Of course it would be Phil who would remind me: today is the 38th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. I remember lying on my stomach on the floor with my chin in my hands, watching TV in the way only 12 year olds can and which would nowadays leave me wondering if I’ll be able to get up again, the front door open, a summer breeze blowing through the screen, the sound of someone down the street mowing their lawns, and right there in front of me, in this ordinary day in a boring little small town, I saw these grainy echos of a human being stepping onto the moon. We can do that. It was hard, and only a tiny few of us have ever accomplished it, but here in our hands and in our minds we have this amazing power to accomplish astonishing things.
How are we going to accomplish our next miracle, do you think?
I’m sure it was very inspirational and emotionally gratifying and so on, but you have to admit: the Moon missions were a complete waste of time and money, otherwise.
When will we learn to make practical miracles like curing HIV or abolishing nuclear weapons?
the Moon missions were a complete waste of time and money, otherwise.
most geologists would disagree with you.
as would most cosmologists.
wasn’t there even a thread here a while back that discussed the theories on the formation of the moon?
a big piece of the evidence that went into the modern theory was based on the composition of rocks brought back from the moon.
interestingly, “The Universe” series on the History Channel went over that evidence in their recent special on moons in the solar system.
wait…
there’s NO way you don’t know this.
trolling again?
I’m sorry I missed it. It must have been mind-blowing.
Caledonian: A complete waste? Perhaps, but I wonder. Your point is well made (as usual) but there may be value in succeeding on a “because it’s there” level. Something was proven that could not otherwise have been proven: That we could do it.
Ok, I guess that qualifies as “inspirational” and you already covered that.
Surely the space program yielded technologies that trickled down into everyday life in a positive way. I don’t know enough about the research that was done and what it revealed, and you don’t have to convince me that the cost/benefit of the whole venture approaches pathetic.
I admit my perspective is naive and uninformed. But wouldn’t we be poorer, somehow, had we never made those round-trips?
Another thing I think made the moon missions meaningful: All the amazing stuff we had to come up with to do it. The tools we invented were really cool, and became useful for other functions.
I admit my perspective is naive and uninformed
it doesn’t have to be.
how long would it have taken you to look up the relevant data acquired through the various moon missions?
5 minutes?
you might start here, for example:
http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/ATTM/wl.html
Why is it that people are still complaining about the near trivial space budget? To listen to some, it would seem that we could afford to end poverty, cure cancer and still be home in time for dinner if we hadn’t had to fund NASA.
How about complaining about the military expenditure instead? We’ll be paying for Iraq for the rest of our lives. Think what we could have accomplished with that money.
Impeachment.
The next big thing will be the replacement of the internal combustion engine…. right around the corner.
The money spent on solving the moon landing problem also brought you wonderful things like Teflon, Mylar, better photovoltaics, more reliable hurricane forecasts, and revolutionary medical instrumentation that today you take for granted.
Yes, yes, I agree that pure scientific knowledge is valuable in itself, AND it also tends to produce spin-off applications of one kind or another.
But in terms of return-against-investment, the Moon missions were pathetic. The only scientists on any of the missions were on the very last ones, and they did nothing of any great importance. While the knowledge gained about the Moon and the Earth’s early history is valuable, for the price we paid? Simply not worth it in my view.
As for the technological advances produced by the project – you could get many times that by taking the money spent on the project itself and investing it in basic research. Even applied research, if you have particular advances in mind, but historically that’s not the best way to move forward.
Imagine if the effort and resources expended on putting men on the Moon by the end of 1969 had been given to robotics with the goal of putting teleoperative probes on the Moon by, say, 1979.
And that’s just if we keep the general goals the same – what if we’d invested in energy production research, health care, or biology?
I found this page- maybe someone can find a better source:
Military spending: 727 Billion
NASA budget : 9 Billion
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
We were at Yellowstone Park, on a cross-country camping trip. I was an excited 15-year-old, and the moon landing was on TV, even there. But the yahoos were lots more excited by Ted Kennedy’s scandalous driving, chortling over the effect it would have on the libruls.
Somehow the same types still think that’s more serious than starting and maintaining a war with lies.
YES.
But I didn’t want to bring it up on a thread ostenibly about the Moon landings. Vietnam and War to End All Terrorism are of course far greater wastes of lives and resources.
That doesn’t make the Moon missions any less pointless, though. Admit it: we went there because we wanted to show up the Russians, and control of space was seen as important to maintaining the Cold War. We’d never have gone, otherwise – Kennedy’s stirring rhetoric would have bent itself to some other goal.
How are we going to accomplish our next miracle, do you think?
A good start would be electing a President who isn’t so afraid of the “booklearnin'” that he mocks and stifles the miracle workers.
That doesn’t make the Moon missions any less pointless, though.
or your contention as stated any less moronic.
But in terms of return-against-investment, the Moon missions were pathetic.
Citation please? This isn’t supported by any evidence or analysis I’m aware of, quite the contrary.
