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What If the Apollo Program Never Happened?
astroengine writes "In a recent debate, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972. Between then and now, NASA's small space shuttle fleet filled in for space travel, but astronauts could only venture as far a low earth orbit — at an altitude much lower than the early pioneers reached. If there were no Apollo crash program to beat the Soviets to the moon, would we have planned to go to the moon eventually? But this time with a commitment of staying? Or would we never go?"
It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Without space exploration there isn't much point to our civilization.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Without the lash of the Communist menace, Congress would not have spend trillions to shoot people into space.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The Cold War and the sudden and unexpected advances the Soviets made in their remarkable early space program (thanks to the sadly underrated and largely forgotten genius of Sergei Korolev) where the primary motivators that led to Apollo. Without the strong desire of the U.S. to have a major "first" in space over such a military rival, it's very unlikely the U.S. would have ever gone beyond LEO. Unlike LEO, there was relatively little to gain strategically or technologically from a manned moon mission. It was mostly a nationalistic pride thing. Apollo was designed to show that the U.S. was capable of space firsts too, and everything about the mission--from its highly public nature to the planting of the U.S. flag--was meant to highlight that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I know Newt is just making vaporous campaign promises and that there are "trickle down" benefits for ordinary people from the space program, but if you are going to spend big to have new technology why not do something more people can benefit from directly?
- a national network of bullet trains?
- a "space race" for an electric car with the same range as a gas powered car and that can be recharged in under 10 min?
"I challenge you to name one thing that requires government spending that hasn't been debated off and on over the years. Oh, the massive Department of Defense spending, right, for some reason nobody debates that ballooning military industrial complex and that's about it"
Umm, liberals and others rally against .mil/DOD spending all the time. You are doing it right now.
Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far. How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending? Face it, we aren't going to the moon or Mars anytime soon. One side of the aisle wants to overspend on the military, the other wants to overspend on social programs. All the debate over taxes and discretionary spending is political theatre. Neither party is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to fix budgetary problems and neither really gives a damn about space exploration.
What's the economic incentive for private industry to build/support a moon base? Without government funding, what's the return on investment? More moon rocks? Mining what minerals? A good view of the ocean? Seriously. Companies don't really invest in altruistic endeavors without a profit motive.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No, the only reason the US sent *people* to the Moon was because the Russians had already beaten them to the punch regarding both farside orbit and robotic softlanding. Manned landing was the only milestone left.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Well, that and the fact that he happens to be campaigning in Florida this week.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Because compared to those two, a moon base is easy to achieve, for different reasons
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills"
- John F Kennedy
and we know a moon base can be achieved with current technology
and the Japanese don't have bullet trains?
Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far.
The idea of a more permanent return to the moon is something Newt has talked about for decades, and also pushed forward a bill or two on.
Newt has been really "into" space for a long, long time. I agree the timing of talking about this is pandering but fundamentally Newt really is interested in furthering space exploration.
How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending?
Here is where your ignorance shows. You didn't even finish reading the SUMMARY much less the actual story!
Newt wants to take some small portion of the NASA budget to issue X-Prize style prizes that move private industry forward in the goal of a lunar space colony.
When put the way he actually means, does it sound so crazy? The tax payers pay very little, private industry takes all the risk. It would accelerate the already growing private space industry but with a very beneficial focus beyond just "going to space".
Regardless of who actually becomes president this is a very good idea to support private space travel and to reduce government spending in space at the same time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The first & second south pole expeditions arrived exactly 100 years ago. But the third one was in 1956. The technology and motivations had improved by then.
It's seriously still a nontrivial problem today, it's not like riding a bike. In my mind, the fact that they did it forty years ago doesn't take away the danger and knowledge involved with such a feat but instead just proves how badass and ahead of their time those people who worked on the Apollo Program were (yes, yes, Wernher von Braun and Nazi scientists, I'm aware).
