> Many Americans and even astronomers opposed the plan for various reasons. Even former President Eisenhower (who created NASA) said: “Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.”
I think he was right.
I think he was right.
Personnaly I think it was way worth it and we should keep going to further science and knowledge.
Totally worth it imo.
But again, the stuff we got from the space program makes it all an extreme bargain.
That’s a massively expensive prestige project.
Considering that the soviets concentrated on building space stations, yielding hardware that is still in use for active scientific purposes I would argue it wasn’t a good way to spend that value.
In simple terms, it was sending a global message: “If our propulsion and guidance technology can put people on the moon, imagine what else would be trivial for us?”
probably one of the best US government investments ever, especially compared to some of the braindead modern programs we throw away money on
Astronauts! To the Moon! Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya!
it would have been cheaper to send the astronauts to the moon without returning them to earth
more seriously, the work that went into developing microelectronics returned a lot to the economy.
the human genome project has only just started returning its benefits
the R&D for manned moon missions didn't have much in the way of spinoffs.
[1]:https://books.google.com/books?id=gXYItzQARVoC&pg=PA127&lpg=...
The moon rocks, not so much. We have meteorites that came from moon. And from Mars! I could happily leave aside sending anything more to Mars.
The manhattan project cost roughly 56 billion in todays dollars vs. 149 billion for the Apollo program. The manhattan project effectively ended global great power conflict, likely saving hundreds of millions of lives from the inevitable catastrophe of a Warsaw pact vs. NATO conflict in Europe and Asia.
The F-35 program cost 1.5 trillion dollars, but this program was also effectively an omni-spending program for the military - sustaining fighter development and arguably deferring several major global conflicts.
We should judge projects by their individual merits rather than the justification that we're wasting less money than the alternative.
0: https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html
1: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does...
Of all outcomes one might imagine, this seems among the better. An alternative reality in which all this wealth is invested solely in the welfare of humans is unrealistic; one in which it is squandered on terrible weapons and endless war is all too plausible.
It's not so much the money spent as the "we get to recruit all the smartest researchers and new grads for 2 generations to focus on a sole achievement" aspect.
Getting to the moon was inspirational, but functionally curing even one type of common cancer or ushering in the information revolution a decade or two ahead of schedule would be an order of magnitude more valuable.
This is like, your opinion. Who knows what would have happened, or more importantly what might not have happened if the US didn't focus on getting to the moon. The context of the times is important - at the time it was important to beat the Soviets to space. Curing cancer, while admirable, wouldn't have given the US any sort of advantage over the Soviets.
Maybe ushering the information age in sooner would have been meaningful. But what captures the attention of the 50s/60s American public more - a couple of bits of electricity pushed around abstractly, or the raw power of a rocket heading to the Moon? Which is more effective in showing the Soviets that the US has true hard power - controlling tiny amounts of electricity or demonstrating that they can send a rocket, potentially loaded with missiles, into space?
I can do that. I can imagine the Apollo program just like it happened, with one spinoff being computer chips and microelectronics. If it wasn't for Apollo we'd probably still be using rotary-dial phones owned by the local PTT.
Going to the Moon was an engineering challenge. We knew what was required, we "just" needed to do the necessary work. Some research advancements in material science were needed, but they were incremental. We also got some computer advancements out of the deal too, and sensors.
Even the reflectors placed on the Moon proved to be very useful.
For cancer – they are several diseases with the same name. We don't necessarily know what we have to do to 'cure' them (in many cases, once we figure out what actually causes an illness, treatments become relatively straightforward).
Even if we just focus on one type, would throwing the same amount of money as was spent in the Moon program (or the Manhattan project) be all that's required to 'cure' it? I don't think that's necessarily true. Funding helps, to an extent. But many things in medicine just take time and there's no way around that.
We still have no consensus on what causes Alzheimer's. A lot of research on amyloid plaques that may or may not be a red herring. Once we can know with a high degree of certainty what causes it, treating or preventing should become much more straightforward.
That said, throwing money at any kind of research seems to be beneficial. Be it the Moon, health and even military. We wouldn't be discussing this without military funding decades ago that enabled what eventually became the Internet. Although we, as in humans, have been wasting too many resources in wars.
> ushering in the information revolution a decade or two ahead of schedule would be an order of magnitude more valuable.
That's hindsight.
When coherent light (what we know as lasers) was discovered, it was regarded as a novelty but with zero practical application.
We can fund many types of research simultaneously – and we have to. You can't take a doctor and get them to engineer a rocket, and you can't take a rocket scientist and get them to work on curing diseases.
A JFK speech calling the nation to adventure + a blank cheque to your org + Walter Cronkite on tv & your nephew at school calling you a hero researcher can get a lot of basic science done.
Is that basic science better aimed at a moon landing or better aimed at stopping people from dying from colorectal cancer?
A moon landing is inspirational (and theoretically achievable) whereas stopping colorectal cancer is a big abstract "maybe".
A moon landing gets you "don't mess with us because we have amazing rockets & targeting systems" cred.
A "we can now save millions of our citizens from this one cancer" gets you "our capitalist society is more advanced than your communist society" cred.
I'm not saying Moon Landing wasn't the obvious choice or wasn't the right choice. I'm saying it wasn't as generally valuable as other choices.
That sounds scary, because there's a lot of encryption in use that is not quantum resistant.