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Comment by BigZaphod | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty hard to quantify things like inspiration - and I personally think that's a huge argument in favor of going to Mars. There's also the insane technological advancement factor to consider. Apollo led to hundreds (if not thousands) of advances in all kinds of fields of technology. It's hard to put a price tag on that, too.

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Can you name a dozen of those hundreds (if not thousands) of advances? If you can, try to identify those which wouldn't have happened without Apollo. The harsh truth is there aren't any.

We've tried the 'get something great as a result of spin-offs' route before. It disappoints every time. Why are people advocating it again with a human 'flags and footprints' Mars mission? Why don't we instead direct resources towards an inspiring goal which delivers something concrete?

Given the choice, I would much rather today have a permanent LEO infrastructure of a dozen privately funded Skylabs (from those same tried-and-true Saturn V rocket parts) and cis-lunar tugs rather than the 'spin off' soon-to-be-retired Goldberg contraption of Shuttle.

You could start here for a list of a few Apollo-era spinoffs: http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/apollo.htm That doesn't take into account the raw knowledge/experiences/technologies that were transmitted between NASA and the various private companies and universities they worked with during that era which no doubt influenced some of those 20,000 institutions later in history.

As to proving if the same technologies or products would exist without Apollo - that's just stupid and pointless. How about you try to prove everything would have turned out the same had we not gone to the moon? Has the private sector developed time machines that I'm not aware of?

So, down from 'thousands of spin-offs' to 13, all of which would have been developed on their own for the explicit purpose to which they were eventually put. None required the magic of putting a human on the Moon for their development and none required an up-front investment of billions of dollars.

The hope for spin-offs is a really horrible justification for a program. If you want to do something specific (say, establish a permanent human presence in space) why not do it direct instead of hope it results from a spin-off of something else?

Geez, dude. Why do you have to change my words (even within quotes!) and twist their meaning to win your argument?

I was never originally talking about corporate spinoffs - I was talking about raw technology, basic science, fundamental ideas and breakthroughs that Apollo helped develop. That got derailed nicely when I happened to provide a link to NASA's corporate spinoff page under the assumption that a reasonable person would consider that commercial products are simply applications of technologies - not a representative list of them! Now you've decided that I meant to say Apollo directly started thousands of companies?!

I didn't twist your words and I'm not talking about corporate spin-offs. To be picky, your exact quote was "Apollo led to hundreds (if not thousands) of advances". It did not.

There were no breakthroughs in basic science, fundamental ideas or raw technology which resulted from Apollo which would not have otherwise been achieved by a bit (not billions of dollars) of direct research in the fields of interest. You've not been able to identify a dozen (or even one!) of those advances you're so sure about.

Romantic and astounding as it was, Apollo was a money-sink which delivered us nothing but memories. It was an awesome 'night on the town' and we would have done better by constructing permanent space infrastructure instead.

"If you can, try to identify those which wouldn't have happened without Apollo. The harsh truth is there aren't any."

Advances in various fields such as Integrated Electronics, Error-Correcting Codes, Communication Systems, Control Systems (etc etc etc) would have happened without the Apollo program, but the Apollo program was a major boost.

And a major cost factor.

Yeah, instead of investing in a project like the Appolo, which inspired millions and led to major technological advances, the U.S. should have instead used the money to make more napalm to burn Vietnamese civilians, and to support "anti-communist" dictatorships all around the Globe.

Sure, manned space flight might be a bad investment, but when half a million people are working towards the same goal then enormous momentum is created. This momentum allowed and forced various fields of technology to develop at a faster rate.

How about lowering taxes instead? That let's people put there money where they want it.

That would be good. However, the point I was trying to make was that the momentum required to advance technology at a faster rate is usually created by the government. I can think of the radar lab at MIT and the Manhattan project, for instance. The public has no immediate need for advanced technology per se, so I doubt that allowing people to put money where they want it would lead to such a fast development of new technologies as WW2 or the Apollo program led.

Please allow me to stress one point: I am against income taxes and big government. As much as I like the Apollo program, it was financed by the taxpayers who did not necessarily approve of it. In any case, of all the projects the U.S. government launched, the Apollo program was probably (one of) the most worthwhile...

Please compare the history of the industrial revolution.

I agree the main point of this. An important economic point that is often ignored is that anytime you take money by force and spend it on some grand project the gains or benefits to individuals has to be less than the costs, otherwise it could be done voluntarily. The net effect of these projects is to invest in technology or create things that the society either cannot really afford or for which there is insufficient demand at the time. It is true some technology may come sooner than what otherwise would have been the case but that just highlights the economic fallacy involved, and you can't point to what was not developed to prove the case because the resources went into the Apollo project or whatever, one can only understand it via principles. This is true regardless of the generally acknowledged inefficiencies of gov't projects, which only makes matters worse.

And ever more tragic: This fallacy was (or is) often used in favour of wars.

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