It feels weird seeing boondoggles like the Senate Launch System actually deliver. On the one hand it’s exciting because we’re actually really possibly maybe finally going back to the moon. On the other hand, it is at the price of, minimum, $1,000,000,000/launch. A successful launch doesn’t actually change the reality that it was and still is largely politically viable only as a jobs/pork program.
I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? In hindsight it feels worthwhile. But the big difference between Artemis and Apollo is that Artemis is coming after Commercial Crew/SpaceX has proven a different business/engineering model.
I’ve been waiting for this since I was in the fifth grade, so I should be happy. But then, I was promised a path to Mars with boots on the Moon two years ago.
> A successful launch doesn’t actually change the reality that it was and still is largely politically viable only as a jobs/pork program.
This is sometimes seen as wasteful, on the surface, but there are very real benefits to doing things like this, even when it is much more expensive than alternatives:
1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability
2. having backup launch capability
3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US
4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech
5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US
These are all generally good for furthering science and technology, and our economy, but it is critical in times of war (and as a deterrent to war)
The romantic nature of space is definitely the best way to sell these programs, but there are much more pragmatic reasons to be doing them.
These are common but post-hoc justifications. Government launch monopolies have suppressed a lot of competition in the market, that would exist in plenty if the money was fairly spent.
A particularly salient example in light of Russia's war is that Congress repeatedly underfunded the Commercial Crew Program in favor of over-funding SLS, while we were trying to wean off Russian dependence.
But this is far from the only case. We could have had redundancy in Artemis by designing for commercial lift; half the money split between three providers would have given a lot more lift and a lot better cadence than SLS. We could seek out redundancy for SLS now, by buying rockets Artemis already requires, modified for SLS' flight profile, and spending a tiny fraction on, say, ULA and Blue's rockets.
We would have more backup launch capabilities, and more relevant talent, and more institutional knowledge, if we just invested the money in open-market demand for products, rather than supporting and endorsing monopoly-making. Was Congress more up in arms over Starship HLS, or ULA EELV? Think what it says to the market when a government is more willing to give money to a company for forming a monopoly and to penalize them for flying commercial payloads, than in purchase of a product.
The motivations for these programs aren't actually grounded in the betterment of the industry, nor of the US' launch capabilities in general. There is no way ~$100B on SLS/Orion is a sane allocation of money for that.
They're not post-hoc at all, military power was the entire reason world powers went to space to begin with, not science.
And private aerospace has highly monopolized themselves -- there's a reason there's so many hyphenated company names in this space. Consolidation is the natural evolution of large private companies in industries with high barriers to entry. The only mechanism we have to counter that is public spending that intentionally props up smaller players. SpaceX would already be out of business if it weren't for the US government swooping in to save the day. They didn't have a viable commercial business until later.
China just built a new space station by itself in about 18 months. A lot of these rationalizations for going the slow bloated pork route are going to evaporate as it becomes clearer we have a great power peer competitor. Hopefully it doesn't take a CCP flag flying on the Moon and people getting arrested for criticizing Xi Jinping Thought on Mars for the USA to finally get off its ass and realize being arrogantly wasteful and inefficient isn't actually a "deterrent to war" against a competent adversary.
The ISS showed large space vehicles can be assembled from small modules that could be launched on the Space Shuttle.
This is the major accomplishment of the ISS program. So what does NASA do? Decide (or be told to decide), "oh no, we need a launcher that can lift much bigger things, because OF COURSE we can't put smaller modules together in space."
We have no idea how long it took the Chinese Government to build their new space station. They lie about practically everything and the record is largely opaque with everything they do. If it took them ten years to bring it to fruition, they certainly would lie about it and pretend otherwise.
I'd add that whilst people generally have a low trust in governments, I personally have zero trust in corporations and the idea of access to space being solely the preserve of commercial entities is an uncomfortable one. Historically both governments and companies have acted for self interest and detrimentally to everyone else but governments still have more accountability than corporations, which are beholden to a profit seeking board. Governments do things that are not profitable but advance society, for profit entities don't.
> Governments do things that are not profitable but advance society, for profit entities don't.
The simplest way to understand if society wants something is if it will pay for it.
> the idea of access to space being solely the preserve of commercial entities is an uncomfortable one
It shouldn't be. Until SpaceX, the only way to the ISS was a Russian-controlled system. Would you prefer that to SpaceX today? Or is it better to have companies - that are regulated - follow money rather than the whims of whomever is currently in charge?
> The simplest way to understand if society wants something is if it will pay for it.
That’s society’s preferences weighted by how good each person is at making money, but it doesn’t represent society as a whole. If a person is disabled or uneducated and can’t hold a job, that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences.
> should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences
They don't get that through the government. A mostly binary choice comprising of what two sides promise to do on a thousand issues? How is that anything close to the perfect accessible system you're positing?
Is it really equality to perfectly equalize decision-making while completely slanting the resulting the burden-taking?
I realize how dangerous/potentially harmful a "taxpayer contribution === influence" is. But I think it doesn't have to be a binary. Perhaps a "three house" style system would be an improvement for representative democracy here:
One house for representatives of each state
One house for representatives of vote by population
One house for representatives of taxpayers by net tax burden carried
Given that a large number of those "states" are net tax beneficiaries, that first house needs to be reformed.
As for having reps of taxpayers by net tax burden, what the hell does "net tax burden" mean? Tesla is useless without roads. Boeing is useless without airports. How do we apportion the tax paid against benefits received?
It's nonsense that "taxpayers" are worthy of further representation than any other citizen. The fact that corporations pay tax should not give them rights to representation in the legislature. Unless you think of corporations as one way to "represent taxpayers by net tax burden" because they are a collection of taxpayers.
Everyone should have equality of opportunity, the fact that we have a progressive tax rate system is deliberately to redistribute wealth across the population fairly to help provide that equality of opportunity.
The fact that people have got to the point of personal selfishness that they think that only "money talks" is a measure of their societal contribution is a sad indictment of the past 30-40 years of Thatcher/Reaganite nonsense.
The purpose of money is to aid in trade and that very creation and distribution of wealth.
