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How the Critics of the Apollo Program Were Proven Wrong
MarkWhittington writes "A recent story in The Atlantic reminds us that the Apollo program, so fondly remembered in the 21st Century, was opposed by a great many people while it was ongoing, on the theory that the money spent going to the moon would have been better spent on poverty programs. The problem with this view was that spending for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society dwarfed the Apollo program, that the programs in the Great Society largely failed to address poverty and other social ills, and that the Apollo program actually had a stimulative effect on the economy that fostered economic growth and created jobs by driving the development of technology,"
The next time we have a story about sending more humans/robots to Mars, can we all keep this historical context in mind please?
Sometimes the best way to help people is to help humanity move forward.
There is always a hidden benefit to trying things never before attempted beyond just the goal.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is this some sort of drinking game? Because, AWESOME!
Dog is my co-pilot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
you can do both
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The argument over whether or not money would be better spent helping the impoverished always comes back to the same basic question: Are we not spending enough to fight poverty, or is it just that the money we're spending not being put to good use?
Frequently, throwing more money at a problem doesn't solve the problem any better or faster.
The space programs were still a way to distract attention from poverty in both the USA and USSR.
If we throw more money at NASA, will they think of ways to build public housing projects for poor people in space? At what point does NASA become something more than a jobs welfare program for unemployed engineers?
The Great Society programs are, quite literally, bankrupting our country. Meanwhile, the advance of technology has afforded that even the poorest of our poor (in the US) has cable televisions, cellular phones and a beater car to drive.
We are going to assemble the best thought and broadest knowledge from all over the world to find these answers. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.
Imagine if we did the same today, to solve our problems. Then readjusted them once we found out what worked and what didn't. Read the whole speech, we don't have any politicians today who are anywhere near as eloquent. We are the generation of incompetent politicians.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I wouldn't consider any "moon program" a must have for a single nation. Maybe for a world-wide international organization.
While fighting the poverty, the illiteracy, the lack of food and water and so on, should be a must have, and a no.1 priority, for every single nation and for every international organization.
IMHO.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
So there just wasn't any other way to get this stimulative effect besides the Apollo program?
Well ...
Let's compared the stimulative effects of space programs (manned or unmanned) to welfare program, shall we ?
I'll take one from each category - For space program, let's take the Hubble Space Telescope
Including all the delays and all the budget over-runs of the Hubble Space Telescope, the total cost for the entire program (some 20+ years) came to about a whopping U$ 6 Billions.
http://www.astrophys-assist.com/educate/hubble/hubble.htm
On the other hand, on the welfare side of the equation --
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/04/20/welfare-tackling-the-fastest-growing-part-of-government-spending/
In fiscal year 2011, total welfare costs equaled $927 billion ($717 billion from the federal government and $210 billion from states).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/04/22/americas-ever-expanding-welfare-empire/
Just one program, Medicaid, cost the federal government $275 billion in 2010, which is slated to rise to $451 billion by 2018.
Do I need to say more ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Obligatory Neil DeGrasse Tyson clip: in my opinion, he hits the nail on the head. Mankind's progress is founded upon the nurturing of the vision created by our scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. We can spend all we want on programs for easing poverty, but when we starve our minds and hearts to feed our bellies, we mortgage our future.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6b4_1337136397
The real outrage is that as things have stood for the past few decades, the choice isn't even about funding science and space exploration versus social welfare. The choice has been whether or not we continue to lower taxes on the wealthiest of Americans, who have reaped all the benefits of our scientists' hard work, and whose bottomless avarice has been responsible for manipulating the system to make them even more wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
...should take note of this article. Every time there is news about India's space initiatives, there are howls of protest - mostly in the Western media, including on Slashdot about how we should focus on poverty alleviation instead of such "wasteful" expenditure.
In the long run, investment in our space program is going to pay off for India. Actually, it has already started to pay off for us - better connectivity, better weather forecasts, getting a greater number of young people interested in pursuing a career in science etc, besides bringing in money from commercial space launches for foreign countries.
The critics are being proved been wrong.
The problem with this view was that spending for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society dwarfed the Apollo program, that the programs in the Great Society largely failed to address poverty...
That's not true. I was a little kid at the time, but I remember Johnson announcing the "Great Society" and even then I realized that it would cause a lot more poverty. And I was sure right. What the author ignores or fails to understand is that the "Great Society" was designed to increase poverty, not eliminate it. It did exactly what it could be expected to do.
