One thing the article doesn't cover is that whilst the pessimists had a point about the moon landing itself not achieving very much except some prestige and cool pictures[1] considering the proportion of US national income spent, the Apollo program ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers, and other tech that could only have come out of a space program like satellites are an essential part of the functioning of the modern world. Estimates suggest the ROI wasn't just non-negative, it was hugely positive (NASA claims $7 for every $1 spent)
That was more evident in 1989 than when people were wondering whether it was a massive waste of money in 1969, and certainly than in 1959
[1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.
> ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers,
NASA has been promoting that claim for years. But it's not real. Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.[1] Flight computers came from the USAF missile programs of the 1950s.[2] Nor was NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.
I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical. If NASA's moon mission caused them to go deep in the archives of forgotten technology and resurrect ideas that had long been discarded, they deserve credit for that.
(I'm not saying this is the case, but you're also not saying that it's not.)
> I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical.
Probably.
IMHO, the US military was and is probably far more effective at making emerging technologies "practical" than NASA is. Their budget's bigger and they buy more stuff, often mass-produced. NASA does a lot of one-off and small-run projects.
> The US military as a guaranteed purchaser, maybe. The US military as an organization, definitely not.
What do you mean? The military will ask for pretty aggressive improvements in capabilities, then be willing to pay essentially infinity dollars to get what they ask for. That was especially true during the Cold War. For instance, my understanding is the military played a crucial step in productizing semiconductors, because they were willing to buy them at volume when they were far too expensive for nearly every civilian use case. That volume allowed for the R&D to drive prices down and make civilian use practical. If the military hadn't been interested, things would have gotten to a much slower start.
No, they don't. The scientists at NASA are as good as those in the private sector. If the private sector needs it badly enough, it'll make it without government interference.
No one has been arguing that NASA scientists are better than private sector scientists. The argument is that having a seemingly-stupid goal that takes a lot of work can spawn off legitimately useful technologies that would never have been targeted by the private sector because moonshots aren't good investments. The theory is that it's a good way to very quickly iterate through many different ideas.
This is just my opinion, but I feel like stuff is way more likely to be actually be accomplished if there's a tangible goal. A goal, even an arbitrary one, helps you actually figure out the limitations of a theory or design, and if you don't have a goal it is far too tempting to handwave away important questions and live in theoretical land.
In a similar vein, F1 racing has an enormous amount of engineering effort put into it in the name of winning a race and those efforts can have positive impacts outside of F1.
It does sadden me that these days their designs are much more restricted, as I enjoyed the wacky ideas we would occasionally see when the rules were less restrictive.
And sports, especially after the leagues/OIC fell hard on drugs, are pushing nutrional science (and medecine) like crazy.
Even in weird ways: my sister can afford to pay her rent/food herself while studying because she prepare meal plans for a water polo team, which helps her study and find ideas for her college projects. Hopefully she can get through her studies without working in a kitchen again.
Well, one difference is that Teslas sort of are luxury products. Given Apple marketshare in the US among consumers, it's hard to consider their products as luxury goods in the same way.
The fact that there's some percentage of status-conscious high schoolers (or whoever) that think that blue bubbles make them special doesn't actually make it so. They're idiots.
Green bubbles are annoying because they’re just way less feature rich, and are entirely antiquated. Every green message is logged and listed on my phone bill and the transcripts routinely are revealed in court proceedings?
Sorry it’s got nothing to do with classism, just objective differences.
See, it's a vicious cycle, the aggressive M&A strategy leads to a need to increase sales, which leads to a larger marketing budget, which finally trickles down in to the price. Now price is actually segmented itself, in terms of up-front elasticity and "walled-garden" elasticity, which Apple can monitor independently of device sales through marketing novelty through the app store and seeing if the nibbles are elastic onto services, say like Apple+. Historically they also have segmented product (XR, Pro XR) to get more data points for the degree of price elasticity, which is probably most responsive because they're the most expensive thing on the broad market.
Apple has only done two large acquisitions in 30 years. Next for $700 Million and Beats for $3 billion.
Even Apple’s cheapest phone - the iPhone SE is over $100 more expensive than the average Android phone sold in the US.
Apple has usually sold this years model, last years model and the year before that concurrently. Sometimes when the n-1 model is too expensive to sell at a discount they introduce a new phone (ie the iPhone 5C)
Tesla is working on a Model 2 I believe they're hoping to market at $25K. I see them as similar to Toyota, Ford, etc who have luxury models or lines, but also want to service the lower end of market too.
Considering the first Cybertruck just rolled off of the production line, after being announced almost 4 years ago, and they've never produced the second gen Roadster after announcing it 6 years ago, I wouldn't put much stock in their development pipeline.
Not OP but Teslas I've seen around the Bay Area while driving around have Big Altima Energy. If someone's driving high above the speed limit, swerving through slower traffic like their life is in danger, or doing a U-turn on a two-lane street in the middle of rush-hour its usually a Tesla Model 3. On the other hand, where I grew up it always seemed to be Nissan Altimas that had this kind of energy. I think the stereotype is not really about individual drivers so much as its about the popularity of the vehicle and its performance characteristics.
Both the Nissan Altima and Tesla Model 3 sell very well and are entry level ("entry level" here meaning entry level for the class of vehicles one is looking for, there are entry-level Mercedes' for instance) sedans with power behind them. So you have a lot of them both on the road, and thus more people who likely treat them as disposable and thus drive them recklessly. Any car that is super popular usually is popular enough that enough of the wrong kind of drivers have it, and so you can start stereotyping them. I think Model 3s have a lot of the wrong kind of drivers on the road. Maybe many of them care about saving the environment but they don't drive like they care about the car.
I thought it was obvious that what I was saying was Bay Area specific when I said Tesla drivers are like Nissan Altima drivers I’ve encountered elsewhere but go off.
A vehicle driven by people who engage in douchebag behavior.
The stereotype in the US is anyone driving a BMW, and any sort of lifted pickup. A non douchey vehicle, as a class of vehicles, would probably be a minivan, a Camry, or a Civic.
Not original commenter, but I think metrics of douchery probably vary person to person. Personally, the number of pithy vanity plates specific to the vehicle's energy source is what does it for me. I think it speaks more to the occupant and their outward projections & posturing than the vehicle.
thinking of the South Park fart smelling prius meme.
FTR - I have no problems with EVs, but I do give myself a good chuckle when I see someone who was proud enough of their vehicle purchase to turn their it into a billboard advertising something / someone (Musk) who has fallen from social grace.
One associated with Mr Elon Musk, and one which is not.
You choose who and what you associate with in this world, and your car is one of the things which, whether you like it or not, will define perceptions of you.
A premature rocketulation man-baby is not who I want to associate with or help fund.
> Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.
Okay, so... the tech existed but was too expensive to actually use, NASA threw a bunch of R&D at making it practical, and now it's cheap enough to use. I'd say that's a great case for NASA getting credit for making the tech useful; that they didn't literally invent it from scratch seems rather beside the point.
Do you know that it was NASA's R&D that made it practical or is that conjecture?
From Institute of Food Technologists (IFT):
Freeze-drying was invented by Jacques-Arsene d’Arsonval at the College de France in Paris in 1906. Later, during World War II, it was widely implemented to preserve blood serum. Since then freeze-drying has become one of the most important processes for preservation of heat-sensitive biological materials. During the 1950s, industrial freeze-drying of foods began. Freeze-drying is currently used as a preservation method for foods, pharma-ceuticals, and a wide range of other products.
So you're a hypothesis is that NASA was instrumental in figuring out how to reduce the cost or mass produce freeze dried food because... That was necessary for 4 astronauts?
Apollo CM and LM had the Apollo Guidance Computer provide very advanced digital fly by wire for the time. (in fact I think it was one of the first DFBW systems). Later DFBW research on F-8 Crusaders started out using the actual AGC as well, interestingly enough.
AGC was also one of the first machines to use integrated circuits (to keep it light, no doubt) so you could say that the apollo program also advanced computer research by quite a bit.
Those missile computers of the day were mostly analog, lots of gears 'computing' trajectories. Really amazing inventions but not really adaptible to changing circumstances. Which makes sense in an ICBM because it has all the facts known in advance. This is where the much more interactive Apollo computer was really new at.
Nike was analog. (I've seen the ground-based analog computers at Site SF-51 in Marin). Atlas was digital, but in the early models the guidance computer was on the ground, with the ground sending commands to the booster during boost phase. [1] Navajo seems to have been the first missile with onboard digital computing. Polaris was self-contained and digital; it had to be, since the sub had no uplink. Missiles showed steady forward progress.
