proslack writes "The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA's copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA's request to fund an extended moon programme.
What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA's wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years..." A nice little what-if sort of story that makes sorta nostalgic for a non-existent present.
...Vietnam was effectively the cold war. Rather than fight each other an an arena that had very high stakes (an invasion of Russia and the USA) the USA and Russia decided to fight in a number of "proxy" wars such as Vietnam and Korea.
And similarly, the cold war would have already ended itself. Soviet Russia while an interesting "experiment" ended up failing due to the fact that human nature plus the Soviet version of communism ended up with a government who could not financially sustain itself.
Would the Cold War have fizzled in the way that it really did, with Saudi Arabia flooding the oil market in 1984 and causing the oil dependent Soviet economy to collapse?
The recent bust might not have anything to do with his assessment.
The Soviet Union was done in by rampant corruption. Some see the previous administration as a repeat of what was going on in the Soviet Union prior to it's collapse. At a certain point, you need to reign in your own greed. This isn't just altruism, it's also enlightened self interest.
If you steal too much ultimately the system won't be able to sustain itself anymore and it will collapse. "Greed with no rules" ultimately destroys itself.
No, but history says [virginia.edu] you can extrapolate it twenty years into the future.
Business was booming when Warren Harding died, and in a primitive Vermont farmhouse, by the light of an old-fashioned kerosene lamp, Colonel John Coolidge administered to his son Calvin the oath of office as President of the United States. The hopeless depression of 1921 had given way to the hopeful improvement of 1922 and the rushing revival of 1923.
The prices of common stocks, to be sure, suggested no unreasonable optimism. On August 2, 1923, the day of Harding's death, United States Steel (paying a five-dollar dividend) stood at 87, Atchison (paying six dollars) at 95, New York Central (paying seven) at 97, and American Telephone and Telegraph (paying nine) at 122; and the total turnover for the day on the New York Exchange amounted to only a little over 600,000 shares. The Big Bull Market was still far in the future. Nevertheless the tide of prosperity was in full flood.
Pick up one of those graphs with which statisticians measure the economic ups and downs of the Post-war Decade. You will find that the line of business activity rises to a jagged peak in 1920, drops precipitously into a deep valley in late 1920 and 1921, climbs uncertainly upward through 1922 to another peak at the middle of 1923, dips somewhat in 1924 (but not nearly so far as in 1921), rises again in 1925 and zigzags up to a perfect Everest of prosperity in 1929-only to plunge down at last into the bottomless abyss of 1930 and 1931.
Hold the graph at arm's-length and glance at it again, and you will see that the clefts of 1924 and 1927 are mere indentations in a lofty and irregular plateau which reaches from early 1923 to late 1929. That plateau represents nearly seven years of unparalleled plenty; nearly seven years during which men an women might be disillusioned about politics and religion and love, but believed that at the end of the rainbow there was at least a pot of negotiable legal tender consisting of the profits of American industry and American salesmanship; nearly seven years during which the businessman was, as Stuart Chase put it, "the dictator of our destinies," ousting "the statesman, the priest, the philosopher, as the creator of standards of ethics and behavior" and becoming "the final authority on the conduct of American society." For nearly seven years, the prosperity band-wagon rolled down Main Street.
The book chronicles a real estate boom (like our generation had a few years ago) and the aforementioned stock market boom. The similarities between that time and ours, economically and sociologically, are astounding.
Give us another fifteen to twenty five years and our economy will be ok, most likely.
In view of what was about to happen, it is enlightening to recall how things looked at this juncture to the financial prophets, those gentlemen whose wizardly reputations were based upon their supposed ability to examine a set of graphs brought to them by a statistician and discover, from the relation of curve to curve and index to index, whether things were going to get better or worse. Their opinions differed, of course; there never has been a moment when the best financial opinion was unanimous. In examining these opinions, and the outgivings of eminent bankers, it must furthermore be acknowledged that a bullish statement cannot always be taken at its face value: few men like to assume the responsibility of spreading alarm by making dire predictions, nor is a banker with unsold securities on his hands likely to say anything which will make it more difficult to dispose of them, unquiet as his private mind may be. Finally, one must admit that prophecy is at best the most hazardous of occupations. Nevertheless, the general state of financial opinion in October, 1929, makes an instructive contrast with that in February and March, 1928, when, as we have seen, the skies had not appeared any too brig
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday July 16, @12:30PM (#28719445)
You're assuming what O is turning our country into resembles anything like Capitalism. Just like Soviet Russia, we're moving towards Socialism.
No, dumbshit, not just like "Soviet Russia". (It's just Russia now, FYI)
There's a whole spectrum between unbridled capitalism and total socialism. When a 12 trillion dollar economy cannot provide basic health care to all (no, ER visits don't count) there's a goddamned problem.
As we've recently seen, unchecked capitalism is not a good thing since the markets aren't rational after all. And as we've seen with USSR in the past, that doesn't work either. I see no problem emulating nations like Canada, New Zealand, or Sweden. Hell, I've got friends in South America with better basic health care for the poor than we have here in the states.
What is the base purpose? For a few to accumulate much, live high, while others endure hardship, or for most to live OK ( with enough security so they don't just die from lack of basic necessities ( food, basic healthcare ) ) but with enough insecurity to incentive hard work and production, and still a few ( and probably more, since the "feeding ground" would be larger ) wealthy living high?
If the economy only has the purpose of remaking the aristocracy and serf conditions of long ago, then I am at a lose as to why the many should participate. CEO's get away with "what is in it for me". What is in it for those "less than" the CEO's?
So, why? Because people are more important than money.
So, why? Because people are more important than money.
That's a nice platitude, but what about people that fuck up their own bodies? Smokers, the obese, heroin addicts... socialized healthcare for the lot of them! And of course once you accept that, then people will start to look at the books and say, "Wow, smokers are expensive!" and then the government will tell you that you can't smoke. Oh, and you can't be fat because fat people are the next line item. Oh, and now you can't ride a motorcycle because motorcycle injuries are our largest ER expense...