Billionaires should be taxed at 100% for all of their liquid wealth over that $1B. If they have it invested into productive and useful wealth creation, then leave it there, otherwise, take it and do something productive with it.
It is treating everyone equally if you don't interpret "equal" under kindergarten "everyone gets the same candy bar" rules. Progressive tax systems try to reduce societal inequality by sharing resources more equally. They recognize that often times high wealth and income come from chance and circumstance, rather than merit or hard work, and seek to rebalance the system.
You're talking about equality of opportunity (which is treating everyone equally) Vs equality of outcome (which is treating people unequally to engineer an outcome.
Why not just say, 'I don't believe in treating everyone equally"? If you have a different position then say so. Why try and redefine things? What's the goal?
Generally I'm not wild about the equality of opportunity/outcome framing. I think to really advocate for equality of opportunity you have to account for the vagaries of life, like:
- If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity"
- Or, should we outlaw wealthy families (maybe this is a 100% tax on wealth > $1m), assuming we could actually do this
- If you're born into a normal family, but one of your parents dies when you're 17, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?
- If you get thyroid cancer at age 33, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?
- How would we even quantify these opportunity gaps? The way we currently do it is by comparing lifetime earnings and try to ceteris paribus everything else, but as we start compensating, we're disturbing the experiment. Also, where does the money come from?
I'd love to hear a set of policies that deals with life's basic unfairness, but I bet it would look a lot like progressive taxation, a strong social safety net, and heavily subsidized education, and the people who support equality of opportunity definitely don't support those things. Mostly their position distills down to "don't tax us to subsidize low income/wealth people", and the best you can say about that is it doesn't reckon with the unfairness issue.
So I reject the premise. But, I also think that "equality" is actually a complex concept. Is a society that allows super wealthy people alongside homeless people equal? Is a society that puts a 100% tax on wealth > $1m but a 0% tax on income < $12,950 equal? What about a society that gives women 6 months paid leave for birth and early childhood, but men 6 weeks? What about a society that subsidizes insulin but not L-dopamine for Parkinson's sufferers?
My ideal would be that we treat people with "equal regard" for their needs and situation. Maybe that sounds like bullshit, or the idea of the government deciding what your needs are/should be is worrying, or you're skeptical we could ever really quantify it, and I would mostly agree. But I also can't come up with a better or more reasonable goal, even though we might not ever practically achieve it.
> - If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity"
Equality of opportunity isn't equalising everything in life, it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person. Equalising everything is equality of outcome, or how some people use "equity".
I.e. having a decent schooling, being treated equally by social institutions such as banking and law enforcement, and having an decent shot at jobs and housing, those are things to do with equality of opportunity. People shouldn't be unequally treated.
That doesn't mean that a legally blind person can become a fighter pilot, or people should be graded in school differently to compensate for ancestral sins; changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.
Outside of those definitions, to be clear, I'd say some things are definitely fantastic to do terms of helping people, such as providing braille on money. We just need to remember that each time we do this it's disproportionately expensive, so we need to make sure we're prioritising (somehow) to remove the most disadvantage from the most people. But I don't think this sort of thing should be in an equality discussion, as it muddles it too much.
> it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person
Well, a couple of things about that:
- That's not equality of opportunity, it's anti-discrimination
- Generally the point of these programs is to create a more equitable society, i.e. when bad stuff happens to you (cancer, slavery) we drop a money bag at your door to catch you back up. People at least say (and indeed the Declaration of Independence starts off by saying) we want an equal society, and this is how we do it. If we give the same bag of money to everyone no matter what happened to them, that doesn't address the inequality, it just causes inflation. Indeed, you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally, because life doesn't treat everyone equally.
> changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.
Why aren't we concerned with outcomes? Whenever I hear the opportunity/outcome framing this is my immediate question. Aren't outcomes the only thing that matters here? Of course we need to consider tradeoffs and costs, but if the goal is to make a more equitable society, how can we not consider outcomes? Can you claim to be an equal society when none of your policies discriminate (let's stipulate this is the case in the US, but it definitely is not), but 2/3s of your people (women and minorities in the US) are effectively an underclass? If that's the definition of equality, it doesn't sound very useful. I think we can do better.
Again this sounds like an excuse to ignore life's basic unfairness, as well as bad stuff our society has done in the past (slavery, the chattel system) and currently does in the present (the war on drugs, the gender pay gap). It's like, it's fine if we deprived people of opportunity in the past, even last year, as long as we fix that opportunity inequality sometime in the future, as though that didn't permanently set millions of people back. How do we make up for past, current, and existing and future inequities of opportunity?
Or put another way, how will we compensate the people today who will be victimized by:
- a vindictive immigration policy
- a racist carceral system
- a misogynistic reproductive rights regime
- a transphobic... everything
Will we just fix the glitch and ignore the damage those systems and policies have created? Again that doesn't sound like it really addresses the full scope of the problem.
In case you were looking for the literal answer, it is because a society is the aggregate of every individual in it. It follows that a society's preferences are defined by the aggregate of the preferences of each individual in it.
Therefore if one wants to know what the society's preferences are, that data must be collected in such a way the each individual's preferences are included in the data set.
We might still apply a weighting function at aggregation time, depending on why we're looking at society's preferences in that instance. There are certain group's of opinions that we don't value as much for answers to some questions, but we should like to be deliberate about those choices instead of applying an implicit weighting function during collection.
I worked at a chain retail store once upon a time. There was a self-proclaimed nazi (he was proud of it of course) that came in daily and stole a lot of merchandise. Company policy was to do nothing, essentially.
The nazi also had a criminal record for raping a young boy.
The parent put it this way:
> If a person is disabled or uneducated and can’t hold a job, that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences
Morally and rationally the nazi child rapist should not have equal say in society's preferences. Any society - any culture - that is stupid enough to place that person's preferences at a level of equality, deserves and will have earned its inevitable collapse. And there are far worse monsters roaming about than the nazi child rapist. While my specific example is an outlier (on purpose), the premise is far more expansive in principle.
It's also why a Constitutional Republic is vastly superior to actual Democracy.
