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One thing the article doesn't cover is that whilst the pessimists had a point about the moon landing itself not achieving very much except some prestige and cool pictures[1] considering the proportion of US national income spent, the Apollo program ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers, and other tech that could only have come out of a space program like satellites are an essential part of the functioning of the modern world. Estimates suggest the ROI wasn't just non-negative, it was hugely positive (NASA claims $7 for every $1 spent)
That was more evident in 1989 than when people were wondering whether it was a massive waste of money in 1969, and certainly than in 1959
[1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.
> ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers,
NASA has been promoting that claim for years. But it's not real. Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.[1] Flight computers came from the USAF missile programs of the 1950s.[2] Nor was NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/801137/
[2] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2190783...
> [1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.
Space-romantics tend to wildly overestimate the benefits of space colonization relative to the difficulty and cost.
Space is... kinda shit. Including all the other rocky bodies in our star system. In the best case, it's like if Earth suffered a half-dozen biosphere-ruining apocalypses and was yet worse than that, even.
The "why?" needs a damn good answer, and we just don't have one, certainly not for long-term human habitation. Even "colonize Mars as a humanity backup" isn't great. There are cheaper ways to achieve most of that supposed benefit, and maybe do it even better, possibly even involving space in some capacity, most of which projects we could kick off today if we really wanted to—yet we don't bother with any of those, no, we fixate on Mars because of the romantic and pop-culture appeal, not because it's the most efficient solution.
Colonizing Mars or the clouds of Venus or putting dome-cities on the Moon or whatever is undeniably cool as hell, but when you sit and really think about it... eh.
NASA was presumably an expensive way to get any inventions not related to space. You could just fund normal research, after all.
People similarly laud military research, but it's not as if you need the military to carry it out. Governments were just willing to fund the research as part of a military effort.
The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs, the space race was just an impetus/motivator for blank check by-all-means research. As a general rule shouldn't as much money as possible go into that sort of research until the marginal return is below $1 for each dollar spent?
flight computers were already designed and built for the missles that predated Apollo- in fact, that's why the team that built them for Apollo was able to be so productive.
freeze dried food predates the space program by decades.
Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.
It was a cold war exercise, and viewed through that lens it almost certainly was a better expense than say the Vietnam War. I suppose a more apt hypothetical would be considering what the return spending that money on various additional DARPA projects would have been.
> […] he Apollo program ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life […]
See perhaps:
Space skeptics came in two flavors: the first being the classic "the money could have been better spent elsewhere" variety, but second was "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they $PETPEEVE". Frankly I miss the days of "Why can't they" vs the trend of vocal minorities simply decrying any and all science, because at least the critics acknowledged the space program actually happened.
These days unfortunately the conspiracy theorists of the world have made their own discoveries like internet forums and Twitter which just help propagate their points of view far more than a mimeograph of dense text and filled with arrows and diagrams stapled to a telephone pole ever did.
"Spend" is a loaded term when it comes to the way governments work.
If I have $100 then I can choose to spend it on say a book. I have a book, my $100 is clearly gone.
But when the govt spends say $400 mil on a lunar landing, they get the lunar landing, but they also get a bunch of money back. Firstly, a chunk of that money goes to salaries, so a decent chunk comes back as primary taxes (income tax etc) and secondary taxes (sales tax, gas tax, taxes on booze and smokes).
What isn't taxes is mostly then circulating in the economy (generating yet more taxes) while giving the economy a nice boost.
Now we can argue about opportunity cost etc, but the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity.
We can quibble about edge-case budgets all day long, but its hard to avoid the jobs program that is "military spending". In truth what does all that money buy? The lunar program, the Mars program, curing cancer, these are rounding errors compared to the military budget.
I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but what do invasions of Iraq, or occupations of Afghanistan for 20 years actually really achieve? Instead of picking on NASA it might be time to wonder what the Defence trillions get us?
Which brings me back to my first point- most of those trillions circle round in the economy anyway, so its all funny money.
> it was hugely positive (NASA claims $7 for every $1 spent)
Could you share this source? I want to read more analysis
There's an argument that all those things would have been invented eventually anyway. There was no need to spend 100s of billions of dollars for basically a photo-op.
Yep. Same for the military industrial complex, unfortunately.
