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Mvandenbergh

The thing about the original moon landing programme was that it had a great clarity of outcome and timeline.

What: Land a man on the moon and return him safely

When: Before the decade is out

That meant NASA could really focus and throw out everything that wasn't directly on that path.

Reusability - take too long, we'll build each craft from scratch.

Permanent mission - Too complicated, keep the missions very short.

Multi-launch architecture - Nope, too complicated again. Launch it all together.

Crew size? Two on the moon so they could help each other, one in the CM to aid in docking. Want a larger crew? Sorry, no. Three is the minimum so that's what you get.

Complicated re-entry vehicles? Nope. We know we can make ablative work.

What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows.

It's impossible to run a clear programme if you don't know what it's for!

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That won't happen again for political reasons. The moon landing is seen as Kennedy's achievement. He died six years before it happened, but that doesn't seem to matter. It's his legacy.

No president (or congress) would let that happen again. When a president of party 1 sets such a goal the next president of party 2 will shift the goal to make it his achievement instead. Repeat ad infinitum.

I think Apollo was lucky that Johnson came in after Kennedy. I think if a republican had won in 1964 probably there wouldn’t have been a moon landing. By the time Nixon came in there was already too much momentum to cancel it.

The country, the Democratic party and Kennedy for that matter were lucky Johnson wound up in the oval office. Johnson was very good at actually making deals and getting stuff done (e.g. ensuring the budget that gets to his desk includes NASA). If it weren't for Johnson Kennedy would only be remembered for getting us into Vietnam then getting shot.

I guess Johnson then took the honor of being blamed for getting the country into Vietnam:). And it broke him.

Johnson accomplished a lot and, more importantly, in the correct order to make sure things got done. I think you're right though (and that he probably felt the same way) that he'll always be the Vietnam president. That may be a little unfair but it happened on his watch so that's what history will rightfully focus on.

> If it weren't for Johnson Kennedy would only be remembered for getting us into Vietnam then getting shot.

Well, getting shot. Kennedy wasn't all that important in getting is into Vietnam, that was mostly before and after Kennedy.

And Cuba. Both Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Getting us through the Cuban Missile Crisis without a nuclear exchange makes Kennedy a great president, nothing else really mattered.

Then again, there's that whole botched Bay of Pigs invasion that led to the capture of thousands of free Cubans and hundreds of deaths ... https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/th...

Except that he did cancel it and effectively disbanded what was at the time arguably the greatest engineering team ever assembled. Apollo 18, 19 20, never launched due to Nixon.

Correct. If he had been voted in four years earlier I bet there wouldn’t have been Apollo 11 either.

Nixon didn't run in 1964; Goldwater did.

Oddly enough, Nixon ran and lost against Kennedy in 1960. So for sure if Nixon had won in '60, there would have been no space program

Moon program maybe but the space program was already in full swing by 1960. Space was immensely important to Eisenhower for national defense purposes and Nixon was his VP.

Yes, of course, but your comment is quite off-topic. We were talking specifically about the moon program.

Obviously, launch & orbital vehicles are critical dual-use civilian/military technologies (space exploration & delivering ICBMs).

In contrast, visits to the moon are not (at least for the near & intermediate future) dual-use civ/mil technologies.

Nixon killed the moon program when he got into office, and it is very unlikely he would have started one had he won in 1960.

Everything I’ve learned about Nixon tells me he would have kept it to avoid losing to the USSR. This is exactly why he escalated Vietnam despite campaigning on withdrawal - they weren’t going to lose on his watch.

He loathed Kennedy tho. He might have cancelled it, or changed it. Who knows really.

The Russians were working on the same problem and were so confident they refused Kennedy’s suggestion they do a joint effort. You can’t blame them either - they beat the US on every milestone except a manned moon landing.

Any attempts to change the game would have been seen for exactly what it was: weakness. He may have hated Kennedy but he loved the US more.

True. I didn’t realize the Soviets thought they could do it? My impression was their whole lunar program was a clusterfuck

Amy "Vintage Space" Teitel's "Apollo's Legacy is Keeping Us Grounded" is a good exploration of the politics and lingering (negative) legacy of Apollo. Longish (27m) but good:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e0ERXwhn-5w

As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of manned space missions is to redirecting taxes to congressional districts and defense contractors. The secondary purpose might be to inspire interest in STEM, but it seems much less successful at achieving that objective.

