It wasn’t just about ICBMs. Perhaps not even mostly about ICBMs. The real fears were about spy satellites, the perception that the Soviets could look down and see everything we were doing. Few in the public could have any good idea what the capabilities of a spy satellite were but that just added to the paranoia.
Eisenhower was well aware of this. In fact, the major reason he forced the military to sit on their space programs was because he didn’t want to give the Soviets an excuse to proclaim that the US was spying on them. There’s little question that we could have had a satellite up first, perhaps by many years, if that were the sole aim.
Yes, when every pelvic thrust sends you and your partner spiraling away from each other in different directions, its hard to get into a rhythm. The only way it would work would be to strap yourselves together, and at that point you lose all the advantages of freedom that makes zero-g sex appear appealing.
I think that if similar ingenuity had been applied to unmanned space missions as were applied to the manned space program, we could have accomplished many of the things Apollo did, and at far less cost, and more importantly, would have created transferable technology for future robotic missions, which would have built on it incrementally – not that it matters all that much whether we could have or not at the time, since there was no urgency about learning more about the moon. The Apollo missions broadly speaking did not create much transferable base technology, in the sense that it was more or less a dead end: we were no closer at the end of it, nor even now, to being able to put men on Mars or the moons of the outer planets, or to fulfilling the science fiction mythology of “colonizing” them. The dead-end nature of the race to the moon was precisely James Webb’s well-considered objection to it, which Kennedy overruled.
Basically I just reject the whole idea that space is “the next frontier” and analogous to the early ocean explorers. Maybe in some inconceivably distant future, but not in any realistically foreseeable one. Every planet and moon in the solar system is incredibly hostile to earth life, and any planets that might be habitable are essentially unreachable. If we did manage to land a bunch of astronauts on Mars, it would have a similar “wow” factor to the moon landings, and then an exactly similar aftermath, which could be summed up as “so now what?”. OTOH, I’m very excited about the future of unmanned exploration. I’d love to see a probe land on Europa capable of drilling through the ice into the ocean below, and reporting back! We could probably do that for a tenth the cost of just one manned mission to Mars, and learn ten times more.
That’s cool…we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I think space is the next frontier, and that it’s where we’ll be pushing towards next. I also think that a manned mission to Mars will be more than a ‘wow’ factor…it will increase our understanding of the planet by an order of magnitude. Plus it will push our engineering and technology as well, and put us in a good place wrt where I think we are going wrt humans in space. But I can see your perspective and can see why you think what you do. WRT the OP, I don’t think Apollo was a boondoggle at all. I’m glad we had the competition with the Soviets as I don’t think we’d be where we are at wrt space exploration without that.
For Mars, one shovel in the hands of a person might save the need to send a billion dollar mission with the right digging tools.
While the speed of light delay to the Moon is kind of reasonable, it isn’t to Mars, and a truly flexible robotic system would need better AI than we have today.
There are also places a person might be able to go that our robots can’t.
However, to be sure, the automated exploration of Mars is also not a boondoggle. Human flight is in addition, not instead of them. It would make sense for a large human expedition to bring several robots which could be launched from orbit to explore places the people won’t be able to get to.
Bolding mine. And the bolded part is the crux of the issue, in my view. I think we can agree that at some enormous cost we can put astronauts on Mars, and then return them safely to earth, along with a bunch of Mars rocks. And then what? I mean specifically, what would be the useful next step? Just keep sending astronauts to other bodies in the solar system at even more enormous cost, to bring back even more rocks? The next step is sure as hell not going to be the colonization of Trappist-1d, 39.6 light-years away. Although if we did somehow manage to get there in some very distant future, I’m pretty sure I know what we would find: a lot of rocks.*
not that I doubt for one moment that life – including intelligent life – exists elsewhere in this galaxy and throughout the universe. We’re just probably never going to actually encounter it because the universe is, like, big – really, really big. Both physically and temporally. Really, really, big, IOW, in spacetime.
Kind of like those Spanish going out into the new world looking for ‘rocks’, there are ‘rocks’…and then there are ‘ROCKS!’. That’s the thing. We don’t need to go to the Trappist star system (though, I hear the beer is really good ;)) to find value in space. We have a whole solar system stuffed with resources that will boost mankind for thousands if not 10’s or 100’s of thousands of years. And we have space to move out into as well. Hell, we don’t even have to leave our little area of space to get value from ‘rocks’. In space, valuable rocks might just be those with that monohydrogen dioxide stuff in it, deadly as that stuff can be on occasion…
Some of the most important discoveries of the Apollo mission would not have happened without the astronauts being there. The ‘red dirt’, the ‘Genesis Rock’, and other samples were collected after an astronaut spotted them after much searching.
The astronauts also covered a lot of ground - especially on the last missions with the rover. Apollo 17 astronauts traversed 22.3 miles by rover. That’s a little less than the Opportunity rover traveled on Mars in 15 years. Lunokhod 1 landed on the Moon during the Apollo era. It weighed 2,000 lbs, and traveled 6 miles in 10 months.
In terms of sample return, Apollo 17 returned about 220 lbs of rocks, hand-selected by humans on site over a 5 km search area for maximum scientific interest. Luna 24, a robotic sample return mission that flew after Apollo, managed to return 6 ounces of material, and only from within reach of where it landed.
