It’s absolutely not a boondoggle; it made exploration and experimentation normal. It opened up the biggest science lab we could possibly have: the Universe from which all things were created. It’s laughably stupid to suggest it was a total waste of money and resources.
Maybe the goal was itself a boondoggle, but at least NASA succeeded at meeting the goal, unlike with its next big project (the shuttle), which was definitely a boondoggle.
If there were a guy with a jack near the Spirit rover…
Then we would have spent enough to get him there as it would cost to send another few dozen rovers. For that matter, if we really wanted to actually repair, rather than replace, we just need to send the jack, we don’t need to send the guy.
If there was a guy on Beresheet, then there’d just be a splattered dead guy among the tardigrades.
That’s very true; there are reasons nobody watches remote-controlled car races, or un-jockeyed horse races, or stuff like that.
Doing it with people generates buy-in and probably most importantly, inspires today’s youth to be interested in science and technology as career paths.
I think it’s going to take a three-pronged approach- robotic exploration, manned spaceflight to follow up on things, and private enterprise to take the real risk and figure out how to best achieve things in space.
Well, we have Battle Bots, but that’s not really the same thing (and I don’t know if anybody actually watches is, assuming that it is still being made[which I doubt]).
We do have greyhound racing, which is like tiny un-jockeyed horse racing.
But, one of the concerns and limitations in things like NASCAR or formula 1 is driver safety. If the driver was safe in a control booth somewhere, then the races might actually start being interesting.
The first prong should be more than just exploration, and should also be preparing the way.
No. I think no matter what your position on this, I don’t think anyone with any sort of brain could say it was a waste of money. Whether it was the best program, or we could have better used the money is, of course, open to debate. But we are STILL processing the science from the missions, still reviewing the data, still examining the samples. We definitely got value that was much more than ‘flags and footprints’ out of those missions.
And of course, we got a ton on the political side. We proved we could do it, which underscored our technological edge and, as a subtext, demonstrated our ICBM capabilities. That is, after all, why the Russians did what they did…to underscore that they COULD do what they did, that their capabilities were there and that this meant on the military side they could back up their own threat.
So, we got science, we got political capital, and we also got psychological mileage out of Apollo. Even today it’s still one of the greatest adventures a single country has ever done, even if a seeming large percentage of Americans and other nationalities have this idea that it was all a hoax. But consider…why would it being a hoax be so important to so many? And why do they THINK it was all a hoax. Answer…because it seemed like it was impossible to do, for anyone to do, especially at that time. I think that’s the final answer.
I’m not sure about that. First off, the Mars rovers, in all their years on planet, haven’t gone as far from their landing site as the Apollo astronauts did. Second, the astronauts brought back, literally, hundreds of pounds of samples which, I doubt a rover could or would. Third, some of the best discoveries were because astronauts were wandering around and happened to look in a different direction and noticed something different wrt soil content or color. Finally…none of the subsequent robotic Moon landing and rover missions by other countries have done all that well as far as longevity or bringing back a lot of science.
Could the US do better? Maybe. Certainly we are the only ones who have had extended success with rovers on Mars, but, again, they haven’t brought back but a fraction of what the Moon landing missions did despite being on planet for years. Certainly, in 1969 we couldn’t have hoped to bring anywhere near the amount of science back that the Apollo program did. MAYBE today we could…of course, the funding and expertise that NASA has stems, in part, from the fact that they DID do the Apollo missions, so it’s kind of a catch 22 wrt speculation about us waiting until now or, say a decade ago to send a robotic mission that could bring back comparable results to Apollo.
The psychological impact should be measurable by an increase in young people going into science majors and engineering. I can’t find any numbers on this. Does anyone know?
Sure, in the long run, we might make money off of space exploration. Heck, we probably will. But that’s not the reason to do it. Sir Edmund Hillary and John F. Kennedy had it right: We do these things because they are hard; because they are there.
It’s all too easy to say that the reason to do things is for the vague “good of humanity”. But what is humanity, itself, good for? If we’re not challenging ourselves, and doing things just for their own sake, then all of the rest of it is for naught. And going to the Moon (and to Mars, and to other stars) is a heck of a lot better challenge than many of the ones humans have come up with.
And that’s the difference between a mission for a few hundred million vs a few hundred billion.
Sure, the manned lunar rovers went further, but they massed a lot more, and that was as far as they could go. Their batteries were pretty depleted by the end, and were not rechargeable, even had they brought something with which to charge them.
There is no reason that an autonomous vehicle could not return hundreds of pounds of samples. We returned people and samples from the moon, just the samples simplifies things. The reason it has not been done is because it has not been deemed to be worth the enormous cost to bring back more moon rocks.