My dad worked on Apollo (and Mercury and Gemini and the space station and shuttle) while we lived next to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. He died a while back from cancer, but during his life, he was the consummate cool engineer: loved to solve problems, never said much, very calm, worked very hard. He focused on the electrical systems, and he just worked on it all the time. He turned down promotions, because all he wanted to do was be an engineer, solve problems and get the systems working.
So when I read your comment, I had to laugh just imagining my dad's reaction to being called a "badass". He would have loved it, and he probably would have even cracked a slight smile. He was one of the hundreds of thousands of people who made it all happen, and then when the money dried up in the 70s, they just tossed him aside. What a waste. But for 15 years, the space program was one point of optimism and hope in a very violent era. Yes, I know it was driven by military objectives, but man, was it fun and so much good came out of it.
The UK still likes to think of itself as a powerful country but it has a debt crisis that is worse then the Greek are facing while their spending is far higher and with a "need/want" to defend pieces of land on the other side of the globe. Yes, the Falkland conflict is back and the UK just had to sell of half its fleet but don't worry, they shall never be slaves or something.
The UK believed for a long time that the country side need not be ruined by efficient farms, the real food production could be shifted offshore and manufacturing followed soon after. The country that started the industrial revolution (according to the brits and who is going to doubt them) is now an industrial reject. Does it really matter if a sailing nation has its port cranes and ships made in China? No, surely not, all those workers can find different jobs, in service industries... any day now... jobs are bound to arrive in Manchester and Liverpool to replace those dirty smelly jobs with nice burger flipping and insurance sellling jobs... just give it a decade or two more, they already been waiting for half a century so a bit more can't hurt.
The economy is like a jenga puzzle with a time delay build in, so you start pulling blocks and think, wow I can remove whole sections and the tower doesn't fall over so it must be okay... and then the time delay kicks in and BOOM, it all comes crumbling down.
Take the Apple/Foxconn boycott discussion below, some posters actually excuse Apple for doing this because there are no factories left in the west that can do this kind of production... they might be right... so they are defending outsourcing as the right thing to do because outsourcing ripped production capacity that once existed from the west... godwin be damned but the nazi's put jews in ghetto's and then used the fact that jews lived in ghetto's as justification for the holocaust.
To far? The same story ALSO had people supporting Apple by saying that American workers no longer had the skills for that type of work... so you remove the jobs and then claim that since no Americans are doing those jobs, they can't do them anymore... NICE!
The UK still invents stuff but if someone then wants to produce it, China is the place to go and what is produced in China is copied in China. The top talent certainly still exists but the support base is gone. It can still be found in isolated places, that metal shop that can produce any spare part just from looking at the broken parts. That painter who can restore a 500 year old house... I seen them work. They are old men, old men working alone because nobody young takes it up anymore. But these are the kind of people that once could have produced the first steam engines, or build rocket engines from scratch. The Space Shuttle had plenty of production line work, just with workers who through the years became really good at their individual tasks. Now they are gone. Some retired, some finding other work but their skills are lost and no new kids are replacing the old farts, learning on the job.
The problem is that the economy is to fragile and small changes take to long to show their effect to leave it to the market. Or for that matter to politicians who can only see to the next election. There is a reason high speed trains were neither a commerical NOR a political project but rather the work of civil engineers. Goverment workers who could see beyond the next quarter and the next election and look for the long term benefits.
Leave it up to business or the politicians and you get Amtrak and British Rail... both disasters. A businessman asks"does it make a profit next yet" and public rail is about how it benefits the entire country (make the workforce more mobile, relieve congestion on the roads) not pure profit margins. The politician asks "if we delay maintence now, can I offer a tax cut to my voters" and that happens then for 2 decades until people start dying.
Move the factory and you can not longer produce locally, the workers will loose the skills and kids will seek
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Wasn't that more or less how the US went to the moon the first time?
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Most of our military spending is really about government contracts for private companies. A kind of stimulus package, except that to justify it we have to keep having wars and exaggerating threats. Not only is space is a much more worthy subject for funding, and if we tolerated even 0.01% of the losses we do for the military we could get people on Mars in a decade.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC