10 ms·

The thing about the original moon landing programme was that it had a great clarity of outcome and timeline. What: Land a man on the moon and return him safely

The thing about the original moon landing programme was that it had a great clarity of outcome and timeline. What: Land a man on the moon and return him safely When: Before the decade is out That meant NASA could really focus and throw out everything that wasn't directly on that path. Reusability - take too long, we'll build each craft from scratch. Permanent mission - Too complicated, keep the missions very short. Multi-launch architecture - Nope, too complicated again. Launch it all together. Crew size? Two on the moon so they could help each other, one in the CM to aid in docking. Want a larger crew? Sorry, no. Three is the minimum so that's what you get. Complicated re-entry vehicles? Nope. We know we can make ablative work. What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows. It's impossible to run a clear programme if you don't know what it's for!

jpadkins 7y ago
constraints help drive engineering decisions!
mikeash 7y ago
On one hand, this got everyone to focus and things happened fast. On the other hand, the result was only what was asked for. We went half a dozen times and then that was it. You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for. Without JFK’s challenge, I’m sure we would have taken longer, but maybe it would have been more sustainable.
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  > You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for. Could be specified as well: "Internationally organized base station (ISS style) on the Moon by 2030, permanently staffed after 2032, an experimental ecosystem to work towards self-sustaining O2 and food generation set up by 2037, usable as launchpad for Mars missions by 2045" That would at least provide clarity on priorities but it's risky: the success would make you famous forever (see JFK) but so would failure. On the other hand, it requires the next 7 administrations to support a programme that will make _you_ famous, not them.
  - Mvandenbergh 7y ago
    The great thing about the original moon landing goal is that it was just about possible and the cost was just about tolerable. If the original goal had been "land on Mars before 1980" rather than "land on the Moon before 1970", I do not think it would have happened.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    I’d rather see a focus on projects that are doable with existing capabilities, and separately an effort to develop new capabilities. It seems like if you immediately aim for something you can’t do, then you develop a bunch of technology and infrastructure that isn’t very good for other tasks. You end up with a stunt that doesn’t really go anywhere. That gets you rockets like the Saturn V, which was amazing but too big and expensive to be used for much besides Apollo. We’re doing it again with SLS: a big, catastrophically expensive rocket built to achieve a specialized goal. It’s not going to be very useful and it might not even fly. Compare with SpaceX’s BFR. It has much more general capabilities. At first blush this might look bad: why lug a heavy heat shield all the way to the surface of the moon and back? Why all this focus on reusability if your goal is to send just a few missions? But at the end of the day you’re much better off with a rocket that’s ok for a bunch of stuff than one that’s really good at one thing. Or just look at the space vehicles of the era. Many of them are still flying today, with lots of evolutionary improvements. How many Apollo-derived vehicles are flying today? I don’t think there are any. Apollo makes me imagine a Roman emperor declaring a program to send an expedition to the South Pole. They can’t even get there! You need to work on your ships before you set such a specific goal. As a bonus, steady, incremental improvement is the sort of thing you can sustain across political changes, if you can just get to the point where people stop asking for moonshots.
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      I suppose the important bit is really that there's universal buy in (and with the moon landing thing that was supported by making it a matter of national pride). With incremental progress you risk things looking invisible (just like AI is always just the things we can't yet do, while newly possible tasks are merely computations). "Do some notable thing in two terms" monument building exercises risk being shot down on budget reasons when any part of government ends up under new management (see Congress). So I guess you can go incremental (but solve the visibility bit somehow) or grand vision. Right now, NASA seems to be going through the worst of all.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  Also, without Kennedy's martyrdom I'm not sure Congress would have been willing to keep appropriating the funds to see it al the way through.
  - Mvandenbergh 7y ago
    Kennedy himself had doubts about the cost as soon as the day after the speech! It was an immensely expensive programme which just managed to achieve its objectives. Had the objective been "build a permanent base" the cost would not have been palatable. It was barely tolerable to people as a one-off race to achieve a particular objective.