Socialized healthcare isn't going to be a panacea, and it's not possible to provide it in unlimited amounts to everyone. Right now cost is the main mediator - with a government pay system it will be government bean counters making rules. Maybe you see one or the other as morally superior, but I can't agree with you. Denying a kidney to a person because they are too old is not morally superior to denying a kidney to someone because they are too poor - either way someone isn't getting a kidney.
All that said, we actually have socialized health care right now, but it's expensive and based around the ER. I'm all for changing the way we pay for basic services to reduce costs... I just don't have any grand expectations.
Just like Soviet Russia, we're moving towards Socialism.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Mantoya
Sorry, but remarks like this also reminds me Major Frank Burns - "When are you two going to learn about Chinese treachery? Did Pearl Harbor teach you nothing?"
Interesting, maybe, but incorrect. The US first got involved in VietNam in the fifties, before the first Cosmonaut reached space. We landed on the moon in 1969, only four years before we stopped bombing North Vietnam (I was stationed in Thailand then and saw the last B-52 leave Utapao to drop the last bomb).
The cold war ended during the Reagan Presidency and had nothing to do with rocket development; it was economics that stopped the cold war, the USSR went broke. If you have a Saturn V rocket that can get to the moon and back, an ICBM is trivial by comparison.
The whole thing was fueled by the ongoing Cold War pissing contest. Continuation of the space race would have meant dealing with the ever-increasing tension of the Cold War. So I'm sad we never got our cities on the moon, but it's a damn good trade-off for not having to worry so much about all-out nuclear war.
If we'd continued the Apollo missions, we'd have found either:
1) That there was indeed a prehistoric alien civilization on the backside of the moon. 2) That it was almost impossible to hide the continued war between advanced US and Russian spaceships on the backside of the moon. 3) There was indeed a better alternative to space icecream.
It's hard to imagine Cold War tensions getting much higher than they actually did. If we'd continued the "space race" (treated the race as a marathon rather than a sprint, so to speak) we'd simply have substituted one form of competition with the Soviets for another -- and you know, seeing who could build the most space stations and Lunar colonies would have been a much better form of competition than seeing who could blow each other up the most times over.
We could have built half the military-industrial complex we did, still had more than enough for MAD, and put the money into NASA. The USSR would almost surely still have collapsed, and today we'd have an American solar system instead of a bunch of missiles and silos that we're not sure what to do with.
Highly likely that: 1) We would have full time orbital manned space station at all times. 2) Visits between Moon and Orbital station would be LESS frequent. 3) Visits between Moon and Earth would be MORE frequent. (because Apollo lifts off from Earth. Public-Private partnership would see to it that NASA doesn't use the most economical way of transport) 4) No Space Shuttle. Rockets all the way. (Why mess with something that works) 5) Ion Spacecraft launched to Asteroids. 6) Still no man on Mars. But a permanent computerized research station on Mars that operates from fixed locations. 7) No Mars Rover. The Rover was a roaming answer. Fixed stations would necessitate no rover. 8) SALT II would have long been abandoned and Earth would be surrounded by nuke armed stations. 9) No Cruise missiles. Why build a Mosquito when an Elephant would be cheaper.
4) No Space Shuttle. Rockets all the way. (Why mess with something that works)
We would have a space shuttle. It simply wouldn't be the "jack of all trades, master of none" we got.
The space shuttle was supposed to be a lightweight launch craft for transporting people to/from LEO where they could rendezvous with a space station and take a transport to a location like the moon. Economically, it made a lot of sense. It would have been fairly simple, cheap to operate, and with fewer disposable parts than the Saturn V. (Which basically throws away millions of pounds of hardware to return barely a few tons of mass. Very wasteful.)
So what went wrong?
Obviously, the same politics that killed the moon program. Nixon told NASA that they could have one launch vehicle, and the Saturn V was too expensive to be "it". Oh, and they needed to meet the military's needs for a launch vehicle as well, because the Titan rockets were also too expensive.
NASA got out their abacuses, ran some numbers, decided that the shuttle was key to a future space station, and committed to producing a super-shuttle that could be all things to all people. After all, they had the technology, right? Right?
Well, sort of. The engineers did an amazing job of producing the most sophisticated piece of space equipment ever designed. The power curves were incredible and the engines left the Saturn V in the dust. Only problem: It was a hellva lot of mass to send up and bring back, leaving little room for cargo. Worse yet, it was so complex that maintenance costs were through the roof. In the end, it would have been cheaper to continue operating the Saturn V with the economics of scale resulting in MORE cost reductions than the Shuttle ever realized!
What I'm getting at is that if we're going to play along with this dream-world where politics don't kill off programs, we'd have the Saturn V, the space shuttle, the space station (with artificial gravity!), and transport tugs originally envisioned by NASA. Because all those pieces have to fit together to make this mythical lunar base of 5,000 people possible.
Back here in reality, all those ideas were doomed from the beginning. The politicians only ever supported the space program to combat the USSR. By the 1970's, the Soviet Union had already collapsed. They were just coasting on momentum from there on out. That's why (save for a push by Regan to push the USSR to the brink of bankruptcy) the space program never recovered. There was no political need. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows that there has to be a need commiserate with size of the solution before there will be a large commitment. Hopes, dreams, and peaceful exploration ala Star Trek just don't cut it.:-(
By artificial gravity, I assume you mean using rotation to produce centrifugal force? I just don't see that being likely until we have a more efficient way than rockets to get material into space, or possible until we have a way to mine and refine metal from space.
Human physiology limits you to 2 RPM, any higher than this and motion sickness becomes very common. That means that to get a full G of apparent gravity, you need a station with a radius of nearly 225 meters. Obviously, you could probably make do with less than a full G. How much less while still maintaining muscle mass and bone density is an unanswered question so far. If a half G is enough, you're in a much better situation, the radius would only have to be 110 meters. If you don't care about everyone not getting motion sickness you could probably up the RPMs to 4, getting the radius down to 28 meters. Of course, that means that your head will be under 10% less force than your feet, which I imagine might take some getting used to.