Of course, other robotic missions have been wildly successful. The Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, GRAIL, the Chandrayaan missions, LADEE and a couple of others have revolutionized our understanding of the Moon.
There’s room for both humans and robots in space exloration, including in science. There’s nothing that can replace a human with judgement on site, actually examining things. And if you are hoping for serendipitous discovery of unexpected things, it’s a lot harder when you have to plan a robot’s movements in advance.
For example, it took a long time for us to discover that there was literally water ice a few inches under the Martian soil in places. It took the failure of a rover wheel, which dragged the top cover off the ice and exposed it, for us to discover that. If a human had been on Mars, such a discovery would have happened almost immediately.
And if you want to look for things like ancient fossils, a robotic mission is highly unlikely to do it. A human could walk around, overturning rocks and examining them, breaking open candidate rocks, digging down under the soil to release promising looking candidates, etc. If only one rock in a thousand has evidence of fossils, it will likely never be discovered by a rover. We just can’t afford the rover time to go on random fishing expeditions over and over again. But a person could do it easily.
Apollo hardware was used for Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab. Parts of Apollo were used in the Shuttle. The launching pads, fire equipment and other infrastructure built for Apollo are still in use today.
But you’re right that a lot of Apollo was throwaway tech. But that’s not the fault of manned space flight - it’s the fault of the specific choices made by the Apollo program managers. The next era of human spaceflight will be carried out with reusable rockets, and we are beginning to develop common architectures that will allow us to leverage the technology for many uses. For example, the international docking adapter on the ISS can be used by multiple types of spacecraft. In-space refueling will likely be architected with commonality in mind. This is going to accelerate both manned and unmanned missions over time.
If we found enough nitrogen on the Moon, you culd build a pretty nice habitat in a lava tube. We can mine the oxygen from the regolith, there’s plenty of water and energy, and lava tubes are protected from pretty much every space hazard. All they need is an atmosphere. And until then, you could still put pressurized habs in them, and they would not need to be protected from cosmic rays, meteorites, etc.
It’s probably the easiest place in the solar system other than earth to house a large quantity of people, if you really wanted to. But I agree, at this time there’s not much commercial reason to go there. Scientifically, there sure is. Those lava tubes will contain pristine rocks from the creation of the Earth/Moon system, untouched by any kind of space weathering. The layers of rock exposed by skylight contain a history of the geology of the moon. They may contain volatiles or other useful minerals. We basically have no idea what’s in them.
I agree that we aren’t going to ‘colonize’ any other body in any recent future (say, a hundred years or more). But if we find enough stuff to do and resources to exploit, we could see space being populated about like how Deep-Sea platforms are populated on Earth - indivisual installations built for profit, each of which only has between 20-200 people on it, but there are so many of them now that about 100,000 people live on platforms on the ocean. But no one would call them ‘colonies’.
Yes. The idea of just starting a ‘colony’ by fiat is ridiculous. Colonies grow organically from the needs of the people or because they can make a profit. When you have a ‘colony’ of 50 people on Mars requiring several billion dollars per year to support them, the idea of making it 500 people instead will look silly. No one will pay for it, and the colonists can’t pay for it themselves. And they’ll never be self-sustaining.
There’s no reason we can’t do both. The cost of such missions is about to decline dramatically. The new Starship promises to get 50 tonnes of mass into Geostationary Transfer Orbit for just the cost of fuel and wear-and-tear on the reusable spaceship. Even if that fails, the concept clearly works and someone else will do it soon. This rocket is big enough that we can fly payloads on direct transfer orbits to places like Europa, instead of decade-long trips involving multiple gravitational slingshots, and do it for launch costs less than a tenth of the historical prices.
That’s a huge boon to unmanned exploration, but it only exists because Musk wanted a rocket that could send people to Mars. So it doesn’t have to be one vs the other.
The Apollo program was started because of the Cold War. Sputnik scared the bejeebus out of the US government because of fears of how space might alter the strategic balance between the US and USSR. People thought that nuclear warheads would be based in space (an idea that survived even as long as the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey).
Before Apollo became focused on sending men to the moon, the defense establishment was thinking in terms of a crash program to develop a massive “spacelift” capability to put men, vehicles, warheads and bases in space as fast as possible. There were a couple of different proposals to establish USAF bases on the moon that would have called for dozens of launches per year to assemble and fuel vehicles in Earth orbit. All this was taking place in a development environment of multiple military and government agencies continually revising their plans. What shook out was that different proposals and programs evolved into Saturn/Apollo, which would focus its efforts on an absolutely-soonest manned landing, with hardware adequate to support any other national strategic goals in space.
But by the mid-1960s it became obvious that the earlier Cold War scenarios weren’t necessary. Chiefmost was the realization that ICBMs could deliver warheads as quickly and far more reliably than any space-based program; and that there was little men could do in space (e.g. reconnaissance) that couldn’t be done almost as well and vastly cheaper by remote controlled satellites. The improvement of guidance systems and electronics in less than ten years had made manned systems redundant, despite the Air Force’s best attempts to keep piloted vehicles in the loop.
All this culminated in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which more or less ended the “Space Race” in purely military terms. It banned nationalizing celestial bodies, basing nukes in space, and interfering with other nations’ peaceful exploration of space. In other words, the original purpose of Saturn/Apollo ceased to exist before the first manned missions even flew.
So in summary, Apollo wasn’t a boondoggle in 1961; but it came to fruition too late.
