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> ‘As one friend put it to me "When you were landing on the moon we were getting running water installed"’ This also applied to large parts of the United State

• ch4s3 3y ago
  > a symbol of misplaced priorities at the time This always feels terribly myopic to me. There's a lot of state capacity and doing a sing;e time bound endeavor did not prevent civil rights legislation from passing or economic development in Mississippi. The moonshot caused NASA's funding to peak at ~4% of the federal budget for a single year in 1966, returning to less than 1% by '73.
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    But in 1969 it was not settled that the country should fix civil rights. Probably Apollo would have been received differently by many people if other, more humane areas had seen as enthusiastic spending. Not saying it was wrong to do Apollo, though! It was important, another great outcome was that it made the Soviet system crack faster. It was also not clear from originally that Apollo would be single time limited project, in the beginning there was a lot of talk about moon bases and such.
    • ch4s3 3y ago
      People use that kind of framing to say my highest priority isn't being addressed therefore anything else government does is wrong. I don't think this is logically sound, or a convincing argument.
    • philwelch 3y ago
      There were a lot of enthusiastic spending programs and civil rights reforms in the 1960’s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, Civil Rights Act of 1968 (which included the Fair Housing Act), the establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, federal funding for elementary and secondary schools, Job Corps, Head Start, expansion of Social Security benefits, the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, the Department of Transportation (along with federal funding for mass transit and high speed rail), the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, and food stamps, just to name the highlights.
      • wolverine876 3y ago
        What is your point? That they happened and therefore had sufficient support and capability? In particular ... > enthusiastic spending programs ... what does "enthusiastic" mean here? Enthusiastic support? There was plenty of opposition.
        • philwelch 3y ago
          Try reading the comment I was responding to for context. I was responding to these claims in particular: > But in 1969 it was not settled that the country should fix civil rights. I responded to that by enumerating some of the civil rights laws that were passed during the 1960's. > Probably Apollo would have been received differently by many people if other, more humane areas had seen as enthusiastic spending. I agree that "enthusiastic spending" is an awkward phrase, but I was specifically calling back to actionfromafar's usage of it. And I responded by listing all of the humane spending programs that had been enacted in that period, ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security expansion to new funding programs for education, food stamps, transportation, and other such things. In reality the administration of Lyndon Johnson was the second greatest expansion of the American federal welfare state in history (after the New Deal); it's simply not true to claim that the federal government during that period lacked "enthusiasm" for such things.
          • 3y ago
• merpnderp 3y ago
  It's criminal that the US is spending money on SLS when it is so incredibly inefficient and will very likely be completely outclassed in cost and operational ability by Starship.
  • criley2 3y ago
    Considering the CEO of the company making Starship has openly messed with his other companies in support of Russia (thinking about Ukraine decisions), there is zero chance the US should get into a situation where Elon Musk is the decider of whether or not Americans can go to space. Honestly, SpaceX with Musk at the helm is becoming a massive national security problem, and as a taxpayer, I'm okay spending more money to insulate ourselves from some globo-billionaire who doesn't give even a single F about my country.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      Starlink over Crimea? I thought the end facts on that were that SpaceX had never turned it on there, to avoid stepping over a redline, and simply refused to change that policy when the Ukranians requested it for a USV attack.
      • simoncion 3y ago
        It's my understanding that Starlink said something to the effect of: > No, we're absolutely not supporting offensive military operations. However, Starshield _is_ in that business, so go file your request through that so as to run it by the appropriate people in the US government to get their approval. And -AFAIK- the request was run through Starshield, and it did get approved.
    • colechristensen 3y ago
      You’re criticizing the “foreign policy” of a company that decided not to directly participate in a foreign war, quite possibly at the request of the US government or under threat of having those satellites shot down which would be a catastrophe for space travel. If the US wanted to contract spacex for Ukrainian military comms, they would have. There are plenty of reasons to criticize musk, but not participating directly in a war isn’t one of them
• rufus_foreman 3y ago
  >> This also applied to large parts of the United States in 1969 By 1970, 93% of the homes in the US had "complete plumbing facilities", which means not just running water but hot and cold water, a shower or bath, and a flush toilet. See https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-plumbing.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-plumb.... 1940 54.7% 1950 64.5% 1960 83.2% 1970 93.1% 1980 97.3% 1990 98.9% In the 1950's and 1960's, the United States was able to do more than one thing at a time.
