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Actually - It doesn't get the numbers right either. If you look at the first reference, "[1]", the author says:

"I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion."

With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)

The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.

> The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold.

And the planetary motions were discovered by somebody trying to prove that the 5 planets all fit inside a babushka doll of the 5 platonic solids. This says nothing of what would happen if these scientists had different creeds or different goals. Most scientific discoveries are indeed very boring. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter while trying study the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, a very simple and very down to earth goal that lead to a remarkable discovery. At the same time Jane Goodall’s big creed was that maybe it is OK to empathize with the individual animals you are studying.

Grand goals are neither necessary nor sufficient for making scientific advancements. And while some goals might be useful, others are just as likely to be a major distraction. There is reason to believe that a human mars landing falls in the latter category.

Love your perspective. It reminds me of the technological advances from the space race to the moon as well. We aren't taking casual trips up there ever, but the tech that came from it was revolutionary

i feel like this is all propaganda to convince tax payers to fund this stuff. it's like we never invented anything worthwhile at all if it wasn't used for war or space. maybe we should just try? try spending some money on good for a change and we'll see if good comes out of it.

Displacing all coal- and oil-generated power with renewables in a short enough time to fend off climate catastrophe would be a good choice.

Yeah, the obvious reason why funding spaceflight yields useful technology is that we also fund e.g. laser technology. We can fund science research without also spending billions of dollars going to the moon.

But will the money actually go there ? The track record is not very good so far in this regard.

If it is propaganda, it is to detract from the fact that we could actually be on Mars already, if we hadn't spent a Trillion dollars a year bombing the shit out of everyone for the last two - or so - decades ..

People tend to forget that we are still murdering each other over this planet.

Getting to Mars would either be a solution to that problem, or just an extension.

I guess, therefore, it matters who gets there first.

(See also: Psyche 16)

The Apollo mission that reached the moon was preceded by very rational steps to get there, and get back.

Prematurely shooting for Mars could literally bankrupt resources on Earth and still have worse odds than a more methodical approach.

I doubt anyone is actually going to “shoot prematurely for the Mars”. I expect what SpaceX is going to do, is once they get Starship up and running, and tick off some intermediate goals such as Artemis III and DearMoon, they’ll start launching demo Mars missions-no crew, but demonstrating some of the technologies a crewed mission will need-and NASA will probably pay for some of it. And that’s likely to take a lot longer than all their optimistic estimates suggest. But they’ll continue to dangle those timelines in front of everybody to create buzz which increases the odds of Congress/NASA paying for some of it. SpaceX might be a bit less risk-averse than NASA, but no way are they sending humans (even privately) to Mars unless they have reasonable odds of surviving, and there is a lot of further technology development and demonstration required to have reasonable confidence in that.

i think musk has basically said he doesn't mind risking/losing some lives. and people have volunteered. whether or not the world allows him to actually do that is another story though

Musk is prone to speak in a somewhat hyperbolic fashion, and may well be more risk-averse when it actually comes time to actually decide whether to put human lives at risk, than he is when talking about that decision as an abstract future. It also isn't entirely up to him–it is also what the rest of the SpaceX executive team feels comfortable with (especially Gwynne Shotwell), and also the comfort level of the regulators and lawyers.

Even NASA "doesn't mind risking/losing some lives", in that while they drive the "probability of loss of crew" as low as feasible, they never can get it to zero. Possibly, a private SpaceX mission might have a higher go/no-go threshold for that probability – but if it adds up to (say) 50%, I really doubt they'll go ahead with the mission, they'll likely instead delay so they can invest further engineering resources in reducing it to a more reasonable level.

Like with reusable rockets before, its very important to a do real world demonstration that this is possible. This way a lot of the naysayers blocking Mars related projects in other companies/organizations/countries will be much less of a problem.

And in general will make more people consider to get involved as this is real now, not another power point, computer model or study.

The Apollo program was insane for the 1960's. It was announced by JFK just one year after NASA's first successful manned space rocket. Engineering was still primarily done with pencils and slide-rules, the US had only just achieved widespread household electrification, and the first supersonic flight was only 15 years earlier.

NASA's budget during the Apollo era was about 10 times that of the Manhattan Project, about 1% of the entire US government budget. It could have turned into history's largest money incinerator if things had gone bad organizationally. I can't really think of any project like it that has been attempted before or since--not at such a huge scale and on such a short timeline.

The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster, and it was only diligence and commitment (and luck) at every level of NASA that allowed them to succeed given such a monumental goal. But the goal itself was very close to madness.

