In 1961 a Gallup poll showed only 33% of Americans in favor of moon landing
newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org
newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org
That was more evident in 1989 than when people were wondering whether it was a massive waste of money in 1969, and certainly than in 1959
[1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.
They were extraordinary customers — willing to fund R&D, patient with bad results but extremely demanding. Without them, I suspect we'd be at least one to two decades behind in your computing timeline. Given how many lives these machines save on a daily basis... it's not hard to do the math.
Flight computers predated Apollo- they were originally developed for missles. most of the folks who worked on the AGC had previously developed very successful flight computers already.
Also – billions? Seems like an overreach.
The modern process was invented in 1890, and used extensively in WW2.
Might as well not send any boats out to find new continent, they will be discovered anyway!
We have far more real technology today than we would have, all thanks to us moving some made up money around 60 years ago...
> Don't bother doing something because it will be done eventually anyway.
If it was "basically a photo-op" it wouldn't have generated so much economic activity in the long run, even if perhaps it wasn't the most cost effective way to get there (in some eyes)?
Because not spending that dollar on putting a guy on the moon could have generated 20 dollars elsewhere.
This is why historians are leery of counter-factuals; unless you have very strong evidence that it would have happened, you have nothing but a "could have" hypothesis.
Companies certainly innovate, but the government innovates a _lot_ (primarily through research grants which are eventually developed into products by entrepreneurs as far as I can tell, also the military).
"basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.
freeze dried food predates the space program by decades.
Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.
What a wonderful tautology.
These things were researched because they were necessary. You don't just sit down and think of new things to invent, you invent things to fix a problem. Without a problem to solve, how is one supposed to suddenly decide what to research?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
> I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..
In many cases yes, they didn't invent the technology per se. But in those cases they improved or refined the tech and by virtue of being a public agency released the information freely for public use.
Even a 700% IRR can be not worth it, if you have alternatives with similar or lower risk with a higher annual return.
That's always the problems with these types of discussions though, isn't it? You can't know what that next leap is going to be and how it is going to benefit everyday life.
For some, like myself, that next leap will be just as revolutionary and will send us to the stars. We imagine a blank check with a direct, long-term goal leading to things we can't even dream of today.
For others, however, they struggle to see what that leap will be. For them, it's just getting to Mars and maybe coming back, maybe with some new tech for the military. Nothing that will affect their own lives or the lives of their children. That was the problem in the 50s and 60s that led to so much backlash against the projects. And even though we saw the fruit those projects bore, who is to say it will happen a second time?
Some people just can't or won't imagine what might come from another Apollo-esque program. And that's who you have to convince.
- shipping solar energy to the dark side of the planet
- ending the COVID-19 pandemic (N95s, air filtration, far UV-C, timely vaccine updates)
- intercontinental high speed rail (low emissions travel)
- preserving the biosphere by removing deforestation incentives w/ international assistance, technology transfer
- interplanetary space infrastructure incl. orbital launch
- high quality durable goods that barely break and are easy to service
The mission to go to the Moon wasn’t just a mission to go to the Moon, it was also a mission to come back from the Moon. This was basically a blank check and a massive cross-disciplinary exercise.
Our next focus should be on Mars with exactly the same criteria: get people to Mars and also get them back as part of the same mission. It will be much more difficult than getting to the Moon and back and that’s exactly the reason to do it.
For half a century we have been massively slashing science spending. From a peak of 2.5% GDP in 1962 steadily down to about 0.5% today. There's not much left.
Sorry to derail, but I'm utterly confounded that cancer research, life extension research, brain-computer research, etc. haven't been given this "by-all-means" approach. It's one thing to defeat a geopolitical rival, it's quite another to escape annihilation for just a bit longer.
One might assume religiosity is the cause, but atheist nations aren't investing in it either.
If anything was deserving of another moonshot / Manhattan project, I think that would be it.
"Cancer" is a nebulous area. You can't really study "cancer". Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases characterized by a breakdown of your own cells' reproductive process. Not to mention, it's a breakdown that can just happen. You can take every precaution, avoid every carcinogen, and still get cancer. The biggest predictor to whether or not you will get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater your chances.
And we might "get" cancer far more often than we realize. It's just that our bodies do have ways to excise cancer from our own bodies. It's just that sometimes, it's not enough.
And there is a lot of research that goes into cancer prevention and treatment. But it's not like one day we'll have the anti-cancer pill. That's just magical thinking.
Life extension research is also in a weird place. Because, like cancer, there isn't just one thing that ends our life. It's a host of things. And a lot of those things are being looked into. And we've already made amazing strides. We are able to get way more people to advanced ages than before. Prior to modernity, it was basically luck as to whether or not you'd make it to 60.
And I don't even know what you want to mean by "brain-computer" research. But I assume it would eventually involve fucking around with living brains. You absolutely cannot make a mistake there. You don't go poking around in the brains of healthy people unless you want to make them very unhealthy, very quickly.
So each of the things you've picked out are vague and/or fraught with their own perils.
Chucking a meat-filled metal tube at a space rock and getting the meat back is an objective with a clear goal.
And also, I'd like to point out, that failure was an option. Michael Collins was trained in everybody's job just in case he had to come back alone. During the first orbit, when he was out of contact with everybody for 48 minutes, he had no idea what he would find when he came back around. That and this was a process of years. The mission that landed on the moon was Apollo 11. Preceded by the Gemini program, whose main purpose was to lead into the Apollo program. 8 years for the singular goal of having a man go to the moon and return.
