] 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. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
] 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.