Collection of data is not equivalent to a judgement on the value of the results.
For example, when considering questions of crime and punishment / deterrence we probably wouldn't value the preferences of say, psychopathic murderers, on the same level as those of the families of their victims. That would be silly.
However, it would still be good to collect their preferences on conditions within the prison system and host of other topics. And we might still intentionally devalue those preferences too, but that would be a deliberate choice of values as society.
When we fail to collect the data effectively in the first place, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to determine what we value and what we don't. So we're still going to want to know these things, that way we don't just discover later that we were ignoring a big thing that, turns out, we would have liked to value once we knew about it.
In your particular example, add in the one stipulation that both the Nazi and the family of his victims don't have much discretionary income to spend and yet they live in a world where society's preferences are collected primarily or singularly by way of observing what people spend money on. In that scenario, all of those people's preferences share the equal status of being completely ignored. That seems unfair to victims as well.
Modify the scenario a little differently and say the Nazi is very wealthy while the victims are poor. So then because of the data collection method alone, as a society, we would then be elevating the Nazi's preferences to 100% greater value than the victims.
That outcome seems vastly contrary to what we would actually value if we just fairly and accurately collected the data first and then applied our judgements about what should be valued.
Further notice that in just asking the questions, we can also easily discover at the macro level that this guy is a Nazi, after all, given the chance, he'll tell us so. This means deliberately ignoring his preferences is easy at time of aggregation and now we can do that on purpose, because as a society, we don't value the opinions of Nazis when it comes to questions of how to run things in a democracy.
> The simplest way to understand if society wants something is if it will pay for it.
Through market approach? This has never worked for roads, fire service, police, courts, sewage, water supply or any other natural monopoly.
Victorian Britain actually had a court system where you would pay the judge to judge you, and the more you paid, the 'better' the judging. You fan imagine the issues...
Not everything works the simplest way. But you'll note that all of those subcontract lots of companies to do their building, cleaning, maintenance, decorating, HR, IT, etc etc.
The things it doesn't work for are very easily defined, and don't interfere with the fact that almost everything does work well like that.
the idea of access to space being solely the preserve of commercial entities is an uncomfortable one.
To be fair, everything else has been like this. The first railways were government funded, the first airlines (in most places), this is quite typical.
Then as things mature, as there can be a profit-motive, government tends to get out of the lime-light, and private orgs take over.
Space-X, as an example, is just that. And space travel is about to become mundane, common, normal. Just like air travel in the early 50s.
And this doesn't mean the government has zero power here. It can take over companies in time of war/national emergency, it can compel for national need.
Again, what we need to do... is realise that space travel is becoming like air travel. And I for one, would be horrified if all control to air travel was through governments only.
Well, there were certainly cases where companies pioneered something and government took over later - like railways in Austria-Hungary. The conservative government in Vienna did not thin these newfangled trains could ever make money, but handed out permits to private companies anyway. Then when it saw how bloody lucrative it is, it nationalized those companies afterwards.
And there are other examples, such as the East India Company having its own army, navy and effectively ruling a big part of India at a time.
The East India Company was a mechanism for the British Empire to spread its rule while maintaining "plausible deniability" about the capture of the wealth of the conquered land and people.
Air travel only began because the US Mail paid for airmail deliveries.
NASA only began because the post-war MIC needed to develop ICBMs.
Public education only began because industrialization required an educated workforce.
Air travel is one of the safest modes of mechanized transportation in the world, space launches would be among the least and probably wont change much in their overall reliability.
Airflight was incredibly dangerous 100 years ago. Yet now you claim it is one of the safest, thereby validating that technological improvements, and design improvements, can change safety.
Then you say, effectively "things won't improve" for "this other tech over here".
Which is it?!
My point in all of this is, while space travel was a monumental achievement 60+ years ago, it's simply not that big of a deal now. Endless commercial corporations now engage in the act, for profit, because there is profit, and because it is so commonplace.
And this trend will only increase, eventually leading to people actually being station in space (eg, the moon, larger commercial structures, mining, etc). This will lead to more trips, and for people visiting said structures for business, and on and on.
Just as with planes, this will become safer, more common, more regulated, more... normal.
What part of this iterative process do you believe will block launches from being more safe? NOTE: don't use today's technology as a blocker, please.
For 3, and 4, I may be wrong, but my understanding is that the SLS is just continuing (and, with future engines, re-producing) the space-shuttle tech package. Which is, well, certainly not cutting edge, and not particularly relevant to anything else anyone is doing in the space-launch sphere.
Now, just because no one else is doing it doesn't mean it's automatically bad, but it's a launch technology suite that was selected against for good reason in the post-shuttle era. The (eventual) launch of Artemis I made clear, for example, that cryogenic hydrogen is a really problem-prone PITA to work with.
If you're working with decades-long development timelines, it isn't the worst idea to use a modernized version of proven technology.
Let SpaceX et al. take the technology risk, and support them via contracts.
But it's an improvement on the prior approach to instead put space eggs in two baskets: {lower risk, conservative technology choices} + {higher risk, cutting edge technology choices}
We tend to think of risk management and secondarily the cost horizon of [re]building eroded technical competence, in the West, but hn commenter User23 also makes a point that is incredibly important and less often mentioned:
> " 'Indeed, besides the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, every organization [of 60+] in the western world that's been continuously operating since 1530 is a university.'
I believe this is why it's critically important that universities remain focused on their timeless mission rather than chasing secular fads. The Buxton index, described in the [link], is an incredibly important concept."
It's natural that we would think technology startups compelling due to the way they succeed with difficulty and risk management competence. But if their Buxton index of planning horizon is limited by their runway, and a decade is considered an Uber-long horizon, how futuristic and exceptional are we ultimately talking? I agree with the parent commenter that the eggs in two baskets serve separately appropriate purposes.
But no one questions why we are working with decades long development timelines. Even Apollo was conceived in 1960 and landed in 1969, under one decade let alone multiple decades. SpaceX went from 0 launches to orbit in a decade, then from 0 reusable to world first in a decade and now looks like they are gunning for Mars within a decade.