Pedantic nit: they used slide rules back then. Abacuses (the electronic ones that use bits for balls that you have on your desk) were for heavy-duty computations.
It's not ironic at all. NASA made an economic misstep by developing the Shuttle. The economics of launch vehicles favor the inline stack with smaller boosters for man-rated vehicles and larger boosters for cargo. Ne'er the two shall meet.
In absence of a clear need for a space station as a rendezvous point, taking a step backwards to more sophisticated capsules is how you get back on track for economic success.
First, your numbers for the shuttle are flat out wrong. You forgot to account for the thrust from the SRBs. Second, your numbers for the SatV are missing. Third, the F-1 and the SSMEs are not comparable. The F-1 == SRB and the SSME == J2. Look them both up and you'll find that the shuttle is WAY more powerful on a per-engine basis.
Here are some corrected numbers:
Saturn V
Thrust: 34.02 MN Mass: 3,038,500 kg Thrust to weight ratio: 11.19:1
Shuttle
Thrust: 30.45MN Mass: 2,030,000 kg Thrust to weight ratio: 15:1
As you can see, the shuttle has 34% more power for its weight than the Saturn V. This is more than sufficient to accomplish the liftoff goals. The SRBs are actually shaped internally to REDUCE thrust during flight to prevent overstressing of the Shuttle hardware. The idea is to get up to Max-Q as quickly and smoothly as possible, then throttle back until the thickest part of the atmosphere is cleared.
There's a reason why the cosmonauts always like hitching a ride on the shuttle. As launch vehicles go, it's a really nice ride both on the way up and on the way down.;-)
8) SALT II would have long been abandoned and Earth would be surrounded by nuke armed stations. 9) No Cruise missiles. Why build a Mosquito when an Elephant would be cheaper.
Read up on the Revolt of the Admirals [wikipedia.org] sometime. There's a good reason why we have cruise missiles and not nukes. It's not for want of orbital platforms.
I don't see the connection between rocket development, moon exploration, and SALT II. Reagan would still have been a nuclear abolitionist, his meetings with Gorbachev would still have discussed the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, maybe even more so if there had ever been nuclear bases in space.
To me it's sad that what seems like a very plausible counterfactual of what would have happend had congress not hamstrung NASA in the late 1960s is now a work of science fiction. Then again, all is not
The rate of spending was unsustainable; we simply could not afford it, no matter how useful the research outputs might have been. On a more prosaic level, once the Cold War posturing had been successfully implemented, the political benefits would be virtually zero - even if the science would be extremely valuable.
I'd say the increases in spending have continued, pretty much unabated. It's just that the government has found other, arguably less productive, stuff to spend that money on.
Had we spent more on Apollo, we would have had more stuff on the moon. It is much less clear, though, that the economic relevance of doing so would have been any brighter than it is now.
TFA presents a fairly rosy picture, where lifting stuff, including vationers, out of Earth's gravity is routine and (relatively) cheap. Presumably, more Apollo would have driven some cost reduction; but that much?
TFA's predictions of bustling free markets on the moon seem even less plausible. With the possible exception of helium-3, the moon contains basically nothing worth shipping back to earth. Exploiting lunar resources really only makes sense to support lunar research activities(like big huge telescopes on the dark side) which might be "private" in the sense of "conducted by people not directly employed by the feds"; but would be largely publicly supported basic research stuff.
So is the earth (it is the 7th most abundant metal). Titanium is expensive because it is expensive to refine. Wikipedia indicates that more titanium dioxide is produced than titanium metal (the dioxide is used as a white pigment) and that current reserves are on the order of about 120 years of current production:
The Secret studios in Nevada where they faked the moon landings would be really busy, they would be having to fake not only the moon bases, but the Mars landings and the bases there as well.
Because we never made it past low earth orbit.
The Above thread is sarcastic, if you hadn't noticed.
what i mean is, just going out there just to have a look-see isn't a valid reason to spend quadrillions. we need to
1. discover an alien race, or 2. be faced with the definitive soon upcoming extinction of earth as a supportive biosphere for some reason, whether man made or cosmic or terrestrial in origin, or 3. discover some fantastic energy source or resource out there (or drug... spice?) 4. more tribal chest thumping and grandstanding a la the cold war etc.
these are reasons that are easy to grasp and easily capture the attention and the imagination of all. this provides the political and cultural and popular compunction to spend large sums of cash on the endeavour
sure, there are lots of reasons to go out there right now. except they are all amorphous and ill-defined and longwinded. something pressing and urgent and/ or clear and easy to grasp is what is needed to get us motivated
there really is no motivation to go out there right now. again, i mean solid, clear, urgent, and earnest motivation
Item 2 is a dead certainty. Take a look around with Google maps. See if you can find spots on the planet where there are marks of impact craters. Look at the small one in Arizona - it is 3 miles across and a mile deep still after 50,000 years of erosion. Now think about what the day was like 50,000 year ago when it hit. Likely to have been a very, very bad day in the Southwest US. I suspect stuff was falling in what is now San Francisco. Lots of stuff. Big stuff. If that rock hit us today it would likely wipe out all life in most of the Southwest US and possibly take out everyone in Mexico as well. Remember, 50,000 years ago there were people on the planet, people that you would recognize as human.
Take a look at Wolfe Creek in Australia - it is 35 million years old and you can still easily see it from space. Think about the day that hit.
There are plenty more examples. Look around for nice round lakes in Canada. A good portion of them are impact craters.
OK, these things are spread out over a long period of time. But the key here is that we haven't been hit in a long time. We haven't been hit by anything big in a very long time. Over a long enough period, it is an absolute certainty we will be hit again. Even a small rock is going to cause a massive loss of life, whereas a big one could wipe out all life on a continent. A water strike - actually the most likely - would probably scoure everything off the grouund for hundreds of miles on all nearby coasts. An Atlantic hit would utterly destroy Europe to nearly Switzerland and Indiana on the US side. South America would be almost devoid of life.