Apollo had to solve many technical problems, but often specialized ones, such as how to handle liquid hydrogen in bulk and how to get stable combustion in a big engine.
A major criticism of Apollo is that it produced too much specialized technology that was never used again.
The Space Shuttle had a different set of problems. It was supposed to be a practical space transport, but only the orbiter was re-usable and it needed a months-long major overhaul after each flight. Not until the Falcon 9 did something cost-effective finally get built.
> [1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.
Space-romantics tend to wildly overestimate the benefits of space colonization relative to the difficulty and cost.
Space is... kinda shit. Including all the other rocky bodies in our star system. In the best case, it's like if Earth suffered a half-dozen biosphere-ruining apocalypses and was yet worse than that, even.
The "why?" needs a damn good answer, and we just don't have one, certainly not for long-term human habitation. Even "colonize Mars as a humanity backup" isn't great. There are cheaper ways to achieve most of that supposed benefit, and maybe do it even better, possibly even involving space in some capacity, most of which projects we could kick off today if we really wanted to—yet we don't bother with any of those, no, we fixate on Mars because of the romantic and pop-culture appeal, not because it's the most efficient solution.
Colonizing Mars or the clouds of Venus or putting dome-cities on the Moon or whatever is undeniably cool as hell, but when you sit and really think about it... eh.
The why is because humans like exploring and colonizing. Our most successful civilizations (in the evolutionary sense, not the meritocratic or moralist sense) were good at exploring and expanding, so a lot of people are wired to want to do that. There are only 2 accessible frontiers - space and the ocean.
This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about.
Very little of the expense of historical exploration was undertaken just so people could scratch their exploration itch. Besides, we have a pretty good idea of what we'll find most of these places, now, without having to send people there, and certainly without needing them to live there. We don't have a strong history of bending entire economies to support these kinds of projects just for exploration's sake, but for expected returns. We can do most of the preliminary exploring of our star system cheaper with robots and closer-to-home remote sensors, now.
Would we have funded so many expensive expeditions, in the age of sail, to explore the Arctic and northern Canada if we'd had satellites to tell us there was no Northwest Passage? Just for the sake of exploring in-person? I doubt it, but that's the conclusion one must draw from the "the need, deep in the human heart, to explore is enough justification! It's our nature!" (see the romanticism?) position if one supposes that justifies massive human space exploration and colonization programs, today, barring new information.
> This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about.
And you don't think the people allocating the resources subscribe to it? That's more or less my point about why they're doing it. The VOC and British India Companies may have done it for profit, but the romanticized version has been drilled into our barons and leaders.
I'm 80/20 on Musk's Mars thing being a way to get great PR in certain circles at near-zero cost. His periodically erratic behavior is the only reason I allocate the 20. Who else is seriously talking about space colonization and even kinda putting their money where their mouth is? Which money, conveniently, would have had to have been spent for much-lesser goals anyway... I'll be convinced he means what he says, on that front, when he starts spending serious cash on projects that have little purpose other than reaching and/or colonizing Mars. For now, I believe he wanted to own a rocket company, and wanted to have a stated mission that might make recruiting easier and buy him some goodwill points.
We have an entire continent which is far more hospitable than either space or the ocean and we don't dare attempt to really colonize it. Hell, Africa is a perfectly fine piece of land and first world countries don't invest any money into building anything worthwhile past the Mesopotamian cradle because they'd rather keep the people poor and exploit them for their resources.
NASA was presumably an expensive way to get any inventions not related to space. You could just fund normal research, after all.
People similarly laud military research, but it's not as if you need the military to carry it out. Governments were just willing to fund the research as part of a military effort.
I really love the book "The decision to go to the moon" because it chronicles not apollo itself, but the years leading up to the decision to do it.
Remember: The soviets had just successfully launched sputnik and were years ahead of the US. It was perceived to be a matter of national security and pride, we had to do something.
The choices were:
1 - do it, but as a secret CIA/Pentagon thing focused on military power, objectives, run by the military leadership.
2 - Do it as it was done, as a civilian, public thing for us all to share in.
Yes! It's very different than the other books I have on Apollo, which are mostly about the engineering and astronauts. This book really answered a lot of questions I had about all the rest of it. The greater economic political and social things going on at the time, the background before. At first it seemed dryer than the other books but it's actually become some of my favorite facts and most discussed details about apollo. If you're into apollo, yes. If you're just into the engineering details and not as much in the politics and societal part maybe not.
Yeah, but if you just fund research without an objective you just waste money because it creates an opportunity for a grifter like me to go there and just not get any results of value.
When you place an objective like the Moon in front, at the least your research has to result in it getting closer. The hope is that this broad objective results in something as opposed to something narrower you might want.
There's a lot of wisdom here. Stupid but hard goals are still hard goals. Necessity -- not taxpayer largess -- is the mother of all invention.
The corresponding risk is in the resulting cargo cult around arbitrary constraints whose reasons were forgotten. I bet if we committed to building the Panama canal with only spoons we'd have ended up with a lot of amazingly useful spoon-platform earth moving technology, and the commercial sector would've ended up with highly optimized spoon-based machines, and it'd all be very stupid compared to what we got instead.
The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs, the space race was just an impetus/motivator for blank check by-all-means research. As a general rule shouldn't as much money as possible go into that sort of research until the marginal return is below $1 for each dollar spent?
The mission to go to the Moon wasn’t just a mission to go to the Moon, it was also a mission to come back from the Moon. This was basically a blank check and a massive cross-disciplinary exercise.
Our next focus should be on Mars with exactly the same criteria: get people to Mars and also get them back as part of the same mission. It will be much more difficult than getting to the Moon and back and that’s exactly the reason to do it.
Going to Mars with real live squishy humans would no doubt be cool. Getting them back in 1 piece would be even cooler. I'd argue capturing near-earth asteroids and starting to build a functional zero-g industry around earth is more useful though. I think those two things are pretty orthogonal.
I'd love to see a Mars space race between China and the USA. If there's another cold war brewing let's at least only keep the cool aspects of the last one and leave the saber rattling bullshit behind in history...
Invest ridicolous amount of money, time, effort and passion to space colonialism instead of solving problems with my neighbours sound hypocritical for me.
Science budgets are already so absurdly low that this idea of getting people to Mars will just sap them further. This just isn't wise spending given the priorities that we have, like not destroying the planet further.
For half a century we have been massively slashing science spending. From a peak of 2.5% GDP in 1962 steadily down to about 0.5% today. There's not much left.
The research was a side effect of a very well defined goal, which was achievable albeit extremely hard. Investing in achieving a goal (with the research being a side benefit) is different from just investing in research because it changes the motivations of the researchers (from "how do we get our next research grant" to "how do we solve this problem").
That's not to say you shouldn't invest in abstract research with no obvious goal at all, but probably you should consider it a much higher risk investment and not fund all your research that way...
There's also the fact that money now is more valuable that money later even if you adjust for inflation (one of the reason countries run a deficit) so the expected return should be much higher than $1 to be worth investing in.
Next, there's the fact that investment is finite, so the expected return has to be higher than the expected return you would get elsewhere.
Finally there's the fact that as you invest more, the effects of all three of those factors increase, so it has diminishing returns.
The most hand wavy R&D propositions ever, a very common take on Reddit. I hate when people assume the specific ROI gained when developing rocketry, when it was still very novel in the 1950-60s, can be used as a general rule for spending money on NASA or related gov projects today.
Our R&D today will go towards items that are today’s equivalent of 1950-60s rocketry. You clearly recognize the giant leap in hind sight. Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That is why it’s worth it both in advancements and ROI.
> Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits.
That's always the problems with these types of discussions though, isn't it? You can't know what that next leap is going to be and how it is going to benefit everyday life.
For some, like myself, that next leap will be just as revolutionary and will send us to the stars. We imagine a blank check with a direct, long-term goal leading to things we can't even dream of today.
For others, however, they struggle to see what that leap will be. For them, it's just getting to Mars and maybe coming back, maybe with some new tech for the military. Nothing that will affect their own lives or the lives of their children. That was the problem in the 50s and 60s that led to so much backlash against the projects. And even though we saw the fruit those projects bore, who is to say it will happen a second time?
Some people just can't or won't imagine what might come from another Apollo-esque program. And that's who you have to convince.
