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What made Apollo a success? (1971) [pdf] (nasa.gov)
96 points by wallflower on Dec 18, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 84 comments



Lots of wise advice. It's telling that one of the most frequently occurring words in this document about landing a man on the moon is "simple."

- "Build it simple and then double up on many components so that if one fails the other will take over. Examples are ablative thrust chambers that do not require regenerative cooling; hypergolic propellants that do not require an ignition source; three fuel cells, where one alone could bring the spacecraft back from the moon"

- "Another important design rule, which we have not discussed as often as we should, reads: Minimize functional interfaces between complex pieces of hardware. In this way, two organizations can work on their own hardware relatively independently...The main point is that a single man can fully understand this interface and can cope with all the effects of a change on either side of the interface. If there had been 10 times as many wires, it probably would have taken a hundred (or a thousand?) times as many people to handle the interface." (interesting proposed scaling)

- "Generally, tedious, repetitive tasks are best performed automatically...but the entire rendezvous sequence was designed so that the pilot could always monitor the automatic system's performance and apply a backup solution if deviations were noted."

- "The single most important factor leading to the high degree of reliability of the Apollo spacecraft was the tremendous depth and breadth of the test activity...Most important of all, the tests gave us a tremendous amount of time and experience on the spacecraft and their systems. Such experience -- together with a detailed analysis of all previous failures, discrepancies, and anomalies -- led us to the conclusion that we were ready to fly a lunar orbit with Apollo 8"

- "Throughout Apollo, many discrepancies or failures occurred daily...the result was the same: The failure had to be understood and, if applicable, some corrective action taken.

- "Pay particular attention to what seem minor details, especially for substitute parts and 'explained' failures."


A lot of this advice can be applied without much additional cost, too!

Whenever one of these "engineering lessons you could learn from aviation (or spaceflight)" threads comes up, there's always a few people who come out of the woodwork with the tired old "LOL aerospace has infinite budget" excuse. Yes, some things in aerospace are cost-prohibitive to bring to your company that does CRUD apps, but things like simplicity, minimizing interfaces, automation and so on probably wouldn't cost as much as you imagine. That hot mess of 50 microservices talking to each other through 20 layers of abstraction and frameworks in your code base probably cost more than a simpler one would. And things like attention to detail, thorough defect analysis and so on are more of a culture change than something your company has to pour money into.

As someone who used to work in the marine and aerospace industries, joining a "normal" application development company was a bit of a culture shock. It took some adjusting to what passes for Quality Assurance, Failure Analysis, Robustness, Stability, in regular commercial software.


Any resources you'd recommend for learning those principles/standards used in more "rigorous" fields? thanks :)


OP’s article is a good start. For avionics, look up DO-178C, Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification.


Speaking from experience with software engineering which might not apply everywhere, but complexity is one of those things that’s often easy to point out and very difficult to get rid of. It’s often a form of organizational disease where a ton of people’s jobs are tied to maintaining or introducing new complexity - once it becomes entrenched, watch out. Requires good (and rare) leadership to pull out of this.

> Examples are ablative thrust chambers that do not require regenerative cooling

Now imagine that there’s already a team with a vested interest to make regenerative cooling work no matter what. The real puzzle is how do you get them to stop working on it altogether gracefully without hurting too many egos or careers.

I have a feeling that Apollo had a different culture in the early days that was focused on the mission, and these problems didn’t show up. This is often true of early stage startups as well.


Man. Moon. Decade. That was the goal. It was achieved.

It was a dead end. Cost per launch was so high that nobody ever went to the moon again. All that technology was special purpose and single use, not useful for much other than moon missions. Apollo didn't lead anywhere.


> All that technology was special purpose and single use, not useful for much other than moon missions. Apollo didn't lead anywhere.

To the contrary, the lineage that underpins modern computing traces directly back to Apollo and the work that supported the program. Apollo was a force multiplier in going from “adding machines running on buildings full of vacuum tubes” to solid state technologies and running higher level software that could control hardware.

Similarly, what we learned about building human-rated spacecraft directly led to the follow-on programs, some of which would become ISS.

Many of these advancements would be synthesized into modern defense, weather forecasting, and other technologies. The need for NASA to interconnect facilities far afield from one another was a huge force for advancing what telephony and telematics could do.

