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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Destin Sandlin from “Smarter Every Day” recently called out this 1971 report. I just resubmitted it as it did not get attention it may deserve 2 weeks ago.

“What made Apollo a success?”

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...

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The executive summary of that report should have a number of dot points that should lead with. Almost unlimited money and a workforce of 400K people pulling in the same direction for one objective.

Work these days has less money, fewer people and less clear direction. Half of all projects are working out what the actual job is.

Plus NASA has become more risk averse, which makes project progress slower and likely ultimately more expensive, at least compared to private space companies. However, NASA is still far ahead of the other space agencies.

Another key factor: NASA has no control over its funding (and thus vision) it’s at the mercy of congress each year which makes planning and financing large projects hard. They have projects and designs imposed from above regardless of the scientific or engineering benefit.

Perhaps the tragic reason for NASA's success in the 60s was Kennedy's assassination. Kennedy set the goal and the deadline, and after his death, it could not be revised.

Perhaps his death was faked for precisely this purpose, by aliens wanting to make sure humans made this important step in space travel.

This doesn't really align with the fact that NASA has had far more manned spaceflight accidents after the Apollo missions. They are more risk averse, but also have more accidents?

Those can be in a deadly spiral.

Risk aversion doesn’t actually mean you’re good at addressing risk; in fact it may keep you from implementing changes (change is risky) that address real risks.

"Risk aversion" here is more a synonym for "prefer planning ahead and trying to account for everything in advance instead of using an iterative trial and error approach". SpaceX is very trial and error focused, which means they learn more quickly. It doesn't mean that their end product, e.g. their Dragon capsule, ends up being more (or less) risky to use for humans than, e.g., NASAs Orion capsule.

I'm good with NASA being risk averse when it comes to human lives. NASA is about exploration, and space isn't going anywhere. If it takes us 10 or 20 or 100 extra years it's all still space.

Last time NASA rushed it was because of a "war", and even then it was really just a vast international tantrum. Nobody really "won" the space race. Somebody got a trophy and someone got a participation certificate and the world went on as before.

I am glad for the research and I would far rather nations competed via engineering stunts than blowing each other up. Especially when those stunts manage to produce some spinoffs and some science... though any science is bound to produce both.

Sorry, I have to politely disagree.

Space exploration could save humanity in so many ways. Nevermind the big "what if" discoveries that would impact the trajectory of our entire species, we also discover valuable science along the way - things that help us in our every day life.

More importantly, the country with the most advanced space agency by default has the most advanced weapons. A hostile nation could pretty easily tow a small asteroid toward Earth and wipe our any country they wanted. Rocket technology, fuel technology, etc.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the space race helped to collapse the Soviet Union to some degree, didn't it?

Regardless of whether my last point stands, I think space is incredibly important to humanity's future.

You’re confusing science fiction with reality here. Attacking a country with an asteroid would be an absurdly slow process without engines which are already weapons on their own. It’s like declaring you’re going to launch a full scale nuclear strike in 6 years and not a moment sooner, you spend all these resources which don’t help you until after you’ve lost the war.

The space race had little to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, for one thing the timing is off significantly. The Soviet union mostly failed due to internal issues that were only tangentially related to the US. Excess military spending was more a symptom than an underlying cause, you can just as easily blame poor manufacturing becoming an increasing issue as technology advances, a culture of mismanagement etc. Corruption, infighting, apathy, ethnic tensions, mismanagement, etc all kept compounding until you got societal collapse.

Given that a current task assigned to NASA is manned flight to the moon (which was accomplished decades ago) it's more likely there is no direction at all. No one really doubts it's possible.

It is as if I bought a controlling interest in Honda and told them my revolutionary idea for the North American market was to introduce a small car with 4 doors to appeal to budget conscious buyers.

And not just a little less money. Apollo was around 2.5% of the GDP for 10 years. That'd be about $200B a year today. For comparison, an SLS launch is about $2B

2.5% of the US GDP ($26 trillion in 2023) would be 600 billion. At its peak in 1967, the Apollo program budget was 3 billion, while the US GDP was about 850 billion. So 0.35 percent. US government spending in 1967 was about 112 billion, so closer to 2.5 percent of the federal budget, not the GDP. Converting to today’s 6,000 billion federal budget, about 150 billion today, or not quite 20% of the defense budget, the largest federal expenditure after Social Security (the defense budget is essentially tied with Medicare).

Wow, that's a third of the amount of money that goes to healthcare insurance administration.

Not to healthcare - to healthcare insurance administration.

That report was written in 1971, meaning it probably assumes sort of the same budget and goals as in the 1960s.

Had the report been written today, it would look very different.

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