There was also a lot of social commentary on it. Particularly striking is this spoken word piece:
As someone who considers the moon landing to be mankind's greatest achievement, this poem has only ever inspired dark feelings within me. The attitude that we have to choose between social services or humanity's future, that we can't do both, that space travel is pointless because we haven't "fixed all the problems at home yet", is pure entitlement, it's selfish and it's wrong.
This poem is certainly good at getting it's message across, but that message is racist degenerative trash.
All the grievances of Whitey on the Moon can be, and regularly are, offered today. Yet Whitey hasn't been to the Moon in 50 years. It's almost as if one has nothing to do with the other.
Link to performance by Gil Scott-Heron: https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4
The first time I heard Whitey On The Moon, I had a strong feeling that we don't all live in the same world, even while we share the same planet.
As a counterpoint, there's Home on Lagrange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRns6u5bHuw
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.
(chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.
(chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.
(chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
(chorus)
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
An important point, for the "we could have spent less money doing direct R&D on the actually-useful technologies which Apollo created, and skipped the pictures and prestige..." crowd to note:
The moon race created an extremely public success/fail benchmark, where everyone from the greediest corporate CEO to the lowliest painter on the launch towers understood that losing would for-sure carry a very high social cost. Millions of people, who were already motivated to win the race, were concentrated in certain areas, industries, and labs - providing positive feedback and intense motivation. Yes, it was very expensive, and there was some profiteering, goldbricking, excess bureaucracy, and waste. But compared to most huge government-funded projects, that crap was pretty scarce.
To paraphrase Napoleon's supposed maxim on war: "The moral is to the budget as three to one."
“Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
The cost of Apollo program is $178 billion in today's money. I personally don't think NASA would've survived to today if Apollo program wasn't successful.
> The cost of Apollo program is $178 billion in today's money
And the cost of Afghanistan/Iraq (in money) was $3,000 billion and yet, somehow, that project survived for twenty years.
I don't want to make light of the human tragedy that was Afghanistan/Iraq but I think it's interesting to put the Apollo spend into perspective.
The two newspaper blurbs that the author didn't highlight, but imho have implications that continue to resonate today:
--eisenhower didn't think it was fiscally sound to lower taxes. Here was a Republican who understood the strategic importance of the Moon landings, and was not afraid to say to the rest of his party- and the wealthy class- that they need to stop whining about tax cuts. Well we know who won that argument, ultimately. The tax base in the early 60s was VERY robust compared to today, despite the explosive growth of the multinationals and megacorps.
Robert Weiner warns about expecting computers to make moral decisions. Seemed paranoid in context, but really it was eerily prescient. Especially considering developments in the last year.
I have commented on HN before that I have been skeptical of the moon landing ever happening, but I've spent some time on apolloinrealtime.org listening and reading the Apollo 11, 13, and 17 moon landing transcripts and I have come around. It sounds way too real to be faked.
In that light, I think it was an incredible feat of engineering for the late 60s, and early 70s. Keep in mind, Japan was unable to land a probe on the moon as recently as last year.
Do I think it was worth it? That's debatable, but the engineers and scientists involved accomplished something pretty fantastic and that alone deserves some merit.
> Noted fiscal hawk Barry Goldwater dismissed the lofty ambitions of lunar exploration as a "wasteful endeavor," an ironic stance given he voiced his criticism at a glitzy dinner that cost each attendee a cool $100 - close to $1000 in 2023.
Some things never change, eh?
Comedy of course but also an indication that it wasn't a hugely unpopular opinion in the intro to Tom Lehrer's Wernher von Braun.
And what is it that put America in the forefront of The nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know-how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
I realize that there's a million obvious answers; but as I type this in the part of the country currently roasting by the heatwave in the United States: will something like this ever happen for climate efforts?
We can use some "Congratulations to the crew of Apollo 8. You saved 1968." moments nowadays.
https://amazingstories.com/2016/12/thank-you-for-saving-1968...
I am a huge fan of space exploration and all the various content that comes with it. I also like fine books. Folio Society's A Man on the Moon The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin (https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/a-man-on-the-moon.html) is an exceptionally fine way to learn more about the technical, budgetary, personal and play bizarre things that went down. The book covers some of the skepticism and the "this is really expensive" objections. If you want to treat yourself, this substantial 2 volume folio is a feast for all your senses.
A few thoughts:
1. I love stuff like this. I think about it with elections all the time; even in the biggest landslide elections there’s always about a third of the population that wasn’t on board. A good reminder about winners writing history books.
