I agree with kunilou and filmore’s posts: satellites and the expansion of STEM education and professions. None of that would have happened as swiftly without the possibility of commie boogiemen knocking on our doors.
But don’t forget - the Space Race also gave us our “Great” time, such that in future years we have a point of reference that we may somehow regain.
It is easy to imagine that space launch and satellite technology would have happened anyway, but the reality is that the cost threshold and degree of risk tolerance of failure is so high that it is difficult to conceive of any commercial entity being able (much less willing) to invest the capital and effort into developing it. We’ve seen two areas of space industry really explode; satellite telecommunications and broadcast (television, radio, satellite internet), and the navigation and geoinfomatics capabilities of the Global Positioning System (GPS). Neither of these, and particularly the latter, would have come about without the “Space Race” just because the threshold of cost and capability was too great for any single company or even collection of companies within an individual industry to invest sufficient capital and effort. GPS is today an estimated economic benefit of around US$56B/year (mid-range estimate) going across navigation, surveying and construction, transportation, precision agriculture, and consumer/recreational use, and will only increase with advances in transportation automation.
And yet, this actually undervalues the potential benefits of space-based observation and telecommunications as a potential area of industrial growth; the cost of access to space has been one of the key limiting factors in deploying satellites to perform a variety of Earth observations, communications, and space weather monitoring functions. The advent of more robust small satellites (satellites massing less than 100 kg, all the way down to nanosats) combined with standardized platforms like the CubeSat and commercial components, combined with up and coming dedicated launchers harkens an era akin to the PC revolution, where entrepreneurs may be able to realize applications in niches which may grow into full fledged industries just as software suites and peripherals did with desktop computers. Space overall is currently about a ~US$100B commercial industry, but has the potential to grow to a multi-trillion dollar industry within a decade or less, and most of that growth is just in low and medium Earth orbit. The applications for wider exploration and resource exploitation are too vast to even calculate, although the economic yields are more likely to benefit future human habitation.
Actual or purported products, such as integrated circuits (which are actually more a result of the Minuteman II guidance set) are almost irrelevant compared to the direct benefits of being able to access a new and essentially endless frontier of knowledge and resources, as well as being able to look back at the planet as a whole and observe it from a distance. Just being able to maximize crop yields or observe the effects of global climate change in a way that we could not from a terrestrial frame are, by themselves, sufficient justification for the capabilities which emerged from the space race.
And, as others have noted, it yielded something of actual value rather than just needless and often pointless international conflict and armament. While the rhetoric of planting a flag on the surface of the Moon is of little material value in and of itself, it certainly established the technical and industrial capability of the United States, and spurred both the US and USSR to advance technology for scientific ends despite political indifference for exploration for its own sake.
All of this discussion about the economic and political value of space exploration sidesteps some of the more salient benefits to space exploration; that is, surveillance and eventual protection from space-borne hazards (potentially hazardous objects, energetic particle storms, human and natural changes to the climate of Earth) and the inestimable but inevitable benefit of abstract knowledge from interplanetary exploration and interstellar observation. We cannot, of course, imagine of what benefit this might be to future generations any more than Archimedes would have conceived a turbine engine propelling a jetliner across an ocean in hours or James Clerk Maxwell could have predicted the iPhone, but abstract knowledge about the world around us has always been of eventual and vast benefit. Being able to detect and (hopefully) deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid–which is not far outside of our current technical capability–just once may justify the entire cost and effort of the space race to the tune of trillions of dollars of value and hundreds of millions of lives.
There are, of course, many things we should be spending more money and intellectual capital upon to help benefit people on Earth today and in the near future. But it isn’t and was never the effort into space exploration which prevented that. For a literally trivial amount of the GDP of industrialized nations we could provide food, potable water, essential health care, and literacy to the entire population of the world. That we have chosen to spend money on other things of highly questionable merit is a sociopolitical problem, not one of having limited fiscal capability or resources, and the space programs of the US and USSR in no way contributed to that problem.
Stranger
Please stop mindlessly repeating this claim. The item in question was not a simple toilet seat (nor did it cost $2000) but rather a “molded fiberglass cover that encloses the stainless steel bowl and plumbing of the toilet on the Navy anti-submarine patrol aircraft”, which was custom built for 54 P-3C Orion aircraft at a total contract cost of less than $35k, or $640.09 per enclosure. This isn’t something you could just go pick up at the local hardware store, and those familiar with manufacturing will understand tooling and labor costs in small production runs, especially those with very specific procurement requirements. There are plenty of examples of corruption and gross incompetence in government procurements, but this is not one of them.