I think one of the next big leaps will be in technologies that are not possible without extensive international cooperation. A few examples:
- shipping solar energy to the dark side of the planet
- ending the COVID-19 pandemic (N95s, air filtration, far UV-C, timely vaccine updates)
- intercontinental high speed rail (low emissions travel)
- preserving the biosphere by removing deforestation incentives w/ international assistance, technology transfer
- interplanetary space infrastructure incl. orbital launch
- high quality durable goods that barely break and are easy to service
Our competitive framework is currently inhibiting our incredible technology from working at full effectiveness.
Sorry to derail, but I'm utterly confounded that cancer research, life extension research, brain-computer research, etc. haven't been given this "by-all-means" approach. It's one thing to defeat a geopolitical rival, it's quite another to escape annihilation for just a bit longer.
One might assume religiosity is the cause, but atheist nations aren't investing in it either.
If anything was deserving of another moonshot / Manhattan project, I think that would be it.
The Manhattan project and the moonshot were implementation problems, not theoretical ones. By 1939 we knew that a runaway nuclear reaction was possible and Werner von Braun probably could have worked out the fuel you’d need to get to the moon on the back of a napkin. It took a lot of ingenuity to get there, but both problems seemed achievable given enough resources.
On the other hand, we don’t even know where to begin to “cure cancer”, because it’s thousands of different diseases with different causes and prognoses. There are cancers that essentially are curable with enough of a headstart. Of the ones that we’ve “cured” there’s little in common in their origins and they all have wildly different treatments. Curing cancer isn’t dumping money at solving one achievable problem - it’s an open-ended investment in tackling thousands of independent problems.
There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?
Of course we know how to begin. We're doing it as we speak!
Cancer survival rates are constantly getting better. The payback for investment in biotech research has been huge and even bigger dividends are on the horizon.
Look at the Hepatitis drugs and weight loss drugs that actually work. These along will address the leading causes of death today.
> There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?
There really aren't. The basic technology is mostly the same. And we have a system for deciding what to spend money on: scientists write grants, get some funding, show results, and then we repeat at a bigger scale seeing who can deliver the best results. It's not perfect, but it works.
Cancer deaths today are a choice we make as a society to not invest in research. We can't "cure cancer" tomorrow, but even with the tiny resources allocated today we're making significant progress. We could do so much more!
For example, in the 70s 5-year survival across all cancers was 58%. Now it's 85%.
The point is that it's a problem where "9 women can't make a baby in a month". It's a slow, iterative, grinding advance in many different directions more than something that could be cracked in a decade with sufficient resources.
Even the Manhattan project didn't have an unlimited pool of top-level scientists. At some point, pouring in more money [ADDED: especially to somewhat vague goals] doesn't give a lot of incremental results. I'd be a lot more convinced if there were evidence that there were top-level, productive scientists in important fields that would be producing world-changing results if they were only given more money. (Of course, they all would like more money and resources.)
"Cancer" is a nebulous area. You can't really study "cancer". Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases characterized by a breakdown of your own cells' reproductive process. Not to mention, it's a breakdown that can just happen. You can take every precaution, avoid every carcinogen, and still get cancer. The biggest predictor to whether or not you will get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater your chances.
And we might "get" cancer far more often than we realize. It's just that our bodies do have ways to excise cancer from our own bodies. It's just that sometimes, it's not enough.
And there is a lot of research that goes into cancer prevention and treatment. But it's not like one day we'll have the anti-cancer pill. That's just magical thinking.
Life extension research is also in a weird place. Because, like cancer, there isn't just one thing that ends our life. It's a host of things. And a lot of those things are being looked into. And we've already made amazing strides. We are able to get way more people to advanced ages than before. Prior to modernity, it was basically luck as to whether or not you'd make it to 60.
And I don't even know what you want to mean by "brain-computer" research. But I assume it would eventually involve fucking around with living brains. You absolutely cannot make a mistake there. You don't go poking around in the brains of healthy people unless you want to make them very unhealthy, very quickly.
So each of the things you've picked out are vague and/or fraught with their own perils.
Chucking a meat-filled metal tube at a space rock and getting the meat back is an objective with a clear goal.
And also, I'd like to point out, that failure was an option. Michael Collins was trained in everybody's job just in case he had to come back alone. During the first orbit, when he was out of contact with everybody for 48 minutes, he had no idea what he would find when he came back around. That and this was a process of years. The mission that landed on the moon was Apollo 11. Preceded by the Gemini program, whose main purpose was to lead into the Apollo program. 8 years for the singular goal of having a man go to the moon and return.
"Curing cancer" is not the same. "Brain research" is not the same. "Life extension" is not the same. Pick one thing. One simple goal. Not "cure cancer", but something like "make non-nauseating chemotherapy". Then dedicate 8 years to achieving that one task, no matter the cost. Which is something they do do. Any time you see something about "targeted cancer medications", that's to end-run around chemotherapy. Because chemotherapy is kind of like setting your house on fire to get rid of termites.
The US government does this a lot, maybe not blank checks, but certainly very large checks. The military in particular hands out astonishing volumes of money in the pursuit of pie-in-the-sky dreams.
Outside of blowing stuff up, the NSF distributes roughly $10 billion a year to research. And while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously. Think about how much open source software was developed at universities, funded directly, or indirectly via NSF or similar grants.
One of the problems with indiscriminate spending on science is people who oppose to the spending will attack it. We often see news articles like, "government gives professor $4 million to study of shrimp". Of course, the article is biased, so it ignores that half that that money goes back to the university to pay for "research facilities" or that the research may have direct military application. So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.
> while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously.
It's a crime that all of that money isn't accessible to people outside of universities...
> So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.
I mean... that's the optimistic case. At least in your imaginary scenario there's actual work happening from 9am to 10:30am and from 3:00pm to 5:00pm...
I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation.
It's hard to really grasp, kind of like insurance which I swear a lot of people also don't really get but in reverse (where you throw a lot of money seemingly down the drain until possibly the day where it completely makes up for it).
How do you tackle budgeting for something with zero guarantees? Not very easily.
> I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation.
I wouldn't say that at all. There are lots of small, tangible positive outcomes that occur along the way. Inventing interplanetary travel is great. But even a failed project gives smart people experience, generates research that might have application elsewhere, funds general economic development.
Lots of indirect development comes from R&D. Think a chemical engineering PhD student designs some software to solve a problem specific to their research, then finds out that there's a broader market for that kind of software and leaves his research to pursue that as a business.
I think that a lot of people think R&D is only about achieving a specific goal. When, in reality, it's about researching and developing a lot of smaller things in the general direction of a particular goal.
Did they? The USSR had a lot of expensive losses, from the war in Afghanistan to the cleanup of Chernobyl. But I'm not sure the space race fits in that category; like in the US it pushed tech advances within the USSR as well, and their launch capabilities generated a lot of revenue for them down the line.
The USSR had massive internal contradictions and inefficiencies. By the end it was brittle, and it couldn't weather shocks, like the late 1980s to early 1990s oil shock, very well, and attempts at reform magnified internal dissent until the constituent republics and satellite states could only be satisfied with complete independence.
>It is suggested that because the Soviet Union had out-of-date oil technology that production decreased. However over time, even in a closed system such as the Soviet Union, information about technology and technology itself must increase.
Why? The Soviet Union had numerous important failures in technology that killed their advancement, often caused by valuing personal loyalty (often treated as party loyalty) over all else, an act that will drive any system to failure eventually.
>There is no reason to believe that management was much better in the 1960's when oil production skyrocketed then in the 1980's when it stagnated
Again, asserted without evidence, as if there aren't hundreds of examples of good management being replaced with bad management, regardless of economic ideology or societal structures.
>Subsequent discontent pushed them toward democracy. The Soviet Union was left trying to simply keep NATO troops out of Eastern Europe but still letting the Eastern Europeans become democracies.
So now rolling tanks into at least one of the revolting countries is "letting the eastern Europeans become democracies"? Russia fought, and continues fighting to this very day, any and all "I don't want to be a part of russia anymore" ideology, including with lethal force.
The Soviet Union degraded over time because it was structurally and socially organized to encourage rewarding people who were loyal and projected strength than people who got things actually done. From the very top with Stalin himself, the way to move up was completely divorced from the way to improve efficiency. This importantly isn't about the economic system, but the ideology of leadership. The Soviet Union would have run into plenty of troubles with a system based on syncophantry even if it were a free market capitalist system. Allowing that kind of blatant corruption and suffusing it through all levels corrodes society. Or at least this is my opinion.
Regardless, my thesis wasn't that the USSR collapsed entirely because of an oil shock. It was that the USSR had severe structural problems and couldn't weather adversities such as the oil shock.
flight computers were already designed and built for the missles that predated Apollo- in fact, that's why the team that built them for Apollo was able to be so productive.
freeze dried food predates the space program by decades.
Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.
>Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.
What a wonderful tautology.
These things were researched because they were necessary. You don't just sit down and think of new things to invent, you invent things to fix a problem. Without a problem to solve, how is one supposed to suddenly decide what to research?
But how many of these actually practical and useful things were invented by NASA? I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..
> I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..
In many cases yes, they didn't invent the technology per se. But in those cases they improved or refined the tech and by virtue of being a public agency released the information freely for public use.
Right, the computers were built for the preliminary programs which ... were stages on the way to Apollo!
Yes, theoretically, but sometimes you need a big bold exciting goal or everyone will say "why are you wasting my tax dollars inventing flight computers? these don't seem very valuable...". The side effects may even be the point of the project, but the goal is essential to getting the politics right.
They really came out of gun targeting and were later developed into ballistic missile targeting (including sub-launched). Not that the AGC wasn't a significant achievement but the basic technology had already been proven out in Polaris and earlier.
It was a cold war exercise, and viewed through that lens it almost certainly was a better expense than say the Vietnam War. I suppose a more apt hypothetical would be considering what the return spending that money on various additional DARPA projects would have been.
Space skeptics came in two flavors: the first being the classic "the money could have been better spent elsewhere" variety, but second was "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they $PETPEEVE". Frankly I miss the days of "Why can't they" vs the trend of vocal minorities simply decrying any and all science, because at least the critics acknowledged the space program actually happened.
These days unfortunately the conspiracy theorists of the world have made their own discoveries like internet forums and Twitter which just help propagate their points of view far more than a mimeograph of dense text and filled with arrows and diagrams stapled to a telephone pole ever did.
"Spend" is a loaded term when it comes to the way governments work.
If I have $100 then I can choose to spend it on say a book. I have a book, my $100 is clearly gone.
But when the govt spends say $400 mil on a lunar landing, they get the lunar landing, but they also get a bunch of money back. Firstly, a chunk of that money goes to salaries, so a decent chunk comes back as primary taxes (income tax etc) and secondary taxes (sales tax, gas tax, taxes on booze and smokes).
What isn't taxes is mostly then circulating in the economy (generating yet more taxes) while giving the economy a nice boost.
Now we can argue about opportunity cost etc, but the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity.
We can quibble about edge-case budgets all day long, but its hard to avoid the jobs program that is "military spending". In truth what does all that money buy? The lunar program, the Mars program, curing cancer, these are rounding errors compared to the military budget.
I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but what do invasions of Iraq, or occupations of Afghanistan for 20 years actually really achieve? Instead of picking on NASA it might be time to wonder what the Defence trillions get us?
Which brings me back to my first point- most of those trillions circle round in the economy anyway, so its all funny money.
If you think the moon landing money comes back to the government, the defense money does the same, with the added benefit of providing security!
I think both are basically wasted, but that's because I don't buy the premise of your argument. Money is constantly circulating, at a given velocity. Each economic actor chooses a balance of investment and consumption, and spends at a certain rate (some take longer to allocate funds than others). The question for me is whether another actor would have either allocated the money faster, or towards an investment with a higher positive externality. My answer is yes.
I think it's called "speed of money" or something similar, but I do wonder how much of which federal dollars end up as profit in an account versus circulating the economy. Wages to USPS employees - probably spent very quickly/high speed. Money sent to Raytheon - probably fifty/fifty on IC wages and COGS (high speed, ish) and fat cats (boards, CEOs). Yes, yes, they go put money in the stock market, but that's fairly low speed.
My guess is defence spending is much lower speed than NASA or medical programs.
First, the government might not have issue borrowing infinitely, but deficit spending/printing cash from thin air leads to inflation. And considering how 'beautiful' that past couple of months have been, I wouldn't dismiss its impact on livelihood.
Secondly, the government might distribute money into the economy, but it's always done inefficiently. That's where we get $20k trash cans [0] and $28 million spent on camouflage uniforms that don't blend in (for use in Afghanistan).
Arguing that government spending is mostly good because it gets money into people's hands is just the broken window fallacy at work - that cash could have been used for more productive investments in the private sector.
Thirdly, I wouldn't trust the ROI figures published by a government agency, especially since the US government has a 'use it or lose it' approach to budget allocation. They have every motivation to just make up figures to channel more cash their way.
If you're a well paid 'military spending' contractor then you can take a nice vacation to the EU and see what the US could afford were the US not spending it all on it's military. Free* health care, free* college, public transit, etc.
>the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity
This can't be true forever, and to me it seems like it is the underpinning of the entire modern world order. Something seems fundamentally warped, I'm just not educated enough to know what it is.
> I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but what do invasions of Iraq, or occupations of Afghanistan for 20 years actually really achieve?
I'm going to answer with another question. For the past thirty years, how many countries have traded crude oil in currencies OTHER than the dollar, and of those countries, which ones have NOT been invaded by the United States?
I think what they're saying that the government will get a large amount back and you, personally, will get less than 1% back. So you would effectively be spending $99.99 on the book and the government would effectively be spending $45, as an example.
The 7X multiplier was what we used when I worked in a university's advancement office to justify funding alumni events. Seems to be very common with justifying sports stadiums, festivals, and many other things that require public spending.
There's an argument that all those things would have been invented eventually anyway. There was no need to spend 100s of billions of dollars for basically a photo-op.
"Eventually" is a pretty long time. If you were in 1959, would you press a button that caused satellites and freeze-dried food and flight computers to arrive 20 years earlier if it cost $10 billion to press? That saves billions of lives over the next 50 years and dramatically accelerates humanity's technology tree, so it seems like it's worth it.
freeze dried food was invented in France around the time of WWI.
Flight computers predated Apollo- they were originally developed for missles. most of the folks who worked on the AGC had previously developed very successful flight computers already.
Inflated numbers. Also counterfactual reasoning: "had it not been for the space program, we wouldn't have developed these technologies and billions of lives wouldn't have been saved."
$25 billion, for the coolest photo-op in history. Hell yeah. We flush orders of magnitude more money down the drain for shits and giggles any way, might as well do something no one else has ever done before.
Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process?
If it was "basically a photo-op" it wouldn't have generated so much economic activity in the long run, even if perhaps it wasn't the most cost effective way to get there (in some eyes)?
> Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process?
Because not spending that dollar on putting a guy on the moon could have generated 20 dollars elsewhere.
This is why historians are leery of counter-factuals; unless you have very strong evidence that it would have happened, you have nothing but a "could have" hypothesis.
Yea, seems pretty loose to assume those dollars would have generated three times the economic impact of the space program if they'd been left in individuals hands.
Companies certainly innovate, but the government innovates a _lot_ (primarily through research grants which are eventually developed into products by entrepreneurs as far as I can tell, also the military).
Speeding up our technological timeline by decades, and it was decades, has saved tens of millions to hundreds of millions of lives. The Integrated Circuit revolution wouldn't have happened at the same pace without Apollo. Apollo (and to a lesser degree the defense program) funded the industry for the first few years of its existence. Something like 2/3rds of all ICs produced until the mid-to-late 1960s were used in the program.
They were extraordinary customers — willing to fund R&D, patient with bad results but extremely demanding. Without them, I suspect we'd be at least one to two decades behind in your computing timeline. Given how many lives these machines save on a daily basis... it's not hard to do the math.
there's a (small) chance that the moon landing was the first time a living organism successfully chose to visit another celestial body in the entire history of the universe.
"basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.
As someone who considers the moon landing to be mankind's greatest achievement, this poem has only ever inspired dark feelings within me. The attitude that we have to choose between social services or humanity's future, that we can't do both, that space travel is pointless because we haven't "fixed all the problems at home yet", is pure entitlement, it's selfish and it's wrong.
This poem is certainly good at getting it's message across, but that message is racist degenerative trash.
I don't think it's unfair to consider the opportunity cost of pursuing these things versus providing social services. Eisenhower points to a similar tradeoff in his Chance for Peace speech:
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Now admittedly this is talking about about the cost of the military industrial complex rather than the cost of scientific pursuits. But I'm sure someone could make a case for the Apollo program merely being an ICBM manufacturing program in a trench coat.
How is it racist? Is "whitey" a slur? Or perhaps a poem written in 1969 highlighting that obvious fact that Apollo astronauts were all white is the real racism?
