NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

It’s just as absurd today as it was in the 60s. It’s an artificial challenge that focuses attention, with the goal of exercising government, industries, academics, etc. and maybe learn and invent a few things along the way. Yes, yes, Cold War and all those theories. But it had and can again have this greater effect.

It’s kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations. The specific goal really doesn’t matter and can just as well be different than the moon. That’s not the interesting part.

Excellent point! I'd add that it also serves to inspire regular people and get them interested in science.

Unfortunately, I think that's the problem with some of the rhetoric like "the green revolution will be the next space race!" For better or worse, solar panels aren't as inspiring to most people as space is.

>It’s just as absurd today as it was in the 60s.

Nah. You can argue that the goal "land on the moon" is artificial, but it being artificial doesn't make it fake or abstract. If you're the first to achieve it then you're the first, and that's it. What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.

Now, if you're not able to repeat it at all, that does say something. But if it takes you a few years longer, well, so what? It's not a race anymore, because it's already been won, by the US of fifty years ago.

The winner of the race to Mars is still undecided, though.

It feels arbitrary to decide we can’t have a Space Race 2 (Space Harder) but we have Olympics every two years and Super Bowls and World Series and all that every year.

I’ve got to assume I’m misunderstanding the objection because it feels ridiculous to overstir the oxygen over semantics. Do we just need to call it Space Race 2?

It succeeded in the 60s because we didn't just focus attention, we focused a LOT OF MONEY on it. In comparison, today's NASA has a meager budget which has only been further slashed by the current administration.

I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.

A space race isn't a sport, it's a technological and scientific challenge. You can't invent the same technology twice, unless the idea is completely forgotten.

Also unlike sports, space races are massively expensive and it's untenable to forever go from one to the next.

A lot of money and time were behind the space race propaganda arm that got people excited about advancements in space technology.

If the same resources were put into popularizing advancements in energy, you'd see more excitement. As it is, there are kids growing up excited about environmentalism like there were kids growing up excited about space.

> What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.

Despite you throwing the word "obviously" at it, that is an extremely untrue claim. Even if we hadn't forgotten a lot of the details, we're solving new engineering challenges with modern material science and manufacturing, and learning a lot of new things about spacecraft design. There is a ton of invention in doing another landing after so long.

> we focused a LOT OF MONEY on it

Apollo at its height commanded 0.8% of the entire US economy.

Technological progress should allow us to repeat ancient feats for cheaper.

True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.

(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.

> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.

Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)

Well, you could try to raise the challenge. Eg do it on a limited budget, or establish a permanent base, etc.

However I agree that manned space flight is a giant money pit with not much to show for. It should come out of our entertainment budget, not eat into our science budget.

If you want to do science in space, go unmanned.

The space race was not just about inventing, though. It was about doing.

You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.

The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.

Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.

What I said was that you didn't have to invent anything new. And yeah, that is obvious. If you've already figured out how to build a Saturn V, to build a second one you just do the same steps you did for the first one. You don't have to use new techniques just because new ones exist.

We have lost a bunch of old techniques.

But even as stated, I don't think your argument holds up. "What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new."

Even if it was technically possible to not invent anything new, that path is not going to be taken. It would be even more expensive and worse in every way. Nobody is going to launch a rocket with just 60s/70s technology ever again. A new moon launch will have lots of invention and learning, and claiming we can still do it does need proof.

> Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.

Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.

Yeah, I already covered that when I said that if you're not able to do it at all it does say something.

>But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.

On the other side of the coin, it's such a huge expense just for bragging rights, that for any country it's not worth undertaking. It's much more preferable to just give the appearance that you could totally do it if you wanted to, but you just don't feel like it. I'd argue that the US is currently failing at this, but until anyone else flies a manned mission to the moon, it doesn't say anything.

>We have lost a bunch of old techniques.

Like I said, you didn't have to invent anything new. In this case you put yourself in the awkward situation of having to reinvent the wheel by your own incompetence. So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?

>It would be even more expensive and worse in every way.