As for the technological advances produced by the project – you could get many times that by taking the money spent on the project itself and investing it in basic research.
Like the SSC, you mean? To fund a massive federal project successfully, it must compete for the hearts and minds of the public with other expenditures. How exactly would you accomplish such an effort (in the real world) without tying it to a specific, inspirational and achievable goal? (One that doesn’t involve fear of brown people, I mean.)
Nah, we never landed on the moon. It was all a hoax. Phil should know that by now.
Extermination of both the Legislative and Executive branches?
No, I acknowledge that you do have a point – getting any research of any kind done while dealing with the moronic ape-men-gone-wrong things running the government is difficult. But saying that the space program was necessary for research to be accomplish doesn’t justify the space program – it damns our civilization for needing to waste so much on inspiring make-work projects.
Mankind simply does not have a future in space. Our descendents, certainly. But humans are too fragile and too needy.
I wouldn’t expect too many rational opinions on the space program from someone who has stated humans need to be wiped out before they can leave earth.
Tell me: what exactly *is* the rational position on the manned space program? And what are the arguments for this position?
Since rational people cannot disagree if they have the same data, present your arguments. Even if you don’t think I’m a rational person, so trying to convince me would be pointless, surely everyone else will quickly rally to your side.
Building the pyramids was highly meaningful to the folks involved. The moon landing was similarly meaningful. It was a purely symbolic accomplishment that belongs to the history of religion more than to the history of science or even the history of engineering.
Honestly, Cal, will you ever give this pseudo-utilitarian trolling a rest? You cannot simultaneously spout libertarian twaddle and profess any kind of concern for social consequence, it’s bullshit. Just admit that the only motive you’ll accept is the rankest, most venal profiteering and give us all a fucking break.
The folks involved were highly superstitious, generally ignorant people who were working on an almost totally-incorrect view of the world.
And the Egyptians were fairly silly, too. (Ba-dum ching!)
Seriously, the Pyramids were meaningful to their makers only because the people who built them were deluded.
To me, the Apollo missions were the epitome of balls-to-the-wall engineering. Committed in Sept 1962 and achieved in July 1969..less than seven years. Plus, the technology to get to the moon did not exist in 1962. It’s just boggling how fast they came up with their solutions and produced their systems.
But was it really fast? In 1995 NASA recommitted to go back to the moon by…..2020. Fifteen years on the second go-round, with all the technology well established. Yeah, it was very fast [and loose…Grissom/White/Chaffee.]
Gemini and Apollo missions were almost non-stop live coverage from launch to splashdown. Aside from the live video of launch and splashdown, it usually consisted of guys listening in to the COM link and every now and then holding up scale models of the craft, acting out the maneuver currently being performed.
I was allowed to stay home from school on launch/splashdown days so I could watch the coverage. Mom would cover for me playing hooky with a note that invariably said, “Willy was sick.” I remember staying up to watch Neil Armstrong, a ghostly image on the screen, step onto the lunar surface.
During all of Apollo 13 I was allowed to stay home to watch the coverage.
I have followed and researched the space program in great detail for almost 30 years.
The space shuttle was a waste. The ISS is a waste (unless you think of it as a public works program for Russian space engineers to keep them from more nefarious work)
The moon program was not a waste by any stretch of the imagination.
Fantastic! Now, convince me of that. I’m listening.
The worst thing to happen to the Apollo program was to reach its climax while Richard Nixon was in the White House. He couldn’t wait to shut down an effort so intimately associated with his rival JFK. It still galls me to think that the Apollo 11 lunar lander has a plaque bearing Nixon’s signature. What an abomination.
We might well have advanced the state of the art in space travel had we not ended Apollo prematurely (we actually discarded hardware already manufactured). Harrison Schmidt was the first full-fledged scientist to go on a moon mission when Apollo 17 was launched in 1972, but that was the last mission. Nixon had cancelled Apollos 18 through 20.
We gradually stumbled into the under-designed shuttle program, which continues to limp along decades after it began, but the shuttle is mostly a money dump these days that sucks funding away from less expensive and more productive programs. It’s a shadow of what it should have been.
But even as I rue the way the shuttle program turned out, the entire NASA budget is way too small for all the whining people do about it. It’s space, dammit! It’s big! There are exciting things to see and do out there! Yet NASA gets less funding than the loose change the Pentagon loses every year in its sofa cushions. Yet people rail against all that “waste” in space. Utter cluelessness.
By the way, this morning I wished my students a “Happy Moon Day.” One of them actually said, “Oh, yeah. 1969. I wasn’t born yet.” I was amazed he knew the year.
“naive and uninformed”
Very true, you don’t have to be– I got a nice big DVD box set of NASA footage… pretty much everything from Mercury missions on up… for about $15 at Best Buy. Sadly, nobody is interested in this sort of thing. “NASA 50 years of Space Exploration” is the title, it’s about 12 hours long. Cool stuff!
