Was it a giant leap?

[airdvr 210]

I've been engrossed in a biography of Neil Armstrong http://www.amazon.com/First-Man-Life-Neil-Armstrong/dp/074325631X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1379734750&sr=8-1&keywords=first+man . Interesting enough but I'm struck by what I believe is the failure of mankind to live up to those most famous words 44 years ago. I wonder how it stalled, because the feeling of the time, even readily obvious to this 11 year old boy was this was the beginning of something wonderful. The world would change for the better. Sadly, I don't think it has.

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[shropshire 0]

What shocked me about that time was how fast 'we' got bored with space travel ... Oh yeah, they're off to the moon again .. what's on the other channel (we only had 2 then).

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[airtwardo 7]

Bad marketing...

I wonder what the time would have been like if Vietnam going on & the economy even stronger - proly be vacationing on Mars by now.


I read Scott Carpenter's bio last year...interesting insight to the early space program. A flawed but driven guy.

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[champu 1]

As demonstrated by the long jump in track and field events, sometimes after a giant leap you find yourself sitting in a sand pit.

[Skyrad 0]

Technology advanced and evolved, man didn't.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

[lurch 0]

How did it stall?
I can offer a few observations.
1: That bad marketing. Nasa did everything so very checklist-slowly that they actually managed to make space exploration BORING. Nothing ever happened in space missions on TV... just beeping, people talking, occasional shots of things moving glacially slowly in space. Yawn.

2: Internal confusion, bureaucracy-bound thinking. When they committed to a moon program they pulled out all the stops, quit dicking around and -built a goddamn moon rocket-. FAST. They weren't concerned with mutual backscratching or endless who-gets-what defense contracts or who was gonna quibble about ooh this isn't safe... they just...fucking...built it. They were only concerned with getting the damn job done.

But after, when they'd succeeded... NASA became a jobs program not a space agency. Turf wars and no budgets and ridiculous inflation of costs... I read somewhere the entire Apollo moon landing thing cost about 24 billion. For the research, the infrastructure, the rocket itself, the entire mission... Now, they'll waste 24 billion developing and testing half a booster that never even gets finished anyway, ends up cancelled, and all they have to show for it is maybe another model engine they can use to lob satellites, but only after a 20 year certification process. Its like the phenomenon I see with public works projects... a bridge is declared unsafe and in need of overhaul or replacement... article says bridge cost 2.7 million to build from scratch in the first place, but will somehow cost 24.5 million just to repair and 79 million to replace. And this makes sense...how? You'd think, with THAT kind of cost that it'd make more sense to try to recreate the conditions that allowed it to somehow be built with less than 3 million to begin with... don't tell me labor and material costs have gone up 30X in a 40 year bridge lifespan... its more important to the bureaucracy that 56 different contractors make out like bandits than it is to actually do the fucking job.

3: Between a safety culture that simultaneously prevented anything from actually getting done while creating disasters like Challenger and the public's shrinking-violet approach to risk, (Omigod we actually lost an astronaut, stop all space travel for the next 7 years while we try and fail to make it safe as mall parking) Hello, space travel is risky...
For 30 years Nasa has produced paper, not spaceships. You could CLIMB back to the moon on the stacks of pretty glossy press release photos of cancelled spacecraft programs that never even came close to getting developed or built. How is it, that when it mattered, with primitive 60's technology they were able to do it before the decade was out, but last time Bush talked about seriously returning to the moon they were talking about a 20+ year timescale? Have we gone backwards?

4: Reality bites. The moon shot is the only space activity that ever lived up to the hype and delivered a result that made people believe in it. Most real space applications are a lot more gritty tentative and limited. And even IF we ever do anything real again like get some guys to Mars, as soon as people realize that A: Its costing 400 billion a month to keep them there
and B: there's not much for them to actually DO there besides BE there and putter around looking for water the public will lose interest faster than last season's failed reality TV shows, and the plug gets pulled anyway so we can focus on what really matters, you know, like the superbowl and "deadliest catch" and similar TV meant for the lowest common denominator, idiotic celeb culture and fucking Snooki.