• germinalphrase 3y ago
  As a touch point: Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
  • euroderf 3y ago
    This song. I get it. And I do not get it.
  • fatbird 3y ago
    Also, this brilliant mockumentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Negro_Space_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Negro_Space_Program
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  I've never thought much of that narrative argument against the Apollo space program, since the Vietnam War cost at least 4X as much as the Apollo program, with much less to show for it and far more negative social effects (e.g. all the homeless Vietnam vets with unrecognized PTSD, etc.).
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    The true, multi-faceted cost of Vietnam sort of crept up slowly though, especially in the 70s. Weren't many armed gangs started by 'nam vets for instance? (Not even counting what it meant for south east asia.)
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    How could killing people on the other side of the world over ideology achieve anything (show for it)?
    • reducesuffering 3y ago
      Ask the South Koreans
      • avgcorrection 3y ago
        “Some of you Vietnamese will die... but that’s a sacrifice that I’m willing to make.” Something like that?
        • philwelch 3y ago
          South Korea is a modern, developed country with a high tech manufacturing economy and a high standard of living. And it only exists today because many countries including the United States defended it from a communist invasion, just as the United States attempted to defend South Vietnam.
          • avgcorrection 3y ago
• ytdytvhxgydvhh 3y ago
  I always appreciate Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger‘s response to such criticism: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space
• somenameforme 3y ago
  It's extremely and utterly odd, to me, that so many people single out things like the Apollo Program as an 'extravagance' when this was also the era of the Vietnam War. The entire Apollo program cost $178 billion in 2022 dollars. The Vietnam War cost more than $1 trillion, and that's if you put a $0 price tag on the millions of people killed, to say nothing of decades more of people being maimed and killed by our cluster bomblets left all over the country. The Vietnam War had absolutely 0 value. We hyped it up as some do-or-die necessity, we invaded, participated in the killing of millions of people, blew a trillion dollars, lost the war, went home, and there was no grand catastrophic change. We could have just skipped to the end by not getting involved in the first place. By contrast one can argue about the exact value of the Apollo Program but it's absolutely undeniable that there was value. We learned a bunch, showed what's possible with human ingenuity, and just plain old did something that would make one proud to be a human, let alone an American at the time. If we did more things like this, it's very likely that the relationship between the people and the government would be far better than it is today.
  • gota 3y ago
    > say nothing of decades more of people being maimed and killed by our cluster bomblets left all over the country. Not to mention the millions of people devastated by Agent Orange. The fact that the specialists warned the US military of these effects and it didn't stop them from poisoning the population for generations is mind boggling. How did these people rationalize their actions? Anyway - there's no possible price tag for that. Your point of comparison is correct; the space race as a whole was about the best- and cheapest-case scenario for a "war"
  • ebiester 3y ago
    Leftists and black activists were also against the Vietnam War. The arguments were far less about the monetary value in that case, though.
    • somenameforme 3y ago
      This is true but, in general, I don't think it should be. One can moralize endlessly about war. Even in this thread you can see somebody arguing that the Vietnam war couldn't have been that bad because it was against communism, which he thinks should always be opposed. And one cannot say he's wrong - it's an opinion. By contrast a trillion dollars is a trillion dollars. And I think almost nobody could argue, in good faith, that near to any war is worth a trillion dollars. That's more than $7,500 per household in the US. That sort of money, for some sort of vague geopolitical ambition, is just beyond absurd. And the thing is, even when we initially claim that this war or that will "only" cost some billions of dollars, they all go this way. Iraq "according to every analyst" was supposed to cost about $80 billion and last 2 years. 4 years later, the Congressional Budget Office estimated its cost to be about $2.4 trillion. That value is also not adjusted for inflation. These wars all around the world are just such an unbelievably tremendous waste of money. They have this magic trick that even Houdini couldn't hold a candle to - they can take trillions of dollars and just make it all disappear, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Nobody could ever rationalize this into being a good thing. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident