7 ms·

I still just cannot wrap my mind around how we could get people there, and then all this time later have lost that ability. What happened?

foobarian 3y ago
And apparently live video..
LorenDB 3y ago
It's largely a matter of incentive. In the sixties, the US had an incentive to prove that it had more advanced technology than the USSR. Once we proved we could land on the moon, the novelty quickly wore off for the public, which influenced Congress's decision to cut funding for the Apollo program. We also haven't returned to the moon yet because of cost, I would imagine.
- tintor 3y ago
  But there is plenty of Helium 3 to mine on the Moon, to justify the cost.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Assuming we manage to build viable reactors to use it.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Helion is the closest for that, but it would be easier for them to make their own 3He by DD fusion. It will be very hard to make 3He extraction on the moon energy positive, since it occurs at very low concentration in the regolith.
- rockemsockem 3y ago
  The public was actually never in favor of the Apollo program except for when we actually landed on the moon. The government was just willing to ignore public sentiment for some reason. And I'm very glad they did.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > public was actually never in favor of the Apollo program except for when we actually landed on the moon Wow, I wasn't aware that the "only point at which the opinion surveys demonstrate that more than 50 percent of the public believed Apollo was worth its expense came in 1969 at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing" [1]. [1] https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/exploding-the-myth-of-popular-support-for-project-apollo/ https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/exploding-the-myth...
    - GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
      Gil Scott-Heron had a very popular song in 1970 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4&list=RDgoh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4&list=RDgoh2x_G0c...
      - Vecr 3y ago
        Someone should see about making a few versions for various crew compositions/landing times for the Artemis program. So you'd have one ready to go pretty much whatever happens.
  - ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
    This is one of the reasons I’m glad the US is a representative democracy and not a direct democracy.
nicklecompte 3y ago
"Lost the ability" is an odd way of putting it. "Lost the budget" is better. Ideally we wouldn't have to pick and choose, but since I wasn't US Dictator during the 90s, the Hubble Space Telescope + a lot of probes throughout the solar system was probably more impactful for overall scientific discovery than the counterfactual where NASA invested in continued moon landings.
- ein0p 3y ago
  We did lose the capability. Read up on the engineering behind Saturn-V. There are books that go into extensive detail. A lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024. Not to mention that cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024 Give me one example. > cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then Inflation adjusted, the Saturn V was a $45bn project [1]. That's a mulitiple of the total capital SpaceX has raised (or been granted). [1] https://apollo11space.com/the-cost-of-launching-a-saturn-v/ https://apollo11space.com/the-cost-of-launching-a-saturn-v/
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Starship is also the biggest rocket to have ever flown, with twice the thrust of the Saturn V! That’s using a fraction of their budget.
      - gibolt 3y ago
        As a bonus, Starship should be fully reusable, meaning long-term costs drop drastically to continue the program. Each flight could cost single-digit millions, mainly in fuel and employees.
cameldrv 3y ago
Part of it is cost: In the mid sixties, NASA was about five percent of the federal budget. Another part is safety: Apollo was extremely dangerous. There were a lot of single points of failure, three astronauts died on the ground, three more were very very narrowly saved over the course of only about ten missions. One of the reasons the program was cut short was the political worry after Apollo 13 of having astronauts die on the moon or something similar. This level of danger was considered acceptable given the mission back then, but I don't think it would be today. Who's right is a worthwhile question. Another part was that Apollo had superb, hard working, young, smart, energetic people working on it. The nature and ambition of the project just attracted top people. The context of the Vietnam war also meant that there were a lot of engineers that would otherwise be working on weapons but maybe would rather not, and Apollo was a very nice peaceful project to apply all of that technology to. I think you see a lot of the success of Tesla and SpaceX in the same observations. Both of those companies were super ambitious, and had a goal a lot of people wanted to get behind. Their competition was unattractive to work for, and seemed unlikely to achieve the goal of getting to mars/electric cars. The result was that they were able to hire some of the very smartest, hardest working people in the country. If you get a bunch of people like that together under a common banner, amazing things happen.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Part of it is cost The other side to this is we don't build rockets today like we did in the sixties. Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. But even if we had that know-how, we wouldn't do it the same again. From novel materials to simulations to communications and onboard computing, modern spacecraft deserved to be redesigned. (For the counterfactuals, see ULA and Arianespace.) So until someone (SpaceX) started eating that node-transition cost, we entered a period of apparent stasis. But that vacuum was energetic, and it wasn't about rediscovering lost knowledge, but inventing new kit.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. Oh, I don't know. I think we've actually made improvements in leaps and bounds over the "lost" tech. Our soundstage, green screen, and post tech has definitely improved /s I know it's not what you meant, but the NoHo reference made me laugh at the thought
bombcar 3y ago
I’m not entirely sure that we’ve actually lost it; is it really far fetched to think SpaceX could moon land- if not now but perhaps in a bit?
- justinclift 3y ago
  In SpaceX's case, they'd probably be the "but we've regained it" side of things.
aredox 3y ago
The best minds of our generation are working on byzantine financial derivatives, making social media more addictive, and turning fake pictures/videos/bots as realistic as possible.
- passwordoops 3y ago
  This comment deserves to be on the front page
  - GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
    It's only because of a version of Willie Sutton's quote: "That's where the money is." Capital allocation.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- analognoise 3y ago
  Don’t forget the parasocial relationships they form with fans who are increasingly lonely, the new frontier in emotionally manipulative AI chatbots, and surveillance capitalism.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > best minds of our generation are working on byzantine financial derivatives, making social media more addictive, and turning fake pictures/videos/bots as realistic as possible Ten years ago, maybe. Today, I'm not sure. It's been a long time since I had that "wow, everyone here is ten times smarter than me" feeling at one of the big tech firms. And to the extent the system works, it's correcting. We're seeing layoffs on one side. And moon landings on another.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    The vanguard of that just isn’t in FAANG anymore. That’s why you’re not seeing it.
dotnet00 3y ago
There's also specifically the difference that humans being onboard added much more tolerance when it comes to things like landing. Neil Armstrong was able to fly the lander to get to a safer landing area and was able to sanity check the sensor readings in realtime. In comparison, these landers have to do everything autonomously, the computer has to figure out where it's safe to touch down, it has to be able to figure out if a sensor is malfunctioning and if so, which is the one that's wrong. Similarly, previous uncrewed landers were not expected to be that smart, they just aimed for a patch of land believed to be flat and hoped for the best.
helpfulContrib 3y ago
[dead]
cobbaut 3y ago
Michael Collins' book Carrying the Fire proves that the sixties were vastly different to today. For example people died while training to become astronauts, because the training was hard. This would be impossible today; the first time someone breaks so much as a leg the whole project would be suspended and several committees would need time to evaluate...
- marcellus23 3y ago
  > For example people died while training to become astronauts, because the training was hard I don't think this is correct. Astronauts died due to equipment malfunction (Apollo 1) or from airplane crashes or car crashes. But those aren't the same as dying because the training was too intense.