Apollo wasn’t meant to go beyond the moon, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t go anywhere. Apollo accomplished what it set out to do and became a scientific foundation for the next several decades.


> To the contrary, the lineage that underpins modern computing traces directly back to Apollo and the work that supported the program.

No, that was mostly the USAF, not NASA. At one point, the USAF was the largest buyer of transistors. There were transistorized computers as early as 1953. The USAF had a transistorized computer in a plane by 1955. DEC was founded in 1957. The Minuteman missile (1962) had a digital computer onboard.

And no, NASA did not develop Velcro, Teflon, or Tang, either.


I didn’t claim that NASA invented transistor based computers, nor did I claim they developed Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.

In the strictest sense, academia and industry developed all of those technologies on a practical level for some amalgamation of NACA, USAF, and NASA programs.

What NASA accomplished with Apollo was something that the USAF wasn’t positioned to do, which was to transform nascent technologies into platforms that went on to be commercially viable. Apollo straddled a line between what existed, what was possible, and what could be applied without compromising national security during the Cold War. Truly digital computing has its roots in Apollo as a result of the need for telematics and communications that could span half the planet and to the Moon.

There is some fantastic reading on the topic that may interest you. Digital Apollo is a wonderful history, and the NASA NTRS and NASA History repositories online have an endless supply from the banal to the executive.

Recently I enjoyed the coffee table book Core Memory, edited by Mark Richards. It’s a fantastic visual survey and light history of specific computers from the past and includes some of the USAF/SAC hardware, including an ARPANET Interface Message Processor, as well as the Apollo GNC. Great to flip through if you also enjoy viewing these legendary pieces of hardware.

Edit: I misread your comment initially; I see you didn’t claim that I said NASA invented transistor based computers. I submit that it’s a nuanced point, although I’ve also been long fascinated by that earlier work by (e.g.) Bell Labs, Draper, MIT MVL, and so on.


  > Most important of all, the tests gave us a tremendous amount of time and experience on the spacecraft.
Surely they mean man-hours and not aggregate time. Apollo 8 was only a year and a half after the Apollo 1 fire, and much of the spacecraft was redesigned afterward.


I think they meant aggregate. Remember that most of the people leading the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo charge had WWII experience. Safety was based on "at least nobody is currently shooting at us" and development cycles were influenced by the fasttrack programs during the war. Similar trends happened in other areas (motor racing). Those with wartime experience just shrugged off safety, accepting danger as they did during the war.


Completely tangential here, but there's an important exception to the Keep-it-simple-stupid rule. It's Admiral Rickover's nuclear reactors. He looked at all the options and decided that there's just no way to "keep it simple". He decided that his reactors will be what they'll need to be, and the operators will be extraordinarily well trained so that accidents don't happen. There's a well known Rickover diatribe [1] where he goes on a rant against know-it-alls who propose different designs that work only on paper. It gets posted on HN regularly, I won't quote it again.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html


"Build it simple"

I once heard a story from a NASA employee. She said that regular ballpoint pens don't work in space due to the zero gravity. So she said NASA got some engineers to develop some sort of fancy ballpoint pen that would move the ink even in zero gravity.

She said the Soviets just used pencils.


And pencils are famously dangerous in space. Graphite is a conductor. You don't want conductive dust floating around a pressurized chamber filled with electronics, oxygen and people.

There are lots of little health details about zero gravity, things that literally never come up on earth. Dust is a big one. Dust doesn't settle to the ground in space. You end up inhaling it. Graphite (also glass) is not the sort of things you want to inhale.


Yeah that's probably why the soviets (and the americans) used grease pencils instead of graphite pencils in space.

The absurdism of this pencil/pen lore goes so deep that even the corrections can't get it right. Seriously does everyone just assume that people in the 60's were that stupid?


It’s a compelling story that’s fun to tell at parties. These are often 90% untrue. Seriously think of any historic “fun fact”, it’s probably mostly false.

The reality is much simpler. Pencils suck for long term record keeping. Grease pencils especially. A guy developed a space pen and asked NASA if they wanted it. They tested it and it worked pretty well, so they ordered a bunch. The Soviets then bought a bunch too by the way! But yeah that’s not nearly as fun as “dumb rich Americans over-engineer everything”.


During the space race, it was actually America that pioneered drinking alcohol in space.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/13...


