What it needs is something of that scale to galvanize the population around an idea of progress. Doesn't have to be a new moon mission (which might have the opposite effect).
An intense dedicated national effort toward the goal of a fusion power plant is one possibility.
Agree completely that our space program needs a new significant mission to stay relevant. However, I don't think going to space matters as much as it did last century. During JFK's reign catching up in space with the soviets was more than about going to space, it was about being able to defend the country. Today I think our new Moon Mission should be about solving climate change. That's an issue the country and world need to come together on to solve.
Gerard Degroot argues in "The Dark Side of the Moon" [1] that going to the moon was mostly about (1) allowing Democrats (LBJ and JFK) to score political points by criticising the Eisenhower administration and (2) cashing in on American cultural enthusiasm for space (Buck Rogers, Orson Welles, etc.). Space exploration didn't actually make much sense in terms of defense policy, international relations, or scientific research.
Eisenhower hated the idea of throwing money away on expensive programs that offered poor return on investment and were primarily funded for political reasons (his famous comments about the military industrial complex were made in a speech at the very end of his presidency). He funded development of American ICBM and space reconnaissance programs in the late 50s, but did so separately from space exploration programs. By the time of the Mercury missions we already had mature ICBM and satellite programs and it didn't have much to do with real defense needs.
Even in the late 50s the US was never really behind the USSR in terms of space technology, but for strategic reasons it was sometimes unclear how far ahead the US was (for example, we had extensive photographs from satellites showing Russian nuclear missile launch sites; these indicated that we had far more missiles than the Russians, but at the time the satellites used to collect these photos were still secret, and so the intelligence they revealed was not widely known, even though most Americans believed at the time that America lagged behind the Russians).
Sputnik may have been the first satellite in space, but Eisenhower had intentionally stopped von Braun from launching a satellite even though we were very close to having that capability. Eisenhower was mostly concerned with establishing a precedent that would allow satellites to fly over foreign countries, and didn't mind if the Russians were the first to space if this meant that one of their satellites would establish this precedent instead of one of ours.
Just from the look of it, without having read the book nor Degroot's critics, looks like a pretty unbalanced viewpoint:
"In the things the we seemed to be behind, we actually were ahead but it was a secret. In the things we irrefutably were behind, it's because we were just waiting for them to set the precedent".
When an argument has such an onanistic appeal to patriots, it's suspect.
That book is fairly critical and a far cry from a patriotic tome. If anything, its anti-patriotic and is overly critical of NASA and US space policy while being fairly mum on the Soviet program and not having too much criticism of the costs of the Soviet programs. That book is the anti-Apollo and dismissive of US accomplishments. Sadly, we live in an age where ahistoric claptrap gets popular because internet forum bubbles encourage "alternative" thinking for the sake of being contrarian.
It is also full of dishonestly. The son of one of the engineers claims a interview in the book never happened:
"But the final word goes to Eisenhower, who once vetoed Apollo. He reminded Americans that "every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed".
This was in reference to the war machine, not our civilian space program and its disingenuous to apply it to NASA.
Lastly, yes the US could have beat sputnik. Recent declassified memos which seem to be authentic have revealed this possibility. Von Braun had a 4-stage Jupiter-C in 1956. It had the capabilities to launch a satellite into orbit. Apparantly, the 4th stage was left ignored due to political concerns of setting off a arms race, or even a war, with the USSR if a US satellite flew over its country every 90 minutes or so.
> Recent declassified memos which seem to be authentic have revealed this possibility. Von Braun had a 4-stage Jupiter-C in 1956. It had the capabilities to launch a satellite into orbit. Apparantly, the 4th stage was left ignored due to political concerns of setting off a arms race, or even a war, with the USSR if a US satellite flew over its country every 90 minutes or so.
Do we have access to the USSR's declassified materials regarding Sputnik? Can't really assume they launched as soon as they could, given that there existed arguments to hold it.
I agree that we need to solve climate change. It's the single most important issue facing humanity at the moment. Where I don't agree though is the general idea that it's mutually exclusive with space exploration. A common theme is that space research often pays of in advancements down here.
