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,"

Comments

Good to keep in mind

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Good to keep in mind

[wermske]

The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that the human population was reduced to 15,000, however, a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution (15 Sep 99) intimates that the human population may have dropped to as low as 2,000 prior to the Late Stone Age.

I've seen numbers for a viable gene pool for humans that range from 80/80 distinct, unrelated males/females to 660 with a ratio of 1 male to every 2 females. Biologists I've spoken to seem to agree that the 80/80 mix that seems to be popular on the net is simply non-viable in except perhaps in a laboratory with eugenic sanctions and cleansing of (suggestive) non-viable breeding stock which is a nasty moral/ethical rabbit hole this thread doesn't need to pursue.

Regardless, cultural norms (and quasi-taboos) that we broadly hold today would be challenged. Sustaining a village of 300-800 mixed age individuals in frontier conditions is vastly different than growing an outpost for a couple dozen adult professional pioneers from a modular deployment.

Fundamental values... the essence of law itself would be unlike anything we know in civil society today.

Re:Good to keep in mind

[HungryHobo]

I think you're only seeing one side of it.

people are happier, work harder and pull together more when they feel they're part of something bigger, doing something grand.

the race to the moon was just that. Something remarkable.

A generation of kids grew up wanting to be astronauts or to build rockets: something of huge value when so many young people don't really know what they want to do or be.

a bigger telescope or a some slightly better motors might be of more scientific value but they only make a rare few dream of being anything or doing anything.

Re:Good to keep in mind

[Lumpy]

If we spent only 10% of the Military budget on NASA, we would see most of science fiction become a reality within only 2 generations (If physics plays nicely)
Instead we dont even spend the amount of money used by the military to air condition tents on NASA. We value killing people far more than advancing technology.

Re:Good to keep in mind

[Lumpy]

Cheap is not the issue. each satellite launch can cost $90 bajillion dollars, but if it will turn a handsome profit, they will be launched. You think that DISH and SIRIUS/XM put their birds up there because they were told how cheap it was?

Re:Good to keep in mind

[houghi]

That is how I learned to swim. My father just threw me in the water. Swimming was the easy part. The hard part was getting out of the bag, but luckily babies have pretty sharp nails.

Re:Good to keep in mind

[silentcoder]

>In 50 years your kids will be a lot better off than you are

That is hardly axiomatic. Were the Jewish kids born in Germany in the 1930's better off in their teens than their Grandparents who lived there in the 1890s ?

Were the Afrikaans children in the concentration camps in 1902 better off than their grandparents who worried about the power of the British empire and moved away from it in 1838 ?

There are both good and bad times in history. Nobody has absolute control over what comes, but we definitely DO have an influence on the future. We can help make it better or help make it worse. We can play a role toward a future that is an improvement over our lives, or one where the freedoms and technology we have has been lost.

Every society comes to an end. Every empire falls. The great western empire is showing many of the signs that other great empires showed in their final days. It could be that the end of our civilization is close by.
If it is, would you prefer it be replaced by a better or a worse one ? History is full of either.

Re:Good to keep in mind

[Teancum]

There were private efforts to buy a Shuttle, including several investors that wanted to simply be permitted to have Rockwell International (the company who built the Space Shuttle) to simply keep the production line going to make a couple Space Shuttles for private industry.

NASA wouldn't even let it happen. They controlled the design and it couldn't be used for anything but government work.

That those investors were lucky because it ended up costing way more to actually fly the Shuttle than NASA was originally advertising, the fact that private efforts to get into space had been happening at all should have been a sign that there were better ways to get things like that done.

There were a few astronauts who flew on the Space Shuttle that could be seen as from outside of the traditional NASA astronaut corps recruitment process. At least one Saudi prince and an Israeli engineer flew on the Space Shuttle, as well as a few NASA contractors has some of their personnel go up too. Serious proposals to send private citizens on their own dime were proposed, but didn't happen and in particular after the loss of the Challenger all such proposals were openly dismissed.

It really should be seen as a sad statement of the state of American spaceflight where the first private commercial spaceflight crews were launched with equipment designed by a Communist country.

Give a man to fish...

[viperidaenz]

... 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.

Job creators

[br00tus]

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.

Re:Space program vs Welfare

[Taco Cowboy]

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.