> Seriously does everyone just assume that people in the 60's were that stupid?

Most people assume history is about getting smarter and better; That bartering changed to trade with seashells because currency is smarter. They don't understand the supply chain, and the difficulty of obtaining enough quantities of calcium carbonate to construct city walls. They don't understand that people can't economize on things they don't know. They think /dumb/ is synonymous with /ignorant/. Some do learn the difference, but choose to remain /stupid/ by assuming past people were dumb, instead of making the best out of what they had and knew.


No, it's just a meme about how Americans are supposedly nerds who overengineer things while Russians are supposedly commonsensical manly alcoholics.



Yet they sold me one of those space pens in the cape canaveral visitor center in 2000…and it‘s a really good pen, works as advertised upside-down, and is still working. I like to use it when I sign important papers.


The urban legend is not that such a pen exists. But the part about the pencils and the part that NASA paid their engineers to develop the pen. The Fisher pen was developed using private capital, not government funding. It was later used by both NASA and the USSR.


You made it even worse by quoting an urban legend and trying to pass it as personal experience.

Also, graphite shavings are bad for your lungs and they float everywhere in low gravity.


This was personal experience, it’s really not necessary for you to call me a liar.



This document was referenced by Smarter Every Day in his latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU


This was a good presentation. I liked how he didn't pull punches, but was also friendly with the audience. It was an intervention, more than a confrontation.


Being an outsider he approached it in a psychologically correct way. To harken to mythology, it is the court jester who tells the king what no one else will say.

Not to say Devin is a clown - far from it! Much respect for him.


*Destin


I think he missed the point. His entire focus is the landing on moon as the only objective, and doing that with minimal features, which is logical if your goal is just landing on the moon.

US already landed on the moon, now they want a framework that will allow a lunar base, taking into account a mars base. With that in mind, you need extra features.

So I think his entire talk is based on a wrong assumption (and funny to watch from aside, as it is a bit headstrong).


His point wasn't anything specific about landing on the moon or even the details of the mission. At least not the main point from what I can tell.

He had the opportunity to stand in front of involved decision makers and demonstrate to them that they were not communicating well. At all. And that lack of communication made it seem impossible, to him anyway, that they could even come close to landing on the moon in the planned timeframe without some major changes to how they worked.


He chose poor examples that didn't help his point at all (from my opinion).

I didn't get his point, other than - copy the first landing, you have the manual - and that seems like he misses the point. Maybe I got that impression because all the counter arguments he reasoned were made from the apollo lens, but in the end I didn't hear any solid argument from him, only a "teaching moment" from somebody that doesn't understand the context.


What was really impactful for me was when he showed the comparison of the Apollo mission plan image / diagram and compared it with the current one. He didn't even say much he just silently let the audience look at the two side by side, and it scene speaks for itself.

I also think the fact that no one could answer how many refuelings were needed or planned for the mission warrants attention, as mentioned by other commenters.


I felt the same way. Also, asking for things to be "simple" is an empty ask because nobody is trying to come up with ways to make things more complicated on purpose. It is very hard to take action on such ask.

Going to the Moon/Mars is hard. Establishing a permanent base is even harder, probably orders of magnitude harder. That's just the basic nature of the problem.

And I also noted, most likely subjectively, a certain anti-SpaceX bias. Maybe it was just me?


I think it was just you. The bias I got was that of anti current contractors and pro SpaceX. I feel this way since he implied that complex operations, such as refuelling in space, were only planned because the SLS was not powerful enough, and starship will be.


The fallacy here is that we don't need a Moon base to make a Mars base in terms of infrastructure.

It won't make sense to launch a mission from the Moon to Mars until the Moon has Earth-equivalent industry, and refueling a rocket at the Moon is questionable as the fuel required to go directly from Earth to Mars isn't much higher than putting something in orbit around the Moon.

We can maybe gain some knowledge from a modern attempt at a Moon base that we can apply to Mars, but then what planetoid did we explore to gain knowledge in order to land on the Moon?

If we want to go to Mars, we go to Mars, if we want to go to the Moon, we go to the Moon.


It's pretty clear you want a moon base before estabilishing a mars base (seems common sense why).

The fallacy here is that you need a capitalist reason, and that is wrong from a multitude of aspects.


It isn’t clear to me. One is not a prerequisite for the other, they can be done independently.