If we actually have a stable outpost on the moon or Mars. We'll likely advance the state of solar systems and energy storage. We'll also likely need research into maintaining a stable biome on said station. And then there is the next generation of scientists that will be inspired. So in a roundabout way, space exploration could help save our butts down here.
Earth always has been, and in all likelihood will forever be, screwed up. Climate change will never be solved until (to paraphrase a quip from memory) global inequity has been evened out to a level a Pakistani brickmaker would consider prosperity. I don't see countries with higher standards of living making those sacrifices for the greater good of our planet.
I'd sleep much better betting our species on space expansion than on sustainability.
PS: To say nothing of the possibility of peak global output. Maybe we only get one shot at the level of resources and technologies required to seed space.
If peak global output is barely enough to colonize, then there is no way any of the colonies will ever reach that level of output, and then whats the point? It should be done sustainably, or it doesn't really matter at all.
"Earth always has been, and in all likelihood will forever be, screwed up."
Agreed. Not only screwed up, but screwed up in multiple ways. Throwing more money at the dozens of money sinks here does nothing to significantly help ensure our long-term survival. It might be the right thing to do, and over time continuing to do things like this may mean that mankind enters into some new wondrous universe free from pain and suffering. But right now, right here? We need an insurance policy. We need to get the hell off this ball of mud.
Want to know why the space program never went anywhere? Because back in the 60s and 70s, people said exactly the same thing "We need to spend our money on earthbound problems"
We've spent trillions on those problems. They are still here. In fact, the places we've made the most progress are the places we didn't try to fix.
I'm not in favor of a new huge national mission. I think a huge national goal to decrease LEO launch costs by 99.9% or more would be worth spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on. But heck, if we narrowed our focus to just that, we could probably get it done a lot cheaper than if we went down the mission creep road again.
To be accurate, we did go to the moon and do the other things.
The other things at the time happened to be ensuring people weren't lynched for the color of their skin and ensuring Vietnam didn't fall to communism on the current administration's watch.
Care to go back to that porch in the Appalachians that LBJ sat on when he declared his war on poverty -- a war that has cost trillions -- and take a look at the results?
Or heed Bono, when he states the obvious that dumping money on things because they are politically important is a counter-indicative factor of success of the effort. In fact, just look at the evidence.
Political systems exist for political reasons.
The danger, as I have outlined it, is that instead of spending money in some kind of mathematical way, we behave as humans always have, and spend money based on immediate pain or rewards.
If you can't sustain a a huge, rich, self-repairing ecosystem, what are your chances of getting one of the ground where there is none, and then sutaining it?
Are we really sure this isn't just a bunch of rationalization because really, we ought to confront the people who carve up resources and people? Going to the moon, even colonizing the whole Milky Way is completely uninspiring compared to something like bringing war criminals to justice, rather than celebrating and comforting them. So yeah, if we can't do the serious things, I guess toy stuff is all we're stuck with.
I believe we can sustain a huge, rich, self-repairing ecosystem, but I don't think we should want to:
Building the capability to get into space will be hard.
Building the capability to get into space while trying to preserve the self-repairing ecosystem of the Earth that birthed us, may be much harder, and might be impossible.
If a catastrophic event is truly inevitable (and whether it's an asteroid, or too many cows is irrelevant to me), then getting into space is absolutely essential for our species long-term survival, and a conversation about sustaining our ecosystem really needs to be about how long we need this ecosystem to last us: At the current rate of pollution, it's very possible the earth will never become uninhabitable to humans simply because humans aren't yeast.
That being said: A more measured conversation about increasing quality of life by reducing pollution isn't necessarily in conflict with the goals of getting off the planet. It'd just be nice to have that conversation instead of the polarizing one that most people seem to want to have about climate change.
> Going to the moon, even colonizing the whole Milky Way is completely uninspiring compared to something like bringing war criminals to justice
I'm all for creating as much justice and sustainability as we can with an efficient amount of effort, but still for stopping short of perfection. In a thousand years, which of your options is going to matter more to our future descendants?
