Just another Apollo? Part two (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Just another Apollo? Part two (2005)

thespacereview.com

125 pointsjohndcook118 comments

The Apollo missions were awe-inspiring, particularly given the tech at the time. But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive. I see inflation-adjusted numbers putting the Saturn V launch cost at just over $1 billion but I honestly think the equivalent is way more than that.

The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms).

Payload costs are now <10% of the Saturn V/STS costs in real terms. That's what we need. If Satrship lives up to expectations, that'll drop even further. In addition to that there are important advancements in scalability (ie how many launch vehicles you can product and that really translates to how many launches you can do per year) and reliability.

My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn't sustainable. Lots of people like to say things like we'd already have put a man on Mars if we didn't cancel Apollo but that was never going to happen.

The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive

There's no contradiction here. It's resolved because, relative to its original promise, the STS program was a complete failure. Yes, it did wind up doing a bunch of useful stuff. But it didn't achieve nearly as much as was promised, and what it did do cost vastly more than anticipated.

Source: my grandfather. He was a project manager on the Hubble, and specifically on the ill-fated mirror, this being simultaneously his greatest pride and greatest embarrassment. We talked about this stuff often. According to gramps, and not denying that there were major errors in the Hubble mirror management, they wound up getting screwed by the STS failures. It was always understood that the mirror wouldn't be perfect because they expected to be unable to perfectly compensate for the deflection of the mirror due to gravity while it was being manufactured. The STS promised the ability to deliver the Hubble to orbit to test it, and bring it back down again to correct if necessary. In the end, something like this was eventually required, but only many years later, and not in the fashion that the initial STS mission would have allowed.

> And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the Senator suggested that there might not be any medical obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the mission.

From https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm, which contains far better analysis of the politics of the STS program than I can provide.

hey, i got to learn about deconvolution in undergrad because of this. pre-fix hubble data can be corrected in software fairly reliably and i learned a lot messing around with it.

You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades. If the space shuttle was never pursued we could reasonably assume that its budget would have gone into a launch system like the Saturn V or even just kept cranking Saturn Vs out on the assembly line. If they were the case then it seems like many of their plans would have played out, the continued moon missions at least.

Part of that was the alluring promise that the shuttle would be cheaper.

But that was doomed by the design requirements tug-of-war between government agencies, being a bit too early and ambitious, and the drop in flight rate and commercial and defense payloads after Challenger.

The shuttle is still an interesting science experiment in what it did teach us about reusability in space craft, failures included. At the time reliable booster recovery and reuse seemed unlikely and command module reuse seemed the best way to drive costs down. The shuttle was a good command module design for reuse based on available data at the time (even with all the design by committee compromises), but proved to be difficult and expensive to maintain/refit between missions.

Today we've seen incredible advances in booster recovery and reuse in part spurred by learnings from shuttle reuse including the learning about how expensive heat shield maintenance/refitting turned out to be on the shuttle.

(A bit of an aside, but ironically and sadly the Challenger disaster didn't "fail hard enough" to drive costs down or do much to reimagine the shuttle program: that problem was a dumb booster problem that had nothing to do with the shuttle directly and could have happened to any payload. (It was still terrible that it happened to that shuttle and its crew, specifically, of course.) It's curious to wonder if something more like the Columbia disaster, which did more reflect shuttle maintenance issues, may have had an interesting scientific impact if it had "switched places" in a different timeline.)

There was a near miss of heat tile damage from a foam strike very early in the STS program - STS-27 but it was on a classified military payload flight and the whole thing was ignored.

I wouldn't quite say "covered up" but the damage would have been a lot harder to hand-wave away if this had been a normal mission with all the media coverage those got.

> You seem to be stating two contradicting things, that the Saturn V was too expensive to be maintained and that the space shuttle was even more expensive and yet continued operating for decades.

It was worse than that. NASA never received sufficient funding for the STS. So they turned to the miltary who wanted it and were willing to fund it.

However, the military needs were also what made the space shuttle so stupidly hard to engineer. Think about how much harder all of the current commercial space programs would have it if they also had to engineer switching to a polar orbit. That's why the STS has those stupidly big engines.

