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The Apollo mission that reached the moon was preceded by very rational steps to get there, and get back. Prematurely shooting for Mars could literally bankrupt

The Apollo mission that reached the moon was preceded by very rational steps to get there, and get back. Prematurely shooting for Mars could literally bankrupt resources on Earth and still have worse odds than a more methodical approach.

skissane 4y ago
I doubt anyone is actually going to “shoot prematurely for the Mars”. I expect what SpaceX is going to do, is once they get Starship up and running, and tick off some intermediate goals such as Artemis III and DearMoon, they’ll start launching demo Mars missions-no crew, but demonstrating some of the technologies a crewed mission will need-and NASA will probably pay for some of it. And that’s likely to take a lot longer than all their optimistic estimates suggest. But they’ll continue to dangle those timelines in front of everybody to create buzz which increases the odds of Congress/NASA paying for some of it. SpaceX might be a bit less risk-averse than NASA, but no way are they sending humans (even privately) to Mars unless they have reasonable odds of surviving, and there is a lot of further technology development and demonstration required to have reasonable confidence in that.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  i think musk has basically said he doesn't mind risking/losing some lives. and people have volunteered. whether or not the world allows him to actually do that is another story though
  - skissane 4y ago
    Musk is prone to speak in a somewhat hyperbolic fashion, and may well be more risk-averse when it actually comes time to actually decide whether to put human lives at risk, than he is when talking about that decision as an abstract future. It also isn't entirely up to him–it is also what the rest of the SpaceX executive team feels comfortable with (especially Gwynne Shotwell), and also the comfort level of the regulators and lawyers. Even NASA "doesn't mind risking/losing some lives", in that while they drive the "probability of loss of crew" as low as feasible, they never can get it to zero. Possibly, a private SpaceX mission might have a higher go/no-go threshold for that probability – but if it adds up to (say) 50%, I really doubt they'll go ahead with the mission, they'll likely instead delay so they can invest further engineering resources in reducing it to a more reasonable level.
- m4rtink 4y ago
  Like with reusable rockets before, its very important to a do real world demonstration that this is possible. This way a lot of the naysayers blocking Mars related projects in other companies/organizations/countries will be much less of a problem. And in general will make more people consider to get involved as this is real now, not another power point, computer model or study.
gary_0 4y ago
The Apollo program was insane for the 1960's. It was announced by JFK just one year after NASA's first successful manned space rocket. Engineering was still primarily done with pencils and slide-rules, the US had only just achieved widespread household electrification, and the first supersonic flight was only 15 years earlier. NASA's budget during the Apollo era was about 10 times that of the Manhattan Project, about 1% of the entire US government budget. It could have turned into history's largest money incinerator if things had gone bad organizationally. I can't really think of any project like it that has been attempted before or since--not at such a huge scale and on such a short timeline. The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster, and it was only diligence and commitment (and luck) at every level of NASA that allowed them to succeed given such a monumental goal. But the goal itself was very close to madness.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  "The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster..." For All Mankind on Apple TV+ has a lot of fun extrapolating from the premise of the Soviet moonshot succeeding and beating the US to the moon. Then presenting an alternate history of how events unfold differently because of it. Basically extrapolating the insanity of the Apollo program up until the present day, as USA and Soviet Union continually try to one up each other in the space race. It's a lot of fun.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Beside that, it did not seem to result any direct advancements in technology. We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. (But we can build SLS and Falcon Heavy though, after 50+ years.) It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.
  - postingawayonhn 4y ago
    > We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. It's not that we can't, we just decided to redirect those resources to other areas (i.e. the Space Shuttle) and now those designs are very out of date.
m4rtink 4y ago
Haha, not really - the original Apollo program was reasonable - lets doe a low Earth orbit space station or two, build some space infra, improve and ideally reuse launchers... Then Kennedy came with "LETS DO A LUNAR LANDING LIKE RIGHT NOW, LOL!" & then got himself killed so it could not be taken back. What followed was an ultimately successful mad dash with great emphasis on cost-is-not-an-option which did bring us some nice inventions but did not really help to build any real space infra or to lower the launch costs. And arguably also entrenched the bad idea that space needs to be horrendously expensive and always will be. Not really, until you are on a mad dash with a singular unrelated objective. But hey, it might still be useful experience next time a killer asteroid or hostile aliens show up.