“The Lunar landing of the astronauts is more than a step in history; it is a step in evolution.”
[The New York Times Editorial,
July 20, 1969]
“I remember lying on my stomach on the floor with my chin in my hands, watching TV in the way only 12 year olds can and which would nowadays leave me wondering if I’ll be able to get up again, the front door open, a summer breeze blowing through the screen, the sound of someone down the street mowing their lawns, and right there in front of me, in this ordinary day in a boring little small town, I saw these grainy echos of a human being stepping onto the moon.”
I’ve got to say, PZ, that sounds very much like the superb prose of my coauthor Ray Bradbury.
I was in Jason McCord’s dorm room at Caltech, Pasadena, California. Not the guy who starred in the Branded episode “I Killed Jason McCord.”
The room was filled with smoke. Not entirely tobacco. I was drinking Coca-Cola, chilled almost to slush, from a glass bottle. We were joking about what the first words would be when Armstrong stepped forth, some hours later.
I opted for “Oh, shit, I think I twisted my ankle.”
We argued about Feynman’s rederivation of Kepler’s laws from Newton’s laws.
Meanwhile, CAPCOM Charlie Duke’s voice.
Some interpolations below from
http://members.pcug.org.au/~jsaxon/space/book/Apollo11.htm
Duke: “Eagle, Houston. You are GO. Take it all at 4 minutes. You are GO to continue powered descent.”
Armstrong: “Roger.”
Altitude 40,000 feet (12,192 meters.)
Aldrin: “And we got the Earth right out our front window.”
Altitude 33,500 feet (10,211 meters).
[
a yellow caution light winked at the astronauts from the computer control panel. It was identified as a 1202 alarm. They automatically asked the computer to define the problem. “I am overloaded,” it answered in its own code, “I can’t handle all the jobs you’re giving me in the time available,” and the data screen went blank.]
Armstrong:”Give us the reading on the 1202 program alarm.”
[Capcom Charlie Duke said of that moment, “When I heard Neil say 1202 for the first time, I tell you my heart hit the floor. I looked across at Steve Bales but he was busy at his console and came back with the answer almost straight away we were go.”]
[Jack Garman, a “back room” boy supporting Bales from another console, remembered a similar problem had been tried out in a simulation only a week or so before, quickly reassured Bales: “It’s executive overflow; if it does not occur again, we’re fine.”]
[Plunging to the moon’s surface, both astronauts eyed the ABORT button and sweated out a thirty second pause while at Mission Control Kranz snapped out a final tense roll call around his flight controllers.]
[Chuck Deiterich in Retro chopped in: “Flight, Retro.”
Kranz: “Go Retro.”
Deiterich: “Throttle down 6 plus 25.”
Kranz to Duke: “Six plus twenty five.”
[Retro was advising Kranz to pass on to Duke that 6 minutes 25 seconds into the burn the crew should expect the engine to throttle down to 55 per cent power.]
Duke: “Roger. We got you. We’re go on that alarm…..six plus 25 throttle down.”
Armstrong: “Throttle down.”
Aldrin: “Throttle down on time! Better than the simulator.”
Duke: “You’re looking great at 8 minutes.”
Altitude 9,200 feet (2804 meters.)
[Lunar Module began to drift up from its horizontal attitude, slowly its legs began to point down to the moon’s surface, and the astronauts could begin to see the moon’s surface in the bottom of their windows.]
[Armstrong was trained to land the Lunar Module. The controls were on his side. The two pilots had to work together as a cohesive team, Armstrong controlling the spacecraft’s flight while looking out of the window at the landing site; Aldrin concentrating on the display panel and calling out the information he needed. Armstrong had to translate what he saw with what he heard with what he felt to the spacecraft controls to guide the Eagle safely down to the lunar surface.]
2000 feet, (610 meters), and another alarm winked from the computer, “1201,” said Aldrin with growing concern. With no time for explanations from Houston, they had to trust their lives to the judgment of the flight controllers .
Armstrong: “12 alarm. 1201”
Duke: “Roger, 1201.”
In Mission Control Kranz queried Bales again: “1201 alarm?”
Bales had already been onto Garman: “Same type, we’re GO, Flight.”
Kranz to Duke: “Okay, we’re GO.”
Duke: “We’re GO. Hang tight. We’re GO. Two thousand feet….”
Aldrin: “Forty seven degrees.”
Duke: “Eagle looking great. You’re GO.”
[Armstrong was riveted to his controls: “Now we get to that final landing phase and this is altitude versus range to the landing site. This is about the last ¾ of a mile into the touch down spot from a thousand feet (305 metres). This part is normally flown automatically and as you get down to 500 feet (152 metres) you have some options as to what you can do to complete the landing. One is to just leave the thing run automatically. Then there’s several manual options that you can choose from. One is manual attitude control but with an automatic throttle that will control the descent rate to the programmed value that it thinks it should have. One is manual attitude control with a rate of descent mode on the throttle so that you can actually command your descent rate and it’ll freeze. Say you’re coming in at 17 feet (5 metres) per second, it’ll hold 17 feet per second down until you put a blip on the switch and each blip changes your rate of descent mode by one foot (0.3 metre) per second. I really didn’t think that was likely to work, but it did. Matter of fact, it was quite smooth.]
