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Comment by karlkatzke | Hacker News Reader

I think at the time, most folks at NASA expected moon landings to be commonplace within a decade.

I think that even if you expected them to become commonplace, you would realize what a momentous event in history the first landing would be.

The crazies, maybe. I hope not most NASA folk; there really is no way for lunar landings to have been common using chemical propellants and disposable rockets. Even today alternatives are mere speculations. So either our NASA dreamer was a poor engineer, or a nut job willing to nuke Earth to visit a lifeless rock.

Which is not a bad thing: given the immensity and ludicrousness of the Apollo accomplishment, I think NASA had quite a few nutjobs!

In Apollo 13 the movie, there is a scene where the NASA representative is walking politicos on a tour:

JIM LOVELL - I'm slated to be the commander of Apollo 14 sometime late next year.

CONGRESSMAN - If there is an Apollo 14... Now, Jim, people in my state have been asking why we're continuing to fund this program - now that we've beaten the Russians to the Moon. [1]

The chasm between what NASA wanted, pilots down, was to keep on its trajectory, but the politicians saw monies to tender.

[1] https://sfy.ru/?script=apollo13

Why people blame politicians that accurately represent people's views? If you have a bigoted, stupid, awful politician who's popular without fraud or dishonest competition practices in general, may be you should blame education, may be the media, but the politician himself is just doing his job — representing the people. The bigoted, stupid, awful people.

I am not blaming the politician, just noting the chasm in the NASA projections and what the politicians are pivoting on.

To some extent what you say has merit. But remember we are a republic, we elect people to lead us. They are not meant to raise only to the level of the average person. At least they were not until maybe the last 20 or 30 years.

It is true the main blame for our policies rests with those continuing to elect them. But those actually representing us and making the decisions are responsible also.

It takes about as much energy to get into orbit as it does to fly from NY to Japan. So, regular trips to the moon could end up fairly cheap even with chemical rocks.

The OP was referring to NASA's shot term (ten year) delusion. Flying a rocket to the moon is orders of magnitude more expensive that couldn't have been matched by chem rockets (and weren't, even for the very generously funded ICBM projects)

Not to mention, if you are given a task that requires use of the same type of tapes and are not offered any funding to procure unused ones, then you will have no choice but to record over them. As a government employee, I see this as the most likely scenario.

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