9 ms·

One thing the article doesn't cover is that whilst the pessimists had a point about the moon landing itself not achieving very much except some prestige and coo

• shtopointo 3y ago
  There's an argument that all those things would have been invented eventually anyway. There was no need to spend 100s of billions of dollars for basically a photo-op.
  • starkparker 3y ago
    What's the argument?
    • shtopointo 3y ago
      That those things would have been invented anyway, because science and technology progresses even without gov't intervention.
      • willis936 3y ago
        Is this a brownian motion/maxwell's demon argument or are you suggesting that progress is guaranteed by some principle?
  • jxf 3y ago
    "Eventually" is a pretty long time. If you were in 1959, would you press a button that caused satellites and freeze-dried food and flight computers to arrive 20 years earlier if it cost $10 billion to press? That saves billions of lives over the next 50 years and dramatically accelerates humanity's technology tree, so it seems like it's worth it.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • dekhn 3y ago
      freeze dried food was invented in France around the time of WWI. Flight computers predated Apollo- they were originally developed for missles. most of the folks who worked on the AGC had previously developed very successful flight computers already.
    • shtopointo 3y ago
      Inflated numbers. Also counterfactual reasoning: "had it not been for the space program, we wouldn't have developed these technologies and billions of lives wouldn't have been saved." Also – billions? Seems like an overreach.
    • Vvector 3y ago
      > freeze-dried food The modern process was invented in 1890, and used extensively in WW2.
      • kalleboo 3y ago
        For blood plasma and penicillin, not food
  • areoform 3y ago
    Speeding up our technological timeline by decades, and it was decades, has saved tens of millions to hundreds of millions of lives. The Integrated Circuit revolution wouldn't have happened at the same pace without Apollo. Apollo (and to a lesser degree the defense program) funded the industry for the first few years of its existence. Something like 2/3rds of all ICs produced until the mid-to-late 1960s were used in the program. They were extraordinary customers — willing to fund R&D, patient with bad results but extremely demanding. Without them, I suspect we'd be at least one to two decades behind in your computing timeline. Given how many lives these machines save on a daily basis... it's not hard to do the math.
  • bearjaws 3y ago
    What kind of argument is that? Might as well not send any boats out to find new continent, they will be discovered anyway! We have far more real technology today than we would have, all thanks to us moving some made up money around 60 years ago...
    • VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
      People really do just get on here and confidently say absolute nonsense. > Don't bother doing something because it will be done eventually anyway.
      • shtopointo 3y ago
        Not my argument. Just saying it's different when it's taxpayer money and there is no popular support.
  • codyb 3y ago
    Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process? If it was "basically a photo-op" it wouldn't have generated so much economic activity in the long run, even if perhaps it wasn't the most cost effective way to get there (in some eyes)?
    • jdasdf 3y ago
      > Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process? Because not spending that dollar on putting a guy on the moon could have generated 20 dollars elsewhere.
      • mcguire 3y ago
        It could have, yes. Would it? This is why historians are leery of counter-factuals; unless you have very strong evidence that it would have happened, you have nothing but a "could have" hypothesis.
        • codyb 3y ago
          Yea, seems pretty loose to assume those dollars would have generated three times the economic impact of the space program if they'd been left in individuals hands. Companies certainly innovate, but the government innovates a _lot_ (primarily through research grants which are eventually developed into products by entrepreneurs as far as I can tell, also the military).
    • shtopointo 3y ago
      $7 for each $1 is marketing math. Someone is being very generous in attributing too much economic activity to the space program.
      • codyb 3y ago
        I mean, even if it was 2 for 1... or 1 for 1... why not do it? Pretty neat to go to the moon.
  • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    $25 billion, for the coolest photo-op in history. Hell yeah. We flush orders of magnitude more money down the drain for shits and giggles any way, might as well do something no one else has ever done before.
  • bleepblop 3y ago
    Yeah and Bell Labs had developed cellular technology in the late 40s. When did we get commercial use for that tech? Oh yeah, nearly 40 years later.
  • carleverett 3y ago
    there's a (small) chance that the moon landing was the first time a living organism successfully chose to visit another celestial body in the entire history of the universe. "basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.
  • charlieyu1 3y ago
    Eventually, a century or two later. I mean it has been 50 years and we still couldn't send a human to the moon again despite technological advances
• dekhn 3y ago
  flight computers were already designed and built for the missles that predated Apollo- in fact, that's why the team that built them for Apollo was able to be so productive. freeze dried food predates the space program by decades. Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.