Stranger
Oh that makes all the difference in the world … they were only $640 each … what a bargain.
Do you have any notion of the cost and effort of producingcomplex manufacuring tooling and performing engineering analysis to assess compliance to MIL-STD-1791 aircraft flight environments?
Stranger
I think this is really the crucial part of the issue. It took an astounding amount of effort and a willingness to endure a ridiculous number of devastating failures before success, so much so that really only the looming threat of nuclear devastation was enough to release the money needed.
It does depend upon what defines as the space race. Apollo is not the definition of the space race. Many forget that items like the Saturn V were conceived and being designed before Kennedy put the US on a path to the moon. The F-1 engine was well under way. But conceived initially for use singly on a smaller rocket for use by the army.
Other tech would have come. Apollo needed miniaturised circuits, but the work to build them was happening anyway, and the modern era of semiconductors would have been pretty much what is is. But any idea about using that capability for miniaturisation of sophisticated technology in space applications would still quite likely still be a dream.
The link between the public awareness of a “space race” and the ICBM programmes is perhaps harder to quantify. You might argue that an ICBM is not a spacecraft. But that makes it all a bit silly. The early “space race” launches were all done on ICBM platforms. Militarisation of space was the main driver, whether a man was in the can or not. (Although things like a manned platform was on the agenda for the US quite early on until cancelled.) Both sides were performing flag waving as part of the more serious focus on avoiding losing a major military edge. The Russians were just a bit more willing to take risks.
The point with almost anything in life is this. They didn’t cost $640 each. The first one cost $35k. After that each additional one was essentially free.
If you went to the local hardware and discovered that the exact toilet seat you wanted was no longer in production, a manufacturer would quote you many many $10’s of thousands to make you one. However if you wanted 10,000 of them you could have the additional ones for a dollar each. But you still have to pay for the first one.
There are so many example of this, and anyone in any sort of commercial or industrial setting will tell you the same. $5000 wrench? Sure, if the thing has to be designed for a specific purpose (like fit around an existing assembly) and has to be forged and ground. Design, and tooling will take up all that money and more. And the contractor will have done it on a fixed price, so they need to factor in testing, possible redesign and tooling. Plus of course, if it is Mil spec, or aviation spec, the paperwork. Those standards are not just for guidance. You have to be able to prove your product meets them.
An In-Law was an engineer working on projects for the military told me once that the price per unit for either a wrench or toilet seat had included in it the price for rewritten technical manuals that detailed new and improved maintenance procedures.
Re: the $2000 toilet seat.
So many of the plastic items we see every day only cost cents because of the developed technology and infrastructure behind them.
Take a small action figure McDonalds puts in a happy meal. The plastic and shipping bag probably cost no more than $0.15. The MOLDS for the plastic parts would cost $20-30,000 in the USA and $5-8000 in China. The molding machinery could cost $100-400,000. The printing machinery might be $5-20,000.
So now you can own a McDonalds toy for free but to make ONE exactly like it, starting from zero infrastructure, might cost $500,000
This is not really correct. Use and maintenance of a tool, vehicle, or other system are detailed in Technical Orders (TO) and (for the Navy) Technical Manuals ™ are written and maintained by the respective services. Hardware vendors and contractors provide inputs to the TO/TM but may have little insight or control over how a system is used. There is, of course, no need to have a specific technical order for a simple tool like a wrench or a hammer. What the contractor does have to provide or maintain records to comply with procurement specificiations (MIL-STD, MIL-DTL, and the various industry standards such as MS and NAS fasteners, AWS/ASM certified welds, ASTM/ASM/AISI, et cetera are certifications, manufacturing specifications, quality inspection records, and for complex products, and process and inspection documentation such as travellers, work package instructions, acceptance/lot acceptance test records, discrepency reports, et cetera. The reason for this is that in the case of a failure or defect it allows the procurement authority or failure investigation team to go back through the chain of production and determine if there was a latent defect or change in materials or processes that resulted in the observed problem, which is often critical in cases such as the loss of an aircraft, launch vehicle, or ordnance device where there is little or no direct physical evidence to review. It also certifies that a material or component was procured from a certified vendor and a lesser strength or quality of component (“counterfeit”) was not substituted. This data is often required to be collected and provided through the entire production chain back to material and individual component or lot procurement, so for a complex system such as an aircraft it may be many layers deep, e.g. the avoinics box on an aircraft will have certs from the box manufacturer, the PCB and component manufacturers, material and fasteners specs, et cetera, which results in many volumes of documentation. This is in addition to the engineering documentation such as design analysis reports (DAR) and qualification test reports (QTR) which are required to verify that the basic design meets the specified design requirements laid out in the procurement specifications.
