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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 pri

by 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we just decided to redirect those resources to other areas (i.e. the Space Shuttle) and now those designs are very out of date.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    No, we actually can't. In short, we've lost enough knowledge: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/6290 https://space.stackexchange.com/a/6290 We can build a replacement, more capable than Saturn-V, and less expensive even. But we cannot reproduce Saturn-V the way it flew in 1970s.
    - Invictus0 4y ago
      It's like saying we can't build the pyramids anymore just because we can't build them the exact same way the Egyptians did. Is the goal to get to the moon or is the goal to build a faithful replica of the rocket along with a faithful replica of the tools that built the rocket?
      - nine_k 4y ago
        We developed a particular pinnacle of tech and lost it through disuse. This happens in aerospace and high-end weapon-making areas regularly, because the runs are small, and much of the knowledge and technology is uniquely purpose-built, with thick layers of secrecy protecting the know-hows. Speaking of military technology, humans lost the secret of "Greek fire" [1], which apparently was a medieval form of napalm, not extinguishable by water. All the current knowledge of chemistry did not help restore the recipe yet (because history studies have a smaller budget than the actual military, of course). We haven't lost the ability to fly to the Moon, of course, because the principles remain the same, and the technologies advance. But we had to build completely different rockets, not reusing many, if any, bits of Saturn-V. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire
        satvikpendem 4y ago
        It just goes to show that human progress is not monotonically increasing, we must travail to make it so, as without such effort, we slide back.
- runarberg 4y ago
  > It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science. Has it though? These are requirements for our normal earth orbit satellites, surely these would have advanced at a similar pace without the moon mission. > We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end?
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end? Dead end, yes; engineering, no. More: we didn't need it for so long that everyone who was responsible has since gotten old/died. And even then, only a dead end given the scientific and industrial position at the time; those can change to turn dead ends into open ends.
RichardCA 4y ago
It succeeded because the Saturn V had enough heavy-lifting capablity that we could do the entire mission with one launch vehicle for the complete round-trip. It was the power of the Saturn V being sufficient to get us out of the Earth's gravity well, plus the cleverness of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission plan that allowed us to pull it off. Once those two things were worked out and understood, the rest was just a matter of executing. But it was pure happenstance that the laws of Physics and the Earth/Moon orbital mechcanics lined up to make it possible.
- nradov 4y ago
  And the Saturn V only had enough lifting capacity because the Air Force had issued a requirement to Rocketdyne back in 1955 for an engine powerful enough to deliver the huge H-bombs in use at the time. Within a few years, nuclear weapons researchers had figured out how to build lighter weapons so the huge F-1 engine was no longer needed for ICBMs, but fortunately it was ready for use in the Apollo program. The USSR had nothing comparable.
  - m4rtink 4y ago
    Well, the USSR did something similar - for a while you could only really sell a new space rocket by branding it as an ICBM. Even the bloody 700 ton UR-500 which became the Proton eventually piggybacked on this, marked on paper as a 50-100 megaton warhead ICBM! But looks like the Americans were thinking even bigger. :-)

by gary_0 4y ago

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.
- nine_k 4y ago
  No, we actually can't. In short, we've lost enough knowledge: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/6290 https://space.stackexchange.com/a/6290 We can build a replacement, more capable than Saturn-V, and less expensive even. But we cannot reproduce Saturn-V the way it flew in 1970s.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    It's like saying we can't build the pyramids anymore just because we can't build them the exact same way the Egyptians did. Is the goal to get to the moon or is the goal to build a faithful replica of the rocket along with a faithful replica of the tools that built the rocket?
    - nine_k 4y ago
      We developed a particular pinnacle of tech and lost it through disuse. This happens in aerospace and high-end weapon-making areas regularly, because the runs are small, and much of the knowledge and technology is uniquely purpose-built, with thick layers of secrecy protecting the know-hows. Speaking of military technology, humans lost the secret of "Greek fire" [1], which apparently was a medieval form of napalm, not extinguishable by water. All the current knowledge of chemistry did not help restore the recipe yet (because history studies have a smaller budget than the actual military, of course). We haven't lost the ability to fly to the Moon, of course, because the principles remain the same, and the technologies advance. But we had to build completely different rockets, not reusing many, if any, bits of Saturn-V. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        It just goes to show that human progress is not monotonically increasing, we must travail to make it so, as without such effort, we slide back.
runarberg 4y ago
> It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science. Has it though? These are requirements for our normal earth orbit satellites, surely these would have advanced at a similar pace without the moon mission. > We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end?
- ben_w 4y ago
  > Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end? Dead end, yes; engineering, no. More: we didn't need it for so long that everyone who was responsible has since gotten old/died. And even then, only a dead end given the scientific and industrial position at the time; those can change to turn dead ends into open ends.

RichardCA 4y ago

It succeeded because the Saturn V had enough heavy-lifting capablity that we could do the entire mission with one launch vehicle for the complete round-trip. It was the power of the Saturn V being sufficient to get us out of the Earth's gravity well, plus the cleverness of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission plan that allowed us to pull it off. Once those two things were worked out and understood, the rest was just a matter of executing. But it was pure happenstance that the laws of Physics and the Earth/Moon orbital mechcanics lined up to make it possible.

nradov 4y ago
And the Saturn V only had enough lifting capacity because the Air Force had issued a requirement to Rocketdyne back in 1955 for an engine powerful enough to deliver the huge H-bombs in use at the time. Within a few years, nuclear weapons researchers had figured out how to build lighter weapons so the huge F-1 engine was no longer needed for ICBMs, but fortunately it was ready for use in the Apollo program. The USSR had nothing comparable.
- m4rtink 4y ago
  Well, the USSR did something similar - for a while you could only really sell a new space rocket by branding it as an ICBM. Even the bloody 700 ton UR-500 which became the Proton eventually piggybacked on this, marked on paper as a 50-100 megaton warhead ICBM! But looks like the Americans were thinking even bigger. :-)