I almost down voted you in a knee jerk reaction. I believe that manned space exploration serves a very important purpose in advancing humanity . . . however, from the typical Congress critter's point of view, I suspect you're right.

I suspect GP underestimates the scientific value of Apollo missions. It's so much difference to e.g. study samples brought from the Moon (and taken with reasonable care) in Earth labs than to send robots to do the same.

There is a POV that robots are good for scientific missions up to certain price point. After that manned missions become more cost effective.

I don't see how it would be cheaper to send a human to the Moon to retrieve samples than it would be to send a robot.

and that's really just the cost the actual mission. Consider the impact of having to prepare a program that meets acceptable risk levels for humans vs. machines. This is a huge consideration. I'm not suggesting unmanned exploration can take a trial and error approach, but losing a robot is sad & expensive while losing a human astronaut can terminate the entire program.

Some arguments are here: https://phys.org/news/2005-11-unmanned-space-exploration_1.h...

Retrieving a sample is cheaper with a robot - Luna-24 costed a fraction of Apollo. Knowing what to retrieve while having flexibility of choosing surface regolith, separate rock, samples dug out from a better place or else - that's where humans win.

Indeed. Apollo 17 even flew an actual geologist to the surface of the Moon and gave him 20 hours to explore it.

The money spent on Apollo would support a large number of robotic missions, including sample return. And they could visit a bunch of different areas.

If we were trying to maximize science per dollar, every manned program would have a lot of robotic preparation. Are we doing that? No. We've spent almost nothing on the Moon and only a tiny, tiny fraction of the manned budget on robots to Mars.

I would bet good money that when Starship makes its first safe return to Earth after a manned lunar landing mission, there's going to be some serious-as-a-heart-attack talk within the worlds' universities about pooling cash for manned missions.

The other cynical view is that the moon program was really military.

As in, if the Soviets got to control the ultimate "higher ground", they could rule the world from it. Apollo made sure no one could control space, and we now have peace in space.

I kinda believe in this, though I don't know how historically verified it is. It's of course not what you ever say in your rousing speeches to the nation and the world!

The moon program was quite explicitly a showboat for American Engineering vs Soviet.

There was fear that if the Russians got to the moon first they might set up a base, and having a base they could shoot down any other landing attempt (literally, with guns mounted in their moon base). Thus the moon could become Russian domain, which would not just grant them great research opportunities but also a virtually unreachable weapons platform. (Remember that the first crewed space station was 2 years after the moon landing, and also Soviet)

On that basis the military was advocating for a moon mission years before Kennedy's speech. It's hard to tell if this actually played a big role in the decision to go to the moon, but it was the cold war after all.

Also the Soviet Union was winning most of the relevant milestones in space (first satellite, first animal in orbit, first human, first woman, first space walk, etc), and this was a great source of national pride. Beating them had great propaganda value.

Shooting people from the moon is probably the least practical military endeavor ever seriously contemplated, and that is saying a lot.

The Cold War resulted in a lot of really nutty thinking so I can't rule it out entirely, but it's hard to imagine what such a base would look like, especially with 1960s tech.

Getting from the moon to earth is trivial when compared to launching anything from earth. Using some back-of-the-envelope calculation a Atlas B ICBM from 1959 has enough fuel and thrust to deliver over 5 tons of warheads from the moon to earth. If you launched from the far side of the moon I imagine early warning and interception aren't on the table with 1960/70s tech, providing excellent first strike and second strike capability.

Of course actually getting ICBMs on the moon is a whole other endeavor.

If you can land a ship on the moon, you can land an ICBM on a house in Moscow. It was less about launching from the moon. It was more about getting it to land where you want.

Early warning satellites would be a heck of a lot easier to install than the missiles. Basically once someone started building such a plant it would be impossible to hide what you're doing.

You'd never get first strike launching from the Moon, regular ICBMs would be all over you long before the moon IPBMs made the 1 day journey back to Earth. Even with the faster travel speed from only having to accelerate out of the Moon's gravity well, you're talking about a distance of 384,000km vs. 8,000km. Your missiles arrive to a planet that is already a radioactive moonscape.