You're going to need to look beyond NASA for earth sciences for the time being - there's about to be a certain change in the US that has already said earth science research is to be scrapped.
The new moon mission will likely literally be a moon mission, as the incoming change has alluded to.
Honestly, not sure what the future is for NASA, other than perhaps the past, and a return to primarily propaganda rather than scientific activities.
Can downvoters please explain which of these facts they disagree with?
As a non-american I still think that climate change is the wrong problem for the US to focus on, and space exploration and colonization goals are better targets.
The US has a huge concentration of wealth and brainpower. Neither of those are what's need to solve climate change. You'd need an army of Mahatma Gandhis and the new breed of "social entrepreneurs", not of Einsteins and Oppenheimers.
And you know, that concentration of wealth and brainpower is actually one of the problems that would have to be solved to solve climate change: India and China and soon Africa and all the other poorer countries will keep not giving a fuck about climate change and polution if it helps them pull up their living standards. Those CO2 and methane taxes: they'd rather fight a nuclear/chem/bio war than pay them! Only thing that would incite a more global cooperation towards reducing climate change would be a massive global redistribution of wealth.
And that would mean the end of US as an economic superpower among many other things.
So imho, US should shoot for the stars while you still can and raise the standard of the international space race at all cost! ...cause after the next either world war or "global redistribution of wealth" there might not be enough concentration of brainpower and wealth left to do these things, and the human race needs some kind of plan B!
New Einsteins and Oppenheimers are precisely what's needed to fight climate change. "Social enterpreneurs" will do jack squat, other than make people feel better. The only way to actually beat climate change is to improve the relevant technology to the point where the route to high standard of living is cheaper to do with clean tech. Constantly reducing the cost of solar power, and better batteries mean that we are halfway there.
The job of carbon taxes is not to be the cause of reducing global emissions in the long term. It's to make development of cleaner energy production more economically viable in the short term, to drive investment that way, so that the cost can eventually be driven below fossil fuels.
It's not necessary for some to be pulled down for others to climb up. The rest of the world catching up (and they will) will do nothing to the capability of the the USA.
While I try to avoid politics on HN - I'm one data point in disagreement with you.
The only thing to realistically fight climate change is de-population. At least if you want everyone to have a similar standard of living as the "West".
Cleaner energy is something we need - but simple math can tell you that at our current population growth and developmental growth of incredibly poor but populous nations - it only extends the inevitable.
Any environmental program that doesn't make population growth it's first concern is simply a feel-better program in my opinion. It's ignoring the mountain to focus on the molehills.
Anything a future environmental Einstein comes up with will be instantly used to slam the world population right up the the new limit (e.g. the invention of nitrogen fixation).
You could be right on this. It's probably more about changing politics and rerouting billions and billions, not something doable grass-roots style. But...
Most of the clean-power tech is here now and it works (maybe it needs lots of incremental tweaks, but no breakthroughs), if you just fix the broken economy around it. The price of oil or rare metals shouldn't be artificially lowered just because the big guys found a way to externalize the environmental costs out of it or because it makes sense in a twisted geopolitical way! A plastic cup should fucking cost $10 if it has to and if you can't afford it then buy a reusable glass or metal one. A damn next-gen smartphone should cost $1000 if it this is what it has to cost for the constituents of its battery to be mined in an eco-friendly way.
We're trying to use technology to fix a broken economy and broken world-politics. And it might work!
But think of the opportunity cost of doing this: all the great minds working to shave off an extra cent from solar panel assembly tech could work on basic nanotech research of medical research or ai or space travel. And the advances from these fields could then, maybe, be backported to the solar panel assembly process to make it 1 cent cheaper.
Yeah it probably kind of works this way too, with advances in basic science and tech driven by research directly applicable to clean energy, then later applied to things like space exploration.
But... it just feels totally backwards to me!
Science should be driven by whatever stimulates people's curiosity, whatever makes them dream higher, then later applied to practical problems. Oh, and economy should never be "tweaked" to work in unnatural ways and then later fixed through technology. This feels just wrong and I'm sure (hope? :) ) a disaster will sooner or later come out of it.