"Curing cancer" is not the same. "Brain research" is not the same. "Life extension" is not the same. Pick one thing. One simple goal. Not "cure cancer", but something like "make non-nauseating chemotherapy". Then dedicate 8 years to achieving that one task, no matter the cost. Which is something they do do. Any time you see something about "targeted cancer medications", that's to end-run around chemotherapy. Because chemotherapy is kind of like setting your house on fire to get rid of termites.
The Manhattan project and the moonshot were implementation problems, not theoretical ones. By 1939 we knew that a runaway nuclear reaction was possible and Werner von Braun probably could have worked out the fuel you’d need to get to the moon on the back of a napkin. It took a lot of ingenuity to get there, but both problems seemed achievable given enough resources.
On the other hand, we don’t even know where to begin to “cure cancer”, because it’s thousands of different diseases with different causes and prognoses. There are cancers that essentially are curable with enough of a headstart. Of the ones that we’ve “cured” there’s little in common in their origins and they all have wildly different treatments. Curing cancer isn’t dumping money at solving one achievable problem - it’s an open-ended investment in tackling thousands of independent problems.
There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?
Cancer survival rates are constantly getting better. The payback for investment in biotech research has been huge and even bigger dividends are on the horizon.
Look at the Hepatitis drugs and weight loss drugs that actually work. These along will address the leading causes of death today.
Coming soon is xenotransplantation. Already we're experimenting with hearts. The outlook is that in 10 years we'll routinely be doing this. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10143783/
> There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?
There really aren't. The basic technology is mostly the same. And we have a system for deciding what to spend money on: scientists write grants, get some funding, show results, and then we repeat at a bigger scale seeing who can deliver the best results. It's not perfect, but it works.
Cancer deaths today are a choice we make as a society to not invest in research. We can't "cure cancer" tomorrow, but even with the tiny resources allocated today we're making significant progress. We could do so much more!
For example, in the 70s 5-year survival across all cancers was 58%. Now it's 85%.
I'm pretty sure Apollo was a political model for this ongoing "war on cancer" launched in 1971.
Cold War spending probably kickstarted Silicon Valley:
That's not to say you shouldn't invest in abstract research with no obvious goal at all, but probably you should consider it a much higher risk investment and not fund all your research that way...
There's also the fact that money now is more valuable that money later even if you adjust for inflation (one of the reason countries run a deficit) so the expected return should be much higher than $1 to be worth investing in.
Next, there's the fact that investment is finite, so the expected return has to be higher than the expected return you would get elsewhere.
Finally there's the fact that as you invest more, the effects of all three of those factors increase, so it has diminishing returns.
Invisible in rich coutnries like the US, I mean. The USSR space raced itself into recession.
Did they? The USSR had a lot of expensive losses, from the war in Afghanistan to the cleanup of Chernobyl. But I'm not sure the space race fits in that category; like in the US it pushed tech advances within the USSR as well, and their launch capabilities generated a lot of revenue for them down the line.
http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm
> To summarize, the period 1988 to 1992 was the world's third oil crisis in 20 years. This one brought down the powerful Soviet Empire.
>It is suggested that because the Soviet Union had out-of-date oil technology that production decreased. However over time, even in a closed system such as the Soviet Union, information about technology and technology itself must increase.
Why? The Soviet Union had numerous important failures in technology that killed their advancement, often caused by valuing personal loyalty (often treated as party loyalty) over all else, an act that will drive any system to failure eventually.
>There is no reason to believe that management was much better in the 1960's when oil production skyrocketed then in the 1980's when it stagnated
Again, asserted without evidence, as if there aren't hundreds of examples of good management being replaced with bad management, regardless of economic ideology or societal structures.
>Subsequent discontent pushed them toward democracy. The Soviet Union was left trying to simply keep NATO troops out of Eastern Europe but still letting the Eastern Europeans become democracies.
So now rolling tanks into at least one of the revolting countries is "letting the eastern Europeans become democracies"? Russia fought, and continues fighting to this very day, any and all "I don't want to be a part of russia anymore" ideology, including with lethal force.
The Soviet Union degraded over time because it was structurally and socially organized to encourage rewarding people who were loyal and projected strength than people who got things actually done. From the very top with Stalin himself, the way to move up was completely divorced from the way to improve efficiency. This importantly isn't about the economic system, but the ideology of leadership. The Soviet Union would have run into plenty of troubles with a system based on syncophantry even if it were a free market capitalist system. Allowing that kind of blatant corruption and suffusing it through all levels corrodes society. Or at least this is my opinion.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24808741
Assuming JSTOR still works for anyone.
Regardless, my thesis wasn't that the USSR collapsed entirely because of an oil shock. It was that the USSR had severe structural problems and couldn't weather adversities such as the oil shock.
Outside of blowing stuff up, the NSF distributes roughly $10 billion a year to research. And while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously. Think about how much open source software was developed at universities, funded directly, or indirectly via NSF or similar grants.
One of the problems with indiscriminate spending on science is people who oppose to the spending will attack it. We often see news articles like, "government gives professor $4 million to study of shrimp". Of course, the article is biased, so it ignores that half that that money goes back to the university to pay for "research facilities" or that the research may have direct military application. So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.
It's hard to really grasp, kind of like insurance which I swear a lot of people also don't really get but in reverse (where you throw a lot of money seemingly down the drain until possibly the day where it completely makes up for it).
How do you tackle budgeting for something with zero guarantees? Not very easily.
I wouldn't say that at all. There are lots of small, tangible positive outcomes that occur along the way. Inventing interplanetary travel is great. But even a failed project gives smart people experience, generates research that might have application elsewhere, funds general economic development.
Lots of indirect development comes from R&D. Think a chemical engineering PhD student designs some software to solve a problem specific to their research, then finds out that there's a broader market for that kind of software and leaves his research to pursue that as a business.