I agree with the other poster that the only thing that will light a fire under the US' butt is having a peer country clown them in a space milestone. I don't like the CCP and I abhor their practices but I do root for their space program since seeing that bright red commie flag on the moon is the only egg big enough to cover all the faces necessary in the usgov in order to actually get something done.
I also really hope that India gets in the game in a serious way so we can have even more competition, an India-China space race would be fun to watch and would have the US scrambling to catch up.
The F-1 engine was developed in response to a mid-50s requirement, and itself borrowed heavily from 40s Nazi technology.
It does seem historically accurate to say that governments don't successfully complete state-of-the-art mega-projects absent war or an existential treat.
I expect those are the only things powerful enough to cut through the bureaucratic resistance to progress.
Whatever he turns out to be, this tech is going to be there in the head of those people working at SpaceX. Should it go bankrupt later, other investors will hire them and they go forward.
Musk is … unique. Let’s say. But he is very good at organizing companies for a relentless push for the results.
Treating employees as burnable resources isn't very good business, though. He's "good at" long-term dysfunction for short-term gain. Through that lens, I wouldn't be surprised if he decided to juice Twitter's MAU metrics by turning the place into a trainwreck.
> 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability
Alternatives to what? Commercial manned capsule ventures already have alternatives. Specifically, the only US manned capsule today, Dragon, has alternative capabilities being developed by SpaceX itself in the form of Starship, and Boeing has a capsule that keeps failing milestones but is being developed. If you are referring to the rocket, then the SLS is not compatible with any other rocket in use for any purpose, due to the SRBs. All commercial payloads are designed with smoother liquid-only rockets in mind - designing for an SRB launch adds considerable weight to the birds.
> 2. having backup launch capability
Backup to what? What can the SLS launch that would go on another rocket?
> 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US
This is true.
> 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech
The SLS is not cutting edge. It's refactoring 1970's technologies. The Orion capsule might be considered modern, but again it's not cutting edge in any sense of the term.
> 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US
Since the CRS program has been underway, this has not been in danger.
Im not sure you actually achieve any of this with the SLS, and NASA in general. 1 and 2 are irrelevant if the cost is too high for anything that isnt a political stunt, to be a real alternative it needs to be something that a commercial payload might plausibly choose.
3 and 4, are compromised by the political nature of NASA spending, I dont believe the current institution is capable of innovation. The talent of the people is uncertain, not due to the individuals, but the way work can become visible (also the hiring, promotion, and leadership determination is based on politics not merit) Apart from long range experiments, nasa is really the cutting edge at the moment.
5 is just another way tax money evaporates.
> I dont believe the current institution is capable of innovation
But leaving aside the SLS, there are missions like the mars rovers and the james webb telescope, that I think show innovation and scientific success (but I do not live on the us, so i have an incomplete view).
Sure there are these benefits, but the real question is what would be the benefits of some alternative way to spend the money, and how does that compare? What if we made STEM degrees tuition free across the country? Surely that would result in a larger talent pool than simply paying NASA engineers to dig holes and then fill them up with rocket parts.
> 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability
SpaceX suddenly going out of business (as in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy) seems rather unlikely. The same is true of ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. Absolute worse case scenario would be Chapter 11, in which the business continues to operate under new ownership, and the current owners lose everything – but even that doesn't seem that likely. Anyway, the chapter 11 scenario is still a risk with the cost-plus procurement SLS model – Boeing (or Aerojet Rocketdyne, or Lockheed Martin) going through chapter 11 might not have doomed SLS/Orion, but it likely would have caused delays. In fact, it is open to doubt whether SLS/Orion-style cost-plus contracting has any real advantage over commercial from a bankruptcy risk perspective, for two competing commercial providers must have less bankruptcy risk than a single non-commercial government contractor
> 2. having backup launch capability
Multiple commercial providers, like they've pursued for commercial cargo and crew to ISS, and are still planning to pursue for Artemis HLS, would meet that just as well as an SLS-style program could. Given they likely could have afforded at least two commercial systems for the cost of SLS+Orion, it seems this actually gives worse backup than commercial does.
> 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US
This doesn't seem relevant, given that the most likely firms to have provided NASA with a commercial SLS alternative – SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada, etc – are all US firms anyway. In fact, IIRC, the NASA procurement documents for commercial crew and cargo, and Artemis HLS, all said only US firms could respond. ITAR makes it a lot harder for US space firms to offshore jobs than most other industries.
> 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech
While it is true that NASA doesn't own the engineering for the commercial programs, in the way they own SLS engineering, NASA engineers are still heavily involved in the commercial programs, for review/advice/consulting/sign-off/etc. This factor is the most plausible of all those you've mentioned, but it is unclear if having somewhat deeper engineering expertise among NASA employees (as opposed to US private sector space firms) is important enough to justify a procurement approach which costs billions over and above its commercial alternative
> 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US
This doesn't seem relevant for the same reasons as (3)
> SpaceX suddenly going out of business (as in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy) seems rather unlikely. The same is true of ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin
SpaceX is not critical to national security, and it—many times—came close to bankruptcy in its adolescence of the early 2010s. Aerospace, in the past, saw massive recessions where companies larger than SpaceX went poof. This will almost certainly happen again, once we’re done tooling up for China.
It didn't use to be. But as soon as they started launching national security payloads on the Falcon Heavy and the Delta IV Heavy retired, they became the only heavy-lift launch vehicle on the market capable of taking up national security payloads. Until Vulcan/Centaur enters the game.
> This is sometimes seen as wasteful, on the surface, but there are very real benefits to doing things like this, even when it is much more expensive than alternatives:
Those benefits are from having government rocket program, not from having one where politicians micromanage the rocket design to the extent of dictating the choice of engine.
] For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.
My family has copy of Mr. President[1], a 1967 game that simulates a US presidential election in fairly detailed fashion. As part of the game, the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates will have positions on a number of controversial issues, one of which is Space exploration, right up there with things like entitlement programs and Vietnam.
As a kid in the 80s, most of the issues made sense as "yeah, people still debate this", but seeing space exploration there as a big, controversial thing while living through the heyday of the pre-Challenger shuttle program always gave me this strong sense of cognitive dissonance.