foobarian 3y ago

And apparently live video..

LorenDB 3y ago

It's largely a matter of incentive. In the sixties, the US had an incentive to prove that it had more advanced technology than the USSR. Once we proved we could land on the moon, the novelty quickly wore off for the public, which influenced Congress's decision to cut funding for the Apollo program. We also haven't returned to the moon yet because of cost, I would imagine.

tintor 3y ago
But there is plenty of Helium 3 to mine on the Moon, to justify the cost.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Assuming we manage to build viable reactors to use it.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Helion is the closest for that, but it would be easier for them to make their own 3He by DD fusion. It will be very hard to make 3He extraction on the moon energy positive, since it occurs at very low concentration in the regolith.
rockemsockem 3y ago
The public was actually never in favor of the Apollo program except for when we actually landed on the moon. The government was just willing to ignore public sentiment for some reason. And I'm very glad they did.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > public was actually never in favor of the Apollo program except for when we actually landed on the moon Wow, I wasn't aware that the "only point at which the opinion surveys demonstrate that more than 50 percent of the public believed Apollo was worth its expense came in 1969 at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing" [1]. [1] https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/exploding-the-myth-of-popular-support-for-project-apollo/ https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/exploding-the-myth...
  - GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
    Gil Scott-Heron had a very popular song in 1970 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4&list=RDgoh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4&list=RDgoh2x_G0c...
    - Vecr 3y ago
      Someone should see about making a few versions for various crew compositions/landing times for the Artemis program. So you'd have one ready to go pretty much whatever happens.
- ThisIsMyAltAcct 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons I’m glad the US is a representative democracy and not a direct democracy.

nicklecompte 3y ago

"Lost the ability" is an odd way of putting it. "Lost the budget" is better. Ideally we wouldn't have to pick and choose, but since I wasn't US Dictator during the 90s, the Hubble Space Telescope + a lot of probes throughout the solar system was probably more impactful for overall scientific discovery than the counterfactual where NASA invested in continued moon landings.

ein0p 3y ago
We did lose the capability. Read up on the engineering behind Saturn-V. There are books that go into extensive detail. A lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024. Not to mention that cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024 Give me one example. > cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then Inflation adjusted, the Saturn V was a $45bn project [1]. That's a mulitiple of the total capital SpaceX has raised (or been granted). [1] https://apollo11space.com/the-cost-of-launching-a-saturn-v/ https://apollo11space.com/the-cost-of-launching-a-saturn-v/
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Starship is also the biggest rocket to have ever flown, with twice the thrust of the Saturn V! That’s using a fraction of their budget.
    - gibolt 3y ago
      As a bonus, Starship should be fully reusable, meaning long-term costs drop drastically to continue the program. Each flight could cost single-digit millions, mainly in fuel and employees.