It doesn't have to be a one day journey. With a 3 ton payload the Atlas B seems to have > 8000km/s delta-v. Getting from moon to earth took Apollo about 4800km/s delta-v, leaving our little Atlas 3200km/s spare fuel. If you use that to accelerate to 3200km/s travel speed you arrive on earth after about 2 minutes (if we ignore the time it takes to accelerate).

You are off by at least 3 orders of magnitude.

I think we can simplify this further. It seems reasonable to assume that any weapon deployed on the surface of the moon would be devolved and dedicated specifically for that purpose, so we can ignore playing theoretical math games :).

It would also be fairly obvious that someone was trying to move several thousand pounds of hardware onto the moon, and launch detection satellites would be even more effective at monitoring the moon. So you've got a first strike, that will be detectable basically immediately, and weapons that now need to travel ~385,000 km and survive even more serious re-entry than the ICBM's based on Earth. Or you've got a second strike capability that cost you billions of rubles/dollars.

Once you look at it like that, its pretty easy to see why the submarine launched weapons were the preferred method for threatening rapid first strike while providing a guaranteed second strike capability.

A two minute travel time is ridiculous. Even light takes more than a second to reach us from the moon.

The lunar orbit->earth delta-v is 4.8km/s. I didn't check your other numbers but they seem to be off by a factor 1000 too.

Besides acceleration at the moon side, wouldn't there need to be deceleration before entering the atmosphere? I'm thinking an IPBM traveling that fast would rip apart in the upper atmosphere and/or explode too high to cause any real damage.

Can a missile survive reentry at 3200km/s? From https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/BGH/hihyper.html LEO reentry speed is 17500 mph = 28000 km/h = 7.7 km/s. It's 415 times the speed.

I didn't do the math but at that speed you don't need a warhead to destroy a target. Let's try with 1000 kg steel or whatever won't melt down

1/2 mv^2 = 500 * (3200 * 3600)^2 = 345,500,000,000 J

1 J lifts about 100 g mass by 1 m on the surface of Earth. That energy would lift 345,500,000 kg by 100 m.

Do you have a source for this claim? A base on the moon is a sitting duck for an incoming missile -- it's easier to figure out how to guide a missile near the moon than to shoot down an incoming high-velocity missile.

>Also the Soviet Union was winning most of the relevant milestones in space (first satellite, first animal in orbit, first human, first woman, first space walk, etc), and this was a great source of national pride. Beating them had great propaganda value.

I would rather say that the Soviet Union was winning the irrelevant milestones, precisely for the propaganda value. First woman in space means nothing, really - you put a woman on your spaceship, wham, easy win. The moon landings forced the USA to tackle real engineering challenges - rendezvous and docking, piloted spacecraft and piloted orbit changes, functionally useful EVAs, keeping humans alive in space for long periods, etc.

Oh boy, you underestimate the power of feminism. First woman in space is a lot, especially if you go back to 60th of previous century.

That's the point - it's a propaganda win, not a technical achievement in any way. Not to belittle the symbolic importance of it, but cmon - first dog murdered by being launched in a rocket, first time running two manned missions at the same time, first nap in space - a large proportion of the Soviet "firsts" were just low-complexity stunts.

One of the last major "firsts" was "first organisms to circle the moon" - they barely squeaked this one in a few months before Apollo 8, and they accomplished it by shoving some tortoises into a Soyuz (no food or water required!).

First satellite and first man in space are not irrelevant. They're very challenging engineering problems.

First woman in space is technically easy, but it does say something about the two cultures that the Soviet Union put a woman in space almost immediately, whereas the United States didn't do so for decades.

There's also a lot of value in the research NASA/JAXA/ESA/Roscosmos does in space. Some experiments are only really doable under long term microgravity The US runs it as a national lab and many companies use it for experiments. Maintaining it that way makes it way easier for companies to run experiments in space, with out the ISS each company would have to design, build and launch their own satellite for each experiment they wanted to do. That could be done but it would be very complex and quite fragile compared to having an established station where humans can do the work.

The catch 22 is any experiment that you can only do in microgravity is also only really relevant in microgravity. That’s fine if we have a larger goal, but not really useful on it’s own.