[The final method that you have is manual attitude and manual throttle. Just hand on throttle like most of our rudimentary VTOL (Vertical Take Off Landing) aircraft and like you would fly a helicopter. Now, you could fly auto, but it’s not likely that many test pilots would do that. One reason is that the auto system doesn’t know how to pick a good area and can’t change its mind. The second is that when you get right down to the final phases and it turns out there is a little residual velocity of a couple of feet per second sideways you’d have a bad case of stubbing your toe on touch down. For those reasons, I didn’t intend to make an automatic landing; it was my intention to fly the manual mode with this one foot per second incremental rate of descent mode on the throttle into touchdown, which is what I did.]
[But as we got to the point where you’d normally take over manually, I had been looking out the window and, if you had been listening at the time, all we really saw was a gigantic crater and lots of very big rocks a very unfavourable position to land. Now it looked like we might be able to land short and I was really tempted for a minute because I knew the scientists would have a ball if we could land in the middle of that boulder patch. They would think it was just JimDandy if we could run up on the rim and take pictures down the sides of this really big crater and be overjoyed; and I thought about that for a little bit and I didn’t do it. It’s an old rule, when in doubt, land long, and I did. We extended the range down about 1,100 feet (335 metres) past where it would have gone if we had let it go automatically.]
[I didn’t have any of those 30 storey rocks that Tom (Stafford) looked at, but I thought that this area with all those automobile sized rocks wasn’t probably a good place for me to try and join them. Well, I thought this was a good spot and then I got closer and decided it wasn’t so I changed the descent rate and changed the attitude and went on a little bit further and thought this was a good spot, and when I got closer, I was dissatisfied and was just absolutely adamant about my God given right to be wishywashy about where I was going to land.”]
[At 160 feet (49 meters) above the surface, a red warning light came on only 5 per cent fuel remained and they still weren’t down. There were only 94 seconds left to land. Kranz remembers, “That really grabbed my attention, mainly because during the process of training runs we had generally landed by this time. Now it was a question of continuing the countdown. It was a horse race between running out of fuel or getting down on the surface.”]
[Aldrin: “At an altitude of fifty feet (15 m) we entered what was accurately referred to as the deadman zone. In this zone, if anything had gone wrong if for example, the engine had failed it would probably have been too late to do anything about it before we impacted with the moon. There were no fail safe abort systems available until landing. I felt no apprehension at all during this short time. Rather, I felt a kind of arrogance an arrogance inspired by knowing that so many people had worked on this landing, people possessing the greatest scientific talents in the world.”]
[From out of the airless black sky above the pastewhite lunar surface bathed in the contrasty early morning sunlight, the Lunar Module appeared with a roaring rocket motor blasting a stream of gases down at the surface. Life from Earth had arrived at the moon and brought their inevitable pollution, confusion, and debris.]
[Like a prehistoric predator, its two windows like beady eyes above the four dangling legs, the Lunar Module now hovered 30 feet (9 meters) above the surface, instruments and astronauts desperately searching, trying to probe the lunar dust for a clear spot to land. Brilliant searchlights sent piercing shafts of light through the lunar dust. Armstrong could see boulders and rocks sticking up out of the blanket of dust blasting away from their rocket motor. A hard white surface appeared through the dust, followed by black shadows of the approaching legs and spindly probes.]
[Inside the Lunar Module, isolated from the rocket blast and dust outside, Aldrin was busy reciting facts and events displayed on the console in front of him]:
“..six…forward…… …..lights on….down two and a half…..forty feet…..down two and a half,……… kicking up some dust….thirty feet……two and a half down…..faint shadow……four forward……four forward….drifting to the right a little……Okay…..”
Duke: “Thirty seconds….” (Fuel remaining)
[Kranz: “We escalated another notch when we got the 30 second call. The next thing we would start doing would be to call down every second from 15 seconds on down the line …..”]
[Armstrong: “Normally if you were going into a smooth area in this phase, 10 feet per second or 7 feet per second would be very comfortable and you’d steam on in there and let the thing come down. But I had a requirement to try to pick out a place so what I really wanted was time, and the only way to buy time is to slow down your descent rate so we were flying down here about 4 feet (1.2 metres) per second on the average and every now and then I’d think I see a place I’d want to go and then you’d see an increase in the descent rate, and then I’d change my mind and go back up, and we were at about zero at touchdown. I couldn’t actually precisely feel when touchdown occurred.]