There are three choices: hope that God will protect us and it will never happen to his Chosen people (whoever they are), be able to go out and prevent an impact, or be somewhere else when it comes. Right now, we are operating under the first alternative which I suspect most people will agree sucks. The second is not utterly beyond our capabilities, but it would be tough and require plenty of warning. I'm certainly in favor of a combination of the second and third alternatives. The third implies a self-sustaining outpost that could survive if Earth was wiped out. We are a long way from that being a realistic possibility. But it is something to strive for.
The way things are now, all we can do is hope for a benevolent God that will protect us. And maybe hope for Santa Clause to come and give us all what we need if it did happen. Sorry, I gave up on these options when I was about eight.
I think what the space program lacks now is that grand, unifying sense of adventure. Getting there and seeing what's out there are the kind of thing EVERYBODY can get behind -- there's no specific religious, political or racial bias to outer space exploration.
One thing we've stopped figuring out and stopped doing due our own personal greed are the grand, public gestures of government that provide some kind of bigger purpose. People stopped what they were doing to watch the NASA launches and the Apollo missions; literally -- cars pulled over to listen to the radio, people gathered round and took in its majesty. Kids wanted to be astronauts. It looked like we were *going somewhere* as a civilization.
Now we've sharpened our pencil and realized the "better" science is robots, shuttle missions and other non-inspiring projects designed by bean counters, not visionaries. And what do we have? An underfunded, bureaucratic NASA seen as a cash soak and a civilization bent on narcissism, egocentric enrichment and sectarian bias.
I say, send guys to the moon and beyond. Yes, it's expensive (think of the good engineering jobs!), yes the science isn't as "good" as your robots and deep space cameras, but my god, we could USE the civilization-enhancing awe and purpose. North Korea and Iran lambasting our cultural decline? OK fine, but we're reaching for the stars, not getting lost fighting the unwinnable.
All the discussions about the space program overlook a critical fact. It costs about $10,000 a kilogram or more to lift anything into low earth orbit. That means that the entire manned space program is virtually useless : there's no point in learning how to put people into space and have them survive if no affordable way for a lot of people and supplies to go into space exists. If every kilo costs 10 grand, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to send robots and equipment into space than to send people. Even repairing Hubble never made any sense : it would have been a lot cheaper to build a brand new telescope every time than to pay for each repair mission.
The only way a moon base or a space station or a space hotel or anything else will ever be practical is if that launch cost is reduced through new technology. Personally, out of all the proposals I've ever seen, only one new technology makes the slightest bit of sense : laser launch.
We would have some buildings on the Moon, a much less unmanned space exploration history, a few more advances in the relevant technology, and even bigger a debt.
As interesting as going to the Moon can be, going there ourselves for 40 years continuously would serve little scientific purpose (cue the responses that we are meant to live in space like in all the cool scifi novels and that it should be our #1 priority regardless of reality), waste a lot of money (more than it'd be worth, scientifically) and divert resources from higher ROI science, like huge space telescopes and such.
So yeah, it was cool while it lasted, but I won't cry over what could have been, because it's not like there could possibly have been any drive to do more after over a decade of space racing.
We still haven't established what happens long-term in low-gravity. We know that zero-g is not someplace you could live forever. Is lunar gravity sufficient? We don't actually know. And it's one thing to follow the science fiction cliche that the martians and moonies couldn't adapt to Earth gravity anymore.... it's another thing if the first moonie baby is horribly disfigured.
We don't even know if, were you to raise ten generations of rats in a 1-g centerfuge and ten generations on Earth if the centerfuge rats would be healthy by comparison.
Helium-3 is also present on Earth. You can buy it by the tank. If just getting access to Helium-3 was enough to make fusion possible, we'd at least have one pilot reactor that was able to produce a decent sized net energy gain.
There was a significant concern inside of NASA that our flawless luck of moon launches would run out. What if we had done a few more missions and 19 left us with dead astronauts on the moon when the LM couldn't lift off? Do you think we'd have continued at that point? Remember, there could have been one more moon landing with the hardware we had but NASA didn't want to launch it.
The problem is, cutting off the Apollo program in favor of the Space Shuttle made fairly good sense at the time and awful sense in retrospect. Even a fool can predict the past.
While a great triumph for NASA, the Apollo program was chiefly devised to beat the USSR to the moon and thereby provide an immense propaganda victory over the commies. Once that was achieved, it had little practical use in developing space exploration.
The US actually put its own space plane on the back burner for the duration of the Apollo program. What would have happened if the Apollo program never happened, they might have continued development of the X-15 and we would have had a safe reliable Space Shuttle decades sooner.
'The.. X-15 [wikipedia.org] rocket-powered aircraft.. set speed and altitude records in the early 1960s'
What benefits would we have got? Hard to say, probably nothing tangible - just a group of half-a-dozen scientists and technicians spending a few months at a time far out of the public gaze. There might be the occasional documentary, but there's only so much footage of rocks and dust - and one patch of dirt looks a lot like any other. So I doubt there'd be much about it in the news (again, just like antarctica). Just about the only time it would make the headlines is when there's a debate about cutting funding (again), or when something goes wrong - or when there's an expose about the billions being spent on it, for not-much in the way of returns.
While we are daydreaming about what might have been, I'd like to imagine an alternate history where NASA didn't stop iterating.
NASA got the Saturn V through an iterative development cycle. Get Werner von Braun, have him build rockets very similar to ones he had built before; fly them, collect data, improve the design. Fly the new ones, collect data, improve the design. Over and over.
And then, for the Space Shuttle, NASA essentially said "We don't need to do that test and improve cycle anymore; we are just going to design the Space Shuttle on paper, build it, and be done." NASA's unsung heroes of rocket surgery managed to make it work, but that's a triumph of hard work and overtime against management stupidity.
