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Looking Back At Apollo 17, and Why We Stopped Going To the Moon (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: The 43rd anniversary of the mission of Apollo 17, the last time men walked on the moon, has elicited a strange kind of nostalgia, and no little melancholia in some parts of the media. These qualities are captured in a story in IO9 that purports to tell us why no one has been back to the moon in over four decades and why we might soon return at last. Deadline Hollywood informs us that "The Last Man on the Moon," a documentary on Apollo moonwalker Gene Cernan, is set for a release to both theaters and video on demand in February, having been shown at film festivals for the past year or so,
I was a teen then, and recall all the stories, the promises in the popular press about how we'd be sending men to Mars by the 1980's and have a permanent base there by 2000. It seemed like a time of unbounded, and in hindsight naive optimism.
Since I was not very old at the time I was not able to rationally evaluate those claims on my own, so I bought into them. It was the popular consensus, and I had no basis to reject it.
Now, as someone much older, I believe there is a place for manned space exploration, and we should do both things, but that our science return per dollar is far larger from unmanned missions around the solar system. We should be spending 5X NASA's current budget on that. It would still be a drop in the bucket, easily paid for by stopping the War on Drugs say, but in return we would dream, we would explore, and we would learn.
I want to see a pluto probe every other year. A dozen rovers on Mars. Another half dozen on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We have the ability. We have the technology. We have the budget. We waste more money than that would cost.
We could. But we don't.
The whole point of Apollo was as a realization of Kennedy's challenge of landing on the moon, not some idealistic moon research expedition. Early astronauts were prohibited by NASA from talking with scientists lest it give them ideas that might endanger the mission. The Apollo trips were extremely dangerous. Armstrong said they only had a 50% chance of returning to Earth alive. Support or Apollo was tenuous at best and loss of life was expected to be ruinous for NASA.
We stopped going to the moon because we beat the Soviet Union and they eventually collapsed. The space race was a dick waving contest with the possibility of learning how to put weapons in orbit.
The only reason the U.S. goes back to the moon will be because China wants to try doing it. Otherwise a moon landing is in the hands of the rich entrepreneurs who are holding their own private dick waving contests.
Unfortunately, the Vietnam war and its aftermath bled the USA until there was nothing left.
The Vietnam War didn't bleed the USA. It drove the wrong group into power: The feel-good, anti-science hippies got their representatives to cut back on everything that didn't produce immediate self-satisfaction. That meant no nuclear power, no space program, little basic science. Only when scientists managed to convince the military that something could be a good weapon did anything get done: ARPANET, GPS, etc.
Did you see the Apollo 13 film (1995)? Part of the setup was that the moon missions were already old hat to Americans, who had mostly stopped paying attention after Apollo 11 had achieved the big goal.
I'm confident that the screenwriters had pretty good access to institutional memory at NASA re events that occurred 25 years earlier, there would've been a lot of old hands still around.
Kennedy sent us to the moon for prestige. "Look at America, aren't we wonderful!"
Where's the incentive now. It's a huge expense for little reward. Any mistakes cost billions, lives and ... prestige. Compare the costs and benefits and there is no logical reason to go. Some country more desperate for prestige will go next.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It is depressing to me just how few people admit haw mind bendingly awful it is that we have not been back for what used to be a lifetime.
As to why, I can think of several reasons that nobody from earth has been back in this time...
1. Lack of political leadership globally.
2. There are easier ways to fill pork barrels.
3. The press in the developed world is in the hands of an ever smaller bunch of sociopaths who take pride in being unscientific.
4. The world is too comfortable for the 1%
5. There is a myth that if we don't spend it on progress, the money will be used to feed/house the poor and hungry.
6. Fear by the powerful that once people are off earth, they will become "global citizens", not just good Americans, Russians, Brits or whatever.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
In addition, the very first Apollo mission resulted in loss of life, and they still pushed on - albeit with a delay. Hardly ruinous.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Primary objective was to beat the Reds to the stars, back then it was them or us. When Apollo program started, USSR scored a number of firsts in the Space Race that demonstrated the superiority of Communism (not really but there's extensive discussions on all that). Whatever, Hugh Dryden suggested putting a man on the moon and there was already the Saturn rocket and F1 engine in development. Kennedy used his great oral skills, Johnson used his huge political power, James Webb used his knowledge on how to work the system to maintain budgets over a multi-year period.