Face it. We've peaked out. The "heroic age" is ancient history. Apollo brought us a generation that wanted to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, fighter pilots, astronauts.
MTV and "hip hop" brought us a generation that want to be "Ballers" "DJs" and "Gankstas". We've gone full retard.
And no, I have no solutions to suggest. Ya can't fix stupid.
-B

Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

[jgoose71 0]

lurch

MTV and "hip hop" brought us a generation that want to be "Ballers" "DJs" and "Gankstas". We've gone full retard.
And no, I have no solutions to suggest. Ya can't fix stupid.
-B

Sure you can. All you do is let natural selection take it's course. Unfortunately all the liberals stand up and start crying about needing to end the suffering of the stupid people.

Stupid is supposed to hurt...

"There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
Life, the Universe, and Everything

[GeorgiaDon 381]

I think it was a "great leap", a huge accomplishment that required the sustained effort of thousands of people for almost a decade. I can't think of any other effort that pushed technology so far so fast, except maybe WWII.

Unfortunately it stalled because the underlying motivation was political: beat the Russians to the moon, and prove our political system is better than their system. Just another Cold War proxy for actual conflict. The science was pretty much an add-on until they got to the last few missions; Apollo 17 (the last moon landing) was the first to have a trained geologist on the crew. The rush to beat the Russians meant that no time could be taken to develop cost-effective approaches. Once the race was won, there was no political motivation to sustain the effort. After all, the goal was "beat the Russians", not "establish a permanent colony on the Moon". Once the goal was achieved it became politically impossible to go back and "do it over again from the beginning", but this time with cost-effective technology. "Land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade" was a great goal, but unfortunately it also set up the conditions to make it a one-off effort and not a long-term advance.

Maybe going to Mars will provide an opportunity to do things properly.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[shropshire 0]

I think that you summed it all up right Don

GeorgiaDon

Maybe going to Mars will provide an opportunity to do things properly.
Don

Except -
(1)that could turn into a pissing match with China - when it should be done WITH China

(2)You need to stop wasting money on Stupid wars first!!

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[kelpdiver 2]

lurch

2: Internal confusion, bureaucracy-bound thinking. When they committed to a moon program they pulled out all the stops, quit dicking around and -built a goddamn moon rocket-. FAST. They weren't concerned with mutual backscratching or endless who-gets-what defense contracts or who was gonna quibble about ooh this isn't safe... they just...fucking...built it. They were only concerned with getting the damn job done.

Get the job done ahead of the Russians, who beat us to space, and beat us to space with men (and women for that matter).

Quote

Its like the phenomenon I see with public works projects... a bridge is declared unsafe and in need of overhaul or replacement... article says bridge cost 2.7 million to build from scratch in the first place, but will somehow cost 24.5 million just to repair and 79 million to replace. And this makes sense...how? You'd think, with THAT kind of cost that it'd make more sense to try to recreate the conditions that allowed it to somehow be built with less than 3 million to begin with... don't tell me labor and material costs have gone up 30X in a 40 year bridge lifespan...

Are we building like for like? Bridges built in that era have failed in a variety of ways - most notably the Tacoma Narrows. Today's bridges have more requirements for durability, capacity, and service (bike/ped lanes) than before. And bridges built in the Depression era could certainly pay lower wages than now.

Quote

4: Reality bites. The moon shot is the only space activity that ever lived up to the hype and delivered a result that made people believe in it. Most real space applications are a lot

What else would ever have the same bite? People can see the moon - Verne wrote his book in the 19th century. But Mars is just a tiny red dot. And nothing else is close.

Quote

Face it. We've peaked out. The "heroic age" is ancient history. Apollo brought us a generation that wanted to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, fighter pilots, astronauts.
MTV and "hip hop" brought us a generation that want to be "Ballers" "DJs" and "Gankstas". We've gone full retard.
And no, I have no solutions to suggest. Ya can't fix stupid.
-B

Didn't know people stopped trying to go the Air Force Academy. And I know that med school admissions are as tough as ever, and we continue to have a huge number of lawyers (odd that this made your list, however, usually they are the parasites, not the heroes in this sort of "when I was young" rant). And today's Ballers and DJs were yesterday's hippies and peace corp volunteers. Bohemians before that.

Back on the topic - the space race was a giant leap forward - our life today requires completely on microprocessors and satellites and the birth of Silicon Valley came out of the sudden promotion of STEM post Sputnik.