Programs like the space race improved a lot of things for everyone. Programs like the "Great Society" only siphon money from worthy projects, and make poverty seem more attractive.
I realize this will seem cynical, but I can't help notice that the Democrats' voting base has long been the poor. They benefit by having more poor. The Republican's voting base tends to be the better off, those not looking for handouts from the government and generally wanting less government, not more. They tend to understand that they actually have to pay for anything that the "government" gives them, and passing that money through several greedy hands in Washington before getting some of it back isn't very efficient.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I've often wondered if we could have shown Johnson the results of a fifty year war on poverty if it would have still been pursued.
On the one hand we've created multiple generations dependent on government with no clear avenue of escape. On the other we've created a strong voting bloc for liberal candidates.
While I don't think either of these outcomes was Johnson's goal it's hard to argue that the massive dollars thrown at the problem have achieved the type of economic mobility and freedom originally envisioned.
... and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and you've fed him for a life time (or until the fish run out).
Same applies to poverty. Give a bunch of poor people aid and they'll be forever dependent on you. Give them all jobs and they'll forever be a source of tax revenue.
This is the usual bullshit about how NASA advanced semiconductor and computer technology. About the only real advance to come from NASA was NASTRAN, the first finite-element analysis program. The paper talks about "space and defense". It was DoD, especially the USAF, that pushed semiconductor and computer technology hard. SAGE, the Atlas Missile Guidance Computer, the Navy's nuclear submarine program, and the various huge missile and radar programs of the 1950s and 1960s all advanced computer and electronics technology.
NASA was a consumer of those technologies, and in terms of units purchased, not a big one. NASA bought a few tens of rockets a year; at the peak, missile programs bought hundreds to thousands.
NASA was big on materials and weight reduction, and some interesting materials came out of NASA. But more of them came out of the USAF. At the time, much of that was classified. The SR-71 was a titanium aircraft flown in the 1960s. Lockheed's Skunk Works actually pioneered the use of liquid hydrogen as a propellant, although NASA took the credit. Heat shield materials came from missile nose cones.
NASA was #1 at public relations, and still has a huge PR operation. DoD and the USAF were trying to keep the USSR from finding out what we had. So NASA got to take the credit for a lot of stuff they didn't pioneer.
After all, Alan Shepard went into space atop a Redstone ICBM booster. John Glenn went into space atop an Atlas ICBM booster. The Gemini program used modified Titan II ICBM boosters. Only Apollo had its own booster.
The double-think which one has to perform to try to understand talk about job creators is mind-boggling to me. I can barely wrap my head around what mental gymnastics I'd have to do to buy into this nonsense. I look out my window and see birds flying around and eating food. They are free and need no one to "create jobs" for them, yet we humans seem to supposedly need heirs like the Koch brothers and others to create jobs for us. There was a poster in during the strikes and near-uprising in 1968 France (one fifth of France's population was on strike, de Gaulle fled the country) that said "Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui", but in this day and age of low VC investment, longer hours, boring work, high unemployment etc., people seem more enslaved to the heirs and their broken system then at any time - at least in the USA anyhow. In other countries they're trying to burn down US embassies as I type.
You used to be able to go to the federal government's BLS and see inflation-adjusted historical average hourly wages, but they removed that functionality, perhaps because it looked so bad. Here's a fellow who did it back in 2007, with links to the Federal Reserve and BLS data. As you can see, the hourly wage in the US was higher in the early 1970s then it is now. In fact, it was higher for the whole decade of 1968-1978 then it is now. All of this wonderful economic growth and job creation - what has it done for the majority of Americans over the past decades? Absolutely nothing. It all goes to the 1%, the majority of whom inherited it, if you're to believe the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, Forbes 400 richest list etc.
Political scientists, historians, astronauts etc. are also pretty much in universal agreement that if communist parties had not come to power in Russia, China, eastern Europe etc. in the 1960s, that there is no way Congress would have ever financed the moon shot. Sputnik and the advancements in science and engineering in the Soviet Union are what loosened the purse strings in the US - the Soviets were winning the Space Race from Sputnik up until the end of 1968 where they were still winning the moon race. By that time the USSR was busy with Poland and Czechoslovakia and the like and Apollo 8 did its moon flyby, the first time the US really pulled ahead in the space race, which was followed by the next important US achievement, Apollo 11. It took the US over a decade to catch up and finally surpass the USSR. Then after a moon flyby and landing, that was pretty much the end of any major space spending. I don't see the point of The Atlantic talking about ancient history - it's not like if the US had any leftover money it would spend it on a project like that, not that it has any spare money.