Disagreeable as he might be, I kind of like Mr. Trump ideas... though I wouldn't bet they'll translate into anything that works.
No, I was just trying to avoid the downvotes for a potentially viewed as anti- or pro- trump comment - I'm expressing no opinion on him, just an outcome according to his purported policies. I'm not prepared to say whether I think this is a good or bad outcome, just an outcome. Up to others to decide their own view.
The election is now being referred to as the "recent unpleasantness". I do agree that not saying "Trump" makes him seem a little too Voldemort for my tastes.
He's not being clever. The incoming administration's own statements back his sentiment up. There's going to be more show than science. The incoming administration -- or those making up the incoming administration -- want to use NASA as a propaganda piece, not a problem solving institution.
> there is something to be said for the concept that anything directed by science or engineering almost always results in better outcomes than what is directed by politicians
People had the same complaint about the space program in the 1960's. That it was feel good fluff. That it was a boondoggle with no substance.
And if you watch old movies, you'll hear it echoed it many places.
Clockwork Orange has the quote from the wino:
Men on the moon? And men Spinnin' 'round the earth?
And there's not no attention paid to early law and
order no more?!
I don't really agree. I think it's of profound importance to solve the problem of being able to sustain life in an artificial environment.
If we can confine ourselves within an encapsulated environment, and keep ourselves alive by recycling all biological exhaust, and drawing energy from highly durable, efficient power sources, and/or solar power, we can roll those capabilities into ways of life that dramatically reduce human impact on their surroundings. The two concepts are related, because space travel involves the problem of trying to replicate a sustainable terrestrial environment through artificial means.
America needs simple, cheap, and routine access to space more than a moon shot, then the Moon and beyond will natural goals. Similar to what is occurring with our interplanetary probes now: cheaper, frequent, and reliable. These hideously expensive single shot missions were great in the 1960s to kick start things, but it's time to move beyond that.
Agreed, but it's possible a moon mission may provide the basis for this.
Most NASA engineers in the 1960's were young, and led by hardcore dudes who lived through WW2 - they were the SpaceX of back then.
I worked in space science in the late 1990's and since then - there is a lot of grey hairs protecting their incomes, making sure they can afford to send their kids to Yale.
A more 'entrepreneurial' moon-shot, may be the shot in the arm the industry needs.
I understand that the technology may differ from 'cheap access' somewhat ... but it would also be a good staging type mission for a Mars mission.
Instead of putting Men and Women on Moon or Mars or Jupiter's Moon, how about the new mission be "create environment for 100 spaceX like companies to thrive" I reject the premise that government should be creating these missions or setting these big audacious goals
Those free markets exist after the government already spent all the R&D money needed to make it a reality. Market-based plans can only happen after the research is done, since companies are really bad at long-term R&D with no clear exit.
How about a mission on the same scale but a little closer to home. Let's take nuclear fusion technology to the point where it's ready for commercial and residential power production!
If you are 90% the way to Mars, e.g. failing in its upper atmosphere, you can communicate that proximity to your illiterates. Knowing and communicating proximity to an abstract goal, like EROEI > 1, is more complicated, politically.
Some of the justifications in the article are running against modern rocketry: Who really thinks we can mine water on the moon more cheaply than launching it from Earth on a reusable rocket? Remember that it's not just SpaceX aiming at much lower launch costs, it's also Blue Origin.
There are significant chunks of water ice on Moon. Evaporating and re-condensation of that water on Moon surface can be a cheaper and a more dependable source than shipping from Earth.
Ideally, a Moon base should be able to produce key things, like energy, water, bulk building materials from local sources, and only depend on Earth for lighter-weight, high-tech supplies and machines.
Less ideally, a Moon base could be an uneconomic way of doing all of these things, eating all of NASA's human spaceflight budget. So after getting ourselves stuck with the cost of the Shuttle and the cost of ISS, now we'll get ourselves stuck in the cost of a Moon base that's less reliable and more expensive than reusable launchers.
The reusable launch thing will be proven out in 5-10 years, long before we could set up production on the moon.
