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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I have never understood why landing on the Moon first would amount to winning the space race (except being nice to think about it as such).

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I think that's part of the premise for the show. Landing on the Moon did slow down the Space Race, there are a ton of documented plans for the advancement of the Space program but the will to push them through disappeared as soon as the US "beat" the Soviets. I think the real reason was that many, maybe even most people only really cared about Space from a standpoint of beating the other team. The show really leans into that in the early episodes. It does cast the USA as the "good" guys, in that even if we are losing we never give up until we win.

Totally this. I have a little (uniformed) ramble I do when explaining 'Vision' over 'Mission' to people.

In that putting a man on the moon was just the mission, we don't actually know the vision. The vision statement (if there was one) could well have been 'win at space, and therefore have the most developed scientific processes' 'beat the damn Russians' 'show the world the superiority of capitalism'

(then you can rattle down the vmost pyramid - the objectives (bring them back alive, broadcast it in real time etc) - the strategies (a pure oxygen environment simplifies some things for engineering - and is far too dangerous... ) and the tactical day to day/week to week decisions that had to be made. But all the 'MOST' are easier when people on the project understand the vision.

Did the ruskies slow down after the moon landing too?

I remember watching a great video on their giant (unrealistic) N1 rocket that Russia was trying to create to get to the moon (and elsewhere) with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YscKBzvHBSw

Another good video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gklVhRzkVqA

Besides the space-race part, just the pure industrial might of the Soviet Union at the time is quite amazing to even build such a massive rocket, seeing it rolling towards the launcher. Shows the value competition has on society, it's not limited to markets.

It’s too bad the N1 never lifted off successfully.

It lifted off successfully multiple times, it just never reached orbit.

>’show the world the superiority of capitalism’

The funny thing is is that the federal government pumped billions of dollars into the Gemini and Apollo programs. This isn’t capitalism. It’s socialism for the wealthy.

Right - it was able to apply more resources on the problem because its underlying system created more surplus.

I don't have the skills necessary to evaluate the accuracy or relevance of that argument, but it's not inconsistent with the facts.

On one hand, it’s pure propaganda from the side that didn’t already have the first satellite or human in space to their name.

On the other, landing on an extraterrestrial body is a significantly more difficult challenge, particularly the precision computing to steer the lunar lander.

Computers at the time were hand-welded and unsuitable for the rigors of space (turbulence, radiation). The brand new invention of the integrated circuit sought to solve these problems, but they were wildly expensive, so the US dumped boatloads of money into making them cheaper and easier to manufacture. Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, and the foundations for the personal computing era were in place.

So in a way, Silicon Valley owes an eternal debt of gratitude to Cold War propaganda insistent that the finish line of the space race was to be the lunar surface.

OTOH see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9

it seems even more odd if you view the space race as mostly being a fig leaf for ICBM development. I find this argument mostly convincing, but if the main goal is to build effective warhead delivery systems, why spend so much on manned flight specifically? there's not much of a practical case for building stuff that can take humans all the way to the moon and back. ICBMs don't need nearly as much delta-v nor do they need to keep humans onboard alive, and by far the most useful things to put in space are LEO or GEO satellites.

President Johnson made a fascinating comment about the space program:

I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

Yes but the manned space program was very different than the spysat spacelaunch program. If the goal was only unmanned satellites, the space program would have cost a tenth of what it did. just look to the ICBM/SLBM programs, which diverged from the manned rocket programs after only a couple years. The tech looks similar but is actually very different in practice.

A spy satellite program isn't worth much if your adversary can send astronauts up to mess with them and you can't.

Unless sending people up to mess with a sat costs more than launching its replacement, which would be true of everything short of massive weapons stations. And from day one everyone realized that sending men up to intercept wasnt practical, especially if the target didnt want to be intercepted.

At the beginning of the space race automatic solutions were very limited, and manned spacecrafts were planned to be used for some routine operations, like reconnaissance.

Didn't the ICBM development come first? The Mercury and Gemini programs used barely modified ICBM boosters and the engineers at first didn't want to put controls in at all, they were already confident of their ability to maneuver and navigate in orbit. At some point I think the simplest explanation is the correct one - it was a giant contest of wills between the superpowers.

If countries were companies, the Apollo Program would have got a large portion of its funding from the "Marketing" department. Because that's what it was.

It was still money well spent. Far greater returns than all the billions that are sunk in the military each day.

In this particular case, I think it started as a means to show off ICBMs (the Sputnik in particular) and I guess spy satellites. But then the race started and it got out of hand.

If the adversary has already managed to put a satellite up, you don't go and put yours as it would just get you to parity (at a later date even, so you are actually behind!). What you do is you one-up them. What can you put up there that's better than a satellite? People. But they did that too. What do you do then? Let's put people on the freaking Moon, let's see you top that!

Had the USSR managed to land people on the Moon too and this kept escalating, we would have orbital habitats on Europa by now.

By the time of the Apollo program there was very little technology shared from military ICBM programs. ICBMs had moved on to solid fuel for quick response time whereas the civilian manned programs focused on liquid fuel for safety and payload capacity. Those were almost completely different technologies.

I think the U.S. basically won by the Soviets' "forfeiting". If USSR landed on the moon second but soon after, say, landed a man on Mars, and the U.S. unable to accomplish the feat, we would say the Soviets won.

The Soviet program was doomed by technology and circumstance. The USSR was far behind on hydrogen, computers, and control systems; then the linchpin of their program, Sergei Korolev died (likely due in part to his term in the Gulags). They didn't give up, they failed (as exemplified by the N1 rocket failures).

No, the Sovient program was doomed because the military lost any interest in funding Korolev's trips to Moon after they got what they wanted from the program - a fully working ICBM capable of reaching USA.

After that the funding was heavily curtailed and redirected to other near-military projects like spy satellites.

The fact that the program itself was ruinously expensive for USSR (which was still less developed than US) and was burning precious R&D resources was also not insignificant.

Korolev by James Harford is a rather readable insight into what was going on inside the Soviet space program: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213301.Korolev

I think there's a great argument to be made for Kruschev's downfall being the 'but for' cause of the abandonment of the program, but Korolev and technologies were the 'sine qua nons' of a moonshot.

Every race has to have a finish line

The most obvious counterexample to this would be an arms race.

Maybe we just haven’t hit the “finish line” yet with the arms race...

I really hope that line would have been "the weapons are good enough", but considering the US stockpile of nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War was enough to cause the extinction of humanity a few times over, I guess not...

The claim that we have (or had) enough nuclear weapons to cause the actual extinction of humanity, much less cause it several times over, is dubious. If you google it there are numerous articles debating it. At the very least there isn’t scientific consensus.

> scientific consensus

Do you propose an experimental measurement? /s

We can reduce this to halting problem. We will never know finish line exists until we reach one?

Scientific and technological achievement are critical for evaluating the effectiveness of policy. As I understand it, the issue really was that the Soviets believed that socialism should lead to a more scientific society, as they believed that socialism itself was based on the values of scientific progress. So defeat in the sciences was truly a blow to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire Soviet project. Not to mention that scientific advances lead directly to economic power and military superiority. I read that when Reagan announced the plan to fund the hugely expensive Strategic Defense Initiative, Soviet generals, having exhausted all their financial reserves losing the space race, felt that there was no way that the Soviet economy could keep up with the military advances of the West.

I guess recently released Soviet documents don't support the idea that Soviet generals were afraid of the scale of SDI.

[0] http://russianforces.org/podvig/2013/03/did_star_wars_help_e...

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