[Now I deviated from the plan here a little bit. Our idea was that we were going to get to 5 feet (1.5 metres) and let those probes the ones sticking out the bottom of the Lunar Module’s legs touch the ground. They light a blue light in the panel. Then I was going to go about another second which would get me down to about 3 feet (0.9 metre), say I was coming down about 2 feet (0.6 metre) per second, and then I’d punch the stop button. Now it’s been against my grain to shut off the engine when I was in the air, but it was supposedly an important thing to do because it would prevent the engine from blowing up as it got very close to the surface, or it would avoid overheating of the bottom of the Lunar Module. Also if we hit hard enough, we would collapse those struts so that the stairsteps on the front would be close enough to the surface so we could get comfortably down.]
[Well, I forgot all that when I got down and actually touched down at a very low velocity very much like what you’d be used to in a normal helicopter landing. Turned out the thermal effects weren’t so bad and the engine didn’t have any problem and it was a long way from the bottom stair down to the surface, but we were able to make that 3½ feet (1 metre) or so.”]
[In a maelstrom of dust, lights, shadows, legs, and spent gases, the spaceship Eagle from Earth touched gently down on the lunar surface at 3:18 pm on July 20 (6:18 am AEST, July 21). The billowing dust quickly dropped and all was still. With no atmosphere not a sound was heard outside the Lunar Module.]
[This strange creature from Earth, the Lunar Module called Eagle was safely down on the lunar surface in an area ringed on one side by fairly good sized craters, and on the other side by a boulder field, about the size of a house lot.]
[The first human voices on the moon crackled over the intercom and were relayed to the 600 million earthlings holding their breath. As they all heard the first words from another world in English with an American accent, it seemed that for the first time in history the human inhabitants of the Planet Earth were globally united.]
Aldrin: “Contact light! Okay, engine stop….descent engine command override off.”
Aldrin: “At ten seconds we touched down on the lunar surface. The landing was so smooth I had to check the landing lights from the touchdown sensors to make sure the slight bump I felt was indeed the landing. It was.”
Duke: “We copy you down, Eagle.”
Armstrong and Aldrin looked at each other, reached across and vigorously shook hands, excited by the tension of the events on the way down, before Aldrin responded automatically to their training procedures and began to prepare for an emergency launch when he was surprised to hear Armstrong announce:
“Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed!”
[Everyone was taken by surprise. Tranquillity Base! this was the first time the landing area was named, nobody at Houston had known what they were going to call the landing place. Aldrin admitted, “I had known what he was going to say, but he had never told me when he was going to say it.”]
Duke: “Roger, Tranquillity. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
Armstrong: “Thank you.”
Duke: “You’re looking good here.”
Armstrong: “Okay, we’re going to be busy for a minute.”
[Duke gratefully sank back into his chair, took a deep breath, and exchanged grins with Deke Slayton. He could hardly believe it had happened.]
“Okay everybody. T1, stand by for T1.” Kranz rasped out to the flight controllers while Duke was still saying “We copy you on the ground”, but then for a moment he was speechless.
Duke: “There are lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world.”
Aldrin: “There are two of them up here.”
Collins from 60 miles (96km) above: “And don’t forget the one in the Command Module.”
History. Evolution. Everyone alive remembers the first time.
Oh, and Happy Mendel’s Birthday, too. Evolution, right?
I was five years old — almost six! — and my family was camping at Devil’s Lake in northern Wisconsin. We were in a tent in one of the primitive campgrounds, but there was a rumor that there was a family in the Camper section with a portable TV, and they were inviting anyone who wanted to see the landing to drop by. Of course, by the time we got there, there was no more room in the camper. My Dad picked me up under the armpits and shoved me through the camper door — “He’s small!,” said Dad, and the words burned. I was shoved into a tiny RV full of weird, sweaty, scary grownups. I was probably crying. They sat me down right in front of the set, and soon enough I could see — but not hear — the grainy, distorted image of Neil Armstrong stepping on to the lunar surface. I don’t know that it meant anything to me at the time. When you’re five years old, everything seems equally remarkable and perfectly normal. To this day, the strongest memories I have are of being separated from my family and surrounded by scary strangers. Looking back, I realize what my Dad was doing for me — the trust he showed and his sense of wanting me to be a part of history. I’ve never had the closest relationship to my father, but right now I’m crying. He did his best, when he thought he knew what to do.
Oddly enough, my Dad worked as a consultant on Gemini and the early Apollo missions, as a telemetry software developer. To this day, he doesn’t like to talk about it, for reasons that have never been clear. Cue Philip Larkin again, I suppose.
Caledonian:
It depends on how you determine success. Did the moon program generate net revenue for the U.S.? Doubtful. But it did inspire a generation and it increased our understanding of space-flight and rocketry. It was an engineering triumph.
(Well, this is a shorter post than the post by Post.)
I am disinclined to accept ‘effective propaganda’ or ‘warm fuzzies’ as a measure of success.