Space missions are not worth their cost only if one thinks about them as tight closed black boxes that don't produce any advancements in their own and other fields.
If I hear the spinoff argument one more time, I'm going to gag. That's all a Panglossian argument that there was no other better way to have spent the money.
In any case, several of Etzioni's arguments were clearly NOT thinking about tight closed black boxes. Here are three:
> It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science at the cost of weakening our efforts in other scientific endeavors. ...
> We would fall behind in other sciences because of our dedication to putting men on the moon. ...
> the space race is used as an escape, by focusing on the moon we delay facing ourselves
The quote from the LA Sentinel flips your black box argument around, pointing out the benefits come with a people cost:
> .. argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)."
The linked-to M.A. thesis has more direct quotes, like protestors who want some of the money diverted from the space program to feed some tens of thousands of people who don't have adequate food, nor comfortable homes from which to watch the Moon landing.
Having TV blasted from space, GPS to know to turn at this intersection, and pictures of every roof on the planet is useful. None of those technologies could have happened if we didn't send people in tin cans first.
The moon is an interesting destination for its Helium-3. We will run out at some point on Earth (Helium literally floats away), and going to the Moon for this resource could very well be our first extra-terrestrial mining operation.
> Having TV blasted from space, GPS to know to turn at this intersection, and pictures of every roof on the planet is useful. None of those technologies could have happened if we didn't send people in tin cans first.
The first geopositioning satellite[1], first satellite that broadcast of a human voice from space[2], and the first photos taken from orbit[3] all predate the first human in space[4].
Lunar mining of 3He is a huge canard. It likely requires more energy to extract it from regolith than it returns from fusion (10 ppb is not much!)
3He can be made by DD fusion (which either produces 3He, or produces T which can be allowed to decay to 3He; neutrons from DD fusion can also be used to make tritium which can also be allowed to decay to 3He.) This is Helion's plan, with the system operated in a mode that suppresses DT fusion.
See https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/Jupiter_Energy_Fleet from the late 1970s; people have been thinking about this problem for a long time. This SF TV series cheated with a new physics which allowed compact nuclear fusion reactors minus the ability to do anything with neutrons. We still don't have a good path to them for basic electrical power generation, seeing as how much we're still struggling with theoretical break even DT fusion, with the LLNL experiment per something I just read not counting the power input into the lasers.
So fiction showing people were thinking about X at such and so a time not evidence people were thinking about X at such and so a time???
All the "get to the moon" or beyond SF, which per Robert Heinlein was an explicit goal of his juveniles, to teach the attitudes and what you needed to learn to to get into space, which he was later told actually worked for a number of Apollo project people was ... what??
Can't make fusion reactors that interesting and the SF series never tried except when they didn't get a chance to shut down properly and went boom (actually a very beginning plot point), but I'm glad for all the fiction creators who inspired me into a STEM career when I was young.
I believe pfdietz's point is there's no need to go to the Moon (or Jupiter?!) to extract 3He when sufficient 3He can be generated on Earth, at lower cost, and be energy positive.
Your digression seems irrelevant to that point.
We didn't use Heinlein stories as a source of evidence about reality. We didn't use thorium rockets to get to the Moon. Nor did we develop monoatomic hydrogen ("Single-H") fuel.
Similarly, we don't use Gundam stories.
Also, Project Daedalus' proposal to mine the Jupiter atmosphere for 3He for fusion predates the first Gundam episode, and is likely what influenced the series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus .
If we're going to mine someplace in the solar system for 3He, I'd like to see it done on a (currently hypothetical) "Planet X", a Mars to Earth sized planet 100+ AU from the Sun. It could be cold enough out there for a bit of helium to remain bound over the life of the solar system, but it would be much easier to take off from again than, say, Uranus. And presumably with D3He fusion one could get out there with a fusion rocket.
Yes, many did feel that way and you can hear this for yourself in a small part of the documentary “Summer of Soul” by Questlove. In the film they show archival footage shot at the Harlem Culture Festival on the day of the Apollo 11 landing. The interviewees are resoundly unimpressed with the achievement. They cite the expense of the program, especially in lieu of the lacking services and dire maintenance of Harlem, NYC as a key reason for their lack of support.
Here's a classic letter by Ernst Stuhlinger to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration:
It seems telling that the most concrete example he gives for the value of human space flight is the usefulness of unmanned satellites.
Simplistically it's true that whenever you spend money on some effort there's going to be some benefit. Paying NASA scientists to dig ditches would have some benefit in stimulating the economy, even if it doesn't offset the costs (material and opportunity). Would it be the best use of resources, however?
Whenever I go down the rabbit hole of "spinoff technologies," I find a lot of it to be a gish gallop of stuff, much of which is overstated. There's a reason why you hear NASA talking up pioneering research done on Alzheimer's at the international space station, but you don't read Alzheimer's researchers talking about breakthroughs coming from the ISS.
Still, there are a lot of important technology that NASA has been involved with. But when you look into most of it, the connection to human spaceflight is tangential at best, and often completely non-existent (NASA does a lot of stuff outside of human spaceflight).
The kernel of the argument is accurate - scientific research can be important even if it doesn't provide immediate dividends. But too often people misuse that to argue that no amount of money is poorly spent. It's precisely because scientific research is important that we need to carefully consider the return on different projects, and make sure that the funds that are being allocated are well spent.
Honestly I think all the side-effect technologies are just marketing. The true goal of space exploration is and should be to turn us into an interplanetary and eventually interstellar species. Yes we don't have the tech to do all of that just yet, and maybe some new physics is required, but just as Cathedrals were intentionally built over centuries we should intentionally build out the capability to the best of our abilities. Not only is it essential to our long-term survival as a species, it would provide a cultural release valve just like the old frontier, only this time no natives to worry about.
I highly doubt much if any of the space exploration now is going to have a significant impact on humans being an interplanetary or interstellar species. A good analog might be the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. It was interesting, but it Amundsen's expedition never left we'd be in the exact same place we are now when it comes to exploring Antarctica.
If 200 years ago a country had decided to keep a settlement going at the top of Mount Everest in the name of progress, it wouldn't have been any benefit to the modern efforts to keep people in the ISS. Likewise, I don't expect the ISS to have any noticeable impact on efforts to have people live on other planets.
Keep in mind, this doesn't mean we won't make progress. A lot of people are excited about what SpaceX has been doing, and until very recently they've been entirely involved in non-human cargo. There are a lot of reasons to send things into space, which is why we send up a lot of stuff. There's just not many reasons to send people up at the moment, other than to be able to say we're sending people up.
We have to start somewhere, and private industry isn't going to start it because, as you point out, there's not many reasons to do it at the moment. The ISS is allowing us to experiment with living in orbit for extended periods. We certainly have to master those relatively simple conditions before attempting to survive a manned trip to Mars or living on the Moon.
Also SpaceX wouldn't exist without the ISS. It's NASA contracts for resupplying the ISS that kept it alive in the early days. Which just goes to prove the model: Government invests in "useless" project that allows private industry the toe-hold of capital needed to kickstart a new technology.
To your Antarctic exploration analogy, I'd say the ISS is more equivalent to McMurdo station than the Amundsen expedition
In 2012, William Doino Jr, wrote that "The remarkable thing about Hell's Angel is that it purports to defend the poor against Mother Teresa's supposed exploitation of them, while never actually interviewing any on screen. Not a single person cared for by the Missionaries speaks on camera. Was this because they had a far higher opinion of Blessed Teresa than Hitchens would permit in his film? Avoiding the people at the heart of Teresa's ministry, Hitchens posed for the camera and let roll a series of ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated accusations, as uninformed as they were cruel."
I afraid we stray from the topic, but yes, i'm not either one for Hitchen's obvious ideology-based vendetta against Catholicism in general and Mother Teresa in particular. Having witnessed first hand the Sisters of Mercy at work in rural Africa where no-one except these proselytes of Mother Teresa thought it worthwhile to take in orphans, lepers, old people without relatives and give them food, shelter, life in fact. Not an atheist in sight.
It's laughable that Mother Teresa's critics try to disparage her by contrasting the care of her organization vs. that of a western hospital. The reality of the situation was that you either passed away in a soft bed with someone by your side or alone on the side of the curb. I know which one I would prefer
What about lockheed martin, boeing and blue origin then. They also recruit from the same pool of engineers. LM/ULA gets paid even better with their cost+ contracts. LM/ULA even after getting paid handsomely are way behind in terms of cost/kg or human launchers.
That's fair - but I suspect the same bureaucracy exists in Lockheed et al, as do the incentives to please senators / government that feed the next round of spending.
The simple answer is to prevent small numbers of people having outsize influence on massive spending. So for example, billionaires...
This is a thing I have been noodling on for ages but have no answers other than "you need a clear mission and people at the top focused on that mission even if they are not clear their retirement packages are secure"
(or maybe their retirement packages were secure some way in ...)
> I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? In hindsight it feels worthwhile. But the big difference between Artemis and Apollo is that Artemis is coming after Commercial Crew/SpaceX has proven a different business/engineering model.
The public started to lose interest in Apollo after a couple of years. There was supposed to be an Apollo 18, 19, and 20. They were cancelled. One of them turned into Skylab. The others are in museums. You can walk under a Saturn V in Florida and see the other in Houston.
The big thing that's missing from this discussion is the primary reason for the US manned space mission program and it's ultimate goal per JFK in 1961, 4 months into his presidency, of "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
The previous president Eisenhower allowed the Soviets to get ahead of us starting with Sputnik to avoid them whining forever about overflights of others' territory. To the point Wernher von Braun's team had to put ballast in their rocket payloads to make sure they wouldn't "accidentally" put something into orbit.
This resulted a massive shock in the US which you can see in for example a whole bunch of science education programs spawned after Sputnik, and to the rest of the world put into doubt our technological superiority. After the Soviets were the first to put a man in orbit a month before JFK's speech and a few weeks before our first manned suborbital fight, the next spectacle was obviously a manned moon mission. Which we had a chance to beat them at although back in 1961 that was no sure thing.
> I was promised a path to Mars with boots on the Moon two years ago.
We did some work on a camera system for the Artemis project. It will hopefully make it to the moon's surface by the third mission. Also worked on spacecraft going to the ISS.
I don't think people --including most engineers-- have a good grasp of just how difficult it is to make anything going to space, much less anything that involves people.
The simplest statement I can make is:
Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time.
Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse.
Designing safe and reliable systems to go to the Moon or Mars is complex and hard to nail down to a schedule. This isn't like a software startup where you can deliver half a product and iterate (or even execute a full pivot) over time. You have to get it right or things fail in spectacular ways and people die.
Imagine having to deliver your Social Media, online commerce or SaaS product with a full 100% working set of required features, non-trivial failure tolerance and uptime guarantee, or (to be dramatic) your entire family dies. A bit out there? Not so sure.
"Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time.
I was appalled when I learned about LEO atomic oxygen.
"Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse."
Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Or is this another Apollo Program timed with the solar cycle (which due to delays cut the latter short)?
> Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans?
Well, GCR's (Galactic Cosmic Rays) will go through just-about anything. I think I remember an experiment that measured penetration in water to over half a mile (800 meters). As such, all you can do is manage exposure...you are not going to stop them. On the moon one of the ideas is to pile-up regolith (moon dirt) to create better protection. Without that you would need to transport more material out there than might be possible.
I am not aware of what long-term plans might look like today. I guess is that the ideal habitat will likely take the form of repurposing the rocket to become living quarters and bury it under as much regolith as it might be able to support. Of course, that implies suitable construction equipment to be available. I doubt astronauts are going to shovel the stuff at that scale.
In terms of electronics, you try to keep things powered down to the extent possible. Circuits can self-destruct very quickly if powered-up. An unpowered circuit is less likely to suffer the same kind of damage.
Beyond that, critical systems are typically designed to a fault-tolerance (FT) level. A single fault tolerant system can have one failure and still operate within mission parameters. You could have 2FT systems that will run after two failure. Because mass is important in going to space, FT doesn't necessarily fully duplicate a system (for example, triplicate copies of a system to be able to survive two failures). These days deeper analysis is possible and enhanced fault tolerance can be applied to selected functional units. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to test, test, test.