...and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming-always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again--but always trying and always gaining.
Do you think that matches America today?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Send all the poor people to the moon?
Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioned that in a Science Friday episode that at the time the Apollo program was the biggest thing out there. Every kid wanted to be an astronaut - or at least work in the industry. It inspired a whole generation to be scientists and engineers - that might be even more valuable than the technologies that were directly developed by the program.
Nowdays there's no such thing in the US. Instead the space program is big in China and a generation of science hungry kids is growing up there.
Poverty is an inevitability, not a social ill. What is social ill is the attempt to eradicate poverty at any cost -- since people's capabilities are vastly different, the stratification of a free society is inevitable, so 1) it takes a huge (and unnecessary) effort to bring the so called minimum standard of living to those that are incapable and/or lazy, and 2) the said effort decreases the overall freedom.
So if you do something poorly and something else well (maybe on purpose), it follows that the thing done well would be better by itself and not by how you did it? What a load of nonsense.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Less was spent by the USA on the Apollo program than on lipsticks during the same period.
To counter that argument, let's talk about what else society got from the Apollo program:
What else owes its development to the Apollo program, and how does it benefit society? Please, add to this list so we can rebuff the people who say money spent on space is wasted.
Hmanity will end. Deal with it. There is no way due to the itnerstellar distance and the amount of energy required that we would survive the travel, especially with the problem of gravity, genetic derive and energy make generation ship also unthinkable. And before you tell me there will be future tech : no , you cannot table present planning on the potential availibility of future tech. And don't get me started on the fermi paradox. By today's tech our best chance of survival even when the sun rip our atmosphere apart a few billion year from now, or when luminosity is too bad a few hundred million year from now would be underground in sealed bunker with piping the energy from outside, toward inside.
Which is why I'm glad I decided never to have kids. I'm in my 60's and am glad I never did.
The Apollo programme was wrong, in an ethical sense, because it cost every single family in the US $500 USD (contemporary dollars), where they had no choice in paying.
From the Atlantic piece:
"In an age that worships technology, when man is lost among the instruments he has created, the space race erects new pyramids of gadgetry; in an age of materialism, it piles on more investments in things when what is needed is investment in people; in an age of extrovert activism, it lends glory to rocket-powered jumps, when critical self-examination and reflection ought to be stressed; in an age of international conflicts, which approach doomsday dimensions, it provides a new focus for emotional divisions among men, when tasks to be shared and to bind them are needed," Etzioni thundered. "Above all, the space race is used as an escape, by focusing on the moon we delay facing ourselves, as Americans and as citizens of the earth."
Slaps down several core Slashdot editorial and American technocratic ideals all at once, doesn't it? Kudos to /. at least for talking about the Atlantic article, though of course it's presented in the context of how wrong it is, with the contra pov in the second link swooping in with the "real dope". But the key points in the examiner.com article are very poorly argued. That and its tone give the vibe of being written by a conservative think-tank.
I sure love the use of the phrasing 'proven wrong' to denote 'dude from a libertarian thinktank wrote a comment piece saying the Great Society failed'.
Were the American social programs in the 1960's just about giving the poor money for their consumption needs? They didn't have any long-term purpose?
Don't let Democrats read this!
compared to the cost of the rocket itself. High reliability aerospace hardware isn't something you can buy off the shelf at WalMart, after all.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Just think without the manned space program and the technology behind it, film and TV special effects wouldn't be half as good as they are now ;)
Also it wouldn't be so easy to identify and out the conspiracy nutters
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Even if we accept the article's premise(that the 'great society' collection of programs was a failure), the best that that proves is that some contemporary critics of the Apollo program chose dubious grounds for criticism. As we have learned(and, incidentally, only by trying) social engineering is one of the trickier flavors of engineering.
Where TFA seems to go off the rails a bit is the jump from 'people who think we should have spent the money on 'great society' were wrong because great society failed' to 'Apollo program: Vindicated!'. If you want to assess the worth of a spaceflight R&D program, compare it to other possible spaceflight R&D programs(or to non-spaceflight R&D programs designed to produce interesting technologies: variations on the 'well, set the grad students loose to do basic research' are pretty cheap...)