cameldrv 3y ago

Part of it is cost: In the mid sixties, NASA was about five percent of the federal budget. Another part is safety: Apollo was extremely dangerous. There were a lot of single points of failure, three astronauts died on the ground, three more were very very narrowly saved over the course of only about ten missions. One of the reasons the program was cut short was the political worry after Apollo 13 of having astronauts die on the moon or something similar. This level of danger was considered acceptable given the mission back then, but I don't think it would be today. Who's right is a worthwhile question. Another part was that Apollo had superb, hard working, young, smart, energetic people working on it. The nature and ambition of the project just attracted top people. The context of the Vietnam war also meant that there were a lot of engineers that would otherwise be working on weapons but maybe would rather not, and Apollo was a very nice peaceful project to apply all of that technology to. I think you see a lot of the success of Tesla and SpaceX in the same observations. Both of those companies were super ambitious, and had a goal a lot of people wanted to get behind. Their competition was unattractive to work for, and seemed unlikely to achieve the goal of getting to mars/electric cars. The result was that they were able to hire some of the very smartest, hardest working people in the country. If you get a bunch of people like that together under a common banner, amazing things happen.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Part of it is cost The other side to this is we don't build rockets today like we did in the sixties. Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. But even if we had that know-how, we wouldn't do it the same again. From novel materials to simulations to communications and onboard computing, modern spacecraft deserved to be redesigned. (For the counterfactuals, see ULA and Arianespace.) So until someone (SpaceX) started eating that node-transition cost, we entered a period of apparent stasis. But that vacuum was energetic, and it wasn't about rediscovering lost knowledge, but inventing new kit.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >Yes, some technical know-how here and there was technically "lost"--I've been in North Hollywood scrounging around for old NASA parts so that measurements could be taken and worked backwards from. Oh, I don't know. I think we've actually made improvements in leaps and bounds over the "lost" tech. Our soundstage, green screen, and post tech has definitely improved /s I know it's not what you meant, but the NoHo reference made me laugh at the thought

bombcar 3y ago

I’m not entirely sure that we’ve actually lost it; is it really far fetched to think SpaceX could moon land- if not now but perhaps in a bit?

justinclift 3y ago
In SpaceX's case, they'd probably be the "but we've regained it" side of things.

aredox 3y ago

The best minds of our generation are working on byzantine financial derivatives, making social media more addictive, and turning fake pictures/videos/bots as realistic as possible.

passwordoops 3y ago
This comment deserves to be on the front page
- GeorgeTirebiter 3y ago
  It's only because of a version of Willie Sutton's quote: "That's where the money is." Capital allocation.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
analognoise 3y ago
Don’t forget the parasocial relationships they form with fans who are increasingly lonely, the new frontier in emotionally manipulative AI chatbots, and surveillance capitalism.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> best minds of our generation are working on byzantine financial derivatives, making social media more addictive, and turning fake pictures/videos/bots as realistic as possible Ten years ago, maybe. Today, I'm not sure. It's been a long time since I had that "wow, everyone here is ten times smarter than me" feeling at one of the big tech firms. And to the extent the system works, it's correcting. We're seeing layoffs on one side. And moon landings on another.
- adastra22 3y ago
  The vanguard of that just isn’t in FAANG anymore. That’s why you’re not seeing it.

dotnet00 3y ago

There's also specifically the difference that humans being onboard added much more tolerance when it comes to things like landing. Neil Armstrong was able to fly the lander to get to a safer landing area and was able to sanity check the sensor readings in realtime. In comparison, these landers have to do everything autonomously, the computer has to figure out where it's safe to touch down, it has to be able to figure out if a sensor is malfunctioning and if so, which is the one that's wrong. Similarly, previous uncrewed landers were not expected to be that smart, they just aimed for a patch of land believed to be flat and hoped for the best.

helpfulContrib 3y ago

[dead]

cobbaut 3y ago

Michael Collins' book Carrying the Fire proves that the sixties were vastly different to today. For example people died while training to become astronauts, because the training was hard. This would be impossible today; the first time someone breaks so much as a leg the whole project would be suspended and several committees would need time to evaluate...

marcellus23 3y ago
> For example people died while training to become astronauts, because the training was hard I don't think this is correct. Astronauts died due to equipment malfunction (Apollo 1) or from airplane crashes or car crashes. But those aren't the same as dying because the training was too intense.