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cubefox

The moon program was extremely expensive and the return (scientific or otherwise) was rather small in comparison.

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Man on the moon is such a fantastic (in the original sense) thing - I think it’s an end in itself!

It's only impressive if you're not from Remulak.

Astronauts! To the Moon! Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya!

I think there’s a few hundred programs that cost more and had fewer returns (and many with negative returns) before we get to man on the moon being a problem.

As a fan of big science projects, I find this line of thinking unconvincing.

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.

They might also agree that those projects weren't worth it.

What is the return for all the kids that saw it and because of that decided to become scientists or engineers, and all the technology that they developed? I have no idea how to quantify that, but I can guarantee you that there was an effect. And just because you don't know how to quantify something doesn't mean you get to ignore it. Unknown doesn't mean 0.

The Apollo program is estimated to have generated a ROI of $7-8 for every dollar spent by NASA. Today NASA has a budget of around $20 billion but they generate $70 billion in economic output.

0: https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html

1: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/3721375-how-much-does...

I do not understand how this ROI was calculated. What, exactly, is the economic use case for NASA technology?

I suspect that you're drastically underestimating the breadth of the technology that NASA deals with.

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

How exactly are you measuring "return" in this case? Because I feel that would be nearly impossible.

>How exactly are you measuring "return" in this case?

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.

Right! Even taking "return" very literally, the lunar rock samples brought back are incredibly valuable to science. And the spinoff/technological stimulus value of the program is even harder to quantify--consider that during one year, Project Apollo purchased >60% of U.S. semiconductor production. This was a critical early market for Fairchild Semiconductor, e.g. [1]

[1]:https://books.google.com/books?id=gXYItzQARVoC&pg=PA127&lpg=...

Spinoffs from Apollo, anyway, clearly returned more than the cost.

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.

Well, you know, things like microelectronics, medical imaging, telecommunications, weather forecasting, stuff like that. Nothing important. Certainly we would have been better off if that money was spent here on Earth rather than sending it all into space.

I am skeptical that those things were invented by the Apollo program, and if they were, it would have been easier to do so without also developing moon landers.

What's the point of having a ton of money (USA) if you're not landing on the moon and sending probes to interstellar space?

The intangible returns from the moon program are immense.

Any time we can get countries competing with each other on technology that doesn't directly involve blowing each other up, it is a good thing for the human race.

It redirected a potentially apocalyptic cold war into the peaceful development of fundamental science and new technologies - and into a project which unified all peoples in newfound understanding of ourselves as a single species, miraculously clinging to single pale blue dot.

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.

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