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The goal is entirely different. Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia an

by 1970-01-01 11d ago

The goal is entirely different. Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race. Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget. https://www.planetary.org/charts/apollo-vs-artemis-spending https://www.planetary.org/charts/apollo-vs-artemis-spending

abcd_f 11d ago
> won the space race Some of it. Not first to the space, not first to the Moon, not first in human spaceflight, not first in spacewalk, etc.
- 1970-01-01 11d ago
  That remains a ridiculous argument. The thing about a race is you can always think of excuses for not winning. Plans for Mars were being met by all accounts, however Nixon still cancelled them because the Apollo victory was so decisive.
  - asdfasvea 11d ago
    Thats a ridiculous comment. The thing about the space race is we were getting are ass kicked, then said 'Oh the finish line is actually this. Oh look we kicked your ass " It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
    - 1970-01-01 11d ago
      You're supporting the USA decisive victory with this take. We are not disagreeing on the winner.
    - bee_rider 11d ago
      Actually, in Russia do they have a pitch for where they’d rather draw the finish line? I admit it is probably influenced by having a US upbringing, but “landing on the Moon” does seem like a natural finish line for a space race. The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.” Maybe they have some space-station based claim.
      - roryirvine 11d ago
        But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing, planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station. I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive). The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.
        WalterBright 11d ago
        > first living mammals in orbit And left to die in orbit.
        roryirvine 11d ago
        Sure. So you could maybe add the first animals to safely return from space into the list too - the first win on the American side if you're counting sub-orbital flights, otherwise it'd've been Sputnik 5.
        Teever 6d ago
        That was part of the mission profile, no? If it hadn’t been you’d have a point, but as I understand it that was a reasonable milestone to hit and to determine if an animal can even survive for a time in orbit before they risked a human life. Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.
    - deleted 11d ago
      [deleted]
  - rtkwe 11d ago
    IMO he stopped it because Russia wasn't meaningfully threatening to field a Mars mission. The end was always artificial and if the USSR had beat the US to the Moon maybe we would have gotten a race to the first "permanent" base on the Moon or spacestation or even a rush to Mars. That's the point of the "did the US really win the Space Race?" question, it's about how the finish line was essentially always the next thing the USSR hadn't done yet.
  - somenameforme 11d ago
    Nixon cancelled them because he was increasingly worried about a catastrophic accident and felt it could damage his political career and ambitions. Seriously. [1] If he only knew... Outside of that you're correct. We were already set for progress onto Mars. In a parallel timeline where one man's political ambitions, and myopia, didn't override the interests of an entire species - we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system, and perhaps already be flirting with abstract concepts of moving beyond just the solar system. We're left with our timeline, but hopefully people 60 years from now might look back at us more fondly for our actions of today, and tomorrow. [1] - https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-human-exploration https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-h...
    - teachrdan 10d ago