It would have been cheaper to keep the test/improve cycle going than to spend ten years building the shuttle and flying nothing. According to Wikipedia, the Shuttle program will have cost $174 billion by its conclusion in 2010; the Saturn V program cost $32 to $45 billion in today's dollars ($6.5 billion in 1960's dollars; the inflation is depressing, isn't it?). But at the time the Shuttle project was started, the Saturn V had already been paid for; just keeping it flying would have cost even less than those numbers suggest. And besides, you wouldn't need a Saturn V for every flight; just for ones where you need that kind of crazy lift capacity.
It would actually have been far cheaper to keep flying expendables, but keep developing them, and hopefully iterate into something reusable. Take the rockets from the 1960's, and spend 20 years flying and improving them, and what would you have in the 1980's? A lot more stuff flying, more safely, and a lot cheaper.
The Shuttle was a mistake, of management more than anything else.
Build a linear induction motor up the side of Mauna Kea and launch all your bulk materials that way, leave the low-acceleration launch capacity for humans.
If the Apollo Program would have continued . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
We wouldn't have had Vietnam (this frees up the money) and the Cold War would still be going on (this motivates rocket development).
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Insightful)
And similarly, the cold war would have already ended itself. Soviet Russia while an interesting "experiment" ended up failing due to the fact that human nature plus the Soviet version of communism ended up with a government who could not financially sustain itself.
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Would the Cold War have fizzled in the way that it really did, with Saudi Arabia flooding the oil market in 1984 and causing the oil dependent Soviet economy to collapse?
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Insightful)
And now the US looks like it will be emulating the USSR in decline.
???
I presume you are talking about the economy? Capitalism has cycles. You can't take a 6-month period and extrapolate it indefinitely into the future.
Who is modding this "interesting"?
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Insightful)
The recent bust might not have anything to do with his assessment.
The Soviet Union was done in by rampant corruption. Some see the previous
administration as a repeat of what was going on in the Soviet Union prior
to it's collapse. At a certain point, you need to reign in your own greed.
This isn't just altruism, it's also enlightened self interest.
If you steal too much ultimately the system won't be able to sustain itself
anymore and it will collapse. "Greed with no rules" ultimately destroys itself.
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sorry but if you think what we have now is capitalism, you are clearly mistaken.
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Interesting)
No, but history says [virginia.edu] you can extrapolate it twenty years into the future.
The book chronicles a real estate boom (like our generation had a few years ago) and the aforementioned stock market boom. The similarities between that time and ours, economically and sociologically, are astounding.
Give us another fifteen to twenty five years and our economy will be ok, most likely.
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Insightful)
No, dumbshit, not just like "Soviet Russia". (It's just Russia now, FYI)
There's a whole spectrum between unbridled capitalism and total socialism. When a 12 trillion dollar economy cannot provide basic health care to all (no, ER visits don't count) there's a goddamned problem.
As we've recently seen, unchecked capitalism is not a good thing since the markets aren't rational after all. And as we've seen with USSR in the past, that doesn't work either. I see no problem emulating nations like Canada, New Zealand, or Sweden. Hell, I've got friends in South America with better basic health care for the poor than we have here in the states.
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
What is the base purpose? For a few to accumulate much, live high, while others endure hardship, or for most to live OK ( with enough security so they don't just die from lack of basic necessities ( food, basic healthcare ) ) but with enough insecurity to incentive hard work and production, and still a few ( and probably more, since the "feeding ground" would be larger ) wealthy living high?
If the economy only has the purpose of remaking the aristocracy and serf conditions of long ago, then I am at a lose as to why the many should participate. CEO's get away with "what is in it for me". What is in it for those "less than" the CEO's?
So, why? Because people are more important than money.
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:4, Insightful)
So, why? Because people are more important than money.
That's a nice platitude, but what about people that fuck up their own bodies? Smokers, the obese, heroin addicts... socialized healthcare for the lot of them! And of course once you accept that, then people will start to look at the books and say, "Wow, smokers are expensive!" and then the government will tell you that you can't smoke. Oh, and you can't be fat because fat people are the next line item. Oh, and now you can't ride a motorcycle because motorcycle injuries are our largest ER expense...
Socialized healthcare isn't going to be a panacea, and it's not possible to provide it in unlimited amounts to everyone. Right now cost is the main mediator - with a government pay system it will be government bean counters making rules. Maybe you see one or the other as morally superior, but I can't agree with you. Denying a kidney to a person because they are too old is not morally superior to denying a kidney to someone because they are too poor - either way someone isn't getting a kidney.
All that said, we actually have socialized health care right now, but it's expensive and based around the ER. I'm all for changing the way we pay for basic services to reduce costs... I just don't have any grand expectations.
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:5, Insightful)
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Mantoya
Sorry, but remarks like this also reminds me Major Frank Burns - "When are you two going to learn about Chinese treachery? Did Pearl Harbor teach you nothing?"
Parent
Re:If the Apollo Program would have continued . . (Score:4, Funny)
I was actually thinking more along the lines of "In a civil war re-enactment we need lots of Indians to shoot."
Ok, I'm more a child of the early 90s than the late 70s.
Parent
(SC0RE:1, Interesting) (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting, maybe, but incorrect. The US first got involved in VietNam in the fifties, before the first Cosmonaut reached space. We landed on the moon in 1969, only four years before we stopped bombing North Vietnam (I was stationed in Thailand then and saw the last B-52 leave Utapao to drop the last bomb).
The cold war ended during the Reagan Presidency and had nothing to do with rocket development; it was economics that stopped the cold war, the USSR went broke. If you have a Saturn V rocket that can get to the moon and back, an ICBM is trivial by comparison.
Parent
Bad news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad news (Score:5, Funny)
If we'd continued the Apollo missions, we'd have found either:
1) That there was indeed a prehistoric alien civilization on the backside of the moon.
2) That it was almost impossible to hide the continued war between advanced US and Russian spaceships on the backside of the moon.
3) There was indeed a better alternative to space icecream.