So, because Congress neither gave the project sufficient funding (would take money from my favorite pork barrel!) nor allowed the project to shut down (don't you dare take away pork barrel from my district!), NASA created a vehicle that killed a bunch of astronauts.

The shuttle was originally intended to be launchable into polar orbit from Vandenberg AFB, but it never happened [0]. I rather doubt anybody ever seriously contemplated a transition to polar orbit from a Florida launch; the shuttle couldn't carry enough fuel for that. (One cannot launch a rocket into polar orbit directly from Florida for safety reasons. That's what Vandenberg is good for; there's no inhabited land south of it.)

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27506/vandenberg-afbs-...

>But the Saturn V as a launch vehicle was simply too expensive.

Sure, at that moment in time. You are, however, discounting the abilities of clever people to innovate and improve the $/kg performance. I prefer to think we engineers are pretty good at reducing the effective cost of tech over time.

However, none of this is about Saturn V vs Shuttle vs some other platform. If NASA remained the sole customer over that period, there would not have been adequate incentives to drive that cost down. In that situation I think improvement would have been slow independent of platform choices.

It is the telecommunications age creating scaled incentives that has led to cost efficiencies and companies like SpaceX (and many others) competing to drive those costs down. Lacking the current scale of global incentives, SpaceX and others still wouldn't exist. They certainly couldn't have acquired the necessary funding back in the 70s.

NASA could have gotten the price down to whatever the lockheed's is now. Or should I say up?

Up. Politics is a major detriment to NASA's efficiency.

I havent read the article yet but from my understanding the issue of cost of Saturn V wod have been mitigated by scaling up production.

I read a recebt biography about Von Braun and IIRC the entire project was designed to scale up, and all of that was hastily thrown away for the ineffective shuttle program.

One problem about technology development is scaling too early.

The transistor, integrated circuit, surface mounted component robotic pick and place machine, laser and fiber optics. In the software world, countless of ideas. Open source too. Whole generations of software developers. All those were needed for the information age, not just throwing money to scale up Sage or Sabre or VAX or anything.

This is a pattern you see a lot in sechnology. Often the second version of something significantly learsnf rom the first. Take something like C#, which really corrected a lot of the problems Java had.

A more physical example is the rail network in the US. It's often asked "why don't we have high speed rail in the US?" Being a nation of autophiles obviously doesn't help but it's not as simple as putting higher speed trains on existing track. It's not even as simple as replacing the existing track with track that can take a higher speed train.

The rail network we had is an artifact of the performance constraints of 19th century trains for the most part. Top speed is the most visible constraint. But the grading, turning angles, etc are all a function of much lower constraint on top speed.

We'd probably be better off if we had no national rail network at all, which is pretty much the situation China was in. Admittedly there are other factors in China's rapid HSR deployments (eg streamlining planning and acquisition of land).

But I digress. Timing is hugely important in scaling.

The US low speed rail network works pretty well for freight. Despite some occasional bottlenecks and delays, it's still superior in certain ways to rail freight in China and the EU.

As for HSR, do we really need it? It might make sense in the northeast corridor but it's hard to make a business case elsewhere. The California HSR project has turned into the usual government megaproject boondoggle with long delays and cost overruns. Even if it actually gets built I'll probably never ride on it.

This is very true, and also reminds me of our telephone system, or Japan - which someone described as "living in a futuristic version of the 1990s".

Most accurate description of living in Japan I've read!

Yeah, but if we had just kept investing in faxtech innovation, it might have turned out pretty awesome. Just saying.

In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse. Probably also intact abort and other technologies.

One should look at the operational capacity, not the theoretical capacity. Who cares if you have an airplane that can theoretically do Mach 3 if it's being repaired in the hangar and you need it now? In airplane lingo a plane like that is called a "Hangar Queen"

Falcon 9 is a huge step in the operational direction. But more is needed. Can one do two flights in 24 hours? Can one save the second stage too? Just the fairing? Or can one make the second stage cheaper? Or salvage it in orbit?

> In rocketry one big needed technology before scale up can happen is reuse.

There are other ways to reduce cost, such as cheaper rockets, more efficient fuels, etc. Whatever SpaceX does isn't the only possibility or a necessity.

Those also help, certainly.