smaddox 7y ago
As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of manned space missions is to redirecting taxes to congressional districts and defense contractors. The secondary purpose might be to inspire interest in STEM, but it seems much less successful at achieving that objective.
- goodcanadian 7y ago
  I almost down voted you in a knee jerk reaction. I believe that manned space exploration serves a very important purpose in advancing humanity . . . however, from the typical Congress critter's point of view, I suspect you're right.
  - avmich 7y ago
    I suspect GP underestimates the scientific value of Apollo missions. It's so much difference to e.g. study samples brought from the Moon (and taken with reasonable care) in Earth labs than to send robots to do the same. There is a POV that robots are good for scientific missions up to certain price point. After that manned missions become more cost effective.
    - smaddox 7y ago
      I don't see how it would be cheaper to send a human to the Moon to retrieve samples than it would be to send a robot.
      - ticmasta 7y ago
        and that's really just the cost the actual mission. Consider the impact of having to prepare a program that meets acceptable risk levels for humans vs. machines. This is a huge consideration. I'm not suggesting unmanned exploration can take a trial and error approach, but losing a robot is sad & expensive while losing a human astronaut can terminate the entire program.
      - avmich 7y ago
        Some arguments are here: https://phys.org/news/2005-11-unmanned-space-exploration_1.html https://phys.org/news/2005-11-unmanned-space-exploration_1.h... Retrieving a sample is cheaper with a robot - Luna-24 costed a fraction of Apollo. Knowing what to retrieve while having flexibility of choosing surface regolith, separate rock, samples dug out from a better place or else - that's where humans win.
wongarsu 7y ago
That won't happen again for political reasons. The moon landing is seen as Kennedy's achievement. He died six years before it happened, but that doesn't seem to matter. It's his legacy. No president (or congress) would let that happen again. When a president of party 1 sets such a goal the next president of party 2 will shift the goal to make it his achievement instead. Repeat ad infinitum.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think Apollo was lucky that Johnson came in after Kennedy. I think if a republican had won in 1964 probably there wouldn’t have been a moon landing. By the time Nixon came in there was already too much momentum to cancel it.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    The country, the Democratic party and Kennedy for that matter were lucky Johnson wound up in the oval office. Johnson was very good at actually making deals and getting stuff done (e.g. ensuring the budget that gets to his desk includes NASA). If it weren't for Johnson Kennedy would only be remembered for getting us into Vietnam then getting shot.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      I guess Johnson then took the honor of being blamed for getting the country into Vietnam:). And it broke him.
      - ticmasta 7y ago
        Johnson accomplished a lot and, more importantly, in the correct order to make sure things got done. I think you're right though (and that he probably felt the same way) that he'll always be the Vietnam president. That may be a little unfair but it happened on his watch so that's what history will rightfully focus on.
        deleted 7y ago
wefarrell 7y ago
The lunar mission had one clear objective: don't let the soviets embarrass us again. If the Chinese managed to put a human on Mars the US would get its shit together quickly.
- MegaButts 7y ago
  You have more faith in the US government than I do. I really, sincerely hope you are right about that.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
It's not about the mission, it's about the motivation. Societies only do great things with the proper motivation. Without the specter of American greatness being eclipsed by evil red Commies, what can get 2019 America to feel urgently this should be done?
greglindahl 7y ago
> What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows. In the past 10 years, NASA has had an answer for all of those questions. Two different ones over time. Also, SNC's Dream Chaser isn't ablative, and it's funded by NASA's CRS-2 program.
jlarcombe 7y ago
Yes, though a lot of the Apollo infrastructure was in retrospect massively over-engineered, based on a very high estimate of required numbers of launches. This was partly because they needed to start the infrastructure before settling the mission mode but still, the plans were ambitions beyond what was strictly required to get to the moon by the end of the decade.
idlewords 7y ago
The thing about the moon landing is that there was a rival superpower at rough technological parity, and the technology in question could be used to lob nuclear weapons at one another with great accuracy. No nukes, no ICBMs, no Apollo.
philwelch 7y ago
The flip side of that was that we are left with nothing but fond memories. No space stations or moon bases. No legacy of Apollo-derived manned spacecraft. We're essentially picking up from where we left off in the 1970's...now.