As with any sufficiently large engineering project, there were some side effects. Somebody had to build the thing, and certain technological advances had to be made or perfected to get it working; but the same would be true of building a sufficiently large bridge to nowhere. If you actually want to vindicate a space program, you either have to admit that you are doing it because space is pretty cool, or seriously examine it against other possible technology programs, rather than digging up some overt failure to run against...
This claim in particular lacks any objective justification. Were children not fed? Were they not treated for medical conditions that needed treatment? I the problem of hunger not less today than it was at.any time before 1964?
Someone who died for inability to afford adequate health care in the 1960s might disagree with you on whether the program's opportunity cost was justifiable. There's also the question of whether the same money might not have generated even more jobs and economic growth had it been used to fund non-moon-mission related scientific endeavors.
It depends on premises and goals in many cases. And, why do we seem so hung up on proving people wrong. Why not use the title "Proponents of Apollo Program Proven Right" and cover predictions that opponents got wrong in the body? Also predictions opponents got right and opponents got wrong (if any) should be covered?
We should take an objective look at both sides and use what they got right and remember what they got wrong to not repeat it. If this had a great stimulative effect and created jobs, maybe proponents can work with the poverty program proponents to create a program that both gets us further into space and helps with poverty. Getting both groups working together is more likely to advance both causes than trying to "prove" that one is wrong in order to advance the other.
Let's tack support for research and engineering onto Social Conservative talking points! Then our lords and masters will let us continue doing something useful!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's an open question which of no poverty or more Science should take priority. I think more science is more important but I also realize that no poverty will ultimately result in more science. Sure, going to the moon could have poverty erradicating effects. However, the focus should be on poverty erradicating programs (which might include going to the moon for positive motivational/engineering effects on poverty problems).
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
No brain, no pain.
What the critics were wrong about was not that putting a man on the moon is wrong, it's the nature of poverty. Poverty is a product of a class based society. Dumping money into an anti-poverty program is just money down a rat hole if simply enables the ruling class another day of existence. It has nothing to do with a space program.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I've never believed the line that Americans got tired of the Space Program. The Vietnam War was in full swing and that drew the attention away from the Space Program. Critics of the Space Program need to be reminded the US spent more in ONE YEAR fighting the Vietnam War than the ENTIRE Apollo project. What did America get out of Vietnam? Nothing be grief. 55,000+ dead, hundreds of thousands wounded and families whose lives were ruined. As well, the country was in terrible social turmoil. Kennedy was shot and his brother was killed a few years later. The Vietnam War aggravated the Civil Rights movement. With all the mess that was going on here on Earth, it must have been really hard at times to get excited about the Space Program. The Apollo program did something great: It made us look up. It inspired us and made us proud like nothing before or since.
That science stuff is all hogwash and just made up. Nobody ever went to the moon nor landed on it and global warming is a natural cycle and has nothing to do with gods creatures creating it. And Cowboy Neal never existed.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I liked your first post, and I like your rebuttal as well.
A few years ago, I saw a map of American oil imports that divided it into five regions, all substantial, only one of which was the Middle East. Here's more recent information cribbed from the FT:
Skill testing question: which of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria are in the Middle East? Mexico was also a large (non-Opec) source when last I looked. This is partly political, but also in large measure simple geography. It's 8500 miles from Mexico to Hong Kong, but only 5700 miles from Juneau to Hong Kong. The view is different from Houston.
For all the "eggs in one basket" people I'm reminded of the expression: The first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers. It might even be these same rats who shamelessly gnawed through an essential rope (who feels shame with one eye on the exit?)
There's nothing like a giant Mil-Space program lofting ugly bags of mostly water high into the celestial canopy to fluff a fevered planet's thermal blanket.
Ya know what? FUCK. THE. POOR. Seriously - you're talking about a vanishingly small portion of the population, most of whom are in that position due to their own stupidity or laziness. Are the poor the only people who count in this country? Are not the rest of us - particularly since we're the ones absorbing the cost of government - entitled to demand that government actually does some things to accommodate us?
Poverty is relative. No one has starved to death in the US since Jamestown unless they did something incredibly stupid like get themselves stranded on a mountaintop. Indeed, the poor are the most likely to suffer from obesity! Exactly what standard of living does society owe to people who, truthfully, are mostly a burden on it? Are not the people who are net contributors to society entitled to demand government provide them with some accommodations as well, particularly since they're the ones paying for keeping the whole sorry mess afloat in the first place? Government exists to serve everybody, not just the poor. That's what charities are for.