This is why newer space startups like Stoke are aiming to produce totally reusable second stages. The goal is commercial airline-like refuel and relaunch.

The Shuttle was amazingly effective. It succeeded in most of its original mission objectives. It conducted hundreds of scientific missions, launched and repaired Hubble, and built the ISS (originally Freedom).

The "cost" of Shuttle launches was calculated as NASA's entire manned spaceflight budget divided by the number of scheduled launches. They paid salaried staff all year no matter how many launches happened. That cost was trending downward as the number of launches increased prior to the Challenger disaster. After return to flight after Challenger NASA cut the launch schedule but had to pay the same infrastructure costs so Shuttle flights got more "expensive".

> My point is that whatever NASA wanted to do after Apollo was never going to happen and wasn't sustainable

There was a project to make the Saturn V partially reusable, see

http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html

I don't think that even the moon landing itself was 'too expensive' for such an achievement. Going to the moon will be remembered for a long time by future generartions as an example of what humanity can achieve. What are $1 billion against that?

>The ironic thing is that Congress cancelled the Apollo program and approved the Space Shuttle program and that was even more expensive (in $/kg to LEO terms).

Highly relevant:

"Human Space Exploration: The Next 50 Years" by Michael Griffin, NASA Administrator, March 2007. He wrote that had the agency continued using Apollo-Saturn instead of developing the Space Shuttle, "we would be on Mars today <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/5324ud/human_space_ex...>

I question the assertion that it was too expensive given the costs of programs like the F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program.

Apples and oranges. You are comparing NASA spending to military expenditures (F-35, Afghanistan, Gulf War 1 & 2, or Reagan’s SDI program). In 2020 the US GDP was 20.94 trillion USD [1]. In the same year, NASA's budget was $22.6 billion [2], less than 0.11% of GDP, while US military spending was around 766.58 billion USD [3], roughly 3.66% of GDP. Other sources place US military spending 16%-21.9% of GDP from 1996 to 2015 [5].

In other words, NASA's budget was approximately 3% of the military budget (and maybe as little as 0.5%). NASA's budget has been less than 1% of the federal budget since 1975 [4].

[1] https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spend...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

An interesting aspect of the Shuttle mission was the military dual-use. Scott Manley's video "The Most Important Space Shuttle Mission Never Happened" is a great explainer of a specific planned but never executed mission, the requirements of that drove many of the shuttle's design tradeoffs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY

> The only reason it was not done is because politically it was inexpedient for the Nixon administration to continue supporting the Apollo program, which it saw a legacy of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

What shortsighted thinking! Yet another reason to hate the Nixon administration.

The one month limitation due to CSM seems crazy. I can’t imagine spending a month in the CSM.

> The one month limitation due to CSM seems crazy. I can’t imagine spending a month in the CSM.

From the article, it sounded like the CSM would be unmanned during that time, as they planned to carry a crew of three down to the surface.

It's a sleight-of-hand to shift blame for NASA's failure to articulate a mission to Nixon.

Politicians would do well to remember the quote by Picasso

“Good artists copy; great artists steal!”

If you try to make a name for yourself by creating your own rendition of a space program while scrapping your predecessor’s then you’ll only be remembered for your limited success or spectacular failure. If you take what’s already there and make it your own by expanding upon it and pushing it further then you will look like a genius who advanced the art far beyond where it was before.

Can I recommend "Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race" by the BBC.

It's a fascinating deep dive into this, and the difference in long-term goals between the USA and the USSR. It explores how close the USSR were to getting to the moon first, the reaction of the USSR's team (some swearing, some shrugging), the grief over the loss of their chief rocket scientist, and why there was no need for a "pivot"—the long term goal had always been to populate and explore space.

The interviews are great and there is some amazing footage.

It is a testament to their long-term plan that, despite the collapse of the USSR, the Russians were—for a long time—the only country capable of putting anyone into space.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lcxms

> despite the collapse of the USSR, the Russians were—for a long time—the only country capable of putting anyone into space.

For a few years?

About 9.

> Space Shuttle which retired from service in 2011.

> 30 May 2020 (crewed)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2

EDIT:

Sorry, I forgot the capability of China. I mentally equated "putting anyone in space" with putting people into the ISS.