Parent
Re:Bad news (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to imagine Cold War tensions getting much higher than they actually did. If we'd continued the "space race" (treated the race as a marathon rather than a sprint, so to speak) we'd simply have substituted one form of competition with the Soviets for another -- and you know, seeing who could build the most space stations and Lunar colonies would have been a much better form of competition than seeing who could blow each other up the most times over.
We could have built half the military-industrial complex we did, still had more than enough for MAD, and put the money into NASA. The USSR would almost surely still have collapsed, and today we'd have an American solar system instead of a bunch of missiles and silos that we're not sure what to do with.
Parent
!Tang (Score:4, Informative)
According to The New York Times [nytimes.com].
Parent
Good News Wverybody! (Score:5, Funny)
We would be working with Zoidberg and be drinking Slurm.
If Apollo program had continued (Score:5, Insightful)
Highly likely that:
1) We would have full time orbital manned space station at all times.
2) Visits between Moon and Orbital station would be LESS frequent.
3) Visits between Moon and Earth would be MORE frequent. (because Apollo lifts off from Earth. Public-Private partnership would see to it that NASA doesn't use the most economical way of transport)
4) No Space Shuttle. Rockets all the way. (Why mess with something that works)
5) Ion Spacecraft launched to Asteroids.
6) Still no man on Mars. But a permanent computerized research station on Mars that operates from fixed locations.
7) No Mars Rover. The Rover was a roaming answer. Fixed stations would necessitate no rover.
8) SALT II would have long been abandoned and Earth would be surrounded by nuke armed stations.
9) No Cruise missiles. Why build a Mosquito when an Elephant would be cheaper.
Re:If Apollo program had continued (Score:5, Interesting)
We would have a space shuttle. It simply wouldn't be the "jack of all trades, master of none" we got.
The space shuttle was supposed to be a lightweight launch craft for transporting people to/from LEO where they could rendezvous with a space station and take a transport to a location like the moon. Economically, it made a lot of sense. It would have been fairly simple, cheap to operate, and with fewer disposable parts than the Saturn V. (Which basically throws away millions of pounds of hardware to return barely a few tons of mass. Very wasteful.)
So what went wrong?
Obviously, the same politics that killed the moon program. Nixon told NASA that they could have one launch vehicle, and the Saturn V was too expensive to be "it". Oh, and they needed to meet the military's needs for a launch vehicle as well, because the Titan rockets were also too expensive.
NASA got out their abacuses, ran some numbers, decided that the shuttle was key to a future space station, and committed to producing a super-shuttle that could be all things to all people. After all, they had the technology, right? Right?
Well, sort of. The engineers did an amazing job of producing the most sophisticated piece of space equipment ever designed. The power curves were incredible and the engines left the Saturn V in the dust. Only problem: It was a hellva lot of mass to send up and bring back, leaving little room for cargo. Worse yet, it was so complex that maintenance costs were through the roof. In the end, it would have been cheaper to continue operating the Saturn V with the economics of scale resulting in MORE cost reductions than the Shuttle ever realized!
What I'm getting at is that if we're going to play along with this dream-world where politics don't kill off programs, we'd have the Saturn V, the space shuttle, the space station (with artificial gravity!), and transport tugs originally envisioned by NASA. Because all those pieces have to fit together to make this mythical lunar base of 5,000 people possible.
Back here in reality, all those ideas were doomed from the beginning. The politicians only ever supported the space program to combat the USSR. By the 1970's, the Soviet Union had already collapsed. They were just coasting on momentum from there on out. That's why (save for a push by Regan to push the USSR to the brink of bankruptcy) the space program never recovered. There was no political need. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows that there has to be a need commiserate with size of the solution before there will be a large commitment. Hopes, dreams, and peaceful exploration ala Star Trek just don't cut it. :-(
Parent
Re:If Apollo program had continued (Score:4, Informative)
By artificial gravity, I assume you mean using rotation to produce centrifugal force? I just don't see that being likely until we have a more efficient way than rockets to get material into space, or possible until we have a way to mine and refine metal from space.
Human physiology limits you to 2 RPM, any higher than this and motion sickness becomes very common. That means that to get a full G of apparent gravity, you need a station with a radius of nearly 225 meters. Obviously, you could probably make do with less than a full G. How much less while still maintaining muscle mass and bone density is an unanswered question so far. If a half G is enough, you're in a much better situation, the radius would only have to be 110 meters. If you don't care about everyone not getting motion sickness you could probably up the RPMs to 4, getting the radius down to 28 meters. Of course, that means that your head will be under 10% less force than your feet, which I imagine might take some getting used to.
Parent
Re:If Apollo program had continued (Score:4, Funny)
NASA got out their abacuses
Pedantic nit: they used slide rules back then. Abacuses (the electronic ones that use bits for balls that you have on your desk) were for heavy-duty computations.
Parent
Re:If Apollo program had continued (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not ironic at all. NASA made an economic misstep by developing the Shuttle. The economics of launch vehicles favor the inline stack with smaller boosters for man-rated vehicles and larger boosters for cargo. Ne'er the two shall meet.
In absence of a clear need for a space station as a rendezvous point, taking a step backwards to more sophisticated capsules is how you get back on track for economic success.
Parent
Re:If Apollo program had continued (Score:5, Interesting)
First, your numbers for the shuttle are flat out wrong. You forgot to account for the thrust from the SRBs. Second, your numbers for the SatV are missing. Third, the F-1 and the SSMEs are not comparable. The F-1 == SRB and the SSME == J2. Look them both up and you'll find that the shuttle is WAY more powerful on a per-engine basis.
Here are some corrected numbers:
Saturn V
Shuttle
As you can see, the shuttle has 34% more power for its weight than the Saturn V. This is more than sufficient to accomplish the liftoff goals. The SRBs are actually shaped internally to REDUCE thrust during flight to prevent overstressing of the Shuttle hardware. The idea is to get up to Max-Q as quickly and smoothly as possible, then throttle back until the thickest part of the atmosphere is cleared.