Is such information really necessary or valuable? It clearly isn’t really necessary to have a large binder of documentation for a simple tool like a handle or a wrench; what is really needed is just a basic certification that shows that the tool was built to a certain standard (e.g. materials, tempering and hardening processes, et cetera) and was tested or verified at some level to meet the basic loads and conditions it is intended to operate in. For most consumer products you just get the manufacturer’s say so based upon the perception of brand quality and warranty service. In mission critical applications, however, where failure of a component may culimate in failure of a critical objective or loss of lives, more confidence is often desired, and the tendency for procurement agents (who are often not knowledgeable or experienced in the specifics of the product requirements) to simply accept the lowest bid for a part or system needs to be tempered by the assurance that the product will, in fact, meet functional requirements and is not counterfeit. That this system of procurement has become bureaucratic, officious, and unwieldy is a result of the complexity of military systems and the inflexibility in applying the same procurement standards across the board to hammers and aircraft alike.
However, it should be noted that in the effort to address the egregious cost growth of military procurment, the DoD (and NASA as well) abolished many MIL-STD and MIL-DTL requirements in the early 'Nineties and moved toward a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) procurement strategy (often referred to in the aerospace world as “Crap Off The Shelf”). This was largely a disaster and it is questionable that it saved any money, because while it eliminated the costs associated with traceability documentation, parts and systems still had to be verified at an operating level to meet functional requirements, and when a commercial component fails in acceptance testing, or starts failing in the field after acceptance because a manufacturer made some arbitrary change in materials or process that wasn’t documented in any provided data, it may be difficult or impossible to accurately diagnose the problem, and the vendor has little responsibility to come to root cause or otherwise resolve the issue unless a defect is uncovered. By the late 'Nineties and early 'Oughts the DoD started reviving and reinstituting such standards because of all of the problems with defective and counterfeit COTS parts. And even with this, we’re still dealing with issues today because of the shift of manufactuing to foreign companies where there is often little insight or accurate documentation into production. This has been a particular problem with components such as capacitors, fasteners, and batteries, where even getting certifications doesn’t verify that the certs aren’t fraudulent, and has led to the creation of a government wide tracking system for “sibling alerts” where a suspected or known defect in a component is propagated across procurement agencies with a warning against other products which use similar components from the same vendor.
This is obviously very expensive, and because hardcopy documentation is required, results in a lot of paper that has to be manually handled and stored. The commercial automotive industry, which went through similar issues with globalization of component production, has largely developed an alternate system where vendors show compliance by independently verified lot testing and digital certifications which can be automatically reviewed and don’t take up any physical space. This technology didn’t exist back in the pre-Internet 'Eighties, and government procurement standards today have not kept up with modern methods of digital records and verifications, but it is feasible to achieve the same degree of verification and confidence without the cost of maintaining hardcopy documentation though verification of foreign-sourced components is and will likely remain challenging.
Stranger
Although it should be noted, that nowadays the up-front costs for small production runs is plummeting. For instance, I designed a 30-sided die I wanted. The design process took me perhaps three hours of my time. Once I had the design, manufacturing the first one cost me about 25 cents. If I wanted to make a second one, it’d also cost me 25 cents. As it happens, the first one wasn’t up to the quality I’d like, so I might have to make another one using a more expensive process, that might be as much as 75 cents.
A decade ago, the marginal cost of those dice might have been about that low, but the cost for the first one would probably have been in the thousands of dollars.
Don’t argue the facts!!!
I want there to be a $2,000 toilet seat so I can be pissed at the gov’ment!!!