With China in the picture, the Soviet-only gap would be between Skylab and Shuttle, I guess?

China's first crewed mission in space on October 15, 2003, which carried Yang Liwei in orbit for 21 hours and made China the third nation to launch a human into orbit.

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

More like between Apollo-Soyuz and Shuttle, so about 6 years (1975-81).

I'm curious what the BBC doc has to say about the Soviet lunar program; my impression (mostly from reading Asif Siddiqi's history Challenges to Apollo) is that the lack of political support and focus post-Gagarin lead to a late start on a lunar landing program, plus lack of funding and splitting resources between Korolev's N1-L3 architecture and Chelomei's programs. Between those factors, the uncertainty caused by Khrushchev's overthrow, and Korolev's death, it doesn't seem like the Soviets had much of a chance of beating the US to a lunar landing.

They tried to get Lunokhod on the Moon before Apollo 11 in '69 as a consolation prize, but the rocket blew up and they scattered polonium over much of Russia. Not sure the documentary was referring to that, though.

Related shameless plug: I've been tracking the progress of NASA's Artemis plans to return humans to the Moon on my one-of-a-kind, technical newsletter Moon Monday https://blog.jatan.space/s/moon-monday

It also covers global lunar exploration, science and commercial developments to show that our return to the Moon this is truly worldwide and how valuable each vertical is. Thoughts?

They are going about the Artemis program in about the worst way imaginable.

The lunar gateway notion is about as terrible as I have ever heard of.

The lunar gateway has largely independent goals to the crewed landing missions part of Artemis. IMO only the legally mandatory use of SLS+Orion part is a screw up for Artemis but most of the rest of the hardware and infrastructure will be on commercial models extended from successful ones at LEO, including the at least two spacecraft capable of landing humans on the surface.

May you please elaborate on why you feel this way? I think statements like these would be very valuable to casual observers (i.e. 'me') of the Artemis program if you could provide some more detail that possibly counters the relatively successful Artemis PR.

The "lunar gateway" has no legitimate technical purpose, beyond that it is an orbit that SLS can get to, but Falcon can't. It is not an orbit that is favorable for moon landing: first you need to get from there to "low lunar orbit". And stopping there on the way to another planet would be hugely wasteful.

Essentially, its only purpose is to ensure there is something SLS will be needed for.

My understanding is that the "lunar gateway" is a politically expedient chance to get an ISS replacement on the budget ledgers. It has good technical reason to exist just as an ISS replacement (which must deorbit a lot sooner than we'd all like; some of its warranties are "coming due" as they say).

> And stopping there on the way to another planet would be hugely wasteful.

My understanding is that the scientific missions are less what they'd "stop there on the way" and more what they could eventually consider to "start there". At least some of the "lunar gateway" plans I heard had some complex "fabricator" goals, to assemble and build bigger modules in a "cheaper" in orbit than if they built it on the ground and shipped it all at once straight to the moon. I don't know how many of such plans remain on the books and I don't know enough of the science behind some of the proposals to know how viable they are (I do know that the growing body of inflatable modules research on ISS was pretty neat and supposedly related).

There is literally nothing that could done in high moon orbit that would not be overwhelmingly better done in low earth orbit.

The only reason to even consider using the high moon orbit is to have something, anything for SLS to do. Every conceivable mission scenario is better staged from low earth orbit, but they wouldn't need SLS for that.

And the whole point of SLS is so they can hand out $2B in plums to mil contractors for every mission, that they couldn't for a measly LEO launch.

I'm very willing to believe SLS itself is mostly a political boondog, but I'm also still willing to give Nasa the benefit of the doubt that they're trying their best to get useful science/engineering out of projects like the Lunar Gateway. My understanding is that the lunar orbit they want would give a lot of interesting science opportunities and technical opportunities (simpler communications versus the "tin can on a string that blacks out for worryingly large periods of time" of Apollo communications).

If anything the Lunar Gateway sounds to me a lot like "classic" Nasa risk aversion and over-preparedness. It isn't strictly necessary, probably, but it sounds like it makes lunar projects overall safer (in communications access at the very least, but also reusing ascent stages, and providing more backup habitat space in cases of disaster readiness) and that's still good science to prepare for risk. (They don't want a second Apollo 13, and who can blame them for that?)