Sure simply learning this stuff is interesting, but the costs are so extreme it’s effectively a vanity project.

You could say the same thing about experimental high-energy physics.

I'm not sure that the information from such experiments is only really relevant to applications in microgravity environments. (Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding your point too much.)

The data points from microgravity experiments don't exist in isolation; presumably there are data points for similar experiments at surface gravity. Removing gravity from a system could say very much about how gravity affects the system, and thus how the system works on Earth.

We also might discover effects so important that it would be worth going to microgravity to get them. Stepping out into the unknown just to learn how it works is important.

(Disclaimer: I know jack about what kind of microgravity experiments are going on.)

This generalization isn't true. One modern example is manufacturing optical fibers like ZBLAN[1] -- they work great when you bring them back to Earth. Another new example is 3d printing organs in microgravity[2] to take them back to Earth.

The traditional example is doing basic physics that needs long duration microgravity.

These sorts of research aren't a large fraction of what's currently done on the ISS, but it's also not zero.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBLAN

2: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/growing-human-...

The need for microgravity to manufacture these things is demonstrating my point.

Then I totally didn't get your point. These are things that you manufacture in microgravity that are then usable in gravity. Isn't that what you said did not exist?

I am saying testing say crystal formation in space is only relevant for crystal formation in space. If that’s what you’re going to do aka manufacturing in space then sure experimenting in space is required. Getting the economics to look promising for actually manufacturing in space then that’s a separate thing.

Aka Manufacturing would be that larger goal I was referencing.

It's not though the crystals are used to determine the structure of the molecule itself through XRay crystallography. We have to grow larger crystals that are then used to determine the shape of the individual molecules. Some crystalize easily and we were able to study them using crystals grown here on Earth but others were more difficult and had to be grown in space. Just because the research takes place in space doesn't mean it's only applicable in space!

You can do that same XRay crystallography on the same substances on earth. Going to space is pure cost benefit analysis for growing crystals, not some exclusive experiment you can only do in space.

That said, when you get a massive subsidy by NASA, these costs are less obvious.

You can't currently because we've not been able to grow sufficiently high quality crystals here on Earth with gravity. Basically anything that needs more than 30-60 seconds of microgravity can't be done anywhere on Earth no matter how much money you want to spend. NASA is already up there to learn about the effects on the human body (which again we can only really do holistically actually IN space) so trying to put the whole cost amortized over all the experiments isn't going to come up with a reasonable number.

But even beyond that this is precisely what governments are supposed to do, gather and distribute costs that would make little sense for individual companies or even massive conglomerates to do.

Researchers discover cool-burning flames in space that could lead to better engines here on earth

https://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe...

Actually not true in the slightest. Microgravity removes one more confounding variable present in all experiments gravity. One example, in addition to those already mentioned, is crystallography; where it's much easier to grow the crystals we need for experiments in space than it is on Earth where gravity is constantly present affecting the growth. Those results are useful here on Earth but can only so far be achieved in space.

Even beyond things like that the only real way to study the effect of space on the human body is to put people up there for a long time and test. There are some analogues available here on Earth but they can only really test a few things at once like fluid redistribution and not the entire set of effects.

https://www.nature.com/articles/npjmgrav201510

especially when you look at the scientific pay-off from relatively cheap unmanned space exploration vs. what we get from shooting humans onto the space equivalent of the front step of the house.

What disappoints me is that we could be paying the same organizations to build things to expand space exploration rather than warfare.

On one hand, this got everyone to focus and things happened fast.

On the other hand, the result was only what was asked for. We went half a dozen times and then that was it. You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for.

Without JFK’s challenge, I’m sure we would have taken longer, but maybe it would have been more sustainable.

> You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for.

Could be specified as well:

"Internationally organized base station (ISS style) on the Moon by 2030, permanently staffed after 2032, an experimental ecosystem to work towards self-sustaining O2 and food generation set up by 2037, usable as launchpad for Mars missions by 2045"

That would at least provide clarity on priorities but it's risky: the success would make you famous forever (see JFK) but so would failure.

On the other hand, it requires the next 7 administrations to support a programme that will make _you_ famous, not them.

The great thing about the original moon landing goal is that it was just about possible and the cost was just about tolerable.