I don't see a contradiction here. Reusable launchers bring stuff in from Earth. They are just relieved from doing water tanker missions. But, if there's need, they can definitely bring in some water, too.
A partly self-replenishing Moon base is going to be cheaper to run than the ISS that depends on constant resupply from Earth.
Yet another obsession to 'put man somewhere'. Why this moon village could not be fully automated without human presence? I think this megalomaniac plans are choking real progress.
Human presence was needed in 1960ties, not in 2020.
Why repeat something from 50 years ago? We should be ambitious. Our goal should be to visit and colonise the entire solar system. And we'll need nuclear propulsion to do this at any reasonable timeframe.
It doesn't need a moon mission it needs a Mars mission. 'A Case for Mars' by aerospace engineer Dr Robert Zubrin makes clear why Mars is the only destination that makes sense.
The amount of money that could be saved by performing lithography in the vacume provided by space would be enormious. Too bad the cost of geting up there is also... well... enormious.
buy a big laser, bounce it off the Apollo 11 "laser ranging" reflector still on the moon, then convince me how you can do that from something supposedly still in a sound stage in Arizona
Well, maybe, but the question was not corresponding to that understanding.
>I'm simply asking for evidence. What proved it for you?
It wasn't something that needed much proving in the first place, perhaps the contrary would have needed more proving.
There was a space race, and both players had developed incrementally improved technology that was getting closer to achieving that.
Besides there's the enormity of a cover up operation involving thousands of people of all walks of life and for decades on end (e.g. scientists who to this day do tests on minerals etc brought from the moon).
Plus, we have (and had) all kinds of other related stuff, from airplanes that can get to the stratosphere, to satellites, a space station, etc. Not much of a stretch to also be able to go to the moon.
Who says I don't? For example I question all the "we've never landed on the moon" posts I've read.
>Humans flying to the moon seems pretty extraordinary, no?
Only if one's knowledge/information about technology and about what's possible is at pre-world war II levels, if not 19th century level.
In other words, not much more extraordinary than believing in a "network that instantly allows us to send image/sound everywhere in the world from the palm of our hand", or in "satellites that tell us our precise location", or in "pictures of the Earth from space", or "storing all the world's books in a 2" device", or "going around the Earth on a plane with a Jacuzzi in less than 2 days".
Creating throwaway accounts to act as sockpuppets in a thread where you already commented is certainly a bannable offense, so please don't do that again.
Certainly there's a lot to be suspicious about. No matter how careful the government was, how likely was it that such a complex engineering project worked successfully on the very first try? Even getting there would've been difficult, but then the system can lift off and return to Earth? It does seem incredible. And it's not like you can point a telescope at the moon and see the flags or other evidence.
But I think the evidence is definitely in favor of it actually happening. We've got source code:
The code and documents don't prove that the moon landings happened, but they do show that NASA couldn't have faked them with a stage without ever intending to go to space. They at least did significant engineering work, and made a system that has no obvious errors and could've gone to space.
And then, after putting in all this engineering work, there is video evidence of a takeoff of an object matching the description. There are independent telescopes that tracked Apollo 11 to the moon. People picked up radio signals from the moon of the transmissions the astronauts were sending.
Not to mention, there were multiple moon landings, which raises the chance of an error being revealed. A con artist wouldn't give you so many chances to catch him. The Russians would've been watching. Nixon was in power during Apollo 11, and you could certainly doubt him and maybe his Republican successor; but why wouldn't the next Democrat President shame his opposition to help get reelected, if it were all fake?
There are moon rocks on display. I know that astronomers are able to tell the chemical composition of far-off space objects. If that technology is newer than the moon landings, and the chemical composition of the moon rocks matches what it says the moon is made of, then there would've been no way for NASA to fake those moon rocks without collecting a real sample(or at least sending older equipment to orbit the moon).
Now, they could've sent unmanned rockets to the Moon, with fake broadcast signals that were carefully scripted being sent back, fake video that was pre-staged being sent back. But, those unmanned rockets would've had to leave the moon and come back, or else they'd be detectable via lasers or such still. And at that point, it's not that much of a stretch to add a manned crew.