  • dabluecaboose 3y ago
    >Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly. What a wonderful tautology. These things were researched because they were necessary. You don't just sit down and think of new things to invent, you invent things to fix a problem. Without a problem to solve, how is one supposed to suddenly decide what to research?
    • ffhhttt 3y ago
      But how many of these actually practical and useful things were invented by NASA? I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..
      • dabluecaboose 3y ago
        > But how many of these actually practical and useful things were invented by NASA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies > I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve.. In many cases yes, they didn't invent the technology per se. But in those cases they improved or refined the tech and by virtue of being a public agency released the information freely for public use.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    I heard--probably from someone who worked there--that the Apollo Guidance Computer was pretty much the only no-bid system in the Apollo program.
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs, the space race was just an impetus/motivator for blank check by-all-means research. As a general rule shouldn't as much money as possible go into that sort of research until the marginal return is below $1 for each dollar spent?
  • jdasdf 3y ago
    No, because the time value of money is a thing. Even a 700% IRR can be not worth it, if you have alternatives with similar or lower risk with a higher annual return.
  • dmix 3y ago
    The most hand wavy R&D propositions ever, a very common take on Reddit. I hate when people assume the specific ROI gained when developing rocketry, when it was still very novel in the 1950-60s, can be used as a general rule for spending money on NASA or related gov projects today.
    • ScoobleDoodle 3y ago
      Our R&D today will go towards items that are today’s equivalent of 1950-60s rocketry. You clearly recognize the giant leap in hind sight. Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That is why it’s worth it both in advancements and ROI.
      • apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
        > Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That's always the problems with these types of discussions though, isn't it? You can't know what that next leap is going to be and how it is going to benefit everyday life. For some, like myself, that next leap will be just as revolutionary and will send us to the stars. We imagine a blank check with a direct, long-term goal leading to things we can't even dream of today. For others, however, they struggle to see what that leap will be. For them, it's just getting to Mars and maybe coming back, maybe with some new tech for the military. Nothing that will affect their own lives or the lives of their children. That was the problem in the 50s and 60s that led to so much backlash against the projects. And even though we saw the fruit those projects bore, who is to say it will happen a second time? Some people just can't or won't imagine what might come from another Apollo-esque program. And that's who you have to convince.
• Animats 3y ago
  > ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers, NASA has been promoting that claim for years. But it's not real. Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.[1] Flight computers came from the USAF missile programs of the 1950s.[2] Nor was NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/801137/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/801137/ [2] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2190783/flashback-the-navaho-missile-part-2/ https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2190783...
  • lolinder 3y ago
    I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical. If NASA's moon mission caused them to go deep in the archives of forgotten technology and resurrect ideas that had long been discarded, they deserve credit for that. (I'm not saying this is the case, but you're also not saying that it's not.)
    • tivert 3y ago
      > I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical. Probably. IMHO, the US military was and is probably far more effective at making emerging technologies "practical" than NASA is. Their budget's bigger and they buy more stuff, often mass-produced. NASA does a lot of one-off and small-run projects.
      • ke88y 3y ago
        The US military as a guaranteed purchaser, maybe. The US military as an organization, definitely not.
        • 3y ago
• throw0101b 3y ago
  > […] he Apollo program ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life […] See perhaps: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
• throwoutway 3y ago
  > it was hugely positive (NASA claims $7 for every $1 spent) Could you share this source? I want to read more analysis
  • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    The 7X multiplier was what we used when I worked in a university's advancement office to justify funding alumni events. Seems to be very common with justifying sports stadiums, festivals, and many other things that require public spending.
• technofiend 3y ago
  Space skeptics came in two flavors: the first being the classic "the money could have been better spent elsewhere" variety, but second was "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they $PETPEEVE". Frankly I miss the days of "Why can't they" vs the trend of vocal minorities simply decrying any and all science, because at least the critics acknowledged the space program actually happened. These days unfortunately the conspiracy theorists of the world have made their own discoveries like internet forums and Twitter which just help propagate their points of view far more than a mimeograph of dense text and filled with arrows and diagrams stapled to a telephone pole ever did.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• bamfly 3y ago
  > [1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse. Space-romantics tend to wildly overestimate the benefits of space colonization relative to the difficulty and cost. Space is... kinda shit. Including all the other rocky bodies in our star system. In the best case, it's like if Earth suffered a half-dozen biosphere-ruining apocalypses and was yet worse than that, even. The "why?" needs a damn good answer, and we just don't have one, certainly not for long-term human habitation. Even "colonize Mars as a humanity backup" isn't great. There are cheaper ways to achieve most of that supposed benefit, and maybe do it even better, possibly even involving space in some capacity, most of which projects we could kick off today if we really wanted to—yet we don't bother with any of those, no, we fixate on Mars because of the romantic and pop-culture appeal, not because it's the most efficient solution. Colonizing Mars or the clouds of Venus or putting dome-cities on the Moon or whatever is undeniably cool as hell, but when you sit and really think about it... eh.