I think that a lot of people think R&D is only about achieving a specific goal. When, in reality, it's about researching and developing a lot of smaller things in the general direction of a particular goal.
It's a crime that all of that money isn't accessible to people outside of universities...
> So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.
I mean... that's the optimistic case. At least in your imaginary scenario there's actual work happening from 9am to 10:30am and from 3:00pm to 5:00pm...
NASA has been promoting that claim for years. But it's not real. Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.[1] Flight computers came from the USAF missile programs of the 1950s.[2] Nor was NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/801137/
[2] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2190783...
(I'm not saying this is the case, but you're also not saying that it's not.)
Probably.
IMHO, the US military was and is probably far more effective at making emerging technologies "practical" than NASA is. Their budget's bigger and they buy more stuff, often mass-produced. NASA does a lot of one-off and small-run projects.
What do you mean? The military will ask for pretty aggressive improvements in capabilities, then be willing to pay essentially infinity dollars to get what they ask for. That was especially true during the Cold War. For instance, my understanding is the military played a crucial step in productizing semiconductors, because they were willing to buy them at volume when they were far too expensive for nearly every civilian use case. That volume allowed for the R&D to drive prices down and make civilian use practical. If the military hadn't been interested, things would have gotten to a much slower start.
For example, see the Hubble vs the two prior spy satellites having the exact same tech.
No one has been arguing that NASA scientists are better than private sector scientists. The argument is that having a seemingly-stupid goal that takes a lot of work can spawn off legitimately useful technologies that would never have been targeted by the private sector because moonshots aren't good investments. The theory is that it's a good way to very quickly iterate through many different ideas.
This is just my opinion, but I feel like stuff is way more likely to be actually be accomplished if there's a tangible goal. A goal, even an arbitrary one, helps you actually figure out the limitations of a theory or design, and if you don't have a goal it is far too tempting to handwave away important questions and live in theoretical land.
It does sadden me that these days their designs are much more restricted, as I enjoyed the wacky ideas we would occasionally see when the rules were less restrictive.
Even in weird ways: my sister can afford to pay her rent/food herself while studying because she prepare meal plans for a water polo team, which helps her study and find ideas for her college projects. Hopefully she can get through her studies without working in a kitchen again.
The Apollo missions flew on Rockets designed and Manufactured by Boeing (S-IC), North American (S-II), and Douglas (S-IVB).
The lunar lander was designed and manufactured by Grumman.
That said, a lot of engineering goes into setting good purchasing requirements and assessing the results.
Not an insult. I'm highlighting a business branding issue. A mistake Apple, for example, would never have been so careless as to make.
It’s like bringing Sams Club soda to a picnic when people are use to Coke and Pepsi
See, it's a vicious cycle, the aggressive M&A strategy leads to a need to increase sales, which leads to a larger marketing budget, which finally trickles down in to the price. Now price is actually segmented itself, in terms of up-front elasticity and "walled-garden" elasticity, which Apple can monitor independently of device sales through marketing novelty through the app store and seeing if the nibbles are elastic onto services, say like Apple+. Historically they also have segmented product (XR, Pro XR) to get more data points for the degree of price elasticity, which is probably most responsive because they're the most expensive thing on the broad market.
Even Apple’s cheapest phone - the iPhone SE is over $100 more expensive than the average Android phone sold in the US.
Apple has usually sold this years model, last years model and the year before that concurrently. Sometimes when the n-1 model is too expensive to sell at a discount they introduce a new phone (ie the iPhone 5C)
Sorry it’s got nothing to do with classism, just objective differences.
thinking of the South Park fart smelling prius meme.
FTR - I have no problems with EVs, but I do give myself a good chuckle when I see someone who was proud enough of their vehicle purchase to turn their it into a billboard advertising something / someone (Musk) who has fallen from social grace.
Both the Nissan Altima and Tesla Model 3 sell very well and are entry level ("entry level" here meaning entry level for the class of vehicles one is looking for, there are entry-level Mercedes' for instance) sedans with power behind them. So you have a lot of them both on the road, and thus more people who likely treat them as disposable and thus drive them recklessly. Any car that is super popular usually is popular enough that enough of the wrong kind of drivers have it, and so you can start stereotyping them. I think Model 3s have a lot of the wrong kind of drivers on the road. Maybe many of them care about saving the environment but they don't drive like they care about the car.
How do you say you’re in a bubble without saying you’re in a bubble…
I guess maybe a Camry? That’s a boring practical car that doesn’t carry much stigma.
You choose who and what you associate with in this world, and your car is one of the things which, whether you like it or not, will define perceptions of you.
A premature rocketulation man-baby is not who I want to associate with or help fund.
The stereotype in the US is anyone driving a BMW, and any sort of lifted pickup. A non douchey vehicle, as a class of vehicles, would probably be a minivan, a Camry, or a Civic.
Okay, so... the tech existed but was too expensive to actually use, NASA threw a bunch of R&D at making it practical, and now it's cheap enough to use. I'd say that's a great case for NASA getting credit for making the tech useful; that they didn't literally invent it from scratch seems rather beside the point.
From Institute of Food Technologists (IFT):
Freeze-drying was invented by Jacques-Arsene d’Arsonval at the College de France in Paris in 1906. Later, during World War II, it was widely implemented to preserve blood serum. Since then freeze-drying has become one of the most important processes for preservation of heat-sensitive biological materials. During the 1950s, industrial freeze-drying of foods began. Freeze-drying is currently used as a preservation method for foods, pharma-ceuticals, and a wide range of other products.
https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...
AGC was also one of the first machines to use integrated circuits (to keep it light, no doubt) so you could say that the apollo program also advanced computer research by quite a bit.