[wmw999 2,593]

Having spent a career working in the space program, this pretty much nails it. Lurch's post touches on some things, but they feed off each other.

"too much safety while allowing accidents"
"checklists make it too boring"
etc.

Space exploration is, in fact, dangerous. And when you mix politics in (which is going to happen in a government-run program), you pay extra for "oversight." You pay for the oversight, you pay for the programs to prepare data for the oversight, you pay in the time spent getting ready for it and staying ready for it. But heaven help us if we aren't subject to that oversight -- then we're "wasting tax dollars."

The government projects are good for getting things off the ground that are too risky or large for industry. But I'm really, really glad that resupplying the space station has been turned over to contractors now.

NASA is full of smart, dedicated employees who are more than willing to work for less in order to work for the space program. Of course they're not all like that, but there are plenty. But it can never be perfect (and even NASA 1 wasn't perfect -- there was that whole matter of Apollo 1, after all).

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[lawrocket 3]

I love your perspective on this, Wendy. And I think that Don and lurch also have some good things to say. The "all of the above" answer is appropriate.

What are my thoughts? A big step was actually landing people on the moon. An even bigger step was walking around on it. But to me, the biggest step was in getting back "safely to the earth.". Not nearly as visually spectacular but the whole "getting back alive" thing is what made it so hard in the first place.

What problems do I think we have? Several. The first problem is a lack of balls. Do we want toi go to Mars? To an asteroid? To hang out and a lagrangian point? I can't say we do. It took boldness and a steel set to do what was done. Changing the Apollo 8 mission four months before it flew? Balls. Doing the whole program on television where all screw ups were instantly known worldwide? Yep.

There is also a persistence of the thing that ended Apollo early - politics. Sure, the Apollo program kept a lot of people employed. Mainly in SoCal, Long Island, Houston and Florida. As was shown elsewhere, they were outnumbered by every place else in the country. So when the Mondales of the Congress told the public that we shouldn't be wasting money on the moon while there were problems here on earth, it resonated. So Apollo got cut.

What else happened? Politics. Nixon set the precedent: create no awesome program that a later president will see the fruits of. He knew full well he was basking in the glory of Kennedy and Johnson as President. The only thing to be passed down to the future is a problem.

What else happened? Money. Money killed Apollo. Look at what budgeting did to the shuttle. Do more with less. The Shuttle was a fantastic piece of equipment. But it wasn't exploration. It was for exploitation. The shuttle was essentially space trucking that proved its worth in not just deployments but with Spacelab, Spacehab and the repair missions. Then it got the ISS construction job and did what it was deigned for. And it killed 14 people.

Another thing that happened? Rertardification. The science left behind on the Moon is saddening. (Note: I disagree with the asseertion that the astronauts weren't "trained geologists." It's a discredit to every mission starting with Apollo 15. Schmitt was the first Ph.D. Geologist there. But Schmitt helped train the others along with fellas like Lee Silver. Even the CMPs had extensive traininng from Farouk El-Baz. The breakthroughs of Apollos 15, 16 and 17 were breathtaking. Apollo 16's science completely changed the view of lunar genesis. Schmitt became a damned good pilot. And those other dudes became damned good geologists.)

But the science wasn't enough. Even with the ISS, we the public don't get much on what's going on up there. Mainly because the public doesn't care about anything more than pictures.

It also became routine. Even in the 80s the politicians and press put the "operational" tag on the Shuttle. It was practical, economical and safe. So reliable, in fact, that we selected a teacher to go into space six month later to teach a class! Hey, we sent up Barfin Jake Garn and Bill Nelson (whose crew actually lucked out with two prelaunch scrubs - one that prevented a likely fatal outcome and one that prevented either a fatal or a TAL abort - both scrubs were unrelated to the failure modes I mentioned).

The space program became a victim of its own success. My biggest worry is the loss of industrial knowledge. The people who got us to the Moon are almost all gone. We also know it couldn't be done for under half a trillion dollars now. Because the winning bids would total a half a trillion and after delays and overruns would result in it being ready for test in 2030 after costing $3 trillion. That's how government works nowadays.

We've gotten so good at LEO. We haven't left LEO for 40 years. Kinda sucks.

My wife is hotter than your wife.