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Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

All undeniably incredible achievements. I look at Nasa's budget [1] and see the government achieve something incredible in the apollo project and take their foot off the gas on the most exciting (and potentially unifying) frontier. I also look at the corruption and stagnation in US rocket systems like SLS and the sinkhole of hours and dollars it has been [2].

I am very excited about space and the future, I just think that in the years since Apollo the story has been emblematic of wastefulness, contractor level benign corruption (cost plus contracting) more than it has been inspiring with the stories you mentioned. just my opinion.

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

2 https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/nasas-sls-moon-rocket-is-2...

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Seems like the real and hard truth is that, at anything resembling our current tech levels, human spaceflight just doesn't add much value compared to the massive, overwhelming difficulty.

We've sent hundreds of robots all over the place. To Mars, Jupiter, asteroids, comets, the outer planets, out of the Solar System entirely, as close to the Sun as can be managed, and everywhere else in between. For basically all of these missions, sending humans along would be 1000x more expensive, and the humans would be bored to tears for 99.9% of the time. For most of the rest of the time, they'd be relying on the same instruments as the robotic missions, as the environment is too harsh for anything else. So what's the point?

And who would we be sending? We could send super-smart scientific experts to maybe follow up on things a little faster, but it'd be a waste to have them sit around for years on the voyage back and forth. Or we could send more ordinary folks, who might not be all that much more capable than the robots we're sending now.

Sorry, it might burst some peoples bubbles of romance and sexy space adventures, but it mostly just doesn't make sense to send humans into space for the type of exploration missions we're doing. Maybe if we can send enough resources to actually have a colony on Mars or something, but we're not there yet.

From your first link:

> NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending....In 1973, NASA submitted congressional testimony reporting the total cost of Project Apollo as $25.4 billion (about $156 billion in 2019 dollars).

I wonder if there also wasn't that level of waste at that point but not too many people cared because the country was mostly terrified by the USSR and wanted to win.

Ironically, I think the more we think there's corruption and waste, the more that may lead to corruption and waste, as we distrust and defund and discourage. Again, I imagine some of the waste comes from the fickle attitude that some of the public and lawmakers have towards funding these orgs.

NASA was wasteful and full of contractor corruption during Apollo as well. They just had the political will to get funded and keep pushing forward so they did.

The stagnation in aerospace is mostly due to us running into fundamental limits of physics pretty quickly, not due to some kind of work ethic or creative failures. to keep pushing forward in space would have required another order of magnitude in funding, and funding during Apollo was already huge. That said, I wouldn't mind if all the worlds military $$$ had been dumped into mars colonization either.

I only get opportunities every few years to affect in a minuscule way NASA's budget and mission, the rest of the time I have to act as a passive observer. In that time I choose to be happy with what they've accomplished and excited for what comes next.

It has to be cost-plus or no one would do something that has not been done before. Fixed cost is fine for something you have a grasp on production costs.

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