2. I’m in my 30s. The first time I ever was given an idea that people weren’t all about the Moon landing was a Larry Norman song[0], of all things. (“They brought back a big bag of rocks / Only cost thirteen billion. Must be nice rocks”) I was definitely an adult by this point.
3. I’m curious about the wording, but it seemed like the survey question was focused on cost. Americans never like things when you ask about cost. If the question was “should we develop rockets strong enough to beat the Commies” it probably would have polled a lot better.
4. Americans also always seem to be cool with public works-y stuff once it’s actually built. No one liked the Big Dig until it was done. Part of that is the cost concern, but I think there’s also the disbelief that things are possible, and fears about what the bad side of the thing could be.
This shows poll results, namely the bit in the news paper they used for the headline, but not the actual question American's were asked that ended with "..amount spent for this purpose or not?" which is just as important as the data.
Oh, so THAT's the real reason for why we have so much fake moonlanding nonsense still to this day.
If there's some thing I've learned in the past 6 or so years is that when morons attach their personality to a certain claim and then they're proven wrong, they just double down. So I can totally imagine that a very large fraction of those 66% who opposed it couldn't just be proven wrong and instead attack it. It can't be that I was wrong and landing on the moon was actually awesome, instead it must be fake! Didn't happen!
Let's not forget this phase of the space program was in the context of the Vietnam War, and well as other social issues (e.g., poverty). Even MLK was shifting focus to the injustice of income inequality. Going to the moon was, in that context, seen as another foolish government effort. Few, and for good reason (at the time), were willing to get behind another bloated government idea.
If there was no war, the perception and support shifts. If there was also less other social unrest, the perception and support shift again.
I guess sometimes, the stupid, unpredictable, irrational, doesn't make economic sense choice is the thing that history remembers.
Whitey On the Moon
I love stuff like this. It really illustrates the folly of "popularism" (not to be confused with populism) - where you allow your political agenda to be guided heavily based on issues that align with positive polling outcomes, an deemphasize and abandon policy planks that lack popular support.
Democracy is not a god. Asking the general population about such things and then actually enacting their wishes is like taking your direction from Pooh Bear. He likes the sweet taste of honey, but is a bear of little brain and is happy so long as his supply of it keeps flowing.
I'm more pessimistic about the fact that I have to login/signup to read this article.
Smashed the back button and chose to read the comments instead.
And 66% against, TBH we rather pursue things that benefit people
This is why “democracy” is a flawed idea and why the educated elite should be making decisions (but in a way that offers some accountability to the common man).
perfect example of why pure democracy is a horrible idea
The American revolution was opposed by a majority, and man what a screwup, we could've been eating crumpets instead of building a (checks Google) $20 trillion dollar economy. /s
https://www.google.com/search?q=was+the+American+revolution+...
The moon landings were successful and also a waste of money
You could well ask what provision of the Constitution authorized the Federal Government to spend hundreds of billions of today's dollars to put a man on the moon. If the Federal government can spend money on that, what is off limits? Tax money is ultimately taken at gun point, which means it should only be spent on necessary public goods.
The Revolutionary War was also opposed by the majority of the people in the colonies.
The majority of a large population is always and without exception a dumb herd. It's the rare context where you should listen to what that type of majority says or claims to want. The wisdom of crowds is one of the more idiotic concepts popularized in the past 30 years.
Even more than intelligence is a very scarce attribute, being competent at utilizing reason and generally being rational (by intent, wilfully; being focused on purpose in the direction of being rational and working to maintain that orientation, which requires persistent effort, while the median person is exceptionally lazy).
It's why you shouldn't bother asking people what they want when it comes to building the future. The masses have absolutely no idea what they're doing with their own lives most of the time, much less have any grasp of what's possible when it comes to assembling the future (as referenced Henry Ford & faster horses).
People will say: well then you're invalidating Democracy by ignoring the majority! No. Concepts of rights as in the Bill of Rights are specifically created to protect the minority from the irrational, dangerous majority; it's overwhelmingly meant as a restraint on the ill behavior of the majority. It helps (emphasis) to prevent the majority from voting your rights as a minority individual out of existence just because they have that majority vote.
We need things like the Bill of Rights precisely because the majority are so often dumb, dangerous and irrational (and they're not irrational + dangerous 24/7, the tendency is for them to go on rampages historically, so they must be caged by something like the Bill of Rights to try to prevent that behavior).