> The only reason to even consider using the high moon orbit is to have something, anything for SLS to do.

It seems like that is already disproven. The first few missions to setup Lunar Gateway modules have already been scheduled on SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches (in 2024) so clearly even Nasa understands they may have to rely on SpaceX even for access to Lunar Gateway orbits because the SLS has already missed deadlines. The "traditional" flipside to political boondoggle politics is "standard" commercial bids and contracts, and Nasa is far too pragmatic to rest important pieces of a scientific mission waiting for the SLS as the "only option".

They solved the comms problem on Mars with relay satellites. Would those be harder to use, around the moon? "Habitat space" is useless unless you can get there, and if you can get there, you can get back to Earth.

To disprove it, you would need to find something useful for SLS to do.

NASA, of course, has no say in whether to use SLS. Congress decides that. The best NASA can do is have it not ready to fly. The longer it takes to fly, the fewer flights they will end up forced to do.

It's producing $$$ for the 'old-school' space companies, which seems to be the whole idea. The more elaborate they can make it and the longer they can drag it out and suck up taxpayer money the better.

If you like this subject, I highly recommend the show For All Mankind (on Apple TV).

I don't want to spoil the premise, but it's an amazing alternate history along the consequences of investing in science.

I second the series, it’s amazing (for space nerds). Produced by the same guy who did the Battlestar Galactica reboot which was also amazing.

I think the thing about For All Mankind that makes me sad is how it conveys the potential that the 60s really offered but failed to deliver on, in terms of progressivism, equal rights, womens roles in the workplace. Of course it’s a work of fiction, but science fiction has always been a mechanism for exploring different socio-political evolutions and it makes me feel like we missed something important that we’re only just on the cusp of today.

Anyway, my 2c

Before BSG, Moore was also heavily involved in DS9 from season 3 onwards, and before that was responsible for the arcs in TNG (the whole Worf/Duras/Gowron arc)

DS9, maybe, not TNG?

Moore co-wrote 27 episodes of TNG, including the series finale, and two of the TNG films.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ronald_D._Moore#Star_Tr...

Pretty much every episode Worf got character growth -- growth that was referred back to in later episodes, which was amazing for the late 80s and early 90s.

What in the epic hell are you on about?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement

I don't want to spoil, but the show displays a much faster social progress than our reality, and explains it with a rich political context.

The first Black astronaut wasn't until 1983. Same for women. The show portrays a very different scenario as part of its plot points.

You might want to review the part about how most of the civil rights movement's goals were foiled or rolled back, and someone shot all the major figures, and then Reagan happened and we had another half-century of horrific racism.

> most of the civil rights movement's goals were foiled or rolled back

Not everything is perfect at all - there are very serious problems - but the country (and world) is transformed since before the Civil Rights Movement, and civil rights have spread to others (LGBTQ+ and disabled people, for example).

It's the people against civil rights who want you to quit, to believe you are powerless, that it is all for nothing. Maybe they want to believe it too! :)

> civil rights have spread to others (LGBTQ+ and disabled people, for example)

That only started in the last two decades and in many places it's still a far cry away from being properly established.

> That only started in the last two decades

Plenty happened in the four decades before that. Look up Stonewall, for example.

> it's still a far cry away from being properly established

That doesn't mean nothing happened. People can get married, and most of the country supports that!

I wager there's quite a few stories exploring this premise.

I remember reading Stephen Baxter's "Voyage" in the 90s, in which Kennedy escapes his assasination, the Apollo program ends rather differently and NASA subsequently stretches/evolves the hardware to put a crewed mission on Mars, rather than building the Shuttle. It's been a long time, but I think I recall enjoying the geeking out on the equipment and little historical details.

(I've since read the novel has been widely criticized as plagiarizing the Cox/Murray book on Apollo history, which I read 20 years later and is an amazing achievement.)

I strongly don't.

It's an extremely presentist view of the 1960/70s.

spoilers

The idea that the US of the period would have cared about putting minorities on the Moon because the USSR did it is a fantasy.