The moon landing transcends race, it inspired people, humans, worldwide. This poem diminishes it into some white exclusive eccentricity.
Sure, perhaps a black person should have been among the first involved, I can certainly get behind that criticism. But that's not what the poem critiques, and it's not what activists who protested the moon landing asked for either.
Perhaps aspirationally, but empirically, the Apollo program did not transcend race. It's not racist to call out racism - the "He who smelt it, dealt it" defense is intellectually lazy.
> But that's not what the poem critiques,
I don't see how you can say that, when the poem is literally titled "Whitey on the Moon". One would have to assume the decision to highlight whiteness was deliberate - it easily could have been "Neil on the Moon" or "Man on the Moon" if the author/perfomer so desired.
> Perhaps aspirationally, but empirically, the Apollo program did not transcend race. It's not racist to call out racism
You are wrong. I'm unwilling to debate this fact with you, or even discuss the matter any further frankly, I have made my position clear. Your interpretation of the poem shows a clear lack of understanding on the historical context surrounding it.
All the grievances of Whitey on the Moon can be, and regularly are, offered today. Yet Whitey hasn't been to the Moon in 50 years. It's almost as if one has nothing to do with the other.
Perhaps. Now all that's left to you is to define "address." I suspect what you come up with would be entirely orthogonal to the US space program. I know you could snatch every cent of treasure spent on Apollo and use it in any conceivable manner on Whitey on the Moon grievances and the needle wouldn't move one iota: the engrieved will sing it still.
"Address" would be have a serious discussion about the priorities - both fiscally and socially - of the United States.
In a sense you're right that the US Space Program is a drop in the bucket compared to other spending but Gil Scott-Heron's poem was never a financial proposal. It was trying to express a sentiment that the US government's priorities were messed up, something that still resonates today.
> The first time I heard Whitey On The Moon, I had a strong feeling that we don't all live in the same world, even while we share the same planet.
I think that was the point. White Americans and Black Americans weren't living in the same world in the 1960s.
And you're not providing a counterpoint, you're answering a community's outrage at the literal interplanetary scale gulf of racial inequality (the US was still dealing with desegregation at the time) with twee nerd humor.
It shows what some people want, and what at the time only white people could aspire to.
The criticism that the space program came at a social and economic cost that primarily burdened black Americans while only reinforcing the narrative of white supremacy and racial inequality seems legitimate. The Wikipedia article links to a paper that quotes MLK on the matter:
Today our exploration of space is engaging not only our enthusiasm
but our patriotism. ... No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on
poverty. ... Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking
absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while
only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated
slums. If these strange views persist, in a few years we can be assured that when
we set a man on the moon, with an adequate telescope he will be able to see
the slums on earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence.
I mean yeah, why should black people have given a damn about the moon landing when American society was still permeated by the remnant effects of slavery in many places?
An important point, for the "we could have spent less money doing direct R&D on the actually-useful technologies which Apollo created, and skipped the pictures and prestige..." crowd to note:
The moon race created an extremely public success/fail benchmark, where everyone from the greediest corporate CEO to the lowliest painter on the launch towers understood that losing would for-sure carry a very high social cost. Millions of people, who were already motivated to win the race, were concentrated in certain areas, industries, and labs - providing positive feedback and intense motivation. Yes, it was very expensive, and there was some profiteering, goldbricking, excess bureaucracy, and waste. But compared to most huge government-funded projects, that crap was pretty scarce.
To paraphrase Napoleon's supposed maxim on war: "The moral is to the budget as three to one."
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
The cost of Apollo program is $178 billion in today's money. I personally don't think NASA would've survived to today if Apollo program wasn't successful.
The two newspaper blurbs that the author didn't highlight, but imho have implications that continue to resonate today:
--eisenhower didn't think it was fiscally sound to lower taxes. Here was a Republican who understood the strategic importance of the Moon landings, and was not afraid to say to the rest of his party- and the wealthy class- that they need to stop whining about tax cuts. Well we know who won that argument, ultimately. The tax base in the early 60s was VERY robust compared to today, despite the explosive growth of the multinationals and megacorps.
Robert Weiner warns about expecting computers to make moral decisions. Seemed paranoid in context, but really it was eerily prescient. Especially considering developments in the last year.
I have commented on HN before that I have been skeptical of the moon landing ever happening, but I've spent some time on apolloinrealtime.org listening and reading the Apollo 11, 13, and 17 moon landing transcripts and I have come around. It sounds way too real to be faked.
In that light, I think it was an incredible feat of engineering for the late 60s, and early 70s. Keep in mind, Japan was unable to land a probe on the moon as recently as last year.
Do I think it was worth it? That's debatable, but the engineers and scientists involved accomplished something pretty fantastic and that alone deserves some merit.
I'm not sure where the skepticism for moon landings comes from, given the fact that the Soviets had the means (via a variety of mechanisms, from technical to HUMINT) to know if we faked it. They would have every motivation to "out" us in a UN session with Cuban-Missile-Crisis-like imagery.
A conspiracy between the powers to allow numerous US moon landings and returns to be faked while the Soviet program failed is beyond belief.
Especially considering the USA didn't land humans on the moon just once, it did so six times over the course of three years. Twelve humans have walked on the moon.
It happened so often that public got bored of it and so funding for future missions was withdrawn. Now we've largely forgotten this fact.
It always astonishes me that people speak of THE moon landing, as though it only happened once. One of the greatest achievements of humanity and we undersell it. It would be like Ancient Egyptians thinking there was only one pyramid.
They also did it surprisingly safely. Those vessels were tin cans, with little shielding and just about enough fuel to complete a mission; the chance of them crashing to certain death or not being able to return, every time they went, was very very real. It is half a miracle that effectively nobody ever died as part of actual moon-bound missions, even during testing the fatalities were very low - even more impressive considering it was in the context of a high-pressure arms race.
I'd just like to add that the fact the Lunar Module was flown successfully, when there was zero experience of flying it in 1/6 normal gravity, was a remarkable achievement, even more so when first time it was done there was 20 seconds of fuel left when they landed.
I know there were flying simulators which attempted to simulate 1/6G in earth gravity but I still find it an amazing feat, and a great tribute to everyone involved, particularly, those with their hands on the controls.
> I suspect the semi-conductor industry thinks it was worth it.
That was the USAF, which at one time was the largest purchaser of semiconductors.
They pushed the technology. Especially on the reliability side. The USAF was into naming and shaming vendors. They had a reliability unit which would take failed transistors apart down to the microscopic level and publish pictures of flaws in Aviation Week.
Some USAF generals were rather annoyed when, in the 1980s, commercial uses and technology passed military ones and the semiconductor industry stopped catering to the USAF.[1]
They right way to look at any conspiracy is to assess how many people would be required to pull off the fakery. In the case of the moon landing, it would have to be thousands of people, this very unlikely. A soccer or hockey game on the other hand really only requires two people: the goalie and someone paying the goalie. I’m not suggesting that hockey or soccer are rigged however, it is merely an example.
The amount of people necessary to fool people believing something happened that didn't isn't necessarily (much) greater than the amount it would take to pull it off.
For argument's sake, imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough.
Any group working toward a goal is a conspiracy. NASA actually working to go to the Moon was a conspiracy.
The fake Gulf of Tonkin Incident that was accepted for decades is proof that big lies are possible. Extrapolating to an "unbelievably large" amount of people that it would take to pull of the hypothetical of a Fake Moon Landing conspiracy isn't an actual argument against. It just means that you'd be willing to quote whatever number would be minimally "unbelievably large".
> With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough.
I suppose they could pull it off if everyone truly bought in, but I don't believe for one second that that many people committed to science and engineering would be as committed and diligent as they would need to be to keeping the lie intact at the time, and I certainly don't believe the commitment to the lie would sustain over time. This goes double given the lack of popular support for doing it.
Further, I am not sure even if everyone at NASA that would have to know it was fake was working with automaton-like commitment to their task that we could fool the USSR with a fake landing given they'd have every incentive coupled with the technological means to prove it was fake.
Arguing the personnel politics of the hypothetically fake Moon landing addresses a different argument than the one that I and the OP were addressing. Whether or not I agree with your assessment.
In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.
To illustrate, do you think that US alphabet agencies haven't uncovered critical top secret and massively damaging information about the USSR / Russia since WWII? And vice versa? Perhaps uncovering such information on a constant basis?
Why don't these agencies ever publicly reveal it? Virtually ever?
The public's concept of government is not the same as that of leadership.
