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Dreaming a Different Apollo

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30 pointssrikar10 comments

In many ways it's really rather a shame that the Apollo program was successful. On the one hand it was unquestionably a civilization defining historic achievement for all mankind. On the other hand, the way it was achieved was not something we should want to emulate: the political horse trading, the management and development style, and the expense. LBJ used every political trick in the book to get Apollo running, and they worked. But we've been left with the political legacy of those tricks for the 4+ decades since then which have been massively distorting manned spaceflight policy and efforts without further Apollo scale achievements.

Unfortunately, the public generally only sees the good from Apollo and so tends to imagine that the methods of Apollo were also good, and should be emulated. They should not. There are better ways to run big, ambitious projects and better ways to get back to exploring worlds beyond Earth as well.

This. It's why I just can't get excited about NASA's manned spaceflight plans anymore. In 2004 there was a vision set out to go places, but Congress didn't really fund it, and then the new administration took the lackluster progress (due in no small part to lackluster funding, mind you) along with "not invented here" and gave it the kibosh.

So long as manned exploration is subject to the whims of whatever Congresscritter happens to come into power, as well as their feelings toward their counterparts, their predecessors, the Executive branch, etc ... well, I don't expect consistent achievements.

Ugh. Too many politicians simply view NASA as another way of getting pork, boondoggles, etc and "delivering money" back to their own district.

Instead, I'm hopeful for imaginative uber-rich people (Musk, Allen, Bezos, Bigelow, etc). Not all of their ideas will work, and that's fine ... so long as there's a critical mass of them at least trying something.

NASA used to be a reason I didn't mind paying high taxes. Now, I feel different.

Well if the Ares I hadn't been a massive cluster*...

There were a lot of reasons, that Nasa didn't object to the new plan.

OK, so, yeah, we spend all that additional money and a few more people get to vacation on the moon. But even from a scientific perspective, would we have gained anything like proportional knowledge from the investment? The mid-1970s simply lacks the technological infrastructure to put a self-sustaining colony on the moon, and a non-self-sustaining one would be ferociously expensive. We still lack the tech today, after all. What would be the point of all of this?

I've said it before on HN and a few other places, but this sort of thought experiment just leaves me further convinced that rather than 1969 being some sort of technological height from which we've fallen that the whole space race caused a bizarre sport of technological growth that was not backed by the rest of the tech it needed to be backed by to be successful. Robotics was unbelievably primitive. Materials science still young. Medical science is even today too young to support people in space (we are permanently hurting everyone we put into space for any significant period of time).

The space era is in the future, not the past.

According to your argument, technologically, we are never ready for anything, so we should do nothing. Jumping into the fire when you're half way there is a hell of a learning experience. So you would start a space base for the same reason, the experience. Imagine what would be learned when you actually have to solve the problems that come with living in space instead of just conceptually complaining about them. I'm sure a lot of things would come up that nobody has predicted before, and we would come up with solutions, some of which might have profound technological impact further down the line.

No, that's a strawman. I'm specifically referring to those things we often look back and marvel at: "Wow, they ran a rocket to the moon on a computer with less power than my calculator!" and that sort of thing. We flung core memory into space, a ridiculous use of precious mass. We had no ability to computer simulate anything, which includes many things in addition to the obvious aerodynamics, like materials science computations and such.

The time that we're ready to start seriously moving into space isn't in the indefinite future, it's about now, which is I think why you're starting to see a real private "renaissance" in space (really the first time we should be going with people). The space technology that we actually had the base for was satellites, which you'd note we've made a great deal of use of.

And, well, look at what happened... we got to the moon, and, then... uh... now what? Uh... can't actually do anything. Couldn't leave robots behind, they weren't ready. Couldn't leave people behind. Couldn't do much more than toodle around in a photo-op moon buggie and bring some rocks back. Use your brain, don't just mindlessly rah-rah space travel... we got there too soon. We weren't ready to do anything except look good. We're finally getting to the point where we can seriously plan on what things we might do, and where we really are is still building the foundation we need (cheap access to space). We tried to bull ahead without building the foundation we needed, and that had the usual result.

On the topic of not mindlessly rah-rahing, let me observe that if one insists that the apex of human space travel was achieved in the 1960s, things look quite dim. Despite superficially seeming to slag on the accomplishments of the past (though if you look deeper you will observe that I've actually lined up an argument about how they are in many ways even more impressive than they seem due to being so very far ahead of their time), it's my view here that is actually the hopeful one for the future. We aren't in some sort of inevitable decay... we just got too excited and ran too far ahead, and the next 20 years ought to be great for space travel. We've finally got the resources to start making it cheap, something a corporation can do, instead of "shows up on the national budget as a top-level line item" expensive.

Current technology will always look archaic from the future, I hope in 20 years we get to say something like: I can't believe we didn't build our spacecraft out of some kind of super space crystals!

I see things like the Apollo program as a massively expensive (and yes, wasteful) R&D program. Private space corps, unless they reach some kind of massive scale, will have a hard time justifying throwing enough money at something for real innovation. They will continue to focus on getting satellites up there a bit cheaper than the other guy.

The reason people (geeks especially) love to rah-rah the space program is because it is a wonderful form of waste. Instead of bailing out a corrupt financial system, or spying on it's own citizens, or building some kind of doomsday weapon, we could have our Star Trek fantasy and maybe find some really cool innovations while we are at it.

Apollo was cancelled because after all the patriotic hoopla died down people realized this stuff was far too expensive to be of any practical use.

That hasn't changed, either. There simply isn't any reason to send people to space.

Except for all the unknown reasons.

edit: oh and the obvious humanity sustaining environment redundancy reason which Elon Musk believes is important enough to invest time and effort into SpaceX.

I'm reluctant to support the expenditure of trillions of dollars because of "unknown reasons". If we want to find something out we can do so far more easily and cheaply using unmanned probes.

And what "humanity sustaining environment"? That's a pipe dream - if you had the technology to colonize mars you could do better by building a bunker complex on the earth.

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