The USSR's first female cosmonaut flew in 1963, two years after Gagarin's first flight. By contrast the first US female astronaut didn't fly until 1983, 22 years after the first US manned spaceflight.

The US of the 1960s didn't go for copy cat tokenism, their response to losing the Moon race would have been to start the Mars race. It's a sad indictment of current American mentality that this blindingly obvious escalation wasn't the response of the writers of the show. It's a side effect of living in a country which hasn't been able to build anything more complex than a sports stadium in 40 years. We have no new ideas and neither does our fantasy.

end spoilers

> a country which hasn't been able to build anything more complex than a sports stadium in 40 years. We have no new ideas and neither does our fantasy.

What are you writing this on? If you flew out to L2, what would you see? Etc. Seriously, what forum are you in?

You mean James Webb? That's a prime example of how we've failed. It's a decent $500m telescope with a moderate but not particularly ambitious scope, that overran its budget by a factor of 20 and launched fifteen years late. That so many people think unfolding a sunshield is a pinnacle of human achievement just underlines how much ambition we have lost. We could have had an in-space constructed telescope ten times the size, if the government still actually knew how to build things.

> a decent $500m telescope with a moderate but not particularly ambitious scope

So says someone on the Internet. We can make whatever claims we want if we don't have to back them up. That's the point of the JWST: gather evidence to back up claims.

>That's the point of the JWST: gather evidence to back up claims.

The original cost of James Webb was meant to be $500m and it was meant to launch in 2007.

The actual cost was $9.7b and it launched in 2021 and still isn't fully operational.

We don't know how to build things any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos...

We built it - do you mean our budgeting isn't very good? Was it better before? Were NASA programs on budget historically?

>What are you writing this on?

A glorified BBS.

>If you flew out to L2, what would you see?

Nothing much since the 1960s plans of massive space stations never materialized.

They immediately pivoted towards a moon base race in the series.

Landing on the moon was just what had to be done in order to enable entering the moon base race.

I started watching it, but the whole thing turned me off because they took two fantastic women involved at NASA - Margaret Hamilton and Poppy Northcut, and combined them into one character that in the several episodes I saw was trending towards being a love interest.

For a show that should have accuracy at the start, this was unforgivable given the need for strong women role models in tech.

Leaving aside the tendency to want to have love interests in movies, the two women didn't even work in the same place. Margaret Hamilton worked for a subcontractor (one of many) that was not introduced in the series.

(There is probably also a tendency in general to make it all about NASA which, while obviously central to the whole effort, heavily depended on the aerospace industry and their network of subcontractors.)

Wait, are you talking about the character margo? I'm onto season 3 and I'm not picking up on this love interest vibe you're talking about.

The thing I'm picking up from her is how she seems to be one of the main driving forces behind NASA's success in the show, as hinted at by the fact how she spent years living in her office and gets problems solved trough her USSR contact.

Since you didn’t, I won’t spoil it either, except to say that the first five minutes were an unexpected gut-punch. I knew the premise going in, but I was stunned at how much it affected me to see it happen.

I highly recommend this too.

For me it demonstrates what is possible if we continued to employ the risk taking attitude of those early space programs.

It seems being risk adverse makes human progress very slow and expensive.

It's entertaining, but I wouldn't take the 'consequences of investing in science' too seriously. The idea of the Soviets managing to land on the Moon because one man didn't die is, when you take a critical look at it, as silly as the idea of the Nazis winning WW2 because a single battle went the other way. The Soviets were never able to land on the Moon for good reason, and I'd say for similar reasons their predictions on American technological development would be similarly too rosy.

Alternate history is fun, but maybe best not taken too seriously.

If Korelev had not died it's reasonable that he would have spent his political capital to keep the N1 program going, and worked through it's problems.

Maybe, but there are still a number of problems, even assuming Korolev could have solved the problems in N1's development history that had already been around for years by the time he died.

Let's look at the timeline: Saturn V was rolled out onto the launchpad in May of '66, maiden flight in November '67. In February '66, they tested the Apollo CSM.