The rovers have cameras, and many of the interesting features on Mars were discovered because a team of experts spent hours or days looking at the images that came back, and wanted to take a closer look at particular things. That olivine rock on the moon would have certainly been noticed by the researchers back home, and it was only luck that the astronaut happened to notice it.
Finally, we have not had 100% success at actually landing things on Mars, or even the moon, and that is something that we certainly have to have nailed down before we send more people. Longevity is a factor as well. If we can’t keep a rover going on the surface for very long, then it’s not going to be any easier to keep people alive.
During Apollo, we didn’t have the computers and technology we have now. If we sent a mission to the moon with the same price tag, but fully autonomous, we’d bring back far more science, and we would continue to do so for months, rather than for a few days.
Now, Apollo was probably necessary getting the ball rolling. Many of those technologies that we would use were created or developed for that mission. We didn’t have the computers or transmission technology to send a robot to do much more than take some pictures and scrape away a bit of soil. Would further manned missions also help to develop technologies that we don’t even know we don’t have right now? Sure, but that’s why the manned missions need to start small. Be bad to discover that we were lacking in a key technology while astronauts are halfway to Mars. The moon has the benefit that it’s close, and theoretically help is a possibility.
Now, the biggest part of a manned mission is the PR element. You could send a thousand robots to the moon for the cost of sending one man, but the public is more likely to be willing to fund sending the man than a thousand robots. This is a political and social reality that does need to be figured into how we propose space exploration, as we do get far more science from sending one person than we would by sending no robots, but there is no real scientific benefit to sending a person until after the robots have very well scouted the area and maybe even started building shelter.
Just so you know, I’m not saying automated rovers are a bad thing…just the opposite. I’m a huge fan, and I think they have done great work on Mars, especially. Robotic probes have shown us stuff we would probably not see for decades or centuries if all exploration had to be manned, especially the ones past Mars or into deep space.
But I think there is a place for manned exploration as well, and it’s frustrating when folks talk about Apollo in terms of it being a ‘boondoggle’ or ‘flags and footprints’, as we got a lot more out of the missions than folks seem to realize.
I think we COULD do a mission (well, a series of missions) to the Moon (today) that could bring back much of what we got out of Apollo, though the mission would cost a lot more than a few hundred million or even a few billion dollars. It wouldn’t cost as much as Apollo did, but it would be a very expensive mission if you actually wanted to explore all the sites they did, to the extent they did, and bring back the samples they did. Apollo in today’s money was around $150 billion dollars. I’m sure we could do all of the missions using robotic rovers for, say, half of that or less. Of course, again, we can do that because we aren’t inventing the technology right now, we have a lot better automation and expert systems, can design stuff using CAD and so on. If we never had Apollo we probably wouldn’t be able to do it for that cost though because, IMHO, we wouldn’t have done most of the missions (robotic or otherwise) that paved the way for us to have that capability. That’s kind of why I pointed to some of the other countries, including the USSR, who have tried to do extended missions on the Moon. They did not have the longevity or the durability, nor the capabilities to do what Apollo did.
We’re in Great Debates, addressing a thread titled Were the Apollo Missions a boondoggle? and you’re complaining that you’re getting a subjective opinion?
Either you got up on the wrong side of the bed or you need to flee to another forum real quick before opinions strike again.
Some of the intriguing thingsseen by the rover could be followed up with people being there. One suggestion from the board was for astronauts in orbit to control rovers and other robots on Mars without the time delay that is involved in a radio signal traveling between Earth and Mars.
None. I’m more thinking of Americans’ attitudes about tneir nation: Americans are used to being able to believe that America is best at practically everything, and I’d say that was even more true in the 1960s than now.
A tin can going ‘beep, beep’ threw us into a tizzy in 1957 because it was orbiting the Earth, and it wasn’t ours. Men on the moon wearing the hammer and sickle would have been about a hundred times worse.
Too simplistic. The tin can going ‘beep, beep’ threw us into a tizzy because it demonstrated (not just to US, but to the world), quite clearly, a capability for the Soviets to be able to potentially hit anywhere on the planet with their nukes. And the US not being able to do it (to that point) threw into question if we could. Then there was the perceived technological edge. This wasn’t JUST about US opinion of ourselves as being the best, it was about the perception of other countries about who was the most technologically skilled, perhaps who they should be buying stuff from, and who they should be allying with. There was a lot rolled up in the space race…a lot more than simple nationalistic pride and hubris. It’s why Kennedy pushed for it, despite the fact that, in reality he wasn’t all that impressed with or feeling that space was even important. But he knew that the perception of technological superiority that would come from the first country to put a person on the Moon would be huge. And it was.