Apollo had to solve many technical problems, but often specialized ones, such as how to handle liquid hydrogen in bulk and how to get stable combustion in a big engine. A major criticism of Apollo is that it produced too much specialized technology that was never used again.
The Space Shuttle had a different set of problems. It was supposed to be a practical space transport, but only the orbiter was re-usable and it needed a months-long major overhaul after each flight. Not until the Falcon 9 did something cost-effective finally get built.
Could you share this source? I want to read more analysis
See perhaps:
These days unfortunately the conspiracy theorists of the world have made their own discoveries like internet forums and Twitter which just help propagate their points of view far more than a mimeograph of dense text and filled with arrows and diagrams stapled to a telephone pole ever did.
Space-romantics tend to wildly overestimate the benefits of space colonization relative to the difficulty and cost.
Space is... kinda shit. Including all the other rocky bodies in our star system. In the best case, it's like if Earth suffered a half-dozen biosphere-ruining apocalypses and was yet worse than that, even.
The "why?" needs a damn good answer, and we just don't have one, certainly not for long-term human habitation. Even "colonize Mars as a humanity backup" isn't great. There are cheaper ways to achieve most of that supposed benefit, and maybe do it even better, possibly even involving space in some capacity, most of which projects we could kick off today if we really wanted to—yet we don't bother with any of those, no, we fixate on Mars because of the romantic and pop-culture appeal, not because it's the most efficient solution.
Colonizing Mars or the clouds of Venus or putting dome-cities on the Moon or whatever is undeniably cool as hell, but when you sit and really think about it... eh.
Very little of the expense of historical exploration was undertaken just so people could scratch their exploration itch. Besides, we have a pretty good idea of what we'll find most of these places, now, without having to send people there, and certainly without needing them to live there. We don't have a strong history of bending entire economies to support these kinds of projects just for exploration's sake, but for expected returns. We can do most of the preliminary exploring of our star system cheaper with robots and closer-to-home remote sensors, now.
Would we have funded so many expensive expeditions, in the age of sail, to explore the Arctic and northern Canada if we'd had satellites to tell us there was no Northwest Passage? Just for the sake of exploring in-person? I doubt it, but that's the conclusion one must draw from the "the need, deep in the human heart, to explore is enough justification! It's our nature!" (see the romanticism?) position if one supposes that justifies massive human space exploration and colonization programs, today, barring new information.
And you don't think the people allocating the resources subscribe to it? That's more or less my point about why they're doing it. The VOC and British India Companies may have done it for profit, but the romanticized version has been drilled into our barons and leaders.
If I have $100 then I can choose to spend it on say a book. I have a book, my $100 is clearly gone.
But when the govt spends say $400 mil on a lunar landing, they get the lunar landing, but they also get a bunch of money back. Firstly, a chunk of that money goes to salaries, so a decent chunk comes back as primary taxes (income tax etc) and secondary taxes (sales tax, gas tax, taxes on booze and smokes).
What isn't taxes is mostly then circulating in the economy (generating yet more taxes) while giving the economy a nice boost.
Now we can argue about opportunity cost etc, but the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity.
We can quibble about edge-case budgets all day long, but its hard to avoid the jobs program that is "military spending". In truth what does all that money buy? The lunar program, the Mars program, curing cancer, these are rounding errors compared to the military budget.
I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but what do invasions of Iraq, or occupations of Afghanistan for 20 years actually really achieve? Instead of picking on NASA it might be time to wonder what the Defence trillions get us?
Which brings me back to my first point- most of those trillions circle round in the economy anyway, so its all funny money.
This can't be true forever, and to me it seems like it is the underpinning of the entire modern world order. Something seems fundamentally warped, I'm just not educated enough to know what it is.
I think both are basically wasted, but that's because I don't buy the premise of your argument. Money is constantly circulating, at a given velocity. Each economic actor chooses a balance of investment and consumption, and spends at a certain rate (some take longer to allocate funds than others). The question for me is whether another actor would have either allocated the money faster, or towards an investment with a higher positive externality. My answer is yes.
Did it provide security? I remember 2 towers collapsing...
This part entangles monetary policy with gov’t spending, which to some extent is politically inevitable, but IIUC is a very bad idea in general[1–3].
[1] https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/07/magical-monetary-...
[2] https://www.cato.org/commentary/magical-monetary-theory
[3] https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tAThqgpJwSueqhvKM/frequen...
My guess is defence spending is much lower speed than NASA or medical programs.
If you're a well paid 'military spending' contractor then you can take a nice vacation to the EU and see what the US could afford were the US not spending it all on it's military. Free* health care, free* college, public transit, etc.
First, the government might not have issue borrowing infinitely, but deficit spending/printing cash from thin air leads to inflation. And considering how 'beautiful' that past couple of months have been, I wouldn't dismiss its impact on livelihood.
Secondly, the government might distribute money into the economy, but it's always done inefficiently. That's where we get $20k trash cans [0] and $28 million spent on camouflage uniforms that don't blend in (for use in Afghanistan).
Arguing that government spending is mostly good because it gets money into people's hands is just the broken window fallacy at work - that cash could have been used for more productive investments in the private sector.
Thirdly, I wouldn't trust the ROI figures published by a government agency, especially since the US government has a 'use it or lose it' approach to budget allocation. They have every motivation to just make up figures to channel more cash their way.
I'm going to answer with another question. For the past thirty years, how many countries have traded crude oil in currencies OTHER than the dollar, and of those countries, which ones have NOT been invaded by the United States?
Petrodollar explained: https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/petrodollar/
This doesn't really have anything to do with NASA budget but deserves a lot more scrutiny than it gets, IMHO.
People similarly laud military research, but it's not as if you need the military to carry it out. Governments were just willing to fund the research as part of a military effort.