> Arguing the personnel politics of the hypothetically fake Moon landing addresses a different argument than the one that I and the OP were addressing.
You assert "imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough".
I assert "I do not believe that to be the case when thinking about the real people that would be asked to do this in a real-world setting". That's setting aside the physical evidence (i.e., Russia observing the moon lander) entirely. I don't see that as changing arguments, I see it as an extension of your assertion.
> In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.
It is not a large assumption to say the Space Race was competitive (and certainly at times outwardly antagonistic), though the politics certainly weren't simply black and white.
The moon landing required too much physical evidence, too many whole human beings, and had too many observers to be plausibly fakeable in my view. I'll leave it there vs. getting into a debate on alphabet agency secret-keeping. Occam's Razor isn't perfect, but it's most clearly not on the "fakeable moon landing" side.
The probability of a single whistleblower emerging increases (at least) linearly with the number of people involved. This problem doesn’t exist at all when working toward a real objective.
Not as a moon-landing-denier, but as someone with an interest in epistemology: claiming thousands of people witnessing launches is not indicative of a moon landing, just a launch.
By staking the existence of the entirety of Apollo missions to something that is logically proof of a small part, the validity of the larger claim is diminished to someone who is not already invested the validity.
Don't interrupt grand nationalist narratives and proofs with logic. Especially when the proofs are in the form of cowboy quips from its heroes. You won't win.
This records 165 attempts including non-crewed missions of all types, like flyby of impactor. Of 165, 87 had some form of failure. 40 at launch, 32 at spacecraft and 5 partial failures. 32/(165 - 40) is .25, so about 3/4 of the time a moon mission launched, it succeeded. This indicates to me that "the rest of the trip is not that difficult" mischaracterizes the difficulty.
Not much of a stretch to believe the country responsible for MKULTRA would fund a huge and fake propaganda piece against the USSR.
That said, it would have been pretty silly to waste as much money as we did in the rocket program if the goal was to fake it all along. Plus, the Soviets weren’t exactly knocking on the moon’s door.
I've ultimately become disappointed with For All Mankind. It has its moments of greatness but literally two thirds of it is anti-exploratory, anti-science angst bullshit. I guess it's a a lot cheaper to film that stuff.
I guess I haven't seen that at all. Certainly "For All Mankind" is presumably intended ironically as it very deliberately plays up the Cold War vibe but that seems understandable given the premise of the series. Of course, we can't really know what would have happened in this scenario but I wouldn't expect a great atmosphere of cooperation between the superpowers.
Not OP, but apparently in the movie Interstellar a school teacher is convinced that the moon landings were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union. I've spoken to an amateur Apollo historian/buff and I am convinced we landed on the moon in the 1960s.
The Soviet Union was actually so wealthy, in the early 1960s, to make these bankruptcy-based conspiracies look really silly. I mean, the West perceived it as a threat largely because their economic system appeared superior for a pretty long time. It wasn't until the late '70s that the Soviets really started to sputter.
Americans themselves benefited greatly from it as our government felt it needed to do more to compete against socialism. Granted, much of that was undone/tapered off after the threat was gone, but it’s an interesting piece of history.
> Noted fiscal hawk Barry Goldwater dismissed the lofty ambitions of lunar exploration as a "wasteful endeavor," an ironic stance given he voiced his criticism at a glitzy dinner that cost each attendee a cool $100 - close to $1000 in 2023.
The cure for cancer project was a waste of money! Sure it's nice they did it but that money would have been better as tax cuts where it would have spurred innovation in other fields. People die of something else anyway.
Yeah we built fancy new labs and educated a new generation of scientists, but what does it matter that we made an algorithm that can cure each individual person's cancer? Those people would have studied something else, and you can just git clone the cancer algorithm nowadays.
The whole cure for cancer project was nothing but a tumourdoggle for big research. Hospitals and universities across the country feasting on public money. Labcoat manufacturers and those guys who make beakers, suddenly getting wealthy off what is essentially a photo-op where where we stick it to the Chinese.
Something about that math doesn't work out; all of NASA was about 3% of the federal budget from '62-72. I don't see how that could be 2.5% of the GDP.
[edit]
Upon closer reading I think it means that over a 10 year period they spent 2.5% of the annual GDP, which would work out to a 0.25% GDP spend each year.
That would be pretty sweet. Big fan of Biden's moonshot cancer initiative. I'd love to see another "space race" type event pursued by America in the name of advancing our scientific understanding. Trying to cure cancer seems like it would be an awesome place to start.
2.5% of GDP would be... 500bn a year?
Coordinating that would be wild. What about a race to negative emissions for 2.5% GDP? With the promise of well paying jobs, cleaner air (long term saves money due to reduced asthma, etc), reduced foreign energy dependence, and increasing the number of products we can sell abroad (long term positive), reducing climate impact (long term saves money in reduced disaster relief).
Comedy of course but also an indication that it wasn't a hugely unpopular opinion in the intro to Tom Lehrer's Wernher von Braun.
And what is it that put America in the forefront of
The nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it
possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money
to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old
American know-how, that's what, as provided by good
old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
See also the book "Operation Paperclip" for just how morally questionable (yet ultimately necessary) the US was when importing German scientists for their missle expertise.
I realize that there's a million obvious answers; but as I type this in the part of the country currently roasting by the heatwave in the United States: will something like this ever happen for climate efforts?
It depends. If enough millennials and GenZ suddenly decide to vote, we might get enough representation in congress to override both the "Jewish Space Laser" MAGA chuds and the elderly Democrats who think there's no particular rush. Otherwise, no, this will not be treated as the emergency it is.
Putting someone on the Moon takes a certain number of people, and it's a thing, and you can do it and be done with it. Less than a hundred thousand people, probably. A fixed budget.
Addressing climate change means suddenly stopping everyone from doing certain things. It's much broader in scope and involves forbiddance, long-term. It's a near-endless stream of don't: don't burn that coal, don't leave that light on, don't drive so much, don't use that plastic bag, don't have that many kids, and so on. This goes across billions of people and it won't ever end.
Sorry, but that's both false and defeatist. You personally not leaving a light on for a few hours is going to make fuck-all difference. You know what _would_ put a dent in it? Restricting private jet travel. Instituting some kind of time or fuel constraints on that would be worth a zillion peons turning off their lights more often.
Addressing climate change largely doesn't require personal sacrifice, and personal sacrifice may in fact be counterproductive. We have to identify the actual major sources contributing to it and fix those. There aren't really that many! They're just rich and powerful and they want you to feel like changing a lightbulb in your house is actually doing something. And it is, but it's not doing as much as grounding Musk's private plane forever would.
Private jets are quite inefficient but it's just a minor one of many emission sources. It should be blamed but just banning private jet doesn't end global warming.
I am a huge fan of space exploration and all the various content that comes with it. I also like fine books. Folio Society's A Man on the Moon The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin (https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/a-man-on-the-moon.html) is an exceptionally fine way to learn more about the technical, budgetary, personal and play bizarre things that went down. The book covers some of the skepticism and the "this is really expensive" objections. If you want to treat yourself, this substantial 2 volume folio is a feast for all your senses.
1. I love stuff like this. I think about it with elections all the time; even in the biggest landslide elections there’s always about a third of the population that wasn’t on board. A good reminder about winners writing history books.
2. I’m in my 30s. The first time I ever was given an idea that people weren’t all about the Moon landing was a Larry Norman song[0], of all things. (“They brought back a big bag of rocks / Only cost thirteen billion. Must be nice rocks”) I was definitely an adult by this point.
3. I’m curious about the wording, but it seemed like the survey question was focused on cost. Americans never like things when you ask about cost. If the question was “should we develop rockets strong enough to beat the Commies” it probably would have polled a lot better.
4. Americans also always seem to be cool with public works-y stuff once it’s actually built. No one liked the Big Dig until it was done. Part of that is the cost concern, but I think there’s also the disbelief that things are possible, and fears about what the bad side of the thing could be.
The Big Dig was also a horrific pain when it was going on. (Oh, and Boston traffic is also still horrific.) Nonetheless, once done, it was a nice transfer payment to Boston that the Speaker of the House (Tip O'Neill) arranged for the rest of the country to make that reversed the also horrifying neighborhood-splitting overhead highway decision. Boston is better for it.
The Big Dig almost certainly resulted in less bad traffic than would have existed otherwise--and eliminated some really painful traffic patterns like getting to the airport. But elevated 93 which cut off the North End from downtown was just a blight generally even if it took years to get the greenway plan approved.
I guess SF had the "advantage" of an earthquake to eliminate its issue.