Meanwhile, N1 made it onto the launchpad in November '67, but wasn't tested until February '69. Even assuming Korolev's survival could have moved up the dates, there's not a lot of time here between test flights to crewed missions. The LOK wasn't even flying until December of 1970, on a Proton rocket since N1 wasn't ready. But even assuming N1 had had its first test flights in '68, how long do you think it would have taken to go from that, to testing LOK, to actually landing someone on the Moon? Probably more than a single year.

Finally, let's look at something entirely unrelated to the troubled N1 program: the matter of rendezvous. It was important enough to master that Protect Gemini was devoted entirely to getting rendezvous working as smoothly as possible. The US conducted the first rendezvous in December '65, first docking in March '66, and several more successful tests with Gemini after that (all manned missions), as well as a rendezvous in Earth orbit with Apollo 7 in October '68 and lunar orbit with Apollo 9 and 10 in March/May '69.

Meanwhile, the first rendezvous/docking by the Soviets was in October '67, by unmanned crafts that used more fuel than expected, and their follow-up attempt with Soyuz 2/3 in October '68 failed to rendezvous after running out of fuel to maneuver. Their first success with manned rendezvous wasn't until January '69.

It wasn't impossible that the Soviets could have gotten extraordinarily lucky on numerous fronts if he hadn't died, but I wouldn't call it realistic, or in fact reasonable.

Wait, who's this one man that didn't die in the show?

The alt history takes the, unlikely due to inferior technology, path that the last ditch Soviet launch right before Apollo 11 (a launch that did in fact happen, but failed), succeeded. The show seems to make it clear that this was influenced largely by luck as the Soviets had not done any sort of "dress rehearsals" to the moon like NASA had.

The N1, in our real world, was never crewed. The last ditch Soviet launch you're talking about was a test.

For All Mankind to have a successful Soviet Moon landing, things happened differently before that launch. I thought the show would be interested in exploring what those things are, but it never was the case. As for OP, presumably they're talking about Vladimir Komarov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Komarov

His death during Soyuz 1, the first space casualty, could perhaps be a hinge between our universe and For All Mankind.

Sergei Korolev[0], chief architect of the N1 rocket[1] which never really made it off the ground. I believe the show mentions him surviving heart surgery, and the show's creator points to this as the 'divergence point'. The rockets the Soviets use to land on the Moon in the show were N1.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

Somewhat related: I've been enjoying the series "For All Mankind" on Apple TV+. Really fun alt-history drama that explores these topics.

I'm sure spec scripts in this vein already exist, but it would be cool to do a 1970s "parallel history" in retro futurist style where NASA fully realizes Werner von Braun's concept for a Kubrikian spoke-and-wheel spinning mega space station ;)

1952 Colliers' article: "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Will_Conquer_Space_Soon!

That is actually featured in the new season of For All Mankind.

Spoiler alert for Season 3 ;-)

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey? I guess the station wasn't central to the plot.

The article's mention of lunar bases based on LM-derived vehicles made me think of For All Mankind and Jamestown Base. Jamestown was landed on what were, essentially, four LM DPS engines.

Not spending any time showing the effort to design the base was a huge missed opportunity. The show basically went from mentioning "the race for the base" in the beginning of one episode to showing a few seconds of it landing at the end of the episode with virtually no in-between.

Some of the best scenes in HBO's From Earth to the Moon were about how the engineers tackled designing the LM and expositing all sorts of things about the technical challenges. I still enjoy the show, but I really wish they catered to the space-nerd audience a little more by spending a little less time on interpersonal drama.

I find it incredibly depressing. At least through season 2 it presents a better America that didn't just give up.

If it's a consolation prize, I think there are interesting parts of For All Mankind's timeline that aren't better and may actively be worse. I'm not sure how much of that is intentional message or not, though.

The biggest for instance: in our timeline gay rights advances were able to piggy back on other civil rights advances and waves of feminism. In getting major civil rights and feminist victories early in space it seems like not as much happens "on the ground" as it did in our world, especially with regard to follow up rights such as gay rights.

The next biggest and certainly much more obvious is that the Cold War is much, much worse and international politics a bit more fraught and MAD overall.

There's lots of little other things like earlier backslides in immigration policies. There's deep implications that tobacco companies won for longer and there's less EPA power and there's a lot less public awareness of radiation concerns and carcinogens. (Things that stopped, for instance, real world Project Orion from anything like tests in Earth's atmosphere.)