Am I missing something?


It's the same reason we did a slingshot maneuver rather than just point a rocket straight at the moon: leverage.

Metaphorically, you use time as a fulcrum to exchange a larger total travel distance for not dealing with as much gravity head on.

If we want to go to Mars, it makes sense to establish a moon base that we can use to store fuel and other supplies. Rather than having to escape (as much of) Earth's gravitational field and then head to Mars immediately after, we can utilize what we've gradually built up on the moon.


I was under the impression that the aero braking greatly reduces the amount of fuel required to land on mars vs the moon, and due to this the Saturn V had enough lift to put a crew on mars.

If Apollo-era hardware can get to mars, why rendezvous at the moon?


Loved the most of the presentation but i felt he lacked the big picture, it is no longer about just going to the moon but this time we want to potentially settle and expand to other planets. Because of this we are not just trying to replicate how we went there but it is such an invaluable document to do what we want to do.!!


I felt the same. In the apollo program literally every step along the way had never been done before, and the problems were solved by smart people putting in good work and the result is that we developed a ton of new technologies and skills as a country.

He seems to be saying: don't try new things, keep in simple and just do what we did 50 years ago again. Keep funding the old aerospace giants (Boeing, Lockheed, ULA, and a hundred different contractor companies) rather than giving money to companies that are developing new technologies. This partially makes sense, since he and his dad and many friends work for those old companies and are probably threatened by the new comers.


He clearly implies that politically-driven contracts have made the launch system overly complex, and that SpaceX could do the job for a fraction of the cost with better results compared to the old aerospace giants.

He paused on slide showing Starship on the moon to drive the point home.


I didn't get the impression that he was saying "don't try new things". It was more "practice good engineering". He ask people how many refueling launches it would take for the moon landing. No one knew. The engineers responsible for the project couldn't provide a number for one of the most critical things that needs to occur in the next couple of years. It took a government watchdog agency to come up with an evidence based number. That looked really bad for the program.


We are changing how things are being done. Before NASA was responsible for everything and more hands on approach but now it is hands off approach with fixed cost contract. Because of this you can expect things to work the same way as before but that doesn't mean it is good to keep the tabs on.


The big picture is that instead of sending 16 moon-capable rockets to refuel one moon-capable rocket, just send 16 rockets to the moon.

You can build a lot of infrastructure with 16 rockets to the moon.


Wait, are they not using Starship to refuel? If they are then that's 1 Crew ship (SLS?) + 1 Starship with 16 round trips. Considering we don't know the failure rate for refueling with Starship, they might need 2-3 Starship rockets.

Actually, are they going to be refueling in orbit with crew on board? Or are they launching a rocket into orbit and refueling it, then launching another rocket with the crew to dock with the fueled rocket?

> NASA says SpaceX’s next Starship flight could test refueling tech

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38612585

> In 2020, NASA announced agreements with four companies—Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and a Florida-based startup named Eta Space—to prove capabilities in the area of refueling and propellant depots using cryogenic propellants.

Ah, it's first come first served.

> without astronauts onboard. Once that is successful, NASA will clear Starship for a crew landing on the agency's Artemis III mission, marking the astronauts' return to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

So it seems they'll use a Starship for crew as well?


Real Engineering did a video on the "insane engineering of the Space Shuttle: a couple days ago that is similarly interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcBc0l7IrZU


I highly recommend the book “One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon”. It focuses on the logistics, coordination, and innovation by the other 400,000 people involved in getting us to the moon.

It makes a compelling argument that the most innovative thing to come out of the program wasn’t tech, but rather project management techniques that allowed parts produced thousands of miles apart to mate perfectly for the first time on tight deadlines and the highest levels of safety and reliability. It’s also an easy read. If you like space it’s worth checking out from your local library.


I have been looking for similar recommendations so I'll definitely check it out - thanks for the rec!


Another book that I enjoyed on the topic - "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs". This also comes to the same conclusion that it was the systems engineering process that allowed it to succeed.


Great stuff but don't forget Apollo was plagued with problems.

- Apollo 1 burned up on the pad killing 3 of our best men. - Neil Armstrong's landing simulator suffered catastrophic failure, almost killing him. - Apollo 11 had several in-flight incidents that jeopardized the mission. - Apollo 13 explosion causes a mission abort.