When you place an objective like the Moon in front, at the least your research has to result in it getting closer. The hope is that this broad objective results in something as opposed to something narrower you might want.
The corresponding risk is in the resulting cargo cult around arbitrary constraints whose reasons were forgotten. I bet if we committed to building the Panama canal with only spoons we'd have ended up with a lot of amazingly useful spoon-platform earth moving technology, and the commercial sector would've ended up with highly optimized spoon-based machines, and it'd all be very stupid compared to what we got instead.
I really love the book "The decision to go to the moon" because it chronicles not apollo itself, but the years leading up to the decision to do it.
Remember: The soviets had just successfully launched sputnik and were years ahead of the US. It was perceived to be a matter of national security and pride, we had to do something.
The choices were:
1 - do it, but as a secret CIA/Pentagon thing focused on military power, objectives, run by the military leadership.
2 - Do it as it was done, as a civilian, public thing for us all to share in.
I, for one, am very grateful they chose 2.
I think its out of print. I had to buy it used on Amazon for like 80 bucks when I bought my copy.
As a counterpoint, there's Home on Lagrange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRns6u5bHuw
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.
(chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.
(chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.
(chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
(chorus)
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
I think that was the point. White Americans and Black Americans weren't living in the same world in the 1960s.
And you're not providing a counterpoint, you're answering a community's outrage at the literal interplanetary scale gulf of racial inequality (the US was still dealing with desegregation at the time) with twee nerd humor.
The criticism that the space program came at a social and economic cost that primarily burdened black Americans while only reinforcing the narrative of white supremacy and racial inequality seems legitimate. The Wikipedia article links to a paper that quotes MLK on the matter:
Today our exploration of space is engaging not only our enthusiasm
but our patriotism. ... No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on
poverty. ... Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking
absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while
only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated
slums. If these strange views persist, in a few years we can be assured that when
we set a man on the moon, with an adequate telescope he will be able to see
the slums on earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence.
In a sense you're right that the US Space Program is a drop in the bucket compared to other spending but Gil Scott-Heron's poem was never a financial proposal. It was trying to express a sentiment that the US government's priorities were messed up, something that still resonates today.
This poem is certainly good at getting it's message across, but that message is racist degenerative trash.
Sure, perhaps a black person should have been among the first involved, I can certainly get behind that criticism. But that's not what the poem critiques, and it's not what activists who protested the moon landing asked for either.
So yes it's racist, the real kind.
Perhaps aspirationally, but empirically, the Apollo program did not transcend race. It's not racist to call out racism - the "He who smelt it, dealt it" defense is intellectually lazy.
> But that's not what the poem critiques,
I don't see how you can say that, when the poem is literally titled "Whitey on the Moon". One would have to assume the decision to highlight whiteness was deliberate - it easily could have been "Neil on the Moon" or "Man on the Moon" if the author/perfomer so desired.
You are wrong. I'm unwilling to debate this fact with you, or even discuss the matter any further frankly, I have made my position clear. Your interpretation of the poem shows a clear lack of understanding on the historical context surrounding it.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Now admittedly this is talking about about the cost of the military industrial complex rather than the cost of scientific pursuits. But I'm sure someone could make a case for the Apollo program merely being an ICBM manufacturing program in a trench coat.
The moon race created an extremely public success/fail benchmark, where everyone from the greediest corporate CEO to the lowliest painter on the launch towers understood that losing would for-sure carry a very high social cost. Millions of people, who were already motivated to win the race, were concentrated in certain areas, industries, and labs - providing positive feedback and intense motivation. Yes, it was very expensive, and there was some profiteering, goldbricking, excess bureaucracy, and waste. But compared to most huge government-funded projects, that crap was pretty scarce.
To paraphrase Napoleon's supposed maxim on war: "The moral is to the budget as three to one."
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
The cost of Apollo program is $178 billion in today's money. I personally don't think NASA would've survived to today if Apollo program wasn't successful.
And the cost of Afghanistan/Iraq (in money) was $3,000 billion and yet, somehow, that project survived for twenty years.
I don't want to make light of the human tragedy that was Afghanistan/Iraq but I think it's interesting to put the Apollo spend into perspective.
--eisenhower didn't think it was fiscally sound to lower taxes. Here was a Republican who understood the strategic importance of the Moon landings, and was not afraid to say to the rest of his party- and the wealthy class- that they need to stop whining about tax cuts. Well we know who won that argument, ultimately. The tax base in the early 60s was VERY robust compared to today, despite the explosive growth of the multinationals and megacorps.
Robert Weiner warns about expecting computers to make moral decisions. Seemed paranoid in context, but really it was eerily prescient. Especially considering developments in the last year.
In that light, I think it was an incredible feat of engineering for the late 60s, and early 70s. Keep in mind, Japan was unable to land a probe on the moon as recently as last year.
Do I think it was worth it? That's debatable, but the engineers and scientists involved accomplished something pretty fantastic and that alone deserves some merit.
I'm curious - what caused you to question it ever happening?
Of course, there is extraordinary evidence for this one.
For argument's sake, imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough.
Any group working toward a goal is a conspiracy. NASA actually working to go to the Moon was a conspiracy.
The fake Gulf of Tonkin Incident that was accepted for decades is proof that big lies are possible. Extrapolating to an "unbelievably large" amount of people that it would take to pull of the hypothetical of a Fake Moon Landing conspiracy isn't an actual argument against. It just means that you'd be willing to quote whatever number would be minimally "unbelievably large".
I suppose they could pull it off if everyone truly bought in, but I don't believe for one second that that many people committed to science and engineering would be as committed and diligent as they would need to be to keeping the lie intact at the time, and I certainly don't believe the commitment to the lie would sustain over time. This goes double given the lack of popular support for doing it.
