ETA: Imagine the first woman on the moon; how much adoration she will get. That will be awesome.
With the hidden assumption that our only goal in space is to do science. Who says it is?
We go out into space because it is a vast, untapped resource. It breaks us out of a fragile, closed system and opens us to the limitless possibilities of the universe. It gives people something to hope for, something to dream about. It inspires kids to go to school and study meaningful topics.
And yes, there is plenty of science to do there - science that could have great benefits to Earth. But that’s not the only reason for going.
I also agree with SenorBeef - I think Apollo paid for itself just in the effect it had on education and the spirit of the people. When I was young, hard problems were often prefaced with, “Hey, if we can land a man on the moon, we can solve this.”
Scientists can be inspired by scientific data. For the lay public, inspiration comes from seeing other people achieve great things. We need heroes, and it would be much better if our kids looked up to astronauts instead of athletes, pop stars and Youtube ‘influencers’.
The total cost of the Apollo program is $288 billion in 2019 dollars.
By comparison, the cost of the Vietnam War would be about $1 trillion in 2019 dollars.
So clearly sending a man to the Moon isn’t the dumbest thing you can blow a quarter trillion dollars on.
Especially considering the boatloads of technological advances that were made. Microchips and velcro are popular to site, but a HOST of things came out of the needs of the space program that have HUGE impacts on the economy of today. We were also perfecting rocket technology which had wartime applications (not much difference between a Lunar Rocket and an ICBM) but more importantly our satellite network owes a huge debt to the Apollo program.
Compare that to the total cost of the F35 program ($1.5T over it’s expected 55 year lifespan) which so far has given us… a jet that pilots don’t love, that doesn’t really excell at anything, but will make blowing people up a little easier…
Yeah, no contest.
And the Iraq war cost about $2.4 trillion.
And we should keep in mind that Apollo wasn’t just an engineering project or a science project. It was one of the campaigns of the Cold War.
With what we know now, the entire space program was a ridiculous waste of money. Was it the only enormous waste of money? No. So what? That’s not the question that was asked.
I was around at the time and I would have told you that I was completely for the moon program. Since that time I’ve done a lot of research into the origin of the space race. It’s embarrassing. The military was both paranoid about the Russians and double dog daring them to try something. The space program was pure military dollars laundered through NASA and leavened by a gigantic propaganda campaign, funneled though Henry Luce’s exclusive rights to fill pages of Life magazine.
The true “space-happy” community (a phrase of Robert Heinlein’s) knew how a space program should properly work, taking small steps, creating a space station, and learning about the rigors of vacuum. All this information was publicly available and well-known to everyone in NASA. All of it was thrown away solely to beat the Russians to the moon because losing would hurt the egos of a few politicians and generals. There was no other purpose for the 1969 landing.
The pictures from the past make it appear that the entire country celebrated when we landed on the moon. Maybe we did, for a day or two. But modern research shows that at least half the country was against the space program at the time. And obviously, virtually all the people who celebrated on that July day cared not a whit about it a week later. The moon landing changed nothing and accomplished nothing.
This is heresy among space people, of course. For me, the proof of this opinion is that the current revival of space is due entirely to the egos of a handful of billionaires, who are promoting their large phallic objects over actual scientific research, which continues to be woefully underfunded.
Yes, the moon program was a better thing to spend money on than Vietnam and better things came out of it. Again, so what? You really want to make “better than Vietnam” your standard?
I’m one of them - I’m Mr. “Space is for robots.” Space travel is orders of magnitude less costly and dangerous for travelers that don’t need food, air, water, or protection from vacuum and cosmic rays. But:
These days, I very much doubt that the Soviets could actually have gotten to the moon and back. But in the 1960s, we sure as hell didn’t know that. (Maybe our intel people did - I don’t know. The rest of us didn’t.) Fact is, the Russians got quite a jump on us with their space program, and it wouldn’t have gone over well if they’d beaten us to the moon. I hate to disagree with brother Exapno, but my take is that we really needed to be the first nation there.
I agree that unmanned missions are far more cost effective and productive.
Or what? Seriously, what difference would it have made? Sure, the Russians would have made it a major propaganda victory. But we were in the middle of Vietnam. What greater harm could we have done to our reputation worldwide? The nations that were trending toward Communism would have done so in any case. The USSR couldn’t have followed up with any real-world victories; they were already pouring all the money they had into the useless space and arms race that eventually killed their system.
I could easily project awful consequences from a loss: Nixon and LeMay and some of the others might have actually decided to nuke Nam back to the stone age to prove how wonderful we were. Or maybe with the pressure off, we could have taken a side road and put real effort into space. Anything’s possible.
I’m one of them. I think this is absolutely and incontrovertibly true. But at the time, the political motivations seemed pretty imperative, and that’s no small factor. It’s hard today to fully appreciate the military perspective of the Cold War era and those times, which had hardly much changed since 1953 when LIFE magazine published the following pronouncement about the vital national security aspect of technological control of outer space, coming from what was then one of the nation’s leading space experts. Apologies if I’ve quoted this before, which I may have done, but it’s a fascinating insight into the mindset of the time:
The satellite station, says Von Braun, looking the U.S. military leaders straight in the eye, will pay off as nothing has done since the time of the Roman legions. If placed in its orbit by the U.S., it will give the U.S. a permanent military control of the entire earth. No nation will challenge the power that looks down upon it from an artificial moon. No nation will attempt to challenge it; the earth will enjoy pax Americana and can beat its radars into television sets.