And these are just the major incidents - indicated that low level failures may have been commonplace.

The achievement is never-the-less awe inspiring, and it's wise to study the blueprints Apollo team left behind. Those engineers are now out to pasture, nobody from that program is building the next missions.


I think you're missing the bigger picture - these are the failures that happened even with all the rigorous testing and procedures. Imagine what would have happened without these regulations in place. Of the incidents that seriously injured or killed astronauts, none happened in space. Of the incidents that happened in space, none led to the loss of any life. It's remarkable, especially considering manned flight itself had only been achieved 50 years earlier.


No, I didn't miss the bigger picture. But thank you for providing context.


In the movie "The Right Stuff", Gus Grissom is not portrayed in a very positive light, particularly regarding the incident with the hatch blowing after splashdown on his Mercury capsule. Grissom asserted that the hatch "just blew". The investigating panel countered that there had been done all sorts of tests on the bolts and they never "just blew", putting suspicion that Grissom somehow managed to trigger the hatch.

Later investigation found that, indeed, there was a problem with the way the explosive bolts worked, that they could "just blow", and for that reason, they were not on Apollo 1.

If Grissom had not encountered that problem with his Mercury flight, then Apollo 1 would likely have had a different hatch design and they may well have survived that fire.

Later Apollo capsules had a different hatch design.

They talk about this in the "Apollo 1" episode of the mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon".


There were numerous incidents and failures on the Apollo 11 mission, it's just that the astronauts were able to overcome them.

One rather terrifying one was nobody thought to put a door handle on the outside of the LEM. This meant that if Armstrong or Aldrin reflexively closed the door on their way out, there was no way back in.

I've been reading "Rocket Men" by Nelson.


For reference, these rockets were far from perfect. They had a very different approach to design and safety. Construction/fabrication errors that today would never be allowed anywhere near a human-rated rocket were accepted and dealt with. It was a different time.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/f-1-moon-rocket

"That's one thing we were trying to get knowledge on: what imperfections were OK to live with versus what imperfections are going to give us problems?" "Like with the injector," said Case, speaking of the 44-inch (1.1 metre) metal plate that spewed the propellant into the engine's nozzle. "There are hundreds of holes drilled into the main injector - all drilled by hand, too. And one of the holes you can actually see where the drill bit came down at the wrong spot, and the guy just stopped - you can see where he moved over to where the hole was supposed to be and finished drilling the hole. They kept that and would have flown with that engine. Those kinds of things were pretty neat.""

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/injector-plate...


Ebook (epub and others) version of this on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/what-made-apollo-a-success

This was created by a kind individual after this document was referenced on Smarter Every Day as mentioned by a sibling comment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SmarterEveryDay/comments/18aw4ca/i_...


Is there an automated process to take the OCR'd text from a PDF and make an EPUB like this or does it take a lot of manual adjustment?



Wow, this is a treasure trove. The thing that stands out to me is the idea that testing is the essential ingredient:

> The single most important factor leading to the high degree of reliability of the Apollo spacecraft was the tremendous depth and breadth of the test activity.

And the most valuable reason for testing:

> Most important of all, the tests gave us a tremendous amount of time and experience on the spacecraft and their systems.


The enormous budget doesn't strongly suggest that Apollo was efficiently organized, though it also doesn't rule it out.

One thing to notice is that the Soviet N1 moon rocket development was very iterative (trial and error based, perhaps somewhat similar to SpaceX today) before it was cancelled, while the Saturn V development apparently was more perfectionist or risk averse. Though the modern SLS rocket development was even more risk averse than in the times of Saturn V.


The project was optimized for shortest critical path to land a man on the moon and bring them back in the shortest amount of time.

It was not optimized for lowest cost.


Well, I was writing this because the PDF doesn't seem to mention "large budget" as a reason for the success, perhaps because it would be too obvious. But the Apollo program might still not have been particularly optimized for speed, even though that was the goal. For example, they possibly could have taken a more iterative approach in the Saturn V development, which could have resulted in an even earlier moon landing. It is hard to tell, because for such a large projects there is no good comparison class.


. . . except the N1 wasn't testable. Among other things, engine valves used pyrotechnics to operate, so they couldn't static fire the engines.


They did test the N1 rocket prototypes by launching them. Static fires are a much less expensive way of testing, but they only partially replace test launches.