> I think about it with elections all the time; even in the biggest landslide elections there’s always about a third of the population that wasn’t on board.
You're actually vastly underestimating the amount of the population that wasn't on board.
In 1972, Nixon was reelected with 60.7% of the vote from 56.2% voter turnout, which amounted to only 34% of eligible voters.
In 1984, Reagan was reelected with 58.8% of the vote from 55.2% voter turnout, which amounted to only 32% of eligible voters.
Incidentally, Biden in 2020 was also 34%: 51.3% of the vote from 66.6% voter turnout.
You can't make the voter turnout argument because the US election system is awful, and people know when their vote doesn't matter, or when it's being suppressed, and choose not to vote
> people know when their vote doesn't matter, or when it's being suppressed, and choose not to vote
Why would you count these people as "on board"?
Moreover, even among the people who do vote, there are a lot who plug their noses and vote for what they consider to be the lesser evil, against the other candidate rather than with enthusiasm for their own candidate.
It's not really possible to know if non-voters are on board or not. Because of how the elections are setup, we also don't get any real actionable information about how people might vote under different rules either. Some voters will vote in most elections, and some voters only turn out if they think there's a vote somewhere on the ticket where their vote counts.
What it means to be "on board" is to endorse the leader's agenda. The context here is supporting the Moon landings rather than supporting any particular political candidate. (And recall that JFK only barely edged out Nixon in the extremely close 1960 election.) The question is not which candidate a non-voter would vote for, if forced to choose. That's why I mentioned the lesser of evils phenomenon.
Also, non-voters are consistently at least 1/3 of the population, regardless of the "closeness" of the election, and there's not necessarily a correlation between closeness and turnout.
If that's the definition of "on board", we really don't have any useful information on if citizens (or residents) are on board or not. Other than if they stage a protest, they're probably not on board, but then again we don't know how many of the people who didn't attend the protest aren't on board but didn't go to the protest for whatever reason.
I don't think there were protests about the moon landing, but maybe some small ones I never heard about.
> a) I don't think a Gallup poll is useful information :P
I'm not sure why you're here commenting on the Gallup poll article then, or how you think we would ever have useful information about the public?
b) I thought we were talking about being onboard in landslide elections, as you quoted so many messages ago.
Again, the context is the submitted link. I can't speak for the OP, but I'm guessing the idea was that a landslide election is supposed to give the winner a "mandate" for their agenda.
Point taken, but I would assume that non voters have a mix of reasons ranging from “I hate everyone” to “I like things enough to not do anything about it”
This shows poll results, namely the bit in the news paper they used for the headline, but not the actual question American's were asked that ended with "..amount spent for this purpose or not?" which is just as important as the data.
Oh, so THAT's the real reason for why we have so much fake moonlanding nonsense still to this day.
If there's some thing I've learned in the past 6 or so years is that when morons attach their personality to a certain claim and then they're proven wrong, they just double down. So I can totally imagine that a very large fraction of those 66% who opposed it couldn't just be proven wrong and instead attack it. It can't be that I was wrong and landing on the moon was actually awesome, instead it must be fake! Didn't happen!
Consider that people who opposed going to the moon still may not think that it was "awesome."
It's patriotic bullshit that political scoundrels turn to, but is at least not as horrific as war. Although if the money spent on the moon landing had been spent on starving children, many of them wouldn't have starved, so maybe it's a sort of an inverse war to burn cash like that?
Nationalists are childish. Trump declares a Space Force, and turns half the people who thought he was the antichrist into his defenders.
Let's not forget this phase of the space program was in the context of the Vietnam War, and well as other social issues (e.g., poverty). Even MLK was shifting focus to the injustice of income inequality. Going to the moon was, in that context, seen as another foolish government effort. Few, and for good reason (at the time), were willing to get behind another bloated government idea.
If there was no war, the perception and support shifts. If there was also less other social unrest, the perception and support shift again.
I was shocked that wasn't mentioned in the article. It's still as biting today. It definitely moved me, and has influenced my perspective on and choice of work.
If you don't know it you should listen to to that link of Gil Scott-Heron reading it, but here are the words if you prefer not to youtube:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the Moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the Moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the Moon)
Ten years from now I'll be paying still.
(while Whitey's on the Moon)
It's not biting today, but instead looks incredibly silly in hindsight. The investment in the moon landing was a massive success and had that money been spent on social programs it would've accomplished almost nothing due to structural and cultural issues
I love stuff like this. It really illustrates the folly of "popularism" (not to be confused with populism) - where you allow your political agenda to be guided heavily based on issues that align with positive polling outcomes, an deemphasize and abandon policy planks that lack popular support.
Democracy is not a god. Asking the general population about such things and then actually enacting their wishes is like taking your direction from Pooh Bear. He likes the sweet taste of honey, but is a bear of little brain and is happy so long as his supply of it keeps flowing.
This is why “democracy” is a flawed idea and why the educated elite should be making decisions (but in a way that offers some accountability to the common man).
The American revolution was opposed by a majority, and man what a screwup, we could've been eating crumpets instead of building a (checks Google) $20 trillion dollar economy. /s
Canada's likely a pretty good model of what would have happened if we had not left England, and their GDP per capital is within spitting distance of the USA despite having a less favorable geography.
Doubtful. The US was the first government of its kind and it triggered the French Revolution and every anti-monarchist revolution since then. Canada and every other commonwealth state was influenced by that. The snowballing GDP under republics begin to have its own gravity until a huge portion of the world got pulled into our orbit.
History is not a linear journey from point a to point b. Capitalist republics are not inevitable and liberalism is not assured. We could indeed all be bowing to Charles right now.
Well not Charles. If America didn't become a model Republic, Edward VIII quite likely would not have abdicated to marry American Wallis Simpson, and so George VI would likely have never taken the throne.
> The British administration of Canada was surely informed by the experiences of the 1770s.
The British administration of Canada was different to begin with because Britain acquired Canada from conquering New France and so had a completely separate culture. And the way France ran then-New France / now-Canada was completely different to how the British 'ran' the colonies ('ran' is used loosely, as there was minimal oversight since they were each basically commercial ventures).
For some interesting research on how the administration differences resulted in the cultural differences (even though the countries are right next to each other), see the book The origins of Canadian and American political differences:
A pretty good 1:10 scale model in population, maybe. If the US were still in the Commonwealth, it'd be the second-largest nation in population by 110 million and the largest in GDP by about $20 trillion. Parent comment's GDP rounding error for the US is the entirety of the UK's 2019 GDP ($3.1T).
While I agree on the first part I think it’s hard to separate the economies of USA and Canada due to their proximity and collaboration. I think a fairer comparison would be with Australia or New Zealand. Not sure how close they are in GDP per capita but they are also definitely up there.
Canada's GDP is pulled up by the USA being right over the border but is still quite a lot lower per capita than that of the US. We lag far behind the US in wealth per capita - our economic performance is more on par with the nicer EU countries than with the US.
As a European immigrant to the US, turned US citizen, I would never take the flip side of my move; but, you can rest easy knowing you have that option. If you don’t know people who have expatriated to some degree out of the US, invest in widening your social circle.
There's a good chance you're somehow tied to technology, though, and America pays its software engineers a frankly bonkers amount compared to much of Europe. That may way outweigh a lot of other considerations for you.
But I also agree, I'd prefer to stay in the US than move to Europe. But I'd even more prefer to have some universal healthcare and also live in the US.
The entire purpose of my comment was to provoke someone who understands the world through glib, thought-terminating catchphrases, into obnoxiously quote-replying every few words of my comment, independently of the context they were presented in.
You know, I was going to argue that such an historical landmark has value beyond what is learned. Those who are inspired, those who believe in funding science, the sheer awe of what civilization can achieve and all.
But it would seem the cost ascended to what would now be $280 billion, adjusted for inflation.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider cost 4.75 billion.
International Space Station? A cool 150 billion
GPS costed 12 billion to put in orbit.
James Webb telescope, 10 billion.
Human Genome, 5 billion.
Now, there is a point to be made that maybe we just don't do other very valuable, very expensive projects, and you can always compare it to the US defense budget if you want to make the number look small, but I really wasn't aware of the sheer amount of money poured into this. Damn.
Just as an aside, the US defence budget is actually not the US governments' biggest expense.
Also, humanity is always going to spend a good whack of money on defence - it's just the cost of running a civilization. Lawful behavior is what keeps us on an upward trajectory, and laws are backed up by guns.
If Ukraine had nukes, there'd be no invasion.