There's a reason why the cosmonauts always like hitching a ride on the shuttle. As launch vehicles go, it's a really nice ride both on the way up and on the way down. ;-)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You forgot warp drive and space elevator.
Re:If Apollo program had continued (Score:4, Informative)
Read up on the Revolt of the Admirals [wikipedia.org] sometime. There's a good reason why we have cruise missiles and not nukes. It's not for want of orbital platforms.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see the connection between rocket development, moon exploration, and SALT II. Reagan would still have been a nuclear abolitionist, his meetings with Gorbachev would still have discussed the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, maybe even more so if there had ever been nuclear bases in space.
To me it's sad that what seems like a very plausible counterfactual of what would have happend had congress not hamstrung NASA in the late 1960s is now a work of science fiction. Then again, all is not
Consequences (Score:4, Interesting)
We'd all be dead from toxic levels of perchlorate in our drinking water?
We would have gone bankrupt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We would have gone bankrupt (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say the increases in spending have continued, pretty much unabated. It's just that the government has found other, arguably less productive, stuff to spend that money on.
Parent
Nice (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sceptical. (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA presents a fairly rosy picture, where lifting stuff, including vationers, out of Earth's gravity is routine and (relatively) cheap. Presumably, more Apollo would have driven some cost reduction; but that much?
TFA's predictions of bustling free markets on the moon seem even less plausible. With the possible exception of helium-3, the moon contains basically nothing worth shipping back to earth. Exploiting lunar resources really only makes sense to support lunar research activities(like big huge telescopes on the dark side) which might be "private" in the sense of "conducted by people not directly employed by the feds"; but would be largely publicly supported basic research stuff.
I'm not seeing it.
Re:I'm sceptical. (Score:4, Informative)
So is the earth (it is the 7th most abundant metal). Titanium is expensive because it is expensive to refine. Wikipedia indicates that more titanium dioxide is produced than titanium metal (the dioxide is used as a white pigment) and that current reserves are on the order of about 120 years of current production:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium#Occurrence [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Johnson City is a nice place... (Score:5, Funny)
...but it's got no atmosphere...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
gasp!
The Secret Studios in Nevada Would be Busy.... (Score:5, Funny)
The Secret studios in Nevada where they faked the moon landings would be really busy, they would be having to fake not only the moon bases, but the Mars landings and the bases there as well.
Because we never made it past low earth orbit.
The Above thread is sarcastic, if you hadn't noticed.
If the Apollo program had continued... (Score:5, Funny)
we need a definitive goal (Score:4, Insightful)
what i mean is, just going out there just to have a look-see isn't a valid reason to spend quadrillions. we need to
1. discover an alien race, or
2. be faced with the definitive soon upcoming extinction of earth as a supportive biosphere for some reason, whether man made or cosmic or terrestrial in origin, or
3. discover some fantastic energy source or resource out there (or drug... spice?)
4. more tribal chest thumping and grandstanding a la the cold war
etc.
these are reasons that are easy to grasp and easily capture the attention and the imagination of all. this provides the political and cultural and popular compunction to spend large sums of cash on the endeavour
sure, there are lots of reasons to go out there right now. except they are all amorphous and ill-defined and longwinded. something pressing and urgent and/ or clear and easy to grasp is what is needed to get us motivated
there really is no motivation to go out there right now. again, i mean solid, clear, urgent, and earnest motivation
Re:we need a definitive goal (Score:5, Insightful)
Item 2 is a dead certainty. Take a look around with Google maps. See if you can find spots on the planet where there are marks of impact craters. Look at the small one in Arizona - it is 3 miles across and a mile deep still after 50,000 years of erosion. Now think about what the day was like 50,000 year ago when it hit. Likely to have been a very, very bad day in the Southwest US. I suspect stuff was falling in what is now San Francisco. Lots of stuff. Big stuff. If that rock hit us today it would likely wipe out all life in most of the Southwest US and possibly take out everyone in Mexico as well. Remember, 50,000 years ago there were people on the planet, people that you would recognize as human.
Take a look at Wolfe Creek in Australia - it is 35 million years old and you can still easily see it from space. Think about the day that hit.
There are plenty more examples. Look around for nice round lakes in Canada. A good portion of them are impact craters.
OK, these things are spread out over a long period of time. But the key here is that we haven't been hit in a long time. We haven't been hit by anything big in a very long time. Over a long enough period, it is an absolute certainty we will be hit again. Even a small rock is going to cause a massive loss of life, whereas a big one could wipe out all life on a continent. A water strike - actually the most likely - would probably scoure everything off the grouund for hundreds of miles on all nearby coasts. An Atlantic hit would utterly destroy Europe to nearly Switzerland and Indiana on the US side. South America would be almost devoid of life.
There are three choices: hope that God will protect us and it will never happen to his Chosen people (whoever they are), be able to go out and prevent an impact, or be somewhere else when it comes. Right now, we are operating under the first alternative which I suspect most people will agree sucks. The second is not utterly beyond our capabilities, but it would be tough and require plenty of warning. I'm certainly in favor of a combination of the second and third alternatives. The third implies a self-sustaining outpost that could survive if Earth was wiped out. We are a long way from that being a realistic possibility. But it is something to strive for.
The way things are now, all we can do is hope for a benevolent God that will protect us. And maybe hope for Santa Clause to come and give us all what we need if it did happen. Sorry, I gave up on these options when I was about eight.
Parent
Re:we need a definitive goal (Score:4, Insightful)
I think what the space program lacks now is that grand, unifying sense of adventure. Getting there and seeing what's out there are the kind of thing EVERYBODY can get behind -- there's no specific religious, political or racial bias to outer space exploration.
One thing we've stopped figuring out and stopped doing due our own personal greed are the grand, public gestures of government that provide some kind of bigger purpose. People stopped what they were doing to watch the NASA launches and the Apollo missions; literally -- cars pulled over to listen to the radio, people gathered round and took in its majesty. Kids wanted to be astronauts. It looked like we were *going somewhere* as a civilization.