Beside that, it did not seem to result any direct advancements in technology. We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. (But we can build SLS and Falcon Heavy though, after 50+ years.)

It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.

> We can't even build a Saturn-V any more.

It's not that we can't, we just decided to redirect those resources to other areas (i.e. the Space Shuttle) and now those designs are very out of date.

No, we actually can't. In short, we've lost enough knowledge: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/6290

We can build a replacement, more capable than Saturn-V, and less expensive even. But we cannot reproduce Saturn-V the way it flew in 1970s.

It's like saying we can't build the pyramids anymore just because we can't build them the exact same way the Egyptians did. Is the goal to get to the moon or is the goal to build a faithful replica of the rocket along with a faithful replica of the tools that built the rocket?

We developed a particular pinnacle of tech and lost it through disuse. This happens in aerospace and high-end weapon-making areas regularly, because the runs are small, and much of the knowledge and technology is uniquely purpose-built, with thick layers of secrecy protecting the know-hows.

Speaking of military technology, humans lost the secret of "Greek fire" [1], which apparently was a medieval form of napalm, not extinguishable by water. All the current knowledge of chemistry did not help restore the recipe yet (because history studies have a smaller budget than the actual military, of course).

We haven't lost the ability to fly to the Moon, of course, because the principles remain the same, and the technologies advance. But we had to build completely different rockets, not reusing many, if any, bits of Saturn-V.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

It just goes to show that human progress is not monotonically increasing, we must travail to make it so, as without such effort, we slide back.

> It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.

Has it though? These are requirements for our normal earth orbit satellites, surely these would have advanced at a similar pace without the moon mission.

> We can't even build a Saturn-V any more.

Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end?

> Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end?

Dead end, yes; engineering, no. More: we didn't need it for so long that everyone who was responsible has since gotten old/died.

And even then, only a dead end given the scientific and industrial position at the time; those can change to turn dead ends into open ends.

It succeeded because the Saturn V had enough heavy-lifting capablity that we could do the entire mission with one launch vehicle for the complete round-trip.

It was the power of the Saturn V being sufficient to get us out of the Earth's gravity well, plus the cleverness of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission plan that allowed us to pull it off. Once those two things were worked out and understood, the rest was just a matter of executing. But it was pure happenstance that the laws of Physics and the Earth/Moon orbital mechcanics lined up to make it possible.

And the Saturn V only had enough lifting capacity because the Air Force had issued a requirement to Rocketdyne back in 1955 for an engine powerful enough to deliver the huge H-bombs in use at the time. Within a few years, nuclear weapons researchers had figured out how to build lighter weapons so the huge F-1 engine was no longer needed for ICBMs, but fortunately it was ready for use in the Apollo program. The USSR had nothing comparable.

Well, the USSR did something similar - for a while you could only really sell a new space rocket by branding it as an ICBM.

Even the bloody 700 ton UR-500 which became the Proton eventually piggybacked on this, marked on paper as a 50-100 megaton warhead ICBM!

But looks like the Americans were thinking even bigger. :-)

"The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster..."

For All Mankind on Apple TV+ has a lot of fun extrapolating from the premise of the Soviet moonshot succeeding and beating the US to the moon. Then presenting an alternate history of how events unfold differently because of it.

Basically extrapolating the insanity of the Apollo program up until the present day, as USA and Soviet Union continually try to one up each other in the space race.

It's a lot of fun.

Haha, not really - the original Apollo program was reasonable - lets doe a low Earth orbit space station or two, build some space infra, improve and ideally reuse launchers...

Then Kennedy came with "LETS DO A LUNAR LANDING LIKE RIGHT NOW, LOL!" & then got himself killed so it could not be taken back.

What followed was an ultimately successful mad dash with great emphasis on cost-is-not-an-option which did bring us some nice inventions but did not really help to build any real space infra or to lower the launch costs.

And arguably also entrenched the bad idea that space needs to be horrendously expensive and always will be. Not really, until you are on a mad dash with a singular unrelated objective.

But hey, it might still be useful experience next time a killer asteroid or hostile aliens show up.

As long as people need to worry about things like their own financial ruin, need to worry about their investors each quarter, people aren't going farther than the earths orbit, and if they do, it will surely be a one way ticket to death. Doing it right now its like asking someone to play an impossible chess game where your side only has pawns and you lose $100 billion everytime one is taken.

this seems likely to be ignorant of all the small steps needed in everything everywhere, to romanticize people that marketed themselves well.