If France invaded Germany right after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, there'd be no WW2.
If the Allies didn't invade Nazi Europe, Hitler's son/grandson would be ruling that continent, and possibly a couple of other ones as well.
I fully agree on your point regarding big, valuable projects though.
“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”
Recently read the argument that monuments are less about glory and more about keeping the unwashed masses busy with work, so they don't have time or energy to overthrown the ruling class.
... or juicing the economy with a little redistribution, without simply giving handouts. Or a little of both.
The CCC in the US was a similar thing: paying people to build nice things in parks and such while people were going hungry. We absolutely didn't need that stuff. Coulda just given the money away to those who needed it. Though, this way, at least, we got some wonderful benefits that endure to this day—indeed, the kind of well-built, long-lasting, and nice-to-have but unnecessary infrastructure and flourishes, for the enjoyment and appreciation of all, that make one feel like one actually does live in a very-rich country—even if the resource-allocation wasn't ideal from a greatest-good-for-the-suffering perspective.
A sincere attempt at economic stimulus, or keeping the able-bodied masses busy & fed so they don't get any ideas? Probably both.
As for the true motivations of the pharaohs—who knows.
Of course they were a waste. The reason we like them is because we didn't have to pay for them and we marvel at those who did. I like the moai on Easter Island; should we do more of that?
technically yes. both those things are a waste of energy that could have been spent bettering humanity. not to mention they were probably made by 'slaves'
Archaeological evidence suggests the pyramids were built by paid laborers who got free food and housing, rather than slaves. That's a better deal than most workers get today.
I also think that the outcome value of going to space is far superior to spending those same R&D dollars on DARPA. Don't get me wrong, DARPA does make some cool tech...but instead of generating some science, some footprints, and a flag on the moon, and some rocket science to put communications satellites into orbit, those dollars in R&D put bullets and bombs into people, and prepare ICBMs to drop overseas. They're going to spend the money anyways, I'd rather they literally burn the cash than spend it on killing people.
> The moon landings were successful and also a waste of money
As long as we have
colleges and universities pour money into sports,
taxpayer subsidized NFL stadiums (not having to pay taxes is also a subsidy, we don't have to hand them buckets of cash, just waiving taxes is taxpayer subsidy)
and really any corporate welfare at all
I don't want to hear how investing in science is a waste of money.
> colleges and universities pour money into sports
That's not how it works. Colleges and universities break even or make money from sports.
> taxpayer subsidized NFL stadiums (not having to pay taxes is also a subsidy, we don't have to hand them buckets of cash, just waiving taxes is taxpayer subsidy)
This is just standard institutional legal criminality. States and cities issue huge bonds for the sake of private organizations with no ongoing payments, only a giant balloon payment at the end. When they sell these bonds, they magic them into being tax-free for the owners. When the balloon payment approaches, they issue another huge bond to fund the balloon payment. Eventually if they declare bankruptcy, the state or city has committed to paying off the bonds for them.
Doesn't have anything to do with sports. If you're friends with the right people, you can get this done for adding an expansion to your french fry factory that you promise will allow you to hire 10 extra people. Except there's no compliance enforcement, and instead you filled your new space with a machine that allowed you to lay off 20 people.
When it comes to sports, the government has special carveouts in antitrust law for the NFL (and the like.) It's simply corruption.
> I don't want to hear how investing in science is a waste of money.
This is a strawman. If I say that I oppose funding for your search for the angelic healing properties of bleach, it doesn't mean I'm against science. If I don't think your search for the cure for baldness is worth $50B of public money, I also mean that without reference to however much people who like football waste on football.
You're out of tune with the zeitgeist. A legitimate defense of any politician doing something wrong these days is "Trump did it" i.e. what Bob did is bad, but the person I think is the worst in the world also did it, therefore what Bob did is good (somehow.)
I don't think he's using any tech that could not have been produced without a moon landing. Even if some part traces to the Apollo program, there's no reason to think it wouldn't have been developed via another route.
I'm all for science spending, and a moon shot is probably about as good as any other way to funnel money to scientists and engineers. But let's not be disingenuous that this program was the only possible way to spend money on science.
A good amount of that tech was also designed for ICBM usage. Some of it would may or may not have existed. It would be hard to prove either way as we only have what happened not what could have.
If not the Apollo project what would have been driving force that lead to the development of the personal computer industry at nearly the same rate?
There wasn't a market demand for computers that would justify the R&D budget that Apollo was given to develop computers to the level that was required to get us where we are today.
Where we are today is a result if the work that IBM did not related to the space program, the work that was done for the space program, and the work that was done because of the space program.
The scenario you're describing only has the first one, but not the other two.
Would you say the same thing if WWII human experimentation had useful results? Would that make the cost worth it? How many people died for lack of $180B? Did they get that value back from "tech?"
Public schools for black kids must have been really amazing.
Didn't come out of my pocket so I could really not care less about the money spent. On the other hand I am deeply appreciative of the way it shaped life and culture since then, particularly in the optimism it gives me for the future.
Were they a waste of money? They kind of jump started the personal computer revolution, and the R&D involved as well as the infrastructure built secured the US the place where the latest technology continues to be designed if not built.
This is a fun point that's one of the differences in the For All Mankind alternate universe. In that universe NASA is allowed to patent and license all technologies they develop in the course of their programs. This leads to a huge NASA budget that, by the 90s, is so large political powers want to raid it to pay for welfare. It also means no public internet (as far as we see) despite there being an extensive network of audio and video devices on the Earth and the Moon. Not sure it's realistic but it's an interesting alternative.
You could well ask what provision of the Constitution authorized the Federal Government to spend hundreds of billions of today's dollars to put a man on the moon. If the Federal government can spend money on that, what is off limits? Tax money is ultimately taken at gun point, which means it should only be spent on necessary public goods.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Fair enough, how do you feel about "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" then?
The Revolutionary War was also opposed by the majority of the people in the colonies.
The majority of a large population is always and without exception a dumb herd. It's the rare context where you should listen to what that type of majority says or claims to want. The wisdom of crowds is one of the more idiotic concepts popularized in the past 30 years.
Even more than intelligence is a very scarce attribute, being competent at utilizing reason and generally being rational (by intent, wilfully; being focused on purpose in the direction of being rational and working to maintain that orientation, which requires persistent effort, while the median person is exceptionally lazy).
It's why you shouldn't bother asking people what they want when it comes to building the future. The masses have absolutely no idea what they're doing with their own lives most of the time, much less have any grasp of what's possible when it comes to assembling the future (as referenced Henry Ford & faster horses).
People will say: well then you're invalidating Democracy by ignoring the majority! No. Concepts of rights as in the Bill of Rights are specifically created to protect the minority from the irrational, dangerous majority; it's overwhelmingly meant as a restraint on the ill behavior of the majority. It helps (emphasis) to prevent the majority from voting your rights as a minority individual out of existence just because they have that majority vote.
We need things like the Bill of Rights precisely because the majority are so often dumb, dangerous and irrational (and they're not irrational + dangerous 24/7, the tendency is for them to go on rampages historically, so they must be caged by something like the Bill of Rights to try to prevent that behavior).
However, you miss the point of the American Revolution and the government that followed. Which specifically is to suppress tyrants. Stated otherwise, it is to limit those who are willing to act on their own behalf in a manner that oppresses the "dumb herd" while cloaking themselves in righteousness, superiority, and public good.
The view to which I am responding renders the American Revolution baseless: a waste of time and effort that was only to shift under which aristocrat(s) the colonists were to be governed. To them, it would have been of little consequence. Excepting for the important issue of War deaths.
Last, you begin from an argument of government and justify it with a conclusion that appeals to individual rights. It doesn't follow. There's zero conflict between democracy and the Bill of Rights that anti-populist rulership solves. The term "populism" being from the brand of propaganda that likes to have the word "democracy" constantly oozing out of its mouth while excusing itself to serve mostly special and politician dynasty interests.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe that we've ever had a democracy. At the same time only a fool would allow self-styled aristocrats to claim historical just-governance. It's just not the case. Again, all this argument does is nullify most of the proposition for the American Revolution.
> Concepts of rights as in the Bill of Rights are specifically created to protect the minority from the irrational, dangerous majority
They're not meant to protect the rulers from the citizenry, even though the rulers are a minority. In our form of government, they're meant to be representatives of the popular will, not a special interest group. What you're talking about is monarchy.
That was more evident in 1989 than when people were wondering whether it was a massive waste of money in 1969, and certainly than in 1959
[1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.