I assume you are talking about production using additive manufacturing (AM, colloquially referred to as “3D printing”). Such methods are very useful for rapid prototyping, can produce geometric features impossible to make by casting, forging/forming, and machining, and can also provide novel directional mechanical properties which are not availble from normal processing and fabrication methods. However, AM has some significant limitations in terms of how fast components can be produced, the size or other characteristics which can be produced or control of surface roughness and fidelity. There is no AM machine that I am aware of which could make a room-sized single component, and producing something like a plastic enclosure or tank via AM versus fiberglass layup or rotomolding in large production quantities would not be in any way cost competitive even if it were viable to manufacture. For most complex components, there is and will remain a need for tooling which is a fixed cost of setting up manufacture, notwithstanding the need to verify that the components meet design and production requirements for material strength and compatibility, geometric tolerances, and essential function.
Stranger
It sounds like the government was creating jobs. I thought that was supposed to be impossible.
Two takeaways from this thread:
Apollo and manned missions is what 99% of people think is/was “the space race,” even though many of them will also cite the comm satellite Sputnik.
Don’t get Stranger riled when he’s within access of a typewriter.
History has proven him correct, and in particular Soviet history available only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the book “The Great Space Race”, author Don Dennis evaluates the space race from both U.S. and Soviet sides, using information only now available: https://amzn.com/B00A8A73IO
Exactly as David Fishlock’s 1963 article said, it was driven largely by national prestige and fear that manned space operations might assume military importance. It was also driven by a mindset of limitations in computer and remote robotic technology, and an optimistic less-informed view of our solar system.
Our view of the solar system and space operations was vastly different in the early 1960s when Apollo was planned. Powerful compact computers did not exist. Remote operation was a risky uncertain process. Space telescopes, orbital weather stations and orbital reconnaissance platforms were envisioned and depicted as manned, not remote controlled. This increased the urgency of developing manned space operations.
Much less was known about our solar system in the late 1950s which informed Apollo planning in the early 1960s. Venus was often called earth’s “sister planet”. It was envisioned as earth from an earlier time – maybe foggy, damp, covered in moss and ferns. Not long before Apollo planning began, there was some credible scientific though of intrepid astronaut-explorers hacking their way through the jungle wilderness of Venus. Today we know Venus is nothing like that, with clouds of sulfuric acid, surface temps of 900F, and a pure CO2 atmosphere at 1,300 psi. Carl Sagan called Venus the closest thing to hell in the solar system.
The first clear image of Mars was not until 1965 by Mariner 4. Until that time there was the lingering possibility of vegetation, canals, etc. However Mariner 4 showed a virtually airless, barren, crater-covered waste. Since 2008 we know Mars is coated with the toxic chemical calcium perchlorate, lethal to human life in tiny quantities.
So the space knowledge, technology and mindset of the late 1950s informed manned spaceflight decision making in the early 1960s. Back then the view of space was biased toward manned operation and metaphorically viewed as a “new frontier” and “setting sail on a new ocean” to potentially habitable destinations. The then-limited computer and remote technology reinforced this bias.
Regardless of what the space race (largely Apollo from a funding standpoint) achieved, it was not that expensive relative to some contemporary projects.
Apollo cost about $120 billion in current dollars, which is a fraction of the cost of the F-35 fighter plane. The California high-speed rail project will probably cost about 1/2 as much (in constant dollars) as the entire Apollo project: California High-Speed Rail - Wikipedia The Russian Kashagan oil field project is estimated at $116 billion, roughly equal to Apollo: #1 - Kashagan - $116 billion - World's 10 most expensive energy projects - CNNMoney
The Food Stamp program cost about $74 billion per year, vs Apollo expenditures of $120 billion over 10 years. The U.S. Interstate Highway System cost about $511 billion in 2015 dollars. Since 1971 the U.S. National Cancer Institute alone spent $117 billion in the “war on cancer”. So any notion of shutting down manned space exploration and feeding the hungry, curing cancer or building entire new road systems is not borne out by the numbers.
The space race really began with Sputnik, and for the US, the sudden and very public realisation that they were visibly behind the USSR’s launcher capacity. But the reality was that they were not all that far behind. The real space race had been burbling along driven by the military (and in the US by the usual inter-force rivalries) issues. ICBMs being the real driver.