The satellite station, explains Von Braun, will provide the two essentials of successful war: observation and bombardment. It will swing around the earth once every two hours, and as the earth slowly turns beneath it on its own axis, every part of its surface will come into view. When an enemy is observed making or preparing a hostile move, Von Braun proposes to smack him with small, atom-armed guided missiles sent down to earth along the path of his returning shuttle rockets. They will have rocket motors just powerful enough to put them into descending ellipses. When they reach the atmosphere they can be steered by radio signals acting on their controls. Both the missiles and the target (say a Russian plutonium installation) will be in view from the satellite. So the missiles’ course can be corrected continuously, making a direct hit almost inevitable. The atomic bombs in the missiles’ nose will take care of terminal action.
The goal of going to space is to develop the technologies needed to be able to exploit those resources in a commercially viable way. We do need more science points to unlock in situ resource utilization.
There are two reasons for sending people into space. The first is, as you indicate, PR. People do get more excited about seeing an astronaut play guitar on the space station than they would be watching a rover drill into a rock sample on Mars, even though the latter yields more science and probably cost less to do.
The second, and IMO more important reason, is science, specifically, the science of keeping humans alive in space. This too needs more research before it becomes commercially viable.
All you need is a significant percentage of the most intelligent and educated population to focus on that single problem for a decade with a nearly unlimited budget.
Sometimes, that’s the best way to get something done, especially something hard. But it’s not the most efficient way to approach most problems.
There are downsides to this as well. Obviously the worst would be a serious accident, or series of accidents, that scares people away from space as being too dangerous. Putting too much pressure on manned missions could end up pushing the limits of our engineering too quickly, leading to possible mistakes. A Mars mission is not going to be 3 people, it’s going to be a couple dozen, at least. Losing the crew because we went too early could set space exploration back significantly. Losing a probe doesn’t have the same emotional impact with the public.
Even with a completely successful Mars mission, we’d end up keeping the people as far away from the environment as possible, preferably underground, and do most of the exploration and science with rovers and other autonomous probes. The shorter light lag and the ability to physically inspect and repair a rover would be a benefit, but not one that would justify the actual cost and risk of sending them. You are going to have to send all the rovers and equipment along anyway for the people to run. If you just leave the people behind, you can send ten or a hundred times more rovers.
Once we’ve got autonomous processing sorted out, we can send robots to Mars to build us a nice habitat, complete with food production capability, and ensure we have fuel and basic supplies to get home. At that point is when it makes sense to actually send some people, but I’m still not entirely sure why.
As far as PR moves, it would still be better to work our way up. Start with a manned mission to a near Earth asteroid. You have to be much more choosy about your windows, but you can get to some easier than to the moon, and we’ve already been to the moon. Though less delta-v, the mission will take a bit longer, and give us more experience with longer deep space missions before we tackle the months to Mars.
Really, space belongs to the robots. One of the eventual jobs of the robots is to turn parts of space into acceptable replicas of Earth’s environment. We should send them ahead to pave the way for us, rather than try to forge ahead ourselves as if we are bushwhacking through a jungle.
That is an entirely subjective opinion, dependent on the value you place on the intangible returns from the space program.
The boondoggle was not going to the moon, but throwing away the money spend and expertise developed by not following it up.
Sure unmanned probes are more cost effective, but they can only do so much. Remember, there were unmanned lunar probes before Apollo 11 - they were valuable, but not as valuable as the exploration the later missions did.
The way forward is private enterprise for near Earth missions and lunar missions. I heard a talk by Burt Rutan. He showed the death rate of early airplane pilots - far higher than astronauts. His point is that progress requires sacrifice. Private enterprise is less likely to get congressional investigations if a test pilot dies.
A real space station would have been nice, but it would doubled the cost without adding a lot of benefits. Most of the stuff that would be accomplished by the space stations proposed are done by unmanned satellites today (like communications and observation.) About the only thing I can think of that isn’t would be hotels for zero-g sex. Again, a fine thing for private enterprise to do.
Computers and technology have gotten much better since then. If you sent a rover now, it could do more than the Apollo astrunats did, do it for months or years if we are lucky, and not have to come home at the end.
Once it gets cheap enough, tourism should be a thing. And the danger is not that big a deal, really. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a 6.5% chance of dying on Everest. If we can get spaceflight down to those costs and risks, people will line up for a chance to go, just as they line up at the summit of the mountain.
Low or zero G spas would be fun. There is no mattress softer than a concrete slab at 10% Earth gravity.
High G areas for strength training for athletes could also be a draw.
Also zero-G sex sounds interesting, but I think the novelty would wear off very quickly, as it just doesn’t seem as though it would be practical at all.