jpadkins 7y ago

constraints help drive engineering decisions!

mikeash 7y ago

On one hand, this got everyone to focus and things happened fast. On the other hand, the result was only what was asked for. We went half a dozen times and then that was it. You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for. Without JFK’s challenge, I’m sure we would have taken longer, but maybe it would have been more sustainable.

pgeorgi 7y ago
> You want bigger missions? A base? Mars? Nope, not what we’re going for. Could be specified as well: "Internationally organized base station (ISS style) on the Moon by 2030, permanently staffed after 2032, an experimental ecosystem to work towards self-sustaining O2 and food generation set up by 2037, usable as launchpad for Mars missions by 2045" That would at least provide clarity on priorities but it's risky: the success would make you famous forever (see JFK) but so would failure. On the other hand, it requires the next 7 administrations to support a programme that will make _you_ famous, not them.
- Mvandenbergh 7y ago
  The great thing about the original moon landing goal is that it was just about possible and the cost was just about tolerable. If the original goal had been "land on Mars before 1980" rather than "land on the Moon before 1970", I do not think it would have happened.
- mikeash 7y ago
  I’d rather see a focus on projects that are doable with existing capabilities, and separately an effort to develop new capabilities. It seems like if you immediately aim for something you can’t do, then you develop a bunch of technology and infrastructure that isn’t very good for other tasks. You end up with a stunt that doesn’t really go anywhere. That gets you rockets like the Saturn V, which was amazing but too big and expensive to be used for much besides Apollo. We’re doing it again with SLS: a big, catastrophically expensive rocket built to achieve a specialized goal. It’s not going to be very useful and it might not even fly. Compare with SpaceX’s BFR. It has much more general capabilities. At first blush this might look bad: why lug a heavy heat shield all the way to the surface of the moon and back? Why all this focus on reusability if your goal is to send just a few missions? But at the end of the day you’re much better off with a rocket that’s ok for a bunch of stuff than one that’s really good at one thing. Or just look at the space vehicles of the era. Many of them are still flying today, with lots of evolutionary improvements. How many Apollo-derived vehicles are flying today? I don’t think there are any. Apollo makes me imagine a Roman emperor declaring a program to send an expedition to the South Pole. They can’t even get there! You need to work on your ships before you set such a specific goal. As a bonus, steady, incremental improvement is the sort of thing you can sustain across political changes, if you can just get to the point where people stop asking for moonshots.
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    I suppose the important bit is really that there's universal buy in (and with the moon landing thing that was supported by making it a matter of national pride). With incremental progress you risk things looking invisible (just like AI is always just the things we can't yet do, while newly possible tasks are merely computations). "Do some notable thing in two terms" monument building exercises risk being shot down on budget reasons when any part of government ends up under new management (see Congress). So I guess you can go incremental (but solve the visibility bit somehow) or grand vision. Right now, NASA seems to be going through the worst of all.
Symmetry 7y ago
Also, without Kennedy's martyrdom I'm not sure Congress would have been willing to keep appropriating the funds to see it al the way through.
- Mvandenbergh 7y ago
  Kennedy himself had doubts about the cost as soon as the day after the speech! It was an immensely expensive programme which just managed to achieve its objectives. Had the objective been "build a permanent base" the cost would not have been palatable. It was barely tolerable to people as a one-off race to achieve a particular objective.

smaddox 7y ago

As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of manned space missions is to redirecting taxes to congressional districts and defense contractors. The secondary purpose might be to inspire interest in STEM, but it seems much less successful at achieving that objective.