And I'm not sure that that static tests would have caught the failures plaguing the N1.


Related - the Apollo Mission Reports make great reading.

https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-mrs.html


Page 71 has this paragraph on the Apollo Data Management network. I wish the paper provided more detail on what they did besides "assigning personnel".

Early in the Apollo Program, considerable difficulty was experienced in the exchange, standardization, and dissemination of critical data required both by and from the mission planners. In view of the interdependency of most mission-planning milestone documents, the need for coordination and tight control in disseminating these data became acute. As a result, the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office in conjunction with the hardware contractors and operational elements exercised strict controls and procedures in governing mission-planning data. As a part of this program, most organizations appointed key personnel on a full-time basis to support the data-management network. In retrospect, this action must be regarded as vital in consolidating and strengthening the Apollo mission-planning process.


This was the practice of 'configuration management' - I mentioned it in another thread but a lot of this is discussed in the book 'The Secret of Apollo'. It's a quite a good read and gave me a whole new appreciation for the practice of configuration management and document control, something that many engineers abhor.


The Apollo 3 disaster removed all overconfidence. That’s my answer.


I am not affiliated, but as a fan… Smarter Every Day did a walkthrough with an actual Apollo engineer on the rocket and it was absolutely amazing. Definitely worth watching if you want to understand what this engineering program was up against — it’s kind of insane what they were doing with 1960s tech.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLHIM2IPRY

Same guy also have one of the bravest talks I’ve seen in a while about the lessons of the Apollo program for Artemis, including some criticisms that I thought were deeply valid. Much to learn about Apollo from this talk as well.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

Thus very document is the foundation of that talk and I’m sure why this is ending up on hacker news, so credit where credit is due please.


Yes, credit was given previously. None of us would have heard about this without Destin.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38670760#38671309


3% of yearly GDP budget


You can throw N% of GDP at _anything_ and come out empty handed if the project is mismanaged. While true that the Apollo missions had the political and financial backing of the most powerful country on Earth it was by no means an assured success.

The point of the study is to look beyond the budget and try to understand why the project succeeded. What was done right. You can apply most of the same lessons to high and low budget projects.


> > by no means an assured success

In fact it was a failure, like everything space related failed to deliver the promised ROI, either monetarily or in terms of quality of life.


We invested in a project to

> I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

And got a 4x return on investment (we landed four men on the moon before 1970.)

And we did it because it was a hard thing to do.


Ha! Such an old trope... it's not even worth arguing against it. We benefited then and continue to do so from space exploration.


Citation please?


You know those Lunar rocks that were supposed to hold god knows what secret to the universe and reality itself?

Yeah, it turns out they were just useless rocks


So you insist on negating the benefits of not only engineering, but also science? :)

The question of what benefits space program brought to humanity is old and well known, I'll only remind of one of it. The modern generation of space engineers and explorers was born and raised with the awe of the Apollo program achievements - of man setting foot on another celestial body for the first time. Statistically many people working on space developments came to the industry inspired by the spirit of Apollo.


You are defending your beloved toys (rockets) and those who make them, but you should make a list of consumer stuff which we have today thanks to space:

I can only think of GPS and Sat TV but it's not like we could not find other ways to do it.

Namely some location system with Cell towers and sensors within cars and at the side of roads, and Sat TV well cable and terrestrial signal work just fine.

All the other stuff including the indirect benefits that people always love to cite could be easily achieved by throwing the same amount of money at basic research

At the end of the day this is about the very childish love for rockets, which is also very bizzarre considering that the odds of riding on one are so slim that you can only watch others doing it, also very unrewarding considering that you don't feel anything and you are trapped in a giant condom moving into the vacuum as opposed to a plane or a glider or a motorcycle or a bike where you can feel the feedback from the air and have a sense of relative movement due to stuff around you.


From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA :

    Year  $e6    % fed   in 2022
                budget   year $

    1963  2,552  2.29%  24,394
    1964  4,171  3.52%  39,356
    1965  5,092  4.31%  47,285
    1966  5,933  4.41%  53,513
    1967  5,425  3.45%  47,612
    1968  4,722  2.65%  39,737
So, more than 3% of federal budget (not USA GDP) during 1964, 65, 66, 67 years, other years less than 3%.


Cold war money




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