Further, I am not sure even if everyone at NASA that would have to know it was fake was working with automaton-like commitment to their task that we could fool the USSR with a fake landing given they'd have every incentive coupled with the technological means to prove it was fake.
In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.
To illustrate, do you think that US alphabet agencies haven't uncovered critical top secret and massively damaging information about the USSR / Russia since WWII? And vice versa? Perhaps uncovering such information on a constant basis?
Why don't these agencies ever publicly reveal it? Virtually ever?
The public's concept of government is not the same as that of leadership.
You assert "imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough".
I assert "I do not believe that to be the case when thinking about the real people that would be asked to do this in a real-world setting". That's setting aside the physical evidence (i.e., Russia observing the moon lander) entirely. I don't see that as changing arguments, I see it as an extension of your assertion.
> In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.
It is not a large assumption to say the Space Race was competitive (and certainly at times outwardly antagonistic), though the politics certainly weren't simply black and white.
The moon landing required too much physical evidence, too many whole human beings, and had too many observers to be plausibly fakeable in my view. I'll leave it there vs. getting into a debate on alphabet agency secret-keeping. Occam's Razor isn't perfect, but it's most clearly not on the "fakeable moon landing" side.
That said, it would have been pretty silly to waste as much money as we did in the rocket program if the goal was to fake it all along. Plus, the Soviets weren’t exactly knocking on the moon’s door.
By staking the existence of the entirety of Apollo missions to something that is logically proof of a small part, the validity of the larger claim is diminished to someone who is not already invested the validity.
This records 165 attempts including non-crewed missions of all types, like flyby of impactor. Of 165, 87 had some form of failure. 40 at launch, 32 at spacecraft and 5 partial failures. 32/(165 - 40) is .25, so about 3/4 of the time a moon mission launched, it succeeded. This indicates to me that "the rest of the trip is not that difficult" mischaracterizes the difficulty.
> $x("//tr/td[7]").length
165
> $x("//*[contains(normalize-space(text()), 'failure')]").length
87
> $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Partial failure']").length
5
> $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Launch failure']").length
40
> $x("//*[normalize-space(text()) = 'Spacecraft failure']").length
32I suspect the semi-conductor industry thinks it was worth it.
And by extension (he says typing on his laptop) I think it was well worth it.
That was the USAF, which at one time was the largest purchaser of semiconductors. They pushed the technology. Especially on the reliability side. The USAF was into naming and shaming vendors. They had a reliability unit which would take failed transistors apart down to the microscopic level and publish pictures of flaws in Aviation Week.
Some USAF generals were rather annoyed when, in the 1980s, commercial uses and technology passed military ones and the semiconductor industry stopped catering to the USAF.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_High_Speed_Integrated_Cir...
Good example, but it's interesting how the world is mostly dependent on Taiwan and not the US when it comes to semi conductors.
I know there were flying simulators which attempted to simulate 1/6G in earth gravity but I still find it an amazing feat, and a great tribute to everyone involved, particularly, those with their hands on the controls.
A conspiracy between the powers to allow numerous US moon landings and returns to be faked while the Soviet program failed is beyond belief.
It happened so often that public got bored of it and so funding for future missions was withdrawn. Now we've largely forgotten this fact.
It always astonishes me that people speak of THE moon landing, as though it only happened once. One of the greatest achievements of humanity and we undersell it. It would be like Ancient Egyptians thinking there was only one pyramid.
Some things never change, eh?
I’m definitely glad we did it.
However, the Apollo program was expensive. It was 2.5% of GDP for 10 years.
https://www.herkulesprojekt.de/en/is-there-a-master-plan/the....
Imagine today if we said we were going to try and cure cancer(s) in 10 years by spending 2.5% of GDP over the next decade.
Think people would support that? Doubt it.
2.5% of GDP would be... 500bn a year?
Coordinating that would be wild. What about a race to negative emissions for 2.5% GDP? With the promise of well paying jobs, cleaner air (long term saves money due to reduced asthma, etc), reduced foreign energy dependence, and increasing the number of products we can sell abroad (long term positive), reducing climate impact (long term saves money in reduced disaster relief).
Fuck cancer.
Of course that’s half of people going forward…forever
Yeah we built fancy new labs and educated a new generation of scientists, but what does it matter that we made an algorithm that can cure each individual person's cancer? Those people would have studied something else, and you can just git clone the cancer algorithm nowadays.
The whole cure for cancer project was nothing but a tumourdoggle for big research. Hospitals and universities across the country feasting on public money. Labcoat manufacturers and those guys who make beakers, suddenly getting wealthy off what is essentially a photo-op where where we stick it to the Chinese.
[edit]
Upon closer reading I think it means that over a 10 year period they spent 2.5% of the annual GDP, which would work out to a 0.25% GDP spend each year.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-b...
And what is it that put America in the forefront of The nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know-how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
Putting someone on the Moon takes a certain number of people, and it's a thing, and you can do it and be done with it. Less than a hundred thousand people, probably. A fixed budget.
Addressing climate change means suddenly stopping everyone from doing certain things. It's much broader in scope and involves forbiddance, long-term. It's a near-endless stream of don't: don't burn that coal, don't leave that light on, don't drive so much, don't use that plastic bag, don't have that many kids, and so on. This goes across billions of people and it won't ever end.
They're not even comparable.
Addressing climate change largely doesn't require personal sacrifice, and personal sacrifice may in fact be counterproductive. We have to identify the actual major sources contributing to it and fix those. There aren't really that many! They're just rich and powerful and they want you to feel like changing a lightbulb in your house is actually doing something. And it is, but it's not doing as much as grounding Musk's private plane forever would.
https://amazingstories.com/2016/12/thank-you-for-saving-1968...
