
Dreaming a Different Apollo - srikar
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/dreamingadifferentapollo/
======
InclinedPlane
In many ways it's really rather a shame that the Apollo program was
successful. On the one hand it was unquestionably a civilization defining
historic achievement for all mankind. On the other hand, the way it was
achieved was not something we should want to emulate: the political horse
trading, the management and development style, and the expense. LBJ used every
political trick in the book to get Apollo running, and they worked. But we've
been left with the political legacy of those tricks for the 4+ decades since
then which have been massively distorting manned spaceflight policy and
efforts without further Apollo scale achievements.

Unfortunately, the public generally only sees the good from Apollo and so
tends to imagine that the methods of Apollo were also good, and should be
emulated. They should not. There are better ways to run big, ambitious
projects and better ways to get back to exploring worlds beyond Earth as well.

~~~
BrandonMarc
This. It's why I just can't get excited about NASA's manned spaceflight plans
anymore. In 2004 there was a vision set out to go places, but Congress didn't
really fund it, and then the new administration took the lackluster progress
(due in no small part to lackluster funding, mind you) along with "not
invented here" and gave it the kibosh.

So long as manned exploration is subject to the whims of whatever
Congresscritter happens to come into power, as well as their feelings toward
their counterparts, their predecessors, the Executive branch, etc ... well, I
don't expect consistent achievements.

Ugh. Too many politicians simply view NASA as another way of getting pork,
boondoggles, etc and "delivering money" back to their own district.

Instead, I'm hopeful for imaginative uber-rich people (Musk, Allen, Bezos,
Bigelow, etc). Not all of their ideas will work, and that's fine ... so long
as there's a critical mass of them at least trying _something_.

NASA used to be a reason I didn't mind paying high taxes. Now, I feel
different.

~~~
roberte3
Well if the Ares I hadn't been a massive cluster*...

There were a lot of reasons, that Nasa didn't object to the new plan.

------
jerf
OK, so, yeah, we spend all that additional money and a few more people get to
vacation on the moon. But even from a scientific perspective, would we have
gained anything like proportional knowledge from the investment? The mid-1970s
simply lacks the technological infrastructure to put a self-sustaining colony
on the moon, and a non-self-sustaining one would be ferociously expensive. We
still lack the tech today, after all. What would be the point of all of this?

I've said it before on HN and a few other places, but this sort of thought
experiment just leaves me further convinced that rather than 1969 being some
sort of technological height from which we've fallen that the whole space race
caused a bizarre sport of technological growth that was not backed by the rest
of the tech it needed to be backed by to be successful. Robotics was
unbelievably primitive. Materials science still young. Medical science is even
today too young to support people in space (we are permanently hurting
everyone we put into space for any significant period of time).

The space era is in the future, not the past.

~~~
dismal2
According to your argument, technologically, we are never ready for anything,
so we should do nothing. Jumping into the fire when you're half way there is a
hell of a learning experience. So you would start a space base for the same
reason, the experience. Imagine what would be learned when you actually have
to solve the problems that come with living in space instead of just
conceptually complaining about them. I'm sure a lot of things would come up
that nobody has predicted before, and we would come up with solutions, some of
which might have profound technological impact further down the line.

~~~
jerf
No, that's a strawman. I'm specifically referring to those things we often
look back and marvel at: "Wow, they ran a rocket to the moon on a computer
with less power than my calculator!" and that sort of thing. We flung _core
memory_ into space, a ridiculous use of precious mass. We had no ability to
computer simulate anything, which includes many things in addition to the
obvious aerodynamics, like materials science computations and such.

The time that we're ready to start seriously moving into space isn't in the
indefinite future, it's about now, which is I think why you're starting to see
a real private "renaissance" in space (really the first time we should be
going with people). The space technology that we actually had the base for was
satellites, which you'd note we've made a great deal of use of.

And, well, look at what happened... we got to the moon, and, then... uh... now
what? Uh... can't actually _do_ anything. Couldn't leave robots behind, they
weren't ready. Couldn't leave people behind. Couldn't do much more than toodle
around in a photo-op moon buggie and bring some rocks back. Use your brain,
don't just mindlessly rah-rah space travel... we got there _too soon_. We
weren't ready to do anything except look good. We're finally getting to the
point where we can seriously plan on what things we might do, and where we
_really_ are is still building the foundation we need (cheap access to space).
We tried to bull ahead without building the foundation we needed, and that had
the usual result.

On the topic of not mindlessly rah-rahing, let me observe that if one insists
that the apex of human space travel was achieved in the 1960s, things look
quite dim. Despite superficially seeming to slag on the accomplishments of the
past (though if you look deeper you will observe that I've actually lined up
an argument about how they are in many ways even more impressive than they
seem due to being so very far ahead of their time), it's my view here that is
actually the _hopeful_ one for the future. We aren't in some sort of
inevitable decay... we just got too excited and ran too far ahead, and the
next 20 years ought to be great for space travel. We've finally got the
resources to start making it _cheap_ , something a corporation can do, instead
of "shows up on the national budget as a top-level line item" expensive.

~~~
dismal2
Current technology will always look archaic from the future, I hope in 20
years we get to say something like: I can't believe we didn't build our
spacecraft out of some kind of super space crystals!

I see things like the Apollo program as a massively expensive (and yes,
wasteful) R&D program. Private space corps, unless they reach some kind of
massive scale, will have a hard time justifying throwing enough money at
something for real innovation. They will continue to focus on getting
satellites up there a bit cheaper than the other guy.

The reason people (geeks especially) love to rah-rah the space program is
because it is a wonderful form of waste. Instead of bailing out a corrupt
financial system, or spying on it's own citizens, or building some kind of
doomsday weapon, we could have our Star Trek fantasy and maybe find some
really cool innovations while we are at it.

------
tsotha
Apollo was cancelled because after all the patriotic hoopla died down people
realized this stuff was far too expensive to be of any practical use.

That hasn't changed, either. There simply isn't any reason to send people to
space.

~~~
Fuzzwah
Except for all the unknown reasons.

edit: oh and the obvious humanity sustaining environment redundancy reason
which Elon Musk believes is important enough to invest time and effort into
SpaceX.

~~~
tsotha
I'm reluctant to support the expenditure of trillions of dollars because of
"unknown reasons". If we want to find something out we can do so far more
easily and cheaply using unmanned probes.

And what "humanity sustaining environment"? That's a pipe dream - if you had
the technology to colonize mars you could do better by building a bunker
complex on the earth.

