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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just infrastructure, or cost. After watching Apollo 11 the other night, I can’t fathom how that was done in 8 years.

Also, in the movie, one of the mission controllers looked to be about 70. To think that when we he was born, flight, radio, and computers did not exist. Here he was putting men in the moon.

Here I’m, born a couple of years after that, and seems not a damn thing has happened since. Everyone has a piece of shit in their pocket with which they can sext. Call that progress; Truly depressing.

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It did cost around 2% of the budget every year, and had about 400,000 people working on it.

https://christopherrcooper.com/blog/apollo-program-cost-retu...

Every generation should have such a bold audacious goal.

It was done in 8 years because the US was spending 4% of GDP on NASA, which was probably a mistake in retrospect. The other reason is that it was a greenfield project with competent management, generally.

Has anyone done a good analysis of this? It can probably be argued many ways.

The program did cost much less than the Vietnam War, and did pay off in future dividends. The war not so much.

https://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-cost/

Also the Moon landing was at least as much defense spending as it was science spending. The Soviets derived a lot of national pride from holding all the major space achievements and beating them had great propaganda value. Also without knowing how useful the moon would be it was deemed unacceptable to risk the Soviets gaining a foothold, exploiting all its resources and defending it as their territory.

Doesn’t that sound kind of whacky in retrospect?

Does anybody actually think the Vietnam War was a good idea?

It's not hard to make an argument for the Vietnam War. Compare it to Korea. How much would you pay to get another South Korea (GDP per capita something like 30,000) vs. Vietnam (GDP per capita something like 3,000).

Obviously it's a counter-factual. Maybe Vietnam was inherently unwinnable. Maybe victory would have left Southeast Asia just as messed up as defeat.

I don't see it. Vietnam was not invading the US. Rather, they were trying to eliminate a long, ugly history of French colonialism. Ho Chi Minh at first actually thought the US would favor his movement, given the US's own history with British colonialism.

A couple million people's deaths were caused by the US war in Vietnam and Cambodia. I don't see how I could argue in favor of that.

Had it won, it's not clear that the US would have somehow turned the Vietnamese economy into the South Korean economy. That would have been mostly up to the people of Vietnam. I mean, in another light, consider the fact that the US cannot even turn its own economy into the South Korean economy.

The space program was dual-use for getting better at making ICBMs, and we desperately wanted to keep up with the Soviets in our capacity to eliminate all human life on the planet.

It's great that we did something amazing in the process, but that kind of political will came from a very specific arms race.

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