skissane 4y ago

I doubt anyone is actually going to “shoot prematurely for the Mars”. I expect what SpaceX is going to do, is once they get Starship up and running, and tick off some intermediate goals such as Artemis III and DearMoon, they’ll start launching demo Mars missions-no crew, but demonstrating some of the technologies a crewed mission will need-and NASA will probably pay for some of it. And that’s likely to take a lot longer than all their optimistic estimates suggest. But they’ll continue to dangle those timelines in front of everybody to create buzz which increases the odds of Congress/NASA paying for some of it. SpaceX might be a bit less risk-averse than NASA, but no way are they sending humans (even privately) to Mars unless they have reasonable odds of surviving, and there is a lot of further technology development and demonstration required to have reasonable confidence in that.

8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
i think musk has basically said he doesn't mind risking/losing some lives. and people have volunteered. whether or not the world allows him to actually do that is another story though
- skissane 4y ago
  Musk is prone to speak in a somewhat hyperbolic fashion, and may well be more risk-averse when it actually comes time to actually decide whether to put human lives at risk, than he is when talking about that decision as an abstract future. It also isn't entirely up to him–it is also what the rest of the SpaceX executive team feels comfortable with (especially Gwynne Shotwell), and also the comfort level of the regulators and lawyers. Even NASA "doesn't mind risking/losing some lives", in that while they drive the "probability of loss of crew" as low as feasible, they never can get it to zero. Possibly, a private SpaceX mission might have a higher go/no-go threshold for that probability – but if it adds up to (say) 50%, I really doubt they'll go ahead with the mission, they'll likely instead delay so they can invest further engineering resources in reducing it to a more reasonable level.
m4rtink 4y ago
Like with reusable rockets before, its very important to a do real world demonstration that this is possible. This way a lot of the naysayers blocking Mars related projects in other companies/organizations/countries will be much less of a problem. And in general will make more people consider to get involved as this is real now, not another power point, computer model or study.

gary_0 4y ago

The Apollo program was insane for the 1960's. It was announced by JFK just one year after NASA's first successful manned space rocket. Engineering was still primarily done with pencils and slide-rules, the US had only just achieved widespread household electrification, and the first supersonic flight was only 15 years earlier. NASA's budget during the Apollo era was about 10 times that of the Manhattan Project, about 1% of the entire US government budget. It could have turned into history's largest money incinerator if things had gone bad organizationally. I can't really think of any project like it that has been attempted before or since--not at such a huge scale and on such a short timeline. The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster, and it was only diligence and commitment (and luck) at every level of NASA that allowed them to succeed given such a monumental goal. But the goal itself was very close to madness.

jimbokun 4y ago
"The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster..." For All Mankind on Apple TV+ has a lot of fun extrapolating from the premise of the Soviet moonshot succeeding and beating the US to the moon. Then presenting an alternate history of how events unfold differently because of it. Basically extrapolating the insanity of the Apollo program up until the present day, as USA and Soviet Union continually try to one up each other in the space race. It's a lot of fun.
nine_k 4y ago
Beside that, it did not seem to result any direct advancements in technology. We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. (But we can build SLS and Falcon Heavy though, after 50+ years.) It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.
- postingawayonhn 4y ago
  > We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. It's not that we can't, we just decided to redirect those resources to other areas (i.e. the Space Shuttle) and now those designs are very out of date.

m4rtink 4y ago

Haha, not really - the original Apollo program was reasonable - lets doe a low Earth orbit space station or two, build some space infra, improve and ideally reuse launchers... Then Kennedy came with "LETS DO A LUNAR LANDING LIKE RIGHT NOW, LOL!" & then got himself killed so it could not be taken back. What followed was an ultimately successful mad dash with great emphasis on cost-is-not-an-option which did bring us some nice inventions but did not really help to build any real space infra or to lower the launch costs. And arguably also entrenched the bad idea that space needs to be horrendously expensive and always will be. Not really, until you are on a mad dash with a singular unrelated objective. But hey, it might still be useful experience next time a killer asteroid or hostile aliens show up.