I’m more concerned with practical consequences. As I see it, few practical consequences came out of the Apollo missions at all, and even that couldn’t have been achieved much more easily and cheaply without it.
If you’re going to explore space at all, robotic probes are the way to do it – but they get very little of NASA’s funding, despite being responsible for vast quantities of information about our Solar system. Whatever findings you claim for Apollo, they pale in comparison to even one of the Voyager missions.
Do you begin to see why I consider the Moon landings a waste?
I’m a hopeless idealist. I watched the moon landing, as a kid, on our small black and white TV, (still very common in those days). I remember the tension and excitement, wondering if they were going to get the camera to work so that the first step on the moon would be recorded and televised. When those images came on the TV, the entire country at that moment was electrified and united. Science ruled. Sure, national pride and all of that, but there was more, it was more profound than that, the whole world watched and it was something that the entire human race took pride in.
In an age of computers and myriad advanced technologies, routine space flights (and financially crippling wars), it’s easy to armchair wiser and more efficient decrees in hindsight, but all that money could also have been spent on pursuit’s far less splendid and far less ennobling, and for those who experienced that moment in time, this is not hyperbole.
The most important things in life are not measured on a scale of expediency or justified by monetary reimbursement, (I’m an idealist, remember?). Was the moon program worth it? God yes, it was so cool.
Caledonian (re: #32):
As former Mission Planning Engineer on the Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus, I reject your facile Man/robot dichotomous either/or.
Robots AND people AND flora and fauna will go out into the Solar System, and beyond.
Or die trying.
It was a tremendous accomplishment. Even with 38 more years of technological progress?, it would be amazing if we could recreate it.
I’ve always believed that expanding into space is our only hope.
1. The average species on earth lasts 1-5 million years. Some give rise to decendants, many are dead ends.
2. In the 5,000 years past the stone age, look what we have done to our planet and ourselves. Going to be a long megayear ahead even at present technological levels. Which are bound upwards with spreading knowledge of weapons of mass annihilation.
This is a small basket with one egg. We really need more baskets and eggs if the human species is guaranteed a future. At this time, I don’t really see much interest in occupying the galaxy*. Most would rather play video games.
*This could be the answer to Fermi’s paradox, “where is everyone?” It could be that deep space colonization is too difficult with no obvious short term payoff, so no one ever does it.
I think the Apollo project was one of the greatest enterprises in human history.
Our next big space goal should be to establish a permanent, self-sustaining colony on Mars, primarily to reduce the threat of extinction from some global catastrophe.
Aw, you old people who say you watched the moon landing on tv crack me up!
“How are we going to accomplish our next miracle, do you think?”
Not by beginning with any appeal to the supernatural, I suppose. But forgive me, how can any sensible person actually believe that the lunar landing was anything but a tremendous achievement? Was Cold War paranoia, or some politician’s need for self-promotion, somehow involved? Sure. Do manned missions give as much ‘bang-for-our-buck’, data-wise, as robotic missions? Doubtful. But these complaints entirely miss the point—this was a moment that transfixed a generation, and started many of us on the path to a scientific and technical career. It has had an enormous impact, and a largely positive one. It’s not just a piece of political propaganda for this country or that bureaucracy. It was propaganda for science, for daring to dream, for the potential of our entire species, for humanity itself. It was wonderful, and remains wonderful, a beacon to the future. Look at some of the posts above, and feel the still-present excitement.
I got a space pen out of it. So there.
Some of “Whitey on the Moon” by Gil Scott Heron:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)
For us it was a family day at the Kittson County Fair, and we had done the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Scrambler, the Roller Coaster (max headroom 8′) and all the hamburgers, cotton candy, toy cranes and ring tosses we could handle. Then I told my friends that I had to rush home because of the moon landing. “What’s the big deal?” I was shocked at their attitude, but jumped on my bike for the ride home.
We all gathered in front of a Zenith 19″ Theater B&W TV. No air conditioning, lots of lemonade. We watched as it seemed to take forever for the Eagle to touch down. I couldn’t understand why the hatch didn’t open immediately. Then we lost the TV signal (75 miles from the tower, 5 years before cable came to town.) I stayed and watched and waited through the snow for the picture to come back, and it finally came back in time for the wondrous descent to the surface. Much cheering among the fam.
My sister, five years old at the time, was outside riding her trike. She had tied a helium balloon to the handle, but not very well. It slipped and the balloon drifted skyward. She was pretty excited when we told her it was going to be the first balloon on the moon. What a night.
And Caledonian, manned missions are important because people get bored. And when they get bored, they play. And when they play, they discover things that robots wouldn’t be programmed to look for:
Although Schmitt was the first (and last, as of yet) ‘real’ scientist on the moon, it’s not as though the rest were uneducated gits…They obviously all had at least a B.S., and many had masters’ and doctorates.
Not only that, but it’s not as though all they did on the moon was play space golf and smile for the cameras. I believe they started vigorously training the astronauts in field geology (admittedly late in the game, though later the planned later missions kind of unexpectedly canceled) starting with Apollo 15.