I don't know - NASA being able to fake all this evidence in a way that couldn't be revealed by nearly 50 years of technological advancement seems more extraordinary than doing the landings.
Are you arguing that NASA never sent anything to the moon, only sent one-way unmanned rockets, sent two-way unmanned rockets, or sent one-way manned rockets? Only the two-way unmanned seems remotely plausible to me. And are you claiming that all Presidents afterward know it is fake and are lying to the public, or are they too busy or being lied to by NASA?
> And it's not like you can point a telescope at the moon and see the flags or other evidence.
You can. The Apollo missions left mirrors on the lunar surface, so that lasers aimed at those coordinates would have their light bounce back toward Earth. That's not fakeable.
I would accept the same data humans have always used for these calculations, orienting locations in space history. In this case, that would be a series of images that show the motions of the stars and telemetry data that matches it, much better from multiple angles. It's super easy to provide, super hard to fake, and as definitive as it gets.
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As for the only other ^^evidence^^ offered so far (Taniwha, thank you), unmanned rockets have already put mirrors on the moon that still work today, see Lunokhod 2. If you say the astronauts took pictures of theirs, where are the stars?
Every time I take a photo of the night sky, I'm lucky if I can see a single star. And that's without having the exposure levels set so that I can see the ground as more than a featureless white washed out expanse of light.
The stars are our map. With them we can find our way when we get lost. Every night they shine down on us and guide our direction. How can you excuse not a single orientable picture?
You'd think that with our history so closely connected with the stars (before urbanization limited your camera's view), someone would have made sure to take a couple of photos, even bringing additional lenses, for such a potentially interesting point of view.. Alas none
>You'd think that with our history so closely connected with the stars (before urbanization limited your camera's view), someone would have made sure to take a couple of photos, even bringing additional lenses, for such a potentially interesting point of view.. Alas none
(Even if nobody had bothered to take Earth photos with stars in them, the idea that there would be a huge conspiracy to manufacture a whole fake moon landing and tons of fake images of Earth from space, but somehow they would not know how to add stars with Photoshop to said images is beyond inane).
Where?? That image looks unrelated to any men on the Moon.
>somehow they would not know how to add stars with Photoshop to said images is beyond inane
That level of detail would take huge computational power and software. It takes a lot more than putting bright spots on a fake picture to exactly align said dots and their intensity with our Universe, especially from multiple angles.
It would have been utterly trivial in the 60s and 70s, even without a massive planetarium, just using multiple exposures. 'cause that had been known about since the "fairies at the bottom of the garden" photos of the victorian era.
Stars in the background of the Apollo footage tells you nothing, at all.
The photos of the footprints, from an orbiting lunar reconnaissance probe, says more.
>Where??? That image looks unrelated to any men on the Moon.
You didn't ask specifically for star photos from the moon. I sent one from space. Not enough? Or do you think that it's OK, we can get to space, but somehow the moon is out of bounds?
The few missions of men on the moon had limited time and better things to do than try to take multiple exposures (especially with the camera gear of the time) just to make pretty pictures.
>That level of detail would take huge computational power. It takes a lot more than putting bright spots on a fake picture to exactly align said dots and their intensity with our Universe, especially from multiple angles.
Actually, it's really trivial to do so in 3D space, doesn't take much of cpu, and tons of programs offer such "planetarium" functionality, where you can align everything, even moving around in time as you wish.
> Long-exposure photos were taken with a special far ultraviolet camera, the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, by Apollo 16 astronauts from the surface of the Moon, and operated in the shadow of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM)
Because it that's the kind of photo you wanted, it would have literally took one google search to find it when you asked for one. If anything, it seems like you cheer for finding evidence that speaks the contrary of your argument yourself.
I was referring to having the crew to take several long exposure captures so that you can see both earth and the stars properly exposed in the same photo, despite the limited dynamic range of film. Which this is not. If you don't accept the other stuff, why would'd accept some light dots near another light dot is a real picture of the Earth?
An intense dedicated national effort toward the goal of a fusion power plant is one possibility.