The public perception of the space race however seemed to swiftly switch to manned spaceflight. IMHO there needs to be a huge line drawn between manned and unmanned efforts. I’m an Apollo tragic from wayback, there is little that gets me more enthused than the history of the project. But I will also cheerfully admit that it was largely wasted money in the long term. It accelerated technological progress, and arguably left behind a significant technological capability. One forgets that Apollo was largely built by contractors spread across the entire US and all these contractors benefited, and were left with experience and more advanced capabilities than they started with. But in terms of the commercial value of spaceflight, that still sat on the shoulders of the ICBM programme. The Space Shuttle was an aberration, but post Challenger, NASA was out of the commercial launch business, and the split between manned and commercial unmanned largely complete. NASA isn’t even responsible for the launching of scientific payloads, and contracts out the design construction and operation of a large fraction of what it oversees. JPL for instance does a massive amount of this.
The commercial value of space is huge. In all the memory of the “space race” the US/USSR rivalries, people forget that the Europeans are a huge player in the modern space age. With almost monotonous regularity Arianne launches occur, and commercial and military payloads are lofted from French Guiana. A few days ago a pair of US built Intelsat satellites were launched on an Arianne V. The Web Space Telescope will be launched on one, not on a US platform. The European Space Agency is basically a successful international launch business owned by the European nations. Of course there has been a huge amount of hidden and not so hidden support from the governments, but ESA built the capacity quite separate from the space race. And they are quite happy with the value they get from it (constant griping from the UK not withstanding.)
I think a lot of people are surprised when they discover how active the commercial space industry is. Three major groups compete for commercial launches (US commercial, ESA, Russia) and there is a launch of something interesting just about every week somewhere in the world. China now is swiftly working its way to joining the trio.
Worldwide the civilian benefits from Earth observation, communications, and science payloads is enormous. They are so ingrained in daily life we take them for granted. The military value from surveillance and communications similarly huge. Worldwide, governments and companies from countries that never engaged in any kind of space race cheerfully expand astounding amounts of money to gain access to space. What they don’t do is spend money on manned access.
Manned spaceflight as a military activity got nixed with the realisation that there was no need for a human to do anything, and that they were just a very expensive dead weight. The US Airforce’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory was initiated in 1963, and killed in 1969. And that was pretty much it.
I think this was touched on, but the benefit was that we (the US) didn’t get obliterated from space by the Ruskies. When the Russians started successfully sending up satellites. the US Military went into a panic that it also meant they would have a superior edge in weaponry. The primary motivation for the US was to stay even with, or exceed, Russian space-based capability in warfare. Or so I have read…
I think this is a good point. For all that mantra about the human need for exploration etc., there is a stronger urge to weaponize any new horizon we reach.
Although this really hasn’t happened in space. Although the original objective of military space programs was to achieve a strategic high ground (so to speak) by putting weapons and warfighters in Earth orbit or even on the the Moon’s surface, the reality was that the costs were enormous, even in the basic study phase before much of the hazards of operating in space were actually well understood, and the benefits were small compared to automated surveillance and communication satellites rather than weapon platforms and human operators. Even the furious pace of science fiction fueled concepts funding multimillion dollar ABM studies and proposed global-spanning multi-hundred-billion dollar space-based kinetic interceptors and directed energy weapons but produced little more than a warm bucket of spit. The Soviets, in their parallel efforts to surreptitiously develop space-based weapons discovered the same thing. The attempt at using space for military purposes actually spurred on commercial developments that likely would not have been otherwise affordable to for industry to develop. Even the ICBM and SLBM programs (which travel through orbital space even though they are not technically space-based) contributed more significantly to commercial capability than they did to actual warfare.
That may change once there is something in space to actually fight over, but in terms of conventional terrestrial-based conflict, the weaponization of space has actually been a bust. On the other hand, our scientific achievements in the competitive space race have been remarkable, all the moreso for often receiving indifferent funding and political support. The Voyager 1 Titan flyby and Voyager 2 “Grand Tour” demonstrated the technical prowess of the United States as well as any military conflict, and the Luna/Lunokhod and Venera/Vega did the same for the Soviets. The Hubble, Spitzer, and upcoming James Webb telescopes, while owing their heritage to surveillance satellites intended to spy on the now defunct Soviets and other potential enemies have been outstanding examples of international collaboration in space science.
Stranger