Once we achieved a manned landing the race was over. What's even interesting is Bob Gilruth suggested no more Apollo flights as each one had so many opportunities for things to go wrong and lose a crew (and almost did with 13). Apollo 18, 19, 20 were cancelled to save money (wouldn't have saved much as hardware ready to go, crews pretty much fully trained).
There is the "What If" Gargarin never made the first space flight? Would we have worked on economic development of space like we are trying to do now? Dennis Wingo has some articles including past studies from those years after Sputnik but before Gargarin's flight. https://denniswingo.wordpress....
mfwright@batnet.com
I've never seen any evidence that the same left wing groups who opposed nuclear power opposed landing people on the moon. Those two issues seem very unrelated to me in fact.
Meanwhile, fiscal conservatism has always been the reason for NASA budget cuts in my experience. With a shrinking budget should NASA have kept landing people on the moon or invested its limited resources in other less understood aspects of our universe?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
That's fine. But if you want the American public to fund it, you need to justify it. Do you have skin in the game? Are you willing to do without in order to fund a trip to Mars? Or do you just want everyone else to pay for it?
Get the fuck out of the middle east.
This viewpoint is remarkably similar to the (very popular in some areas, especially Midwestern) Republican Isolationist view prior to WWII. It's not our fight. It's not worth spending the blood of American soldiers. Let's just stay the f--k away, right? And, even if history disagrees with them, they had a very valid viewpoint at the time.
Years ago, before I travelled more internationally, I would absolutely have agreed with you. We have no dog in that fight, right? Our meddling there has produced no objective benefits to the US. Fuck 'em, let the crazies fight over whether the Temple Mount, which was the site of the Jewish Temple of Solomon, before it became a Roman Temple of Venus, before it became a Christian Church, before it became the Muslim Dome of the Rock... etc.
But eventually I realized that this view - while prima facie correct - is naive. What if ISIS takes over the whole Middle East and decides that oil should be sold at $250/barrel for any non-Sharia buyer? What happens when the US economy spins into massive inflation because the cost of trucking every box of Mac 'n Cheese to a grocery store goes up 200%, or an airline ticket across the country costs $1100, or it now costs every driver 3x as much to drive to work and their disposable income goes down commensurately? And what if their success encourages ISIS to export terror to Europe and Russia, just because they can?
What if Iran takes over the Middle East and decides to reinstate a nuclear program that sets up a missile program capable of reaching Europe? What if the Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria is left unchecked and conquers ISIS then rolls into the hollow governmental shell known as Iraq to take over? Are you fine standing by if the Saudis take over the region and install a stable political regime founded on gross human rights violations (from women being unable to drive, to gays being stoned to death)? What about the legitimate political interests of all the voting American citizens of Jewish, Arab-American or Persian-American descent who feel they have a vested interest there?
The point being that - UNFORTUNATELY from my personal perspective - what happens in the Middle East affects the US a lot. Perhaps actively (oil prices), or passively (will you sleep well when women are stoned to death for not wearing hijabs, if you could have done something about it?). Nobody else but us can have a decisive influence, so if we want the world to look the way we want it to, then we can't be isolationist.
The sad truth of the matter is that because the US has the world's largest economy and the only military force on the planet with a presence that can truly be projected globally (e.g. we have more active aircraft carriers than the rest of the planet combined), we will always get involved because we have direct/indirect economic, political or (vaguely) humanitarian interests. Depending on your viewpoint, we may be the good guys or the bad guys. But unless we decide to radically shrink our military, we will always be expected to play a role, one way or another. The best we as Americans can hope for is the collective wisdom to vote in people who use that influence for the better.
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