      > we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system This is nonsense. A trip to Mars would take a minimum of 6 months and could only be resupplied every 2 years. Mars has a tiny amount of water, virtually no atmosphere, and receives 700x more radiation than Earth. Mars colonists would be forced to spend virtually all their time underground working hard to keep themselves alive, being bored senseless because there's nothing to do for fun (besides electronic entertainment, I suppose), or both. Keep in mind that the Apollo program only gave us about two weeks of human time spent on the moon's surface total. In no way were we prepared to go to Mars after Apollo. We couldn't have managed a round trip around Mars, much less landing there and creating a permanent colony. The idea that we would have "parallel civilizations" not just on Mars, the easiest other planet to inhabit, but "throughout the solar system" is delusional. Are we talking about also colonizing Venus, a planet where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the wind travels at hundreds of miles per hour, and the atmosphere is composed of sulfuric acid? The sad (?) reality is that humans evolved to live on Earth and if we ever permanently live outside Earth, it will in all likelihood be in a form no longer recognizable as human, whether it's due to our physical bodies being engineered to withstand the rigors of life on a foreign planet or because our consciousnesses have been somehow uploaded to machines. I cannot enough recommend the book A City on Mars. It's written by two giant space nerds who are nonetheless clear eyed on the many, many, many challenges to creating permanent space settlements of any kind. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292-a-city-on-mars https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292-a-city-on-m... https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/18xmkp0/a_city_on_mars_is_brilliant_much_to_the_annoyance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/18xmkp0/a_city_on_ma...
  - WalterBright 11d ago
    The public had lost interest in it, and so the political support for more was gone.
- tekla 11d ago
  This is such a bad response. The space race was to get to the moon. There is a reason the USSR dropped any crewed lunar plans instantly when the USA landed (also they couldn't get the N1 to stop exploding) and went all in on satellites. They also kept the crewed tests secret because they knew they were behind the USA and was embarrassing. https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/comments/1apgsc9/regarding_the_acktually_russia_won_the_space_race/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/comments/1apgsc9/regardi...
  - orbital-decay 11d ago
    >The space race was to get to the moon. That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed. You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...). Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight. The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.
- JKCalhoun 11d ago
  Well, President Kennedy kind of spelled out the finish line. Although, to be specific, he did not say it was a race, but rather something the U.S. should strive for—even specifying a deadline.
- Ekaros 10d ago
  I have always seen Moon as absolutely sore loser mentality. Ofc they have bigger propaganda and infinitely more gullible population and lot more money to waste on that propaganda so mind washing succeeded. But in the end they(USA) were the losers.
- m4rtink 10d ago
  The Soviets scrapped their N1 after multiple launch failures & then pretended they never were in the race. You can argue if US won, but the Soviets definitely lost the race.
  - abcd_f 10d ago
    First Lunar flyby, first Lunar probe landing, first photos from surface, first Lunar rover - all Soviets. Crewed landing is a massive achievement, but it being the finish line of the race is the US framing, primarily due to getting beaten in all other firsts.
    - m4rtink 9d ago
      Sure, but another aspect of winning a race can be the other party quitting. The Soviets scrapped the N1 (like, they scrapped functional hardware, including many flight ready engines) and pretended they never were in a race to land on the Moon. They did start on many LEO space stations that the US had no good answer to, but its questionable if this was still the same race or a race at all. Many people expected the race to just go on - lunar bases, Mars, etc. Given that nothing like that really happened post US landing on the moon, one could really say the race was over the final victory belonged to the US.
orbital-decay 11d ago
>and won the space race ... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.
next_xibalba 11d ago
That’s like saying the goal of the process is the process. It is a recursive definition and a pointless, expensive endeavor.