1. I love stuff like this. I think about it with elections all the time; even in the biggest landslide elections there’s always about a third of the population that wasn’t on board. A good reminder about winners writing history books.
2. I’m in my 30s. The first time I ever was given an idea that people weren’t all about the Moon landing was a Larry Norman song[0], of all things. (“They brought back a big bag of rocks / Only cost thirteen billion. Must be nice rocks”) I was definitely an adult by this point.
3. I’m curious about the wording, but it seemed like the survey question was focused on cost. Americans never like things when you ask about cost. If the question was “should we develop rockets strong enough to beat the Commies” it probably would have polled a lot better.
4. Americans also always seem to be cool with public works-y stuff once it’s actually built. No one liked the Big Dig until it was done. Part of that is the cost concern, but I think there’s also the disbelief that things are possible, and fears about what the bad side of the thing could be.
You're actually vastly underestimating the amount of the population that wasn't on board.
In 1972, Nixon was reelected with 60.7% of the vote from 56.2% voter turnout, which amounted to only 34% of eligible voters.
In 1984, Reagan was reelected with 58.8% of the vote from 55.2% voter turnout, which amounted to only 32% of eligible voters.
Incidentally, Biden in 2020 was also 34%: 51.3% of the vote from 66.6% voter turnout.
Why would you count these people as "on board"?
Moreover, even among the people who do vote, there are a lot who plug their noses and vote for what they consider to be the lesser evil, against the other candidate rather than with enthusiasm for their own candidate.
Also, non-voters are consistently at least 1/3 of the population, regardless of the "closeness" of the election, and there's not necessarily a correlation between closeness and turnout.
I don't think there were protests about the moon landing, but maybe some small ones I never heard about.
Well, there's the submitted link: "In 1961 a Gallup poll showed only 33% of Americans in favor of moon landing" ;-)
b) I thought we were talking about being onboard in landslide elections, as you quoted so many messages ago.
I'm not sure why you're here commenting on the Gallup poll article then, or how you think we would ever have useful information about the public?
b) I thought we were talking about being onboard in landslide elections, as you quoted so many messages ago.
Again, the context is the submitted link. I can't speak for the OP, but I'm guessing the idea was that a landslide election is supposed to give the winner a "mandate" for their agenda.
And yes, you're right about the second part too. That's another reason the original post was wrong.
At the state level, there's no clear empirical correlation between turnout and closeness of elections.
I guess SF had the "advantage" of an earthquake to eliminate its issue.
If there's some thing I've learned in the past 6 or so years is that when morons attach their personality to a certain claim and then they're proven wrong, they just double down. So I can totally imagine that a very large fraction of those 66% who opposed it couldn't just be proven wrong and instead attack it. It can't be that I was wrong and landing on the moon was actually awesome, instead it must be fake! Didn't happen!
Consider that people who opposed going to the moon still may not think that it was "awesome."
It's patriotic bullshit that political scoundrels turn to, but is at least not as horrific as war. Although if the money spent on the moon landing had been spent on starving children, many of them wouldn't have starved, so maybe it's a sort of an inverse war to burn cash like that?
Nationalists are childish. Trump declares a Space Force, and turns half the people who thought he was the antichrist into his defenders.
If there was no war, the perception and support shifts. If there was also less other social unrest, the perception and support shift again.
If you don't know it you should listen to to that link of Gil Scott-Heron reading it, but here are the words if you prefer not to youtube:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the Moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the Moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the Moon)
Ten years from now I'll be paying still.
(while Whitey's on the Moon)Who is the "you" in this sentence? Are you speaking as the King? Of course the King doesn't have to justify his expenditures to the peasants.
Smashed the back button and chose to read the comments instead.
https://www.google.com/search?q=was+the+American+revolution+...
The British administration of Canada was different to begin with because Britain acquired Canada from conquering New France and so had a completely separate culture. And the way France ran then-New France / now-Canada was completely different to how the British 'ran' the colonies ('ran' is used loosely, as there was minimal oversight since they were each basically commercial ventures).
For some interesting research on how the administration differences resulted in the cultural differences (even though the countries are right next to each other), see the book The origins of Canadian and American political differences:
* https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674031364
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3286270-the-origins-of-c...
History is not a linear journey from point a to point b. Capitalist republics are not inevitable and liberalism is not assured. We could indeed all be bowing to Charles right now.
Canada: 51,987.94 USD
USA: 70,248.63 USD
That places Canada's GDP per capita at about 74% of the US's.
But I also agree, I'd prefer to stay in the US than move to Europe. But I'd even more prefer to have some universal healthcare and also live in the US.
Could you be more specific? There are many countries in Europe, of course.
> I would never take the flip side of my move
I wasn't talking about moving; I was talking about having UK-style health care here in the US.
> you can rest easy knowing you have that option
Which option?
> If you don’t know people who have expatriated to some degree out of the US, invest in widening your social circle.
What was the purpose of this sentence?
catholicism is how rome beat down the 'barbarians', which ended up as the germanic holy roman empire
Isn't anything that isn't humanitarian aid technically a waste of money?
The CCC in the US was a similar thing: paying people to build nice things in parks and such while people were going hungry. We absolutely didn't need that stuff. Coulda just given the money away to those who needed it. Though, this way, at least, we got some wonderful benefits that endure to this day—indeed, the kind of well-built, long-lasting, and nice-to-have but unnecessary infrastructure and flourishes, for the enjoyment and appreciation of all, that make one feel like one actually does live in a very-rich country—even if the resource-allocation wasn't ideal from a greatest-good-for-the-suffering perspective.