Now we've sharpened our pencil and realized the "better" science is robots, shuttle missions and other non-inspiring projects designed by bean counters, not visionaries. And what do we have? An underfunded, bureaucratic NASA seen as a cash soak and a civilization bent on narcissism, egocentric enrichment and sectarian bias.
I say, send guys to the moon and beyond. Yes, it's expensive (think of the good engineering jobs!), yes the science isn't as "good" as your robots and deep space cameras, but my god, we could USE the civilization-enhancing awe and purpose. North Korea and Iran lambasting our cultural decline? OK fine, but we're reaching for the stars, not getting lost fighting the unwinnable.
Parent
What does the moon have, that Earth does not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the Earth has a whole lot of undeveloped acreage in the ocean.
Re:What does the moon have, that Earth does not? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you wiped out all life on the earth with an asteroid, no matter what, it would be more habitable than the moon.
Parent
Rosy bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
All the discussions about the space program overlook a critical fact. It costs about $10,000 a kilogram or more to lift anything into low earth orbit. That means that the entire manned space program is virtually useless : there's no point in learning how to put people into space and have them survive if no affordable way for a lot of people and supplies to go into space exists. If every kilo costs 10 grand, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to send robots and equipment into space than to send people. Even repairing Hubble never made any sense : it would have been a lot cheaper to build a brand new telescope every time than to pay for each repair mission.
The only way a moon base or a space station or a space hotel or anything else will ever be practical is if that launch cost is reduced through new technology. Personally, out of all the proposals I've ever seen, only one new technology makes the slightest bit of sense : laser launch.
Nothing too good (Score:3, Insightful)
We would have some buildings on the Moon, a much less unmanned space exploration history, a few more advances in the relevant technology, and even bigger a debt.
As interesting as going to the Moon can be, going there ourselves for 40 years continuously would serve little scientific purpose (cue the responses that we are meant to live in space like in all the cool scifi novels and that it should be our #1 priority regardless of reality), waste a lot of money (more than it'd be worth, scientifically) and divert resources from higher ROI science, like huge space telescopes and such.
So yeah, it was cool while it lasted, but I won't cry over what could have been, because it's not like there could possibly have been any drive to do more after over a decade of space racing.
A bunch of space cadet masturbation. (Score:3, Informative)
We still haven't established what happens long-term in low-gravity. We know that zero-g is not someplace you could live forever. Is lunar gravity sufficient? We don't actually know. And it's one thing to follow the science fiction cliche that the martians and moonies couldn't adapt to Earth gravity anymore.... it's another thing if the first moonie baby is horribly disfigured.
We don't even know if, were you to raise ten generations of rats in a 1-g centerfuge and ten generations on Earth if the centerfuge rats would be healthy by comparison.
Helium-3 is also present on Earth. You can buy it by the tank. If just getting access to Helium-3 was enough to make fusion possible, we'd at least have one pilot reactor that was able to produce a decent sized net energy gain.
There was a significant concern inside of NASA that our flawless luck of moon launches would run out. What if we had done a few more missions and 19 left us with dead astronauts on the moon when the LM couldn't lift off? Do you think we'd have continued at that point? Remember, there could have been one more moon landing with the hardware we had but NASA didn't want to launch it.
The problem is, cutting off the Apollo program in favor of the Space Shuttle made fairly good sense at the time and awful sense in retrospect. Even a fool can predict the past.
what if the Apollo program never happened (Score:3, Insightful)
The US actually put its own space plane on the back burner for the duration of the Apollo program. What would have happened if the Apollo program never happened, they might have continued development of the X-15 and we would have had a safe reliable Space Shuttle decades sooner.
'The
What if Apollo had continued... (Score:5, Interesting)
We'd have another antarctica (Score:5, Insightful)
What benefits would we have got? Hard to say, probably nothing tangible - just a group of half-a-dozen scientists and technicians spending a few months at a time far out of the public gaze. There might be the occasional documentary, but there's only so much footage of rocks and dust - and one patch of dirt looks a lot like any other. So I doubt there'd be much about it in the news (again, just like antarctica). Just about the only time it would make the headlines is when there's a debate about cutting funding (again), or when something goes wrong - or when there's an expose about the billions being spent on it, for not-much in the way of returns.
Is that what we thought we'd get?
Iterations (Score:5, Insightful)
While we are daydreaming about what might have been, I'd like to imagine an alternate history where NASA didn't stop iterating.
NASA got the Saturn V through an iterative development cycle. Get Werner von Braun, have him build rockets very similar to ones he had built before; fly them, collect data, improve the design. Fly the new ones, collect data, improve the design. Over and over.
And then, for the Space Shuttle, NASA essentially said "We don't need to do that test and improve cycle anymore; we are just going to design the Space Shuttle on paper, build it, and be done." NASA's unsung heroes of rocket surgery managed to make it work, but that's a triumph of hard work and overtime against management stupidity.
It would have been cheaper to keep the test/improve cycle going than to spend ten years building the shuttle and flying nothing. According to Wikipedia, the Shuttle program will have cost $174 billion by its conclusion in 2010; the Saturn V program cost $32 to $45 billion in today's dollars ($6.5 billion in 1960's dollars; the inflation is depressing, isn't it?). But at the time the Shuttle project was started, the Saturn V had already been paid for; just keeping it flying would have cost even less than those numbers suggest. And besides, you wouldn't need a Saturn V for every flight; just for ones where you need that kind of crazy lift capacity.
It would actually have been far cheaper to keep flying expendables, but keep developing them, and hopefully iterate into something reusable. Take the rockets from the 1960's, and spend 20 years flying and improving them, and what would you have in the 1980's? A lot more stuff flying, more safely, and a lot cheaper.
The Shuttle was a mistake, of management more than anything else.
steveha
Linear induction motor (Score:4, Interesting)
Build a linear induction motor up the side of Mauna Kea and launch all your bulk materials that way, leave the low-acceleration launch capacity for humans.
Parent