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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
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 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.
Do I need to say more ?
Yes you do - you promised to
compared the stimulative effects of space programs (manned or unmanned) to welfare program
but all you actually did was show that more has been spent on welfare than space programmes.
not the same thing at all.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
... 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.
The flaw in your argument: you think the poor are only poor because they have responded to incentives that lead them to be poor. Change the incentives, and voila! They will make themselves rich.
For a lot of poor people, this is not true. They just aren't very good at responding to incentives, or making themselves rich. Turns out everyone is different. Some are not as smart as others. There is no reason to suppose a modern economy will provide a neat, well-suited "job" for everyone. The function of the modern economy is to eliminate labour costs as fast and as creatively as possible. Jobs are increasingly the preserve of only the smartest people.
Get rid of welfare, and you'll eventually find out what all these dumb people are good at: getting confused, angry, voting for Chavez, smashing things they don't understand.
Welfare is a bargain.
Imagine how many more benefits could the US have received if that kind of money was not used up for a stupid political competition.
Look at it this way ---- The US would have received a total of nada, zilch, zero, if the money that was spent on the Apollo program (or any other space program, manned or unmanned) was spent on welfare checks
The one spinoff that you guys have failed to take account of --- the brand value of the "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"
It is precisely because of Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon, it is precisely because of the WHOLE WORLD get to witness that particular landing, and it is precisely because of the combined AWESTRUCK of the human population from the entire planet, watching the black and white image of a guy in a very fat suit, bouncing up and down on a rocky / sandy surface, that the BRAND VALUE of the United States of America shot up !
The effect is tremendous.
Ever since the moon landing (back in the 60's) millions of very bright people emigrated from their homeland to America.
It is precisely because of those bright minded people that America leads the world in term of technology, economy and might.
America gets to be so strong not because of Americans alone.
Without new ideas from those who moved into America, based on their perception that America being the BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, America wouldn't be able to churn out so many wonderful inventions, from electronics to bio-tech to many other fields, and it is precisely those inventions and the value of those IPs (intellectual properties) that have propped up the living standard of America.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
LMAO.
Oh, wait - you were serious?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ridiculous. People did not emigrate to the US because of the brand value of the Apollo program. People emigrated to the US because the US was a rich country, which could pay much more than any other place in the world post WWII -- a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.
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.
a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.
If FDR was such an excellent leader, then why did the Second World War happen in the first place? He didn't have the power to stop things like the French leaders and Stalin had, but his economic policies (for example, state-enforced oligopolies, special labor union powers, clunky work programs that didn't do much of anything) directly contributed to US weakness at a time when that was a really bad idea. A strong US would have kept Japan at bay. And there were times during 1936-1938 when Germany could have been thwarted by determined intervention from the other European powers. r.
It was Japan's containment by the Western powers that led to it's desperation. It's an island nation heavily dependent on imports yet the U.S. and the West were shutting them out of the Asian market. And FDR's programs were leading the nation into recovery by getting people back into work. Prior to Pearl Harbor his and the United State's priorities were domestic, not foreign. He had inherited a nation that had gone isolationist ever since the end of the Great War. The Second World War happened because not only were the causes of the first never addressed, the post war handling of the European powers created a nation that was hell-bent on reversing both it's defeat, and the death spiral the reparations enforced had plunged it into.
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.
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