"The president and I want to get to the moon in this president's term" - Sean Duffy NASA administrator.
A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
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A scary way to set a schedule on a complex project with lives at stake. They don't care though.
We let people do stupid shit and kill themselves all the time. Driving 80+ MPH, driving motorcycles, recreational drugs, alcohol, climbing Everest, etc.
I think it's fine. If I were in the position, I'd sign up to do this.
The moon is meaningful.
The risk of people dying is sometimes an acceptable risk. We accept it every time a firefighter goes into a burning building. Is a national vanity project like Moon missions worth the risk? Maybe then, when it was novel and inspirational, but now, when it's a retro throwback and the only reason we're doing it is to avoid losing face to the communist Chinese?
Let's be serious, please. When has Trump ever stuck his name or face on anything nationally meaningful?
I think the US is lacking the organization, culture, and on-a-mission mentality today, not money. I believe the money is the easiest part of the equation, the rest can't be faked or supplied at the click of a button. The US is no longer a serious nation hell-bent on accomplishing great/difficult things. Congress knows if they supply the $30 billion per year, what we'll get in the end is a broken program that won't achieve the set aims, and it'll just take 15 years at $40 billion per year instead, without a single Moon landing. They know full well how dysfunctional the US is, everybody is just acting when the cameras are on.
Also, corners were cut in the testing. (Full stack testing.)
Full stack testing was not cutting corners. After ground testing it was deemed that incremental testing would not be beneficial. Doing tasks in parallel instead of in series can introduce project risks, but that's not the same thing as cutting corners, which is where something necessary is not done at all.
The idea that rocket X not exploding in a single launch makes it man-rated is cutting corners.
Full stack testing was testing the entire rocket at the same time instead of using dummy stages to test parts of the rocket separately. There was opposition to it because if the rocket failed it might be difficult to diagnose why exactly it failed, which would slow the project down in the long run. Based on the ground testing and advances in instrumentation, the risk of a project delay from a failure was considered acceptable. It still took multiple launches to man rate the rockets. There's a reason the first manned launch of the Saturn V was Apollo 8.
After the fact, it always looks inevitable.
Would you have gone up on that first manned Saturn launch? Not me. Recall how the space shuttle was safe, until it blew up. And then it was safe again, and broke up on reentry.
So, I imagine if he hadn't been assassinated, they probably would've landed on the moon around the same time, which would be after a possible 2nd term (unless he lost re-election and then won again).
Everyone on the first manned Saturn test died. Do you know why people got into the second manned test? It was not that they knew with certainty it would be safe, but because they thought it was realistic that they could accomplish their goal.
People die in car accidents every day, that does not make my plan to drive to work tomorrow unrealistic.
> so I take it it probably would've still happened
I'm talking about the Apollo 1 fire.