You could argue that the amount of science done was not worth the cost, and I might not disagree, but the fact that Schmitt landed on the moon so late in the game is always brought up with the sort of implication that the rest of the astronauts were just moron test pilots.
K: You get to wax nostalgic about 911 and the Iraq war. I’ll take my early memories. : )
I was also 12yo that summer. We were camping at Rocky Mountain National Park, near Denver I think. We missed the landing itself, but saw the first moonwalk on a TV in the back of a little country store, a whole bunch of people watching through the top of a dutch door into the owner’s living quarters. The next night I was walking back to camp from a bedtime visit to the toilet; the night was cold from the altitude and crystal clear and I looked up at the moon and thought: Wow. It’s not just a light in the sky; it’s a world, and there are people walking around on it!
Apollo was humans at their very best.
For humans at their worst, just turn on the TV news. Latest suicide bomber in Iraq, some senator from the far religious right with their dick up some prostitute, another school board in Peabrain, Kansas wants to teach 1st graders that the earth is 6,000 years old and old Jews kept dinosaurs for pets, and on and on.
We know we can do better. A lot better. We have. Maybe we will again. IMO, got to dream and hope for the future or you have already started dying.
I think that killing off the microbes of polio, smallpox, and measles is, or would be, an incredible series of encores.
They were by no means morons… but you don’t send test pilots to do selenologists’ work. Geologists, even.
Your emotional responses simply are not important.
The Moon landing may have been purely secular, but the way some of you talk about it is the same as the most credulous fundamentalists talking about being “Born Again” – you’ve invested the experience with a deeply sense of the sacred.
You’d reject this attitude if it came from your opponents. Why do you tolerate and encourage it in yourselves?
Bah! I’m a moron. Please ignore the grammatical errors in the preceding post.
On this thread, Caledonian is an ice-coldrobot moved only by pure logic.
Elsewhere on this site, he’s been arguing that the infinite decimal expansion of pi might have a lst digit.
Ergo, Caledonian is a malfunctional robot.
I think he may react emotionally to that :)
The manual programs are probably of value as inspirational fund-raisers, or so I hope. (Which of course in lean times steal $$$ from the automatic programs and sinks them almost completely. As under Bush last gasps… ehrm, days.)
Congrats to getting down, I guess. :-P
The manual programs are probably of value as inspirational fund-raisers, or so I hope. (Which of course in lean times steal $$$ from the automatic programs and sinks them almost completely. As under Bush last gasps… ehrm, days.)
Congrats to getting down, I guess. :-P
Memories are really wonderful.
But, wait a minute: Somebody mowing their lawn? The first foray out of the landing module was about midnight, Mountain Time . . .
Corrected version:
On this thread, Caledonian is an ice-cold robot moved only by pure logic.
Elsewhere on this site, he’s been arguing that the infinite decimal expansion of pi might have a last digit.
Ergo, Caledonian is a malfunctional robot.
I think he may react emotionally to that :)
I suppose ‘amusement’ at your thoughtless rejection of the point counts as an emotion.
But what makes you think emotions are something robots should eschew? The point is to move beyond mere emotion to reason.
Indubitably, and in fact much better.
And generally, the problem with any sort of transitional technology or exploration (space travel, renewable nonpolluting fuels for cars, HDTV, …) is to find a market. The improvement of already existing conditions (health care, energy savings, pollution reductions, …) is immediate and immensely gratifying. But we need both, ‘variation’ and ‘selection’, right? ;-)
Indubitably, and in fact much better.
And generally, the problem with any sort of transitional technology or exploration (space travel, renewable nonpolluting fuels for cars, HDTV, …) is to find a market. The improvement of already existing conditions (health care, energy savings, pollution reductions, …) is immediate and immensely gratifying. But we need both, ‘variation’ and ‘selection’, right? ;-)
Caledonian,
I think people want to see human space flight for much the same reason that they wanted to see men travel to the New World and the north pole and to climb Everest and so on. It’s the because-it’s-there urge, the urge to travel to and explore and occupy new places.
If you want a more practical reason, again I’d cite the fact that a permanent human presence beyond the Earth would greatly reduce our chances of extinction from some global cataclysm. Carl Sagan made the argument eloquently in his book Pale Blue Dot, and just the other day there was a piece about it in the New York Times.
And for what it’s worth, the risk-of-extinction argument is the only practical justification that I find really compelling. All the stuff about the supposed technology spinoffs of the space program (solar panels! microelectronics! Tang!) and political benefits is more rationalization than reason.
Jason: Considering the results of that explore-and-conquer urge, I’m not sure giving it further expression would be healthy.
By the way, Torbjörn Larsson, nice work pointing out the NOMA problems at Galactic Interactions. You’ve cut straight to the heart of the matter – keep it up!
