Were the moon landings a waste?

[hobbsyoyo]

We're coming up in the 50th anniversary of the moon landings and I am curious what people think of them. They were controversial at the time and did not enjoy as much public support as is often portrayed now. The Apollo program swallowed up a large chunk (25% at peak IIRC) of the nation's budget and were sort of a one-off affair as they did not lead directly to permanent manned exploration of deep space.

Do you think anything positive came of the moon landings or were they a waste? Do you think NASA's current Artemis moon program is a waste of resources? For reference, I believe NASA's funding has been relatively stable at less than 1% of the budget for at least a couple of decades.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Can't imagine living in a world where people hadn't walked on the Moon tbh. So yes, worth it (easy to say coming from a nation that didn't pay for it I guess).

 

[Lexicus]

I dunno, I have mixed feelings, on the one hand I feel like going to the moon is pretty awesome but like on the other hand there was a lot of really bad poverty at the time. We probably had/have the resources to both address poverty and go to the moon though.

 

[EgonSpengler]

While I do see the argument that we have perhaps more pressing Terrestrial concerns - I think it was Bill Maher who said that we ought to send NASA to look for water in Flint, Michigan, not Mars - I also can't help noticing that NASA's total budget is 0.49% of the overall federal budget (and I'm no deficit hawk, anyway). Yes, you could say that that $2b could be spent elsewhere, but so could much of the ~$1trillion in the federal government's discretionary budget. So that's NASA today.

As to the Moon landings specifically, I only have a general sense that research for the sake of research is important. I think there must be many things we wouldn't have discovered if we only went looking for what we expected to find. The fact that I can't, off the top of my head, cite concrete, positive results from the Apollo program doesn't dissuade me - and I don't know that there weren't any concrete gains, I just can't name any without looking it up.

I dunno, I have mixed feelings, on the one hand I feel like going to the moon is pretty awesome but like on the other hand there was a lot of really bad poverty at the time. We probably had/have the resources to both address poverty and go to the moon though.

Right, if you're talking about the Apollo Program, you also have to talk about the Vietnam War. How much did the war cost? A professor of mine used to say, "the cure for cancer might have died, face-down in the mud in Vietnam - we'll never know."

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I dunno, I have mixed feelings, on the one hand I feel like going to the moon is pretty awesome but like on the other hand there was a lot of really bad poverty at the time. We probably had/have the resources to both address poverty and go to the moon though.

I really appreciated how First Man portrayed the resistance to Apollo from the civil rights movement as it was not something I had been aware of previously. I think today, we can afford to ease poverty and do a moon landing but I'm much less sure we could have done the same in the 60's. The points I would make is that:

I don't think Apollo detracted from anti-poverty efforts and in fact I think the failure to address poverty beyond the gains of LBJ's programs was more a political-will problem than a funding one. In other words, the money spent on Apollo was never going to spent on anti-poverty efforts. People thing budgets are flexible in that if one thing gets funded and another cut that this means the funded program cannibalized the unfunded one - and that's not how our budgeting process really works.

The other thing is that Apollo was used as a job-creation vehicle in many southern states - a legacy we're still living with. Right now, Alabama, Texas and Mississippi enjoy somewhat robust aerospace activity they wouldn't have had without Apollo due to all the facilities that NASA built in those states.

While I do see the argument that we have perhaps more pressing Terrestrial concerns - I think it was Bill Maher who said that we ought to send NASA to look for water in Flint, Michigan, not Mars - I also can't help noticing that NASA's total budget is 0.49% of the overall federal budget (and I'm no deficit hawk, anyway). Yes, you could say that that $2b could be spent elsewhere, but so could much of the ~$1trillion in the federal government's discretionary budget. So that's NASA today.

As to the Moon landings specifically, I only have a general sense that research for the sake of research is important. I think there must be many things we wouldn't have discovered if we only went looking for what we expected to find. The fact that I can't, off the top of my head, cite concrete, positive results from the Apollo program doesn't dissuade me - and I don't know that there weren't any concrete gains, I just can't name any without looking it up.

Bill Maher has been an anti-space guy for forever and it never fails to disappoint me how uninformed his argument are. I was a bit surprised though this past week when he tacitly endorsed another moon landing program last week if only because he thinks it's a smarter goal than a Mars landing.

We owe a ton of our electronics revolution to Apollo-era developments. Even when NASA wasn't directly creating new technology, they were funding a ton of electronics companies that went on to do great things.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't think Apollo detracted from anti-poverty efforts and in fact I think the failure to address poverty beyond the gains of LBJ's programs was more a political-will problem than a funding one.

Remember, the federal government has unlimited money so the question is what resources are actually available. I think we had the resources to do both in the 60s much as we do now.