A sincere attempt at economic stimulus, or keeping the able-bodied masses busy & fed so they don't get any ideas? Probably both.
As for the true motivations of the pharaohs—who knows.
- Henry David Thoreau
Of course they were a waste. The reason we like them is because we didn't have to pay for them and we marvel at those who did. I like the moai on Easter Island; should we do more of that?
There wasn't a market demand for computers that would justify the R&D budget that Apollo was given to develop computers to the level that was required to get us where we are today.
Where we are today is a result if the work that IBM did not related to the space program, the work that was done for the space program, and the work that was done because of the space program.
The scenario you're describing only has the first one, but not the other two.
I'm all for science spending, and a moon shot is probably about as good as any other way to funnel money to scientists and engineers. But let's not be disingenuous that this program was the only possible way to spend money on science.
Public schools for black kids must have been really amazing.
NASA is like the government's R&D arm with the excuse (marketing) that it's all about space.
As long as we have
colleges and universities pour money into sports, taxpayer subsidized NFL stadiums (not having to pay taxes is also a subsidy, we don't have to hand them buckets of cash, just waiving taxes is taxpayer subsidy)
and really any corporate welfare at all
I don't want to hear how investing in science is a waste of money.
That's not how it works. Colleges and universities break even or make money from sports.
> taxpayer subsidized NFL stadiums (not having to pay taxes is also a subsidy, we don't have to hand them buckets of cash, just waiving taxes is taxpayer subsidy)
This is just standard institutional legal criminality. States and cities issue huge bonds for the sake of private organizations with no ongoing payments, only a giant balloon payment at the end. When they sell these bonds, they magic them into being tax-free for the owners. When the balloon payment approaches, they issue another huge bond to fund the balloon payment. Eventually if they declare bankruptcy, the state or city has committed to paying off the bonds for them.
Doesn't have anything to do with sports. If you're friends with the right people, you can get this done for adding an expansion to your french fry factory that you promise will allow you to hire 10 extra people. Except there's no compliance enforcement, and instead you filled your new space with a machine that allowed you to lay off 20 people.
When it comes to sports, the government has special carveouts in antitrust law for the NFL (and the like.) It's simply corruption.
> I don't want to hear how investing in science is a waste of money.
This is a strawman. If I say that I oppose funding for your search for the angelic healing properties of bleach, it doesn't mean I'm against science. If I don't think your search for the cure for baldness is worth $50B of public money, I also mean that without reference to however much people who like football waste on football.
But it would seem the cost ascended to what would now be $280 billion, adjusted for inflation.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider cost 4.75 billion. International Space Station? A cool 150 billion GPS costed 12 billion to put in orbit. James Webb telescope, 10 billion. Human Genome, 5 billion.
Now, there is a point to be made that maybe we just don't do other very valuable, very expensive projects, and you can always compare it to the US defense budget if you want to make the number look small, but I really wasn't aware of the sheer amount of money poured into this. Damn.
Also, humanity is always going to spend a good whack of money on defence - it's just the cost of running a civilization. Lawful behavior is what keeps us on an upward trajectory, and laws are backed up by guns.
If Ukraine had nukes, there'd be no invasion.
If France invaded Germany right after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, there'd be no WW2.
If the Allies didn't invade Nazi Europe, Hitler's son/grandson would be ruling that continent, and possibly a couple of other ones as well.
I fully agree on your point regarding big, valuable projects though.
Here's a clue[1] at no cost.
The majority of a large population is always and without exception a dumb herd. It's the rare context where you should listen to what that type of majority says or claims to want. The wisdom of crowds is one of the more idiotic concepts popularized in the past 30 years.
Even more than intelligence is a very scarce attribute, being competent at utilizing reason and generally being rational (by intent, wilfully; being focused on purpose in the direction of being rational and working to maintain that orientation, which requires persistent effort, while the median person is exceptionally lazy).
It's why you shouldn't bother asking people what they want when it comes to building the future. The masses have absolutely no idea what they're doing with their own lives most of the time, much less have any grasp of what's possible when it comes to assembling the future (as referenced Henry Ford & faster horses).
People will say: well then you're invalidating Democracy by ignoring the majority! No. Concepts of rights as in the Bill of Rights are specifically created to protect the minority from the irrational, dangerous majority; it's overwhelmingly meant as a restraint on the ill behavior of the majority. It helps (emphasis) to prevent the majority from voting your rights as a minority individual out of existence just because they have that majority vote.
We need things like the Bill of Rights precisely because the majority are so often dumb, dangerous and irrational (and they're not irrational + dangerous 24/7, the tendency is for them to go on rampages historically, so they must be caged by something like the Bill of Rights to try to prevent that behavior).
The view to which I am responding renders the American Revolution baseless: a waste of time and effort that was only to shift under which aristocrat(s) the colonists were to be governed. To them, it would have been of little consequence. Excepting for the important issue of War deaths.
Last, you begin from an argument of government and justify it with a conclusion that appeals to individual rights. It doesn't follow. There's zero conflict between democracy and the Bill of Rights that anti-populist rulership solves. The term "populism" being from the brand of propaganda that likes to have the word "democracy" constantly oozing out of its mouth while excusing itself to serve mostly special and politician dynasty interests.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe that we've ever had a democracy. At the same time only a fool would allow self-styled aristocrats to claim historical just-governance. It's just not the case. Again, all this argument does is nullify most of the proposition for the American Revolution.
> Concepts of rights as in the Bill of Rights are specifically created to protect the minority from the irrational, dangerous majority
They're not meant to protect the rulers from the citizenry, even though the rulers are a minority. In our form of government, they're meant to be representatives of the popular will, not a special interest group. What you're talking about is monarchy.