So much of these details are easy to miss in the background, and again I don't know how much is intentional commentary versus accidental bits of world building. A lot of people joke about all the Beatles Reunion Tour of the 90s stuff as evidence that the world building of FAM has overly generously been "super optimist utopia" the show claims to have created, but if you actually pause some of the headlines and stories there's a lot of nasty stuff, too, including a lot of interesting digs into that same Reunion Tour with shades of "aged rockers past their prime who don't like each other anymore don't bring anything new or exciting to label requirement to tour again".

I can't fault the show for being optimistic and it's a big reason I tune into the show because I want that "competence porn" of smart people doing cool smart things. I don't think the intent is "utopian" though, I think the writers understand if all the smart people are busy doing smart stuff in space, there's fewer smart people on the ground and some of that bleeds into the world building and I appreciate that as a viewer.

Is this show like a prequel for The Expanse?

I'd consider it more of an informal sequel to Battlestar Galactica. Especially given all the people the two shows have in common and similar style (unsteady crash zooms across vast reaches of vacuum!)

That's a fan theory I've heard based on both shows trying to keep the space action mostly realistic.

Except that the moment they enter the Jamestown base, gravity suddenly seems to be 1g.

(2005), mind, which is relevant given the main topic of the essay is NASA’s contemporary moon program which was originally introduced back then.

Nixon, who was president by the time the US landed on the moon, in case you've forgotten, hated JFK, and had ever since he lost to Kennedy in the 1960 election after Nixon's disastrous appearance at the debate vs JFK.

So of course, when Nixon became president, he considered Apollo to be JFK's program and killed it. Not all at once – first by cancelling missions after 17, then more so. Also, Nixon wanted the money for his expansion of the war in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, as well as money for his other imperialist interventions around the world.

The reason why we got the Space Shuttle was, bluntly, Air Force involvement in wanting a reusable, crewed vehicle to deploy and retrieve spy satellites. That's why the shuttle bay got to be so big[1]

1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1960/1

Adding on to the Air Force thing, the shuttle program was being starved of money so the decision was made to accommodate the Air Force to get some money from the DoD. It wound up seriously disfiguring the original design of the shuttle and it never ended up doing any of the kind of missions the Air Force required the changes for.

There was a shuttle launch pad at Vandenberg, SLC-6, which never saw a launch. After the loss of Challenger on STS-51-L, the Air Force gave up on the shuttle anyway, leaving it as an albatross around NASA's neck.

Interesting that NASA is now pursuing something similar right now. I wonder if some of the then junior engineers started work on this back then and were cut off by Nixon to work on the space shuttle and have now climbed into a position of power and want to complete that initial work they started.

Or I could be reading way too much into this.

They'd be retired by now, even the most junior engineer in 1970 would be into their seventies.

Most of them, yes, but there were some serious geezers wandering the halls before the pandemic. One of my coworkers started at NASA the same year I was born, and she doesn't show any signs of retiring any time soon. These folks don't usually end up directly in management positions, but they often hold advisory roles that give them the ear of those calling the shots.

Perhaps but their direct reports and coworkers that followed them were or are aware of their predecessors goals.

This sort of already happened when some of the Apollo engineers came out of retirement for the Constellation Program. The program was cancelled and they went back into retirement. Nobody came back for the Space Launch System because it was just a jobs program with no real substance. Also, they were very old at that point.

Yeah seems like a lot of the programs aims were to build a moon base of sorts and get a person to mars. They obviously haven't met those goals and have now been heavily defunded, enough that it'll be impossible for them to actually follow through. The latest goals are the same and I can't help but be sceptical if they'll ever get back to the moon.

Yup. The "missions" are an excuse for funding. But the funding is insufficient and misallocated to support the stated missions in earnest.

If NASA gets to the moon again, it'll be on a cheap ride they buy from SpaceX.

> President Nixon rejected the ambitious Space Task Group plan, choosing instead to develop the infamous, loved and hated space shuttle.

So, he really was a crook.

Wouldn't those crews have all had big problems with cancer and muscular atrophy?

Muscle loss isn't the big problem in long term microgravity, bone loss is.

No.

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