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Comment by shtopointo | Hacker News Reader

There's an argument that all those things would have been invented eventually anyway. There was no need to spend 100s of billions of dollars for basically a photo-op.

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"Eventually" is a pretty long time. If you were in 1959, would you press a button that caused satellites and freeze-dried food and flight computers to arrive 20 years earlier if it cost $10 billion to press? That saves billions of lives over the next 50 years and dramatically accelerates humanity's technology tree, so it seems like it's worth it.

freeze dried food was invented in France around the time of WWI.

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.

Inflated numbers. Also counterfactual reasoning: "had it not been for the space program, we wouldn't have developed these technologies and billions of lives wouldn't have been saved."

Also – billions? Seems like an overreach.

> freeze-dried food

The modern process was invented in 1890, and used extensively in WW2.

For blood plasma and penicillin, not food

What kind of argument is that?

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...

People really do just get on here and confidently say absolute nonsense.

> Don't bother doing something because it will be done eventually anyway.

Not my argument. Just saying it's different when it's taxpayer money and there is no popular support.

$25 billion, for the coolest photo-op in history. Hell yeah. We flush orders of magnitude more money down the drain for shits and giggles any way, might as well do something no one else has ever done before.

Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process?

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)?

> Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process?

Because not spending that dollar on putting a guy on the moon could have generated 20 dollars elsewhere.

It could have, yes. Would it?

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.

Yea, seems pretty loose to assume those dollars would have generated three times the economic impact of the space program if they'd been left in individuals hands.

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).

$7 for each $1 is marketing math. Someone is being very generous in attributing too much economic activity to the space program.

I mean, even if it was 2 for 1... or 1 for 1... why not do it? Pretty neat to go to the moon.

Speeding up our technological timeline by decades, and it was decades, has saved tens of millions to hundreds of millions of lives. The Integrated Circuit revolution wouldn't have happened at the same pace without Apollo. Apollo (and to a lesser degree the defense program) funded the industry for the first few years of its existence. Something like 2/3rds of all ICs produced until the mid-to-late 1960s were used in the program.

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.

Eventually, a century or two later. I mean it has been 50 years and we still couldn't send a human to the moon again despite technological advances

Yeah and Bell Labs had developed cellular technology in the late 40s. When did we get commercial use for that tech? Oh yeah, nearly 40 years later.

there's a (small) chance that the moon landing was the first time a living organism successfully chose to visit another celestial body in the entire history of the universe.

"basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.

What's the argument?

That those things would have been invented anyway, because science and technology progresses even without gov't intervention.

Is this a brownian motion/maxwell's demon argument or are you suggesting that progress is guaranteed by some principle?

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