1: Most of that NASA no longer exists.
But the scale of what they did to get to the moon was an impressive demonstration of what Govt could do when it gets it right.
Sadly, politics seem to work in the opposite direction. (Which is what happened to NASA.)
2: Paying folks not to work works about as well as expected.
Welfare without requiring effort feeds the body but robs the soul.
Getting it right is hard and unlikely (see 1 above)
(For example, we have foodstamps because it was too hard to distribute surplus food from subsidized farmers.)
Not getting it right has and is causing a variety of problems.
(Inflation, loss of the positive contribution to society of a whole group of folks, entitlement driven politics, breakdown of social fabric, etc.)
3: Fixing it this November seems unlikely with the current choices.
It's almost like the everybody inside the beltway is addicted to the current situation.
One of the hungry people who were fed.
The exact same situation is true today.
Government taxing and spending for the space program may have been better than taxing and spending for Johnson's "War on Poverty".
But there were other choices.
Perhaps not taxing and spending in the first place would have been even better. Sometimes people make more efficient decisions with their own money than politicians or government bureaucrats make.
Although I grew a kid who loved the space program, as I've grown older I've come to see it as primarily a series of massive technical stunts intended to increase America's status (or brand image). At least the War on Poverty, as inefficient as it was, had a goal of using tax money to help citizens rather than using it essentially for mere national glory.
The government has a "forked tongue" in many poverty issues. They'll give you a loan to start a business, then they'll burden you with paperwork while running it. That's small potatoes though.
Far and away the biggest cause of poverty is housing policy. The goveernment will subsidize your housing, but they'll knock down your shack. When this was a truly free country, people built cabins and nobody gave a damn. You see stories in the local papers sometimes of "homeless" people squatting by creeks, and building "shacks" so strong that they needed bulldozers to push them over. Usually it's just tents because they know the government actually hates affordable housing. A decent house for a family shouldn't cost any more than $100k anywhere in the country (and can cost a heck of a lot less if you don't mind it being on the small side). It's the government that makes it costs more, and causes HUGE poverty.
"the Apollo program actually had a stimulative effect on the economy that fostered economic growth and created jobs by driving the development of technology," Apparently, money exchanged in private hands doesn't foster economic growth or create jobs. It must fall into a black hole of consumption.
I'm reading the Mark Whittington book about Mark Whittington that I learned about from a /. Mark Whittington post about Mark Whittington.
It made some valid Mark Whittington points both in the Mark Whittington article and the Mark Whittington book.
You should definitely buy the Mark Whittington book as soon as you can.
Considering all the Apollo moon landings happened under the Nixon presidency.
The companies that provide must have services for survival or education would have increased their rates to take up any aid that the government would have provided them giving them little to no benefit and the ones providing the services fatter profit margins.
If they started giving out $100,000 college grants, within a couple decades, all colleges would require $100,000 tuition to get in or close to it.
If they started giving people $50 a month that could only be spent on loaves of bread, within a few decades, each life of bread would cost you $25.
The same goes for any government aid program you can think of. So long as you don't stop the inflation of the products those programs mean to help them acquire, you are doing a quick fix followed by an eternity of pissing money into the wind without really helping any of them in the long run.
Giving money to the poor only really helps if you can keep the wealthy from taking it away.
You have to remember the CPU that were designed for NAS were the basis for the original PC's. The Osborne, Apple I and II, Commodore, IBM PC XT and the like. As soon as the average Joe had the power to compute at their desktop the IT revolution was on. Networking, to today's smartphones and cloud computing. Crazy stuff and we would never have it. Also of course there was tang, Velcro, Teflon and other cool things. Just imagine the cool stuff we would have and where we would be if we kept up regular flights to the moon. We would probably already be on Mars maybe even an colony their. I guess giving out entitlements gets short sighted politicians voted in long before quantum leaps in space travel and tech advances.
Paul E. Bahre
The Apollo program cost 98 billion in constant 2008 dollars. The bank bailout cost 750 billion. The Apollo program brought prestige, an increased interest in science, pumped up the economy and made us the most admirable nation on earth. The bank bailout brought us ridicule and disgust in the banking system and in the financial system itself. It makes me appreciate JFK all the more.
That sounds a bit like I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.