5 ms·

I just watched Apollo 13 last night and I have to say, I'm sad i wasn't alive during the space race - the very concept thrills me. But it appears that while we

I just watched Apollo 13 last night and I have to say, I'm sad i wasn't alive during the space race - the very concept thrills me. But it appears that while we have the technology to get to Mars today, we lack the impetus - something that the article addresses, but not wholly. We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. It would be more likely that we would persue a manned Mars program if we had someone to beat. As it stands, I feel it's more likely that a manned Mars program will be undertaken by the various commercial ventures out there than by any government.

uuilly 17y ago
Apropos: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/17/the_moon_we_forgot_97498.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/17/the_moo...
mechanical_fish 17y ago
We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. That's half the truth. The rest of the truth is: We went to the Moon out of sheer terror. In fact, the Moon trip itself was a side effect. The space race took the form of a race to the moon because "the race to the Moon" was a much more joyful marketing slogan than "the race to design and build the next generation of ICBMs that will enable cities and towns like yours to be destroyed with even greater precision." Remember that the Moon race was conceived in the early 1960s. ICBMs were a brand new technology. Everybody knew that we had to build more of them, keep improving them, stay ahead in them -- they'd seen the H-bomb tests. People who had lived through the 1940s -- Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Nanking, Bataan, Dresden, Nagasaki -- naturally found it difficult to have faith in human decency and restraint; they all thought World War III was inevitable, and probably imminent. This was several years before the Cuban missile crisis and a decade before the ABM treaty. But it was hard to stay cheerful when talking about the world's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals, so the space race was portrayed as a game to get astronauts and/or cosmonauts to the moon, and everyone had a lot of fun playing along. Enormous quantities of money were poured into rocket research, the military on both sides of the Cold War got their high-tech missiles and spy satellites and electronics, and in the end we got to watch some truly amazing pictures of people walking on the moon and feel proud. Smiles all around. A big win for everyone. But the Moon itself was a secondary goal. A Macguffin. The Soviets didn't even bother to go, and their effort seems to me to have been rather halfhearted. By 1969 they had long since achieved the important goal anyway: Better rockets. The USA followed through but quickly got bored with the actual "moon" part. The Apollo 13 movie talked all about that: Mere months after the first moon missions, the remaining ones attracted scant public interest. So I find the space race fascinating, and I understand the nostalgia for it, and I'm glad some good came out of the cold war, but I don't want to live through anything like it if I don't have to.
- jibiki 17y ago
  I'm fascinated by comments like this one, which relate a historical narrative explaining what motivated some event. How do I tell if it's true? What would it mean for it to be false? If it's true (which it is, presumably,) could you tell another story that was just as true, but completely different? There's nothing controversial about the idea that the space program was motivated by the desire to test military technology (indeed, everyone assumed this was the purpose of North Korea's recent "satellite launch" or whatever.) And yet the story being told here is much "bigger" than that fact. (If you have trouble seeing what I mean, here's an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624495 . People see the same facts and write completely different stories.)
  - smhinsey 17y ago
    This is something I recently ran into in another thread, and I didn't get into it there because it seemed too meta and unproductive, but this seems like a good opportunity. When we talk about history we are not talking about a binary system, we're talking about experiences related through perspectives. There is rarely an absolute truth to history, and the longer back we go the less certain our understanding tends to be. The situation is even worse when we start talking about motivations. In this case, the motivations of the space program weren't simply military, or rather, they were military to the military, but if you read about or speak to the people involved, you're not necessarily going to hear that. For some of the people, the moon race was genuinely about exploration and wonder, for others it was exploration used as cover for ICBM research, etc. It is very easy to conflate the motivations of the individual with the motivations of the institutions they are associated with, and this frequently ends up cheapening one or the other.
    - mechanical_fish 17y ago
      It is very easy to conflate the motivations of the individual with the motivations of the institutions they are associated with, and this frequently ends up cheapening one or the other. Very well put. It would be a mistake to see the space race as something which was "only" about military ambition. It was about different things to different people, and it grew more meanings over time. But, though there are a thousand different histories that can be written about any event, some historical perspectives are more useful than others for answering particular questions. For example, when you ask "how come the country was happy to write NASA a series of blank checks during the 1960s, but not since?" it's valuable to remember the military angle. In the 1960s the development of better space technology was understood to be a matter of life and death for millions if not billions. Now... not so much.

uuilly 17y ago

Apropos: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/17/the_moon_we_forgot_97498.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/17/the_moo...

mechanical_fish 17y ago

We went to the moon to beat the Soviets. That's half the truth. The rest of the truth is: We went to the Moon out of sheer terror. In fact, the Moon trip itself was a side effect. The space race took the form of a race to the moon because "the race to the Moon" was a much more joyful marketing slogan than "the race to design and build the next generation of ICBMs that will enable cities and towns like yours to be destroyed with even greater precision." Remember that the Moon race was conceived in the early 1960s. ICBMs were a brand new technology. Everybody knew that we had to build more of them, keep improving them, stay ahead in them -- they'd seen the H-bomb tests. People who had lived through the 1940s -- Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Nanking, Bataan, Dresden, Nagasaki -- naturally found it difficult to have faith in human decency and restraint; they all thought World War III was inevitable, and probably imminent. This was several years before the Cuban missile crisis and a decade before the ABM treaty. But it was hard to stay cheerful when talking about the world's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals, so the space race was portrayed as a game to get astronauts and/or cosmonauts to the moon, and everyone had a lot of fun playing along. Enormous quantities of money were poured into rocket research, the military on both sides of the Cold War got their high-tech missiles and spy satellites and electronics, and in the end we got to watch some truly amazing pictures of people walking on the moon and feel proud. Smiles all around. A big win for everyone. But the Moon itself was a secondary goal. A Macguffin. The Soviets didn't even bother to go, and their effort seems to me to have been rather halfhearted. By 1969 they had long since achieved the important goal anyway: Better rockets. The USA followed through but quickly got bored with the actual "moon" part. The Apollo 13 movie talked all about that: Mere months after the first moon missions, the remaining ones attracted scant public interest. So I find the space race fascinating, and I understand the nostalgia for it, and I'm glad some good came out of the cold war, but I don't want to live through anything like it if I don't have to.

jibiki 17y ago
I'm fascinated by comments like this one, which relate a historical narrative explaining what motivated some event. How do I tell if it's true? What would it mean for it to be false? If it's true (which it is, presumably,) could you tell another story that was just as true, but completely different? There's nothing controversial about the idea that the space program was motivated by the desire to test military technology (indeed, everyone assumed this was the purpose of North Korea's recent "satellite launch" or whatever.) And yet the story being told here is much "bigger" than that fact. (If you have trouble seeing what I mean, here's an example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624495 . People see the same facts and write completely different stories.)
- smhinsey 17y ago
  This is something I recently ran into in another thread, and I didn't get into it there because it seemed too meta and unproductive, but this seems like a good opportunity. When we talk about history we are not talking about a binary system, we're talking about experiences related through perspectives. There is rarely an absolute truth to history, and the longer back we go the less certain our understanding tends to be. The situation is even worse when we start talking about motivations. In this case, the motivations of the space program weren't simply military, or rather, they were military to the military, but if you read about or speak to the people involved, you're not necessarily going to hear that. For some of the people, the moon race was genuinely about exploration and wonder, for others it was exploration used as cover for ICBM research, etc. It is very easy to conflate the motivations of the individual with the motivations of the institutions they are associated with, and this frequently ends up cheapening one or the other.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    It is very easy to conflate the motivations of the individual with the motivations of the institutions they are associated with, and this frequently ends up cheapening one or the other. Very well put. It would be a mistake to see the space race as something which was "only" about military ambition. It was about different things to different people, and it grew more meanings over time. But, though there are a thousand different histories that can be written about any event, some historical perspectives are more useful than others for answering particular questions. For example, when you ask "how come the country was happy to write NASA a series of blank checks during the 1960s, but not since?" it's valuable to remember the military angle. In the 1960s the development of better space technology was understood to be a matter of life and death for millions if not billions. Now... not so much.