If the original goal had been "land on Mars before 1980" rather than "land on the Moon before 1970", I do not think it would have happened.

I’d rather see a focus on projects that are doable with existing capabilities, and separately an effort to develop new capabilities.

It seems like if you immediately aim for something you can’t do, then you develop a bunch of technology and infrastructure that isn’t very good for other tasks. You end up with a stunt that doesn’t really go anywhere. That gets you rockets like the Saturn V, which was amazing but too big and expensive to be used for much besides Apollo. We’re doing it again with SLS: a big, catastrophically expensive rocket built to achieve a specialized goal. It’s not going to be very useful and it might not even fly.

Compare with SpaceX’s BFR. It has much more general capabilities. At first blush this might look bad: why lug a heavy heat shield all the way to the surface of the moon and back? Why all this focus on reusability if your goal is to send just a few missions? But at the end of the day you’re much better off with a rocket that’s ok for a bunch of stuff than one that’s really good at one thing.

Or just look at the space vehicles of the era. Many of them are still flying today, with lots of evolutionary improvements. How many Apollo-derived vehicles are flying today? I don’t think there are any.

Apollo makes me imagine a Roman emperor declaring a program to send an expedition to the South Pole. They can’t even get there! You need to work on your ships before you set such a specific goal.

As a bonus, steady, incremental improvement is the sort of thing you can sustain across political changes, if you can just get to the point where people stop asking for moonshots.

I suppose the important bit is really that there's universal buy in (and with the moon landing thing that was supported by making it a matter of national pride).

With incremental progress you risk things looking invisible (just like AI is always just the things we can't yet do, while newly possible tasks are merely computations).

"Do some notable thing in two terms" monument building exercises risk being shot down on budget reasons when any part of government ends up under new management (see Congress).

So I guess you can go incremental (but solve the visibility bit somehow) or grand vision. Right now, NASA seems to be going through the worst of all.

> [...]rockets like the Saturn V, which was amazing but too big and expensive to be used for much besides Apollo[...]

The cost per launch for the Saturn V was around a $1 billion in today's money. That's lower than some estimates for the per-launch cost for the Shuttle. It wasn't unsuitable, the US could have continued with it just like the Russians continued with the Soyuz.

> But at the end of the day you’re much better off with a rocket that’s ok for a bunch of stuff than one that’s really good at one thing.

Perfecting the rocket is opportunity cost eating up missions you could be flying today if you just mass produced your existing but flawed rocket. The US could have had something like a hundred moon missions many the ISS's mass many times over in orbit by the start of the 90s if they just continued improving on the Apollo architecture.

Also, without Kennedy's martyrdom I'm not sure Congress would have been willing to keep appropriating the funds to see it al the way through.

Kennedy himself had doubts about the cost as soon as the day after the speech! It was an immensely expensive programme which just managed to achieve its objectives. Had the objective been "build a permanent base" the cost would not have been palatable. It was barely tolerable to people as a one-off race to achieve a particular objective.

The lunar mission had one clear objective: don't let the soviets embarrass us again.

If the Chinese managed to put a human on Mars the US would get its shit together quickly.

You have more faith in the US government than I do. I really, sincerely hope you are right about that.

Yes, though a lot of the Apollo infrastructure was in retrospect massively over-engineered, based on a very high estimate of required numbers of launches. This was partly because they needed to start the infrastructure before settling the mission mode but still, the plans were ambitions beyond what was strictly required to get to the moon by the end of the decade.

The flip side of that was that we are left with nothing but fond memories. No space stations or moon bases. No legacy of Apollo-derived manned spacecraft. We're essentially picking up from where we left off in the 1970's...now.

constraints help drive engineering decisions!

> What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows.

In the past 10 years, NASA has had an answer for all of those questions. Two different ones over time.

Also, SNC's Dream Chaser isn't ablative, and it's funded by NASA's CRS-2 program.

The thing about the moon landing is that there was a rival superpower at rough technological parity, and the technology in question could be used to lob nuclear weapons at one another with great accuracy.

No nukes, no ICBMs, no Apollo.

It's not about the mission, it's about the motivation. Societies only do great things with the proper motivation. Without the specter of American greatness being eclipsed by evil red Commies, what can get 2019 America to feel urgently this should be done?

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