Well, they’re pretty important to me, so they do get factored in to how I evaluate things. Your central processing unit may vary.
From the classic film Robot Monster: “To be like the humans. To laugh, feel, want. Why are these things not in the plan? I cannot, yet I must. At what point on the graph do cannot and must meet?”
Have we started a new convention of bolding the names of fellow posters in our comments? Because I quite like the effect. And it’s quite useful.
I disagree. The point is to not let emotions interfere with reason. And if an emotional response energizes one to accomplish important things that are realized by the utilization of reason, then emotions are not wasted energy.
Ichthyic (#5):
I totally agree! It’s like you read my mind as I was typing. “I could look this up!”
But the simple truth is this: I was on my way out the door, and the five minutes just weren’t there.
Maybe I was lazy to have posted at all without having done the research, but I let myself off the hook. The rest of you can hang me back up there, I don’t mind. :-D
RamblinDude:
Scott Hatfield:
My feelings exactly. I was not quite 10. It’s still the most literally awesome experience I can remember.
Caledonian:
By that measure, I doubt it was a very good investment. I’m still glad we did it.
This is the same sort of thinking that makes neoconservatives fund abstinence-only programs in schools.
Like Prof. Myers and Eamon Knight, I was 12yo when Apollo 11 landed. I was a huge space fan from the beginning of Gemini onwards. On July 20th, I was glued to the 13″ B&W TV and interpreting all the techie talk for the rest of the family. My greatest regret was allowing my parents to convince me to go to bed before the end of the EVA. I reasoned at the time that this was such a significant event, they’d certainly rebroadcast the entire EVA the next day! Foolish me. To this day, I have yet to see the whole thing, even after buying a DVD that purported to contain the complete broadcast record.
Jonathan @#29: I was puzzled by something you copied. I don’t recall landing lights on the LM. There were docking (marker) lights, but none meant to illuminate the surface, IIRC. Can anyone else confirm this? I’ve even seen the LM at the Smithsonian, and I think I’d notice lights if they were there.
I’m a computer guy, and I’ve always wondered about the computers onboard. This is the best description I’ve come across so far. Does anybody have any better sources of information they can recommend?
I have been doing that to identify quote sources for quite some time. It’s just a coincidence that you and I were momentarily on the same wavelength in comments #57 and #58. Alert the media: This is an exceedingly rare phenomenon!
Personally – not being much of a romantic, I suppose – I favor sending robots. But for those in the human space exploration camp, this former Carter science advisor and Mondale speechwriter (really, look it up) thinks we should establish a base on the moon, then, eventually, on to Mars.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/01/AR2007030101291.html
Ok, I could have told you it was 1969. My parents were/are science, space, sci-fi buffs. I’ve been led to understand that it was a pretty big year for a 12 year old boy growing up in southwestern Connecticut:
– Woodstock.
– “One small step for [a] man…”.
– The Miracle Mets!
This thread has been fascinating and moving to read. I called my dad into the kitchen to read the thread with me on the laptop. He smiled a lot, and related some of his own experiences. I can summarize some of his comments thus:
“I always loved ‘space’ and had a solar system map on my bedroom wall by the time I was seven. The Mercury and Gemini astronauts were my heroes. I built models of the capsules and rockets, and read Tom Swift and Tom Corbett books voraciously.
“That historic night in ’69 we stayed up late watching Armstrong set foot on the surface on a little B&W TV set up in the dining room. Only years later could I look back and truly appreciate the magnitude of the accomplishment. After 160,000 years of scrabbling around on the surface of the Earth, mankind made the flight from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility (and back) in the span of two generations.”
He expressed many of the same sentiments that Scott, RambDude, and others have expressed. It maybe not have been the most efficient use of money, but how many exploration efforts are? An achievment of that magnitude accomplished for its own sake has “proof of concept” value on a grand scale and, by expanding the scope of human achievement, necessarily extends the frontiers of human potential.
Nonetheless, arguments such as Caledonian’s (augmented by the stark realism of Gil Scott Heron) are compelling. The money and effort could potentially have been spent elsewhere, on other important projects with immediate and long-lasting benefits. This is undeniable!
But until some kind of definitive cost-benefit analysis is presented, we’re limited to evaluating the relative worth of each program in a less than fully objective (and rational) way.
Intangibles have worth, too, y’see. Can they be assigned number values? I suppose…
I was born in 1970, but when I was a child I really wanted to be an astronaut/physicist. I discovered punk rock and other nefarious, wonderful things in the 1980s so that didn’t happen.
But one thing that sticks in my head, though, is my parents were so excited about the moon landing that they took polaroids of the TV. That seems pretty mundane these days, but really, that’s all they could think of doing to make sure they had a record of the experience.
I think they still have those photos. They’re probably in the same drawer. I can smell the wood of that little cabinet thing just thinking about it.
phat
And one of Buzz Aldrin’s first acts after landing on the moon was to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. I’ll let you atheists