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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, ho

by 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.
    - bee_rider 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, I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up. Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw > planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station. There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.
  - bryanlarsen 11d ago
    Russia has the first finish line -- Sputnik. You can pick a successor finish line to diminish the American accomplishment, but Russia will always have that first one.
    - WalterBright 11d ago
      Nah, the V2 was the first rocket to reach space.
      - bryanlarsen 11d ago
        While true, the Germans don't claim that first for obvious reasons, leaving the Russians able to claim the first achievement.
        WalterBright 10d ago
        It doesn't matter what they claim. It's a documented fact.
        bryanlarsen 10d ago
        Bragging rights are about bragging, not about facts. Facts make the bragging easier, but they are secondary.
- 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 11d 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.

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.
  - bee_rider 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, I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up. Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw > planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station. There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.
- bryanlarsen 11d ago
  Russia has the first finish line -- Sputnik. You can pick a successor finish line to diminish the American accomplishment, but Russia will always have that first one.
  - WalterBright 11d ago
    Nah, the V2 was the first rocket to reach space.
    - bryanlarsen 11d ago
      While true, the Germans don't claim that first for obvious reasons, leaving the Russians able to claim the first achievement.
      - WalterBright 10d ago
        It doesn't matter what they claim. It's a documented fact.
        bryanlarsen 10d ago
        Bragging rights are about bragging, not about facts. Facts make the bragging easier, but they are secondary.
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 11d 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.