There were a lot of aspects to the space race and the Moon landings. Some of it was scientific. Some was political. Some was psychological. Some of it was what you say here wrt Americans just wanting to and thinking they were the best and it should be us. All of them factored into us actually doing this. I doubt we would have or could have unless all those other things were involved in the calculation. We wouldn’t have gone purely for science or purely for humanity, or even purely for our own egos.
ETA: So, I think that ‘none’ is just wrong. It WOULD have had a profound impact had the Soviets been the country to do this first. Not sure it would have saved them from collapse in the long run, but it would have given them a huge boost.
I’d say the biggest thing that we got out of it were technologies that were invented or developed out of the necessity of doing something so incredibly hard. IMO, that made it worth it. OTOH, if we then didn’t end up launching, that’d be a PR crisis and the end of many careers, and we would not have gotten the science about the moon (which actually tells us quite a bit about the Earth), but all those technologies would still be around to improve the quality of our lives, and we’d have saved a couple of bucks.
I think we should keep pushing manned missions, as the reason that I see for them is to continue to gather data on how to keep us fragile meatbags alive in space. You know how upset an astronaut gets if you ask them to go just one hour without air, they don’t like it when you vary the temperature by a mere 100C, and they tend to squish or break under high accelerations? That should be the primary focus of having people in space until we get that better under control. With any luck, we will also have some level of exploitation of resources from space by then, and it will also become much less expensive to keep them alive. That, in my opinion, is when we should start seriously thinking about manned missions outside of Earth’s orbit.
It does now. This wasn’t nearly as true fifty years ago.
There is a quote, attributed to test pilot Albert Scott Crossfield, that is usually paraphrased along the lines of, “Man is the cheapest non-linear servo-mechanism weighing only 150 pounds and having great adaptability, that can be produced by completely unskilled labor.” Again, not nearly as true now as it used to be, but there’s a reason we haven’t sent any humans to Mars yet.
The first paragraph is absolutely correct. The second one is questionable. I keep hearing about all the learnings from the Apollo missions but I’ve yet to see much evidence of it, except the learnings about the actual engineering of how to do it, not so much about the moon itself – and probably very little, including sample returns, that could not have been done robotically and at far less cost. OTOH, we learned an enormous amount from the unmanned missions to Mars and around the solar system.
The real reason for the moon mission is well summarized in your quote below, which is fully consistent with the Von Braun quote I posted earlier:
Not sure I understand your objection. Is it that you think we could have gotten the same information about the Moon via robotic probes at the time, or that you don’t think that any of the sample return missions as well as the other science that was done on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts was worth anything? We learned a LOT about the Moon in those Apollo missions, and I think the fact that the Soviets failed repeatedly to get much out of their robotic probes at the time shows the contrast. I’m just trying to see where “I’ve yet to see much evidence of it, except the learnings about the actual engineering of how to do it, not so much about the moon itself – and probably very little, including sample returns, that could not have been done robotically and at far less cost.” is coming from. If you mean that, today, we could do robotic missions to the Moon and get as much out of it as we got decades ago, then…well, I think we probably could. Now. Today. But then? No way. From two different perspectives. First off, we wouldn’t have even funded such comprehensive missions…and, without Apollo, I’m doubtful we even would later on down the line. We didn’t have the robotic tools to do it, either, and, again, without Apollo I doubt we would have gotten there either. We wouldn’t have even developed the rockets to do it, IMHO, certainly not in the time frame of doing this in the late 60’s and early 70’s…probably not even in the 80’s. MAYBE in the 90’s we would have started developing that technology for heavier lift rockets and more advanced robotics, but we wouldn’t be where we are today. And we wouldn’t have had the samples to study for 40+ years or the other things we actually have. It would have put our understanding of the Moon back decades, and would have pushed our missions to Mars back to the point I doubt we’d have any of the landers actually there.
YMMV, but I think what we got was a lot, and I seriously doubt we would have gotten nearly as much if we hadn’t done Apollo. Sure, in a perfect world where you are king of the country, you could not do any manned missions and put all those resources into robotic missions, but that’s not what would have happened in our world. We could only do Apollo because of the space race with the Soviets, and the space race was about manned missions. And that space race is what got us all the goodies and technology to have rockets that could take robots throughout the solar system. You could see this in the context of how the US was lagging behind the Soviets in the 50’s and early 60’s wrt rocket technology…we just didn’t care about it that much. Until we did. What we cared about was ballistic missiles that could strike the USSR, not rockets to the Moon or Mars or whatever. And really, only scientists at that time cared about landing robotic probes on other planets or moons…the general public didn’t care enough to pay for that sort of stuff. Hell, the public wasn’t even all that keen on the actual Apollo missions, once we managed to land on the Moon the first time. It was the fact that we had done it, and had engineered how to do it that allowed NASA to leverage that knowledge and those techniques later down the road to do all the cool stuff you think we should have focused on.