Worse and more expensive than what? The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?

> You didn't have to invent anything new

Yes, you do.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-th...

You have to invent the same thing twice because the original tools and materials aren’t used anymore.

Let me make this point very clear with no distractions:

The "you're certainly not learning anything new" argument only works if we do reuse old techniques. "You don't have to invent anything new" is not sufficient to support the argument.

> Worse and more expensive than what?

Trying to reinvent old techniques and rebuild a bunch of machines and factories that used those techniques would be worse than inventing new things. You'd have to deliberately choose to not learn anything and to waste extra money in pursuit of that choice.

> The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?

We don't have a time machine, so the contenders are "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 1970" or "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 2030".

> So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?

If you actually do it, in a reasonable way, then in addition to the inventions and learning and any proof to do with that, you prove you can go to the moon, because saying "oh of course we can, we could use the old method" is not a particularly strong claim as industries change and workers retire over the course of more than half a century.

AI is today's equivalent race. I wouldn't be surprised if it's now over 1% of the US economy.

And IMHO this AI race will do something Apollo never did, at least not with people aboard… crash and burn.

Apollo was much better value for money. It inspired generations to study and enter STEM fields, it gave us multitudes of technological advances, and it gave the entire world something to marvel at. It gave us the earthrise image, which fueled the environmental movement. What has "AI" inspired? What marvels will the enshittificatement of googling, or the latest deepfake garbage bestow upon us? If "AI" is our moonshot we're all well and truly fucked.

It doesn't make it new just because you've forgotten how to make it.

And most of the people who actually did it aren't alive anymore. A corollary from some other recent tech news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649178

For what it's worth military research projects also come up with plenty of scientific advancements and the military also is doing things in space, including things they have had up there for years without explaining the purpose of.

Money is fungible. How do you decide what debt is military related?

(And yes, the government can give labels to the debt, but that's more of a political exercise than fiscal reality.)

This is a common misconception. The total amount spent on the Apollo program over its 13 year time span (1960-1973) was $25.8 billion as reported in 1973, around $240 billion inflation adjusted. That's around $18.5 billion per year, distributed on a bell curve. NASA reached it's minimum post-apollo budget in 1978 at $21.3 billion per year! Their current budget is $25.4 billion. [1] So based on current (and historic spending) NASA could have been constantly doing Apollo level programs, on loop, as a 'side gig' and still have plenty of money for other things.

The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.

The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

> The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.

This is inaccurate. Here [1] is a nice table showing US military spending over time, inflation adjusted. Up, up, and away! And it's made even more insane because what really matters is discretionary spending. Each year lots of things are automatically paid - interest on the debt, pensions, medicare, social security, and so on. What's left over is in those giant budgetary bills that Congress makes each year that cover all spending on education, infrastructure, and all of the other things people typically associate government spending with.

And military spending (outside of things like pension) is 100% discretionary, and it consumes about half of our entire discretionary budget! And this is again made even more insane by the fact that discretionary spending, as a percent of all spending, continues to decline. This is because we're an aging population with a terrible fertility rate. So costs for social security, medicare, and other such things are increasing sharply while new revenue from our children is barely trickling in. Notably this will never change unless fertility rates change. Even when the 'old people' die, they will be replaced by even more old people, and with even fewer children coming of age.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

You should adjust for GPD, not for inflation.

Perhaps I wasn't quite clear when I said "spends less of its total income". I meant as as a proportion of GDP.

I agree that the US has some weird distinction between discretionary and mandatory spending. And I also agree that much of the 'mandatory' spending needs a reform, and should probably not be on the government's balance sheet at all. Eg a fully funded pension system that invests globally is both off the government's balance sheet, and doesn't care about domestic fertility.

(Of course, you still want to have a means tested welfare system to catch those people who couldn't earn enough for retirement and other poor people in general.)

I don't think percent of GDP is a meaningful metric. Dollar for [inflated] dollar we're spending a lot more on defense, and it eats up near to the majority of our discretionary spending. The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending. And so now a days near to the majority of what the government has the choice of spending, is spent on war.

Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - governments can't ever control their spending, so the funds always end up getting plundered. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a great example. It was created after massive oil reserves were discovered in Alaska resulting in a huge windfall of money to the government. The government proceeded to completely waste all of that money with nothing to show for it, which made people less than happy. So the idea of the APF was to create a fund that could provide social dividends in both the present and even after the oil eventually runs out.

But as the government started, again, blowing money, they started dipping into the fund and eventually changed the law to normalize it and it's gradually turning into a joke. This years dividend was $1000, compared to $3300 (inflation adjusted) at its peak in 1999. The problem with 'well just make it where you can't do that' is that the same people that make that law, are the exact same that can unmake that law and give themselves lots of other people's money, which they will do, sooner or later.

I can’t tell if this is a joke. The Apollo mission did crash and burn and kill people.

No. Kids are not stupid. You can appreciate environmental innovation while also recognizing that it is fundamentally, qualitatively different from doing difficult things in space. Do you look at the Mars Rover and say to yourself 'big deal, we have cars right here on Earth'?

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Apollo 1 burned quite well unfortunately. But IMHO it makes no sense to compare those things anyways.

>to build a second one you just do the same steps you did for the first one.

Are you in manufacturing? Because when following perfectly mature process, defect still happens.

Then, how do you even "do the same steps for the first one"? After 50y, lots have lost.

> I don't think percent of GDP is a meaningful metric.

Why not? I think it's close to the only useful metric across time.

> The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending.

Laws aren't god given. They can be changed. The political processes are slightly different, but if the voters want it, they can get it.

> Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - [...]

I'm not alluding to any sovereign wealth funds. What makes you think so?

I suggested to get pension systems out of the hands of government, not into them.

A fully funded pension system that invests globally outside the government's balance sheet is essentially exactly what a sovereign wealth fund is. Even when it is managed privately (as the Alaska fund is) the government has regulatory control of the fund, which is where the looting is, probably unavoidably, introduced.

As for money vs GDP, our discussion on mandatory vs discretionary spending is already one reason why $$$ is far more informative. Dollars can, after inflation, be compared and paint a relatively clear picture. Percent of some other metric, which has often changed wildly over time, is instead more likely just to mislead.

So for instance we now spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on the war machine than we did during the Cold War when we were facing a very viable threat of nuclear annihilation. That's an extremely valuable metric that does mean a lot. Why are we spending so much on war?

The fantasy about it creating some sort of unstoppable war machine has clearly been clearly shattered. It's not even clear that would have been desirable if true. One thing this administration got completely right was renaming the Department of Defense to its old moniker of Depart of War, because that is what it really is.

This reality is completely muddled if you start trying to frame things as percent of some other metric, be that budget, GDP, or whatever else.

I never claimed kids were stupid, my point is that a ton of resources were dumped into things like fan clubs, movies, TV and radio programs, toys, collectibles, children's books, keeping it in the news, etc. We even sent a grade school teacher into space even if that ended in tragedy.

Look at the cult of personality the Soviet Union built around Yuri Gagarin, yes people were always going to find space exploration interesting, but manufacturing a folk hero means even more people will, too, and it becomes something aspirational and seemingly attainable. The Soviets were not unique in doing this, the US did similar things.

I agree that all played a role. I'm just not sure that a similar PR campaign would be able to produce comparable inspiration from, for example, public infrastructure. There's no afro-futurist movie called "The Interstate Highway is the Place".

I think we were able to strike a chord with nationalist tendencies, which can be strong motivators, for public infrastructure during the New Deal era with the PWA and WPA and their associated propaganda. There was both a personal pride in bettering oneself with hard work, and larger shared pride of building huge, sometimes incredible feats of engineering, infrastructure that your neighbors and nation depend on, and quite literally rebuilding the nation for a new modern era.

There are already some related things in popular culture that seem to inspire younger generations, like new urbanism. The hope for a new way of living can be a huge motivating force.