The other thing is that Apollo was used as a job-creation vehicle in many southern states - a legacy we're still living with. Right now, Alabama, Texas and Mississippi enjoy somewhat robust aerospace activity they wouldn't have had without Apollo due to all the facilities that NASA built in those states.

Yeah, fair point. Not the best job-creation vehicle because (I assume) it is very capital-intensive and rather than increasing overall productivity here at home like building infrastructure does, it is building stuff that literally gets shot into space, but it is a job creation vehicle nonetheless.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Yeah, fair point. Not the best job-creation vehicle because (I assume) it is very capital-intensive and rather than increasing overall productivity here at home like building infrastructure does, it is building stuff that literally gets shot into space, but it is a job creation vehicle nonetheless.

Yeah but we don't load pallets of cash into fairings and send them off into the void. The money spent on these programs is spent here on Earth, paying people to do and build things. I know this is analogous to the trickle-down myth but I think the government spending money on tangible things including infrastructure is a better use of stimulus than tax cuts for the billionaire class. And it's not just ground infrastructure they built - we have GPS and weather satellites and communication satellites and all of those things started either with NASA or military investment in space and they have all had huge returns to the people.

And I think hugely capital-intensive projects are good projects for government to undertake because the private sector does not have the same long-term horizons or any sense of the public good to consider.

Look at the Iridium constellation - used by every aid and disaster relief organization worldwide and also by merchant fleets and now airlines to track their assets and provide communications services that would be impossible without it. That was built with a ~$3+billion investment by private industry which then immediately tried to destroy the entire constellation of 70+ satellites when their business model proved to be wrong. It took intervention from Clinton (and Jesse Jackson of all people) and some extremely smart, long-term investors to stop the madness and turn it into a profitable enterprise rather than throw it all in the trash bin.

And I do mean immediate. The constellation was activated and then Motorola attempted to de-orbit it in just 6 months because it wasn't a cash-printing machine. And in reality, it is a cash-printing machine, Motorola was too inept to manage it properly.


Fun random fact - Iridium was saved in large part due to a group of African American investors who thought (and I'm paraphrasing) that the stupid white guys running Motorola were flipping stupid to throw it away. Iridium was one of the only white-owned businesses that the group invested in.

 

[Lexicus]

I know this is analogous to the trickle-down myth

Nah, it's not. It is very similar to the argument I made about the tangible benefits of military spending.

And it's not just ground infrastructure they built - we have GPS and weather satellites and communication satellites and all of those things started either with NASA or military investment in space and they have all had huge returns to the people.

Yeah, that's true. Though this is an example of technologies developed by public funding and public institutions then turned over to the private sector for profit.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think space spending is a total waste by any means, I'm just saying that it's a less efficient way of stimulating the economy than some other things i can think of.

But as I say I think we have the resources to do all the things so it isn't really a trade-off.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

GPS and weather satellites have not been handed over to the private sector. In fact, both those things cost a ton of money for the US to maintain and the US provides the services they offer completely free to everyone on Earth. Right now, Trump is trying to appoint a guy to NOAA who has lobbied to keep the government from giving away free weather data so his company can profit but even the GOP-led Senate will not go along with his appointment.

Communication satellites are a bit different as most of them are privately owned but many of the biggest satellite companies are actually quasi-governmental entities and not fully private. Intelsat, Eutelsat and Inmarsat were all founded by governments and run as public-private joint ventures. Similarly, many of the big Asian and Middle Eastern satellite companies are actually government ventures.

 

[Lexicus]

There are no privately owned GPS or weather satellites? Not the impression I had.

 

[Synobun]

I wish the government more frequently had targeted accomplishments like the initial moon landings.

I'd say the opportunities got wasted, but that the moon landings themselves were not a waste. Our society is shockingly anti-social welfare now (it was never very pro-, though), and we could do with more pro-investment attitudes in governance. Even something as simple as investing in infrastructure is essentially a fever dream now. Having targeted research and targeted big-picture projects would be a welcome sight. Nowadays all the "big projects" are just lobbied corporate moneymakers.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

And there is another trickle down-type effect at play -

While sure, launch pads have extremely limited utility to the public at large but the space companies buy a ton of hardware from non-space companies. I would not be surprised if the Lowe's next door to SpaceX's headquarters is their most profitable store given how much hardware the engineers and technicians buy there. That happens writ large in the economy - if you build a rocket factory with public funds, you'll also be supporting their huge line of suppliers and trucking companies and so on and so forth.

There are no privately owned GPS or weather satellites? Not the impression I had.

Nope, GPS is insanely expensive. There are 4 global navigation satellite services built or being built right now (European Galileo, Russian GLONASS, Chinese Baidou and American GPS) and they're all government-owned and run even if they use private companies to build them.