  • arrosenberg 3y ago
    The why is because humans like exploring and colonizing. Our most successful civilizations (in the evolutionary sense, not the meritocratic or moralist sense) were good at exploring and expanding, so a lot of people are wired to want to do that. There are only 2 accessible frontiers - space and the ocean.
    • bamfly 3y ago
      This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about. Very little of the expense of historical exploration was undertaken just so people could scratch their exploration itch. Besides, we have a pretty good idea of what we'll find most of these places, now, without having to send people there, and certainly without needing them to live there. We don't have a strong history of bending entire economies to support these kinds of projects just for exploration's sake, but for expected returns. We can do most of the preliminary exploring of our star system cheaper with robots and closer-to-home remote sensors, now. Would we have funded so many expensive expeditions, in the age of sail, to explore the Arctic and northern Canada if we'd had satellites to tell us there was no Northwest Passage? Just for the sake of exploring in-person? I doubt it, but that's the conclusion one must draw from the "the need, deep in the human heart, to explore is enough justification! It's our nature!" (see the romanticism?) position if one supposes that justifies massive human space exploration and colonization programs, today, barring new information.
• JackFr 3y ago
  It was a cold war exercise, and viewed through that lens it almost certainly was a better expense than say the Vietnam War. I suppose a more apt hypothetical would be considering what the return spending that money on various additional DARPA projects would have been.
• bruce511 3y ago
  "Spend" is a loaded term when it comes to the way governments work. If I have $100 then I can choose to spend it on say a book. I have a book, my $100 is clearly gone. But when the govt spends say $400 mil on a lunar landing, they get the lunar landing, but they also get a bunch of money back. Firstly, a chunk of that money goes to salaries, so a decent chunk comes back as primary taxes (income tax etc) and secondary taxes (sales tax, gas tax, taxes on booze and smokes). What isn't taxes is mostly then circulating in the economy (generating yet more taxes) while giving the economy a nice boost. Now we can argue about opportunity cost etc, but the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity. We can quibble about edge-case budgets all day long, but its hard to avoid the jobs program that is "military spending". In truth what does all that money buy? The lunar program, the Mars program, curing cancer, these are rounding errors compared to the military budget. I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but what do invasions of Iraq, or occupations of Afghanistan for 20 years actually really achieve? Instead of picking on NASA it might be time to wonder what the Defence trillions get us? Which brings me back to my first point- most of those trillions circle round in the economy anyway, so its all funny money.
  • idiotsecant 3y ago
    >the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity This can't be true forever, and to me it seems like it is the underpinning of the entire modern world order. Something seems fundamentally warped, I'm just not educated enough to know what it is.
  • bradleybuda 3y ago
    How is the $100 spent on the book not circulating in the economy?
    • tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
      I think what they're saying that the government will get a large amount back and you, personally, will get less than 1% back. So you would effectively be spending $99.99 on the book and the government would effectively be spending $45, as an example.
• nitwit005 3y ago
  NASA was presumably an expensive way to get any inventions not related to space. You could just fund normal research, after all. People similarly laud military research, but it's not as if you need the military to carry it out. Governments were just willing to fund the research as part of a military effort.
  • renewiltord 3y ago
    Yeah, but if you just fund research without an objective you just waste money because it creates an opportunity for a grifter like me to go there and just not get any results of value. When you place an objective like the Moon in front, at the least your research has to result in it getting closer. The hope is that this broad objective results in something as opposed to something narrower you might want.
    • ke88y 3y ago
      There's a lot of wisdom here. Stupid but hard goals are still hard goals. Necessity -- not taxpayer largess -- is the mother of all invention. The corresponding risk is in the resulting cargo cult around arbitrary constraints whose reasons were forgotten. I bet if we committed to building the Panama canal with only spoons we'd have ended up with a lot of amazingly useful spoon-platform earth moving technology, and the commercial sector would've ended up with highly optimized spoon-based machines, and it'd all be very stupid compared to what we got instead.
  • scarface_74 3y ago
    Let’s look at Apple before Steve Jobs and Parc research. There was a lot of useless research being done without focus on a shipping product.
    • nitwit005 3y ago
      While NASA and the military only fund effective research with practical applications?
  • iancmceachern 3y ago
• robswc 3y ago
  Yep. Same for the military industrial complex, unfortunately.