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The "moon landings didn't happen" conspiracies are, of course, inane, but they come from an understandable place. If moon landings really did happen, how could

by pfdietz 19d ago

The "moon landings didn't happen" conspiracies are, of course, inane, but they come from an understandable place. If moon landings really did happen, how could they just have stopped? There's a disconnect between the event and the consequences. The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.

m4rtink 18d ago
Yeah, if you read a bit into the the pre-lunar-Apollo era, the plans were sensible - LEO space stations, space shipyards and orbital assembly, lunar space stations, eventually a landing and a surface stations & resource usage. All gradual sustainable infrastructure building. Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P
- pfdietz 18d ago
  Those plans were only sensible if launch costs could be greatly reduced. It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.
  - m4rtink 18d ago
    Yeah, but I think it is all related - there were various programs to reuse the Saturn and other rockets, there are pictures of them dunking engines in the sea & studying what it does to them or even the rather insane concept for a giant helicopter for catching the first stage of Saturn V. Reading the early space program history it really looks like the consensus was "of course we will reuse those rockets, it would be insane to not do so". But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.

by pfdietz 19d ago

m4rtink 18d ago

Yeah, if you read a bit into the the pre-lunar-Apollo era, the plans were sensible - LEO space stations, space shipyards and orbital assembly, lunar space stations, eventually a landing and a surface stations & resource usage. All gradual sustainable infrastructure building. Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P

pfdietz 18d ago
Those plans were only sensible if launch costs could be greatly reduced. It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.
- m4rtink 18d ago
  Yeah, but I think it is all related - there were various programs to reuse the Saturn and other rockets, there are pictures of them dunking engines in the sea & studying what it does to them or even the rather insane concept for a giant helicopter for catching the first stage of Saturn V. Reading the early space program history it really looks like the consensus was "of course we will reuse those rockets, it would be insane to not do so". But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.