NASA has a lot of publicly-available resources about this and more. Chapter 3 of this one has an overview of protection from space radiation:
Thanks for the general info ... have we found any caves on or in the moon?? And the reference, just skimmed it but it appears to be written at a high and thorough level.
But I wasn't clear about my real question: is there a shield planned for the Orion spacecraft to keep astronauts alive during a sufficiently bad solar event on a trip to or from the moon? As I recall the lunar orbiting space station was going to be unmanned but I was wrong or they've changed their minds: https://www.nasa.gov/gateway So they've got to be thinking about this problem, and as the reference notes we'll need for example adequate space weather surveillance which I note we've been emplacing as of late.
I've never checked it out like running the numbers but I've heard for a long time Apollo was timed for a low part of the solar cycle and one reason Nixon cut it short was because delays put those canceled missions into the active part of the cycle.
> is there a shield planned for the Orion spacecraft
Not sure what they are using in Orion. The general answer is that, yes, there has to be a shield. Historically that has been aluminum. Mass is a huge problem in going to space. Because of this, you can't have the shield you really want.
Over the years we have learned that thick laminated (under heat and pressure) polyethylene is a better space radiation shield than aluminum and at a significant savings in weight.
Building a rocket that is hard to launch and costs a fortune is a boondoggle.
Talented scientists and engineers can waste their time building the wrong thing.
What other current rocket system matches the specs of the SLS, or has the same goals? The only thing comparable is Starship, which isn't ready yet.
There are legitimate complaints to be made about things like cost plus accounting, but the project itself isn't a boondoggle. Like, the people who greenlit it aren't idiots.
If you want to complain about boondoggles, look at the military.
Yeah, I was comparing vehicle cost to vehicle cost, So yeah, Apollo was much higher, because of the costs to operate the tracking network, etc - which isnt rolled into this new program today.
NASA is a way to channel money to the US Military Industrial Complex. Rockets of the form of SLS are relevant not only to space exploration, but obviously to missile and ICBM/equivalent design.
Boeing is maintained as a competitor for Airbus for national competitive reasons. As are the other contractors for NASA and the general MIC itself.
The MIC is the biggest socialist redistribution of wealth in existence, it takes $800B/year from taxpayers and redistributes it to the relevant companies, which in return, commit to providing employment and general wealth distribution.
The MIC even beats out the US Department of Agriculture, which is the most "socialist" of all the US departments.
NASA does great stuff, it's science is unparalleled in the space world, but the projects and systems that are developed, particularly for space as opposed to aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA) use space as the excuse for the wealth distribution.
There's actually nothing wrong with that. EU has had national "champions" as companies for centuries. It just doesn't fit with the conventional view that the US is a "free capitalist market".
You should know that using words like that taints the rest of your comment. While you are welcome to your opinion, and expressing it is perfectly fine, you should be aware that other people may not take the remainder of what you write seriously.
$1,000,000,000/launch
A microwave oven used to cost more than a car.
We learn, we innovate, we iterate, and eventually the cost comes down. But we have to start somewhere.
Lunar samples could have been returned by unmanned vehicles at a fraction of the cost of Apollo. The Russians did just that! Maybe not hundreds of kilograms, but enough to get the major science results (moon is evolved not primitive, oxygen isotopes, volatile depletion, europium anomaly). Unmanned vehicles could even have reached the polar regions, which Apollo never could do.
Honestly, SpaceX has been delivering results steadily and with seemingly no change in rate or quality since he was distracted by Twitter. The recent news [1] that he isn't doing the lead engineering at Starbase means this likely won't be felt there either.
I suppose it really boils down to whether the organization was succeeding _because_ of him or _in spite_ of him. Maybe he was necessary to get it where it is and can step back and have the company continue to perform well.
I think the concern is not their output but the fact that Musk could one day just decide he will no longer provide rockets when $political_party is in power.
Falcon 9 has been flying for a while and is indeed quite reliable. Their main project is Starship now, right? Let’s see how that will progress, Musk said they need 2 launches per week to stay afloat, but that was a lie apparently. When do they need to make it work to stay afloat for real?
At this point we don’t know what he will do next even as SpaceX made Falcon-9 a reliable workforce Musk has already threatened to bankrupt SpaceX at least couple of time, e.g. that time he lied about needing to launch two Starship launches per month to avoid it.
Don’t forget that he is cozy with China and definitely has someone from Russia close to his ear (no way “Khrushchev’s mistake” did not come from a Russian political contact).
Are we sure be will not defect with a briefcase full of secrets?
Whilst its fantastic (and to be honest a little surprising) that the mission went without any major issues (and the staff at NASA are obviously to be commended for their efforts), the whole project still feels like 'the wrong solution to the problem'.
I get it, SLS was started years ago before commercial space became so successful...but it should've adapted as needed. We're now stuck with a poorly planned mission that's going to cost obscene amounts of money - some of the same reasons they canned Apollo.
I just hope that SpaceX (and others - we need multiple operators) can get this right on their own and force NASA to accept that 'old space' is not the way to be doing things anymore. If we want this to last and not be a 2-3 year run of launches followed by another 50 years of NASA stagnation they'll need to adapt and stop allowing themselves to get bent over by the likes of Boeing and Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, etc.
Point the finger at congress, not NASA. Orion itself appears to be a pretty good craft. The SLS being a boondoggle is of course true, but it’s something most engineers inside NASA accept to some degree (that was my experience). It is definitely a shame that the agency’s budget is so hamstrung by the development and procurement costs of SLS. Nobody will be happier than NASA when spacex eats ULA’S lunch and can provide them cheap lunar access.
I visited the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL semi-recently, for the first time since I was a very little kid.