abcd_f 11d ago

> won the space race Some of it. Not first to the space, not first to the Moon, not first in human spaceflight, not first in spacewalk, etc.

1970-01-01 11d ago
That remains a ridiculous argument. The thing about a race is you can always think of excuses for not winning. Plans for Mars were being met by all accounts, however Nixon still cancelled them because the Apollo victory was so decisive.
- asdfasvea 11d ago
  Thats a ridiculous comment. The thing about the space race is we were getting are ass kicked, then said 'Oh the finish line is actually this. Oh look we kicked your ass " It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
  - 1970-01-01 11d ago
    You're supporting the USA decisive victory with this take. We are not disagreeing on the winner.
  - bee_rider 11d ago
    Actually, in Russia do they have a pitch for where they’d rather draw the finish line? I admit it is probably influenced by having a US upbringing, but “landing on the Moon” does seem like a natural finish line for a space race. The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.” Maybe they have some space-station based claim.
    - roryirvine 11d ago
      But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing, planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station. I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive). The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.
      - WalterBright 11d ago
        > first living mammals in orbit And left to die in orbit.
        roryirvine 11d ago
        Sure. So you could maybe add the first animals to safely return from space into the list too - the first win on the American side if you're counting sub-orbital flights, otherwise it'd've been Sputnik 5.
        Teever 6d ago
        That was part of the mission profile, no? If it hadn’t been you’d have a point, but as I understand it that was a reasonable milestone to hit and to determine if an animal can even survive for a time in orbit before they risked a human life. Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.
  - deleted 11d ago
    [deleted]
- rtkwe 11d ago
  IMO he stopped it because Russia wasn't meaningfully threatening to field a Mars mission. The end was always artificial and if the USSR had beat the US to the Moon maybe we would have gotten a race to the first "permanent" base on the Moon or spacestation or even a rush to Mars. That's the point of the "did the US really win the Space Race?" question, it's about how the finish line was essentially always the next thing the USSR hadn't done yet.
- somenameforme 11d ago
  Nixon cancelled them because he was increasingly worried about a catastrophic accident and felt it could damage his political career and ambitions. Seriously. [1] If he only knew... Outside of that you're correct. We were already set for progress onto Mars. In a parallel timeline where one man's political ambitions, and myopia, didn't override the interests of an entire species - we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system, and perhaps already be flirting with abstract concepts of moving beyond just the solar system. We're left with our timeline, but hopefully people 60 years from now might look back at us more fondly for our actions of today, and tomorrow. [1] - https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-human-exploration https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-h...
  - teachrdan 10d ago
    > we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system This is nonsense. A trip to Mars would take a minimum of 6 months and could only be resupplied every 2 years. Mars has a tiny amount of water, virtually no atmosphere, and receives 700x more radiation than Earth. Mars colonists would be forced to spend virtually all their time underground working hard to keep themselves alive, being bored senseless because there's nothing to do for fun (besides electronic entertainment, I suppose), or both. Keep in mind that the Apollo program only gave us about two weeks of human time spent on the moon's surface total. In no way were we prepared to go to Mars after Apollo. We couldn't have managed a round trip around Mars, much less landing there and creating a permanent colony. The idea that we would have "parallel civilizations" not just on Mars, the easiest other planet to inhabit, but "throughout the solar system" is delusional. Are we talking about also colonizing Venus, a planet where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the wind travels at hundreds of miles per hour, and the atmosphere is composed of sulfuric acid? The sad (?) reality is that humans evolved to live on Earth and if we ever permanently live outside Earth, it will in all likelihood be in a form no longer recognizable as human, whether it's due to our physical bodies being engineered to withstand the rigors of life on a foreign planet or because our consciousnesses have been somehow uploaded to machines. I cannot enough recommend the book A City on Mars. It's written by two giant space nerds who are nonetheless clear eyed on the many, many, many challenges to creating permanent space settlements of any kind. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292-a-city-on-mars https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292-a-city-on-m... https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/18xmkp0/a_city_on_mars_is_brilliant_much_to_the_annoyance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/18xmkp0/a_city_on_ma...
- WalterBright 11d ago
  The public had lost interest in it, and so the political support for more was gone.
tekla 11d ago
This is such a bad response. The space race was to get to the moon. There is a reason the USSR dropped any crewed lunar plans instantly when the USA landed (also they couldn't get the N1 to stop exploding) and went all in on satellites. They also kept the crewed tests secret because they knew they were behind the USA and was embarrassing. https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/comments/1apgsc9/regarding_the_acktually_russia_won_the_space_race/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/comments/1apgsc9/regardi...
- orbital-decay 11d ago
  >The space race was to get to the moon. That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed. You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...). Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight. The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.
JKCalhoun 11d ago
Well, President Kennedy kind of spelled out the finish line. Although, to be specific, he did not say it was a race, but rather something the U.S. should strive for—even specifying a deadline.
Ekaros 10d ago
I have always seen Moon as absolutely sore loser mentality. Ofc they have bigger propaganda and infinitely more gullible population and lot more money to waste on that propaganda so mind washing succeeded. But in the end they(USA) were the losers.
m4rtink 10d ago
The Soviets scrapped their N1 after multiple launch failures & then pretended they never were in the race. You can argue if US won, but the Soviets definitely lost the race.
- abcd_f 10d ago
  First Lunar flyby, first Lunar probe landing, first photos from surface, first Lunar rover - all Soviets. Crewed landing is a massive achievement, but it being the finish line of the race is the US framing, primarily due to getting beaten in all other firsts.
  - m4rtink 9d ago
    Sure, but another aspect of winning a race can be the other party quitting. The Soviets scrapped the N1 (like, they scrapped functional hardware, including many flight ready engines) and pretended they never were in a race to land on the Moon. They did start on many LEO space stations that the US had no good answer to, but its questionable if this was still the same race or a race at all. Many people expected the race to just go on - lunar bases, Mars, etc. Given that nothing like that really happened post US landing on the moon, one could really say the race was over the final victory belonged to the US.

orbital-decay 11d ago

>and won the space race ... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.

next_xibalba 11d ago

That’s like saying the goal of the process is the process. It is a recursive definition and a pointless, expensive endeavor.