goodcanadian 7y ago
I almost down voted you in a knee jerk reaction. I believe that manned space exploration serves a very important purpose in advancing humanity . . . however, from the typical Congress critter's point of view, I suspect you're right.
- avmich 7y ago
  I suspect GP underestimates the scientific value of Apollo missions. It's so much difference to e.g. study samples brought from the Moon (and taken with reasonable care) in Earth labs than to send robots to do the same. There is a POV that robots are good for scientific missions up to certain price point. After that manned missions become more cost effective.
  - smaddox 7y ago
    I don't see how it would be cheaper to send a human to the Moon to retrieve samples than it would be to send a robot.
    - ticmasta 7y ago
      and that's really just the cost the actual mission. Consider the impact of having to prepare a program that meets acceptable risk levels for humans vs. machines. This is a huge consideration. I'm not suggesting unmanned exploration can take a trial and error approach, but losing a robot is sad & expensive while losing a human astronaut can terminate the entire program.
    - avmich 7y ago
      Some arguments are here: https://phys.org/news/2005-11-unmanned-space-exploration_1.html https://phys.org/news/2005-11-unmanned-space-exploration_1.h... Retrieving a sample is cheaper with a robot - Luna-24 costed a fraction of Apollo. Knowing what to retrieve while having flexibility of choosing surface regolith, separate rock, samples dug out from a better place or else - that's where humans win.

wongarsu 7y ago

That won't happen again for political reasons. The moon landing is seen as Kennedy's achievement. He died six years before it happened, but that doesn't seem to matter. It's his legacy. No president (or congress) would let that happen again. When a president of party 1 sets such a goal the next president of party 2 will shift the goal to make it his achievement instead. Repeat ad infinitum.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think Apollo was lucky that Johnson came in after Kennedy. I think if a republican had won in 1964 probably there wouldn’t have been a moon landing. By the time Nixon came in there was already too much momentum to cancel it.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  The country, the Democratic party and Kennedy for that matter were lucky Johnson wound up in the oval office. Johnson was very good at actually making deals and getting stuff done (e.g. ensuring the budget that gets to his desk includes NASA). If it weren't for Johnson Kennedy would only be remembered for getting us into Vietnam then getting shot.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I guess Johnson then took the honor of being blamed for getting the country into Vietnam:). And it broke him.
    - ticmasta 7y ago
      Johnson accomplished a lot and, more importantly, in the correct order to make sure things got done. I think you're right though (and that he probably felt the same way) that he'll always be the Vietnam president. That may be a little unfair but it happened on his watch so that's what history will rightfully focus on.
      - deleted 7y ago

wefarrell 7y ago

The lunar mission had one clear objective: don't let the soviets embarrass us again. If the Chinese managed to put a human on Mars the US would get its shit together quickly.

MegaButts 7y ago
You have more faith in the US government than I do. I really, sincerely hope you are right about that.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

It's not about the mission, it's about the motivation. Societies only do great things with the proper motivation. Without the specter of American greatness being eclipsed by evil red Commies, what can get 2019 America to feel urgently this should be done?

greglindahl 7y ago

> What is NASA's manned programme for now? Maybe the Moon. When, who knows? Maybe Mars. What architecture, when, how, for how long? Who knows. Moon orbit? For what, when? who knows. In the past 10 years, NASA has had an answer for all of those questions. Two different ones over time. Also, SNC's Dream Chaser isn't ablative, and it's funded by NASA's CRS-2 program.

jlarcombe 7y ago

Yes, though a lot of the Apollo infrastructure was in retrospect massively over-engineered, based on a very high estimate of required numbers of launches. This was partly because they needed to start the infrastructure before settling the mission mode but still, the plans were ambitions beyond what was strictly required to get to the moon by the end of the decade.

idlewords 7y ago

The thing about the moon landing is that there was a rival superpower at rough technological parity, and the technology in question could be used to lob nuclear weapons at one another with great accuracy. No nukes, no ICBMs, no Apollo.

philwelch 7y ago

The flip side of that was that we are left with nothing but fond memories. No space stations or moon bases. No legacy of Apollo-derived manned spacecraft. We're essentially picking up from where we left off in the 1970's...now.