We are only just now reaching the point where any private companies have weathersats and they're very small and un-sophisticated compared to the legacy government birds. My company owns a weather satellite constellation that uses GPS signals to detect atmospheric conditions - which it does very well but it's the only thing it does. Meanwhile government satellites do that as well as a hundred other things. It's also worth noting that my company's satellites use GPS to make these weather predictions, it does not create a GPS signal on its own. So even here, government investment is supporting the private sector in ways that were never ever envisioned. The thought of using GPS to back-out weather data is pretty wild and was never intended to happen.

 

[Lexicus]

I see. I think the general point that a lot of the technologies developed in the space race were then turned over to private sector for profit stands, though, no?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I see. I think the general point that a lot of the technologies developed in the space race were then turned over to private sector for profit stands, though, no?

Yes, that is an accurate assessment. NASA is not allowed to sit on technology it develops and not share it and it goes out of its way to support basic research in addition to targeted research in support of specific projects. What has not yet happened, however, is the complete turnover of government built space infrastructure to private corporations. It does happen and the government subsidizes a lot of infrastructure but for the most part, what the government builds, it owns. The technologies themselves are another issue and that does get pushed into private hands aggressively.

There are moves to hand over the ISS to private interests though and that's going to be very interesting to see play out. I will say that the government has massively mismanaged the ISS to the point where very little useful science comes out of it, despite that being the whole purpose of its existence.

 

[Lexicus]

What has not yet happened, however, is the complete turnover of government built space infrastructure to private corporations.

Ahh, okay, I can see how what I said might have been interpreted this way but this isn't exactly what I meant. I just assumed there were privately-run GPS and weather satellites along with the government-run ones, that the technologies involved had been developed by the government then turned over to the private sector.

 

[Truthy]

My impression is we got a pretty large ROI specifically from Apollo Program technology. Though a lot of lists of Apollo Program (or NASA generally) innovations like this one seem at least a little dubious to me. E.g., number 2: "Computer microchip: modern microchips descend from integrated circuits used in the Apollo Guidance Computer." For one, I don't think this is true. Two, I'm not sure the Apollo Program was particularly important for any of the pioneering advances in computer design. Like, it didn't create the von Neumann architecture, it didn't create the crystal oscillator, it didn't create the transistor, and they used that weird rope memory no one ever used afterwards (edit: and I think their whole instruction set architecture was idiosyncratic and not of particular use to anyone else--but not sure). Three, insofar as it did help a bit, it's not clear to me it even mattered much. By the 60s, we already had a rapidly developing CPU industry. We were already seeing rapidly growing demand for computing power in the private sector, universities, and the military. The military, companies like IBM, Intel, and TI, and university architecture and compiler researchers all seem vastly more important than the Apollo Program. I don't want to say the AGC wasn't an important innovation, but it seems people greatly overstate how much it mattered as a spinoff technology and I wonder how much this is true of other NASA spinoff tech.

 

[warpus]

I mean I'd rather the U.S. spend money on moon landings than aircraft carriers and baby killing drones

 

[hobbsyoyo]

@Truthy
The other major driver of computer advancement besides NASA was the military for use on their ICBMs and satellites. You're right in that the specfic architecture used by Apollo was a dead-end but it's still a net positive because it pushed things forward. Even when you find out something isn't good for re-use elsewhere, that is still something worthwhile to find out. And there are plenty of instances where private industry cannot or will not make the sort of investments necessary to figure that out. And while the Apollo guidance computers were one-off, the computers developed for the rest of their satellite and rocket fleets were not.

But I do agree that the space program was not the only way that these computer technologies moved forward.

Ahh, okay, I can see how what I said might have been interpreted this way but this isn't exactly what I meant. I just assumed there were privately-run GPS and weather satellites along with the government-run ones, that the technologies involved had been developed by the government then turned over to the private sector.

There are not yet private GPS or many private weather satellites. They are too expensive to build and maintain with too-little profit making opportunities. The technology has made its way into private hands but for the most part there are not companies out there trying to re-make GPS or weathersats. And the few private weathersats that exist only exist because the government is paying for their data - there is no private market for the data yet.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I mean I'd rather the U.S. spend money on moon landings than aircraft carriers and baby killing drones

Just wait til those baby killing drones grow up.

 

[Lexicus]

There are not yet private GPS or many private weather satellites. They are too expensive to build and maintain with too-little profit making opportunities. The technology has made its way into private hands but for the most part there are not companies out there trying to re-make GPS or weathersats. And the few private weathersats that exist only exist because the government is paying for their data - there is no private market for the data yet.

Right, I gotcha.