It was disappointing all around—lots of stuff broken, outdoor exhibits clearly deteriorating, nickel-and-diming for every activity after a not-cheap entry fee, a ton of floor space dedicated to a visually (at least) hideous display that looked like someone took all the material from an aerospace defense contractor trade show and dumped it haphazardly about the place, their collection of space travel artifacts generally being unimpressive aside from the obviously-amazing turned-on-its-side-and-broken-apart Saturn V (if you could pay half the entry fee to just see that, it'd be the superior bang-for-the-buck experience by a long shot)—but the goofiest bit about it was that 100% of its depiction of the future of space flight, which was pushed on little displays and such scattered about the place, was dedicated to the obsolete money-pit SLS. Contributed to the feeling that the whole facility was paid-entry advertising for the aerospace-defense industry (I assume the SLS has been a reliable source of fat contracts for the usual suspects).
Now that Orion has returned safely to Earth, it feels so amazing to talk about Artemis I as the past! If its help in returning humans to our Moon deeply moved you too, you can follow the pieces of its progress via my one-of-a-kind, technical newsletter called Moon Monday: https://blog.jatan.space/s/moon-monday
It also covers global lunar exploration, science and commercial developments to show that our return to the Moon this is truly a worldwide trend and how valuable each vertical is.
Makes me feel sick knowing we’re going to keep blowing money on this. We’ve made so little progress in the last 30 years while dumping billions into unsustainable launch systems. Everyone thinks space can’t be don’t without NASA. The reality is their monopoly and deep government pockets have held back any real progress.
It’s just like healthcare and education - government money turns these systems into jobs programs with inflated costs and slow progress.
Moving to Israel I knew prescription meds were way cheaper than in the US.
What surprised me was that in the US, non-prescription meds are FAR cheaper. THe joys of having an actual free market as opposed to the captured and unwieldy hybrid that is US insurance.
What's really funny is that there are some meds (Flonase in this example) That can be purchased OTC, or prescribed and picked up at a pharmacy through your insurance.
They cost nearly the same, whether your insurance is "negotiating a rate and covering a large portion and you pay the remainder", or if you just buy a box of 120 sprays off the shelf, from a generic manufacturer.
American insurance industry is a giant, systemic fraud. It pretends to save you money by creating entirely fake high prices that they """negotiate""" down to a still stupid price that you are contractually obligated to pay a portion of. How much money actually changed hands between all parties? Oh they can't tell you that.
Every other developed country is not way better than the US at healthcare. Cost in the US are high but there is also quality and availability, which the US ranks very high in.
Just as an anecdote, I had to go to an ENT in the US. I was discouraged that it took 12 days. Meanwhile I learned that a friend in the UK had to wait 4 months. Imagine being in pain and misery for weeks with no solution and being told you have to wait 4 months before someone can evaluate you.
27% of cases take one month or longer to get to a specialist in the US. Compare that to 61% Norway and Canada and 0% in Spain and Chile, all of which are single payer systems. That figure is at 25% in Germany and The Netherlands, which are both mandatory multi-payer systems (a mix of private and public insurance with much stricter limits on out of pocket costs compared to the US). It's not obvious that single payer systems lead to universally better or worse wait times.
A very great deal depends on urgency. Here in the US when it was erroneously through I might have cancer I was in the specialist's office in less then 24 hours. Granted, that was a "Oh, we're not going to be too busy tomorrow morning, come in and we'll make room for you" partial special case. Other times I've waited a lot longer for a specialist's appointment, but those absolutely weren't high urgency situations.
I was in exactly the same situation last week. A risk of a serious illness was identified and all of a sudden the red carpet was rolled out - next day appointments for procedures that typically take at least weeks to get scheduled. Now that they've ruled out everything really nasty (thank goodness) it's back to waiting a week for my doctor to reply to my messages.
You're falling for the availability heuristic. I work at a healthcare software company that specializes in finding people services (a.k.a. referrals), and the wait times for our "have-nots" are much longer than four months. There are so many events and disabilities in America that can lead to you just never getting care at all. Most of our population is under-served.
Now, the UK is especially bad but their system is receiving a national gutting at the moment.
The rest of the world is in the same situation. Government subsidized, unable to innovate without someone else proving it out first. And even then they still fall back on the minimum set of tech.
I had a hard time being interested in this because of how it mostly just represents the corrupt and unchecked priorities of the US government. Some of the pictures were pretty, but in the end it's still a massive waste of money and NASA constantly talks about "a sustainable presence on the Moon" with Orion as if they're praying that saying it often enough will make it true.
There is no path to a sustainable presence anywhere which involves Orion flying, especially if it's flying on SLS.
It's a sustainable source of Federal tech job program subsidies for the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas.
Even Arianespace in France is talking about reusable cores now, but I assume for them there's less political pressure to run the ESA as a jobs program.
I think there's plenty of pressure to run the ESA as a jobs program as well, it's just that they're forced to channel it into a slightly more productive direction due to wanting/needing the commercial launch business.
NASA/Congress could have achieved the same jobs program effect by pushing the same money towards a reusable rocket and an appropriately larger number of missions. Although perhaps that wouldn't have been as good for Alabama etc (it's a massive shame that they didn't take the SLS money to improve Alabama's ability to handle higher tech space stuff).
> Even Arianespace in France is talking about reusable cores now, but I assume for them there's less political pressure to run the ESA as a jobs program.
If that is the case, then why do people argue that we shouldn't be going to the moon until all humans on Earth are fed and have homes? Over the past ten years the cost of an Artemis mission was 1/70 the cost of social security - and that price will go down every mission as the R&D phase is done. Would an additional 1.4% funding to social programs really solve hunger and homelessness?
Social Security is a public pension system, and is necessarily huge since it serves hundreds of millions of people. It's often excluded from budgetary analyses because it tends to throw everything out-of-whack, and the money that flows into it is separate from ordinary taxes, so isn't available for the general funds anyway—the way it's set up, Congress can't simply redirect Social Security spending to other purposes through anything like the ordinary budget process, they'd have to modify Social Security itself first, then probably weather a torrent of lawsuits.
I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? In hindsight it feels worthwhile. But the big difference between Artemis and Apollo is that Artemis is coming after Commercial Crew/SpaceX has proven a different business/engineering model.
I’ve been waiting for this since I was in the fifth grade, so I should be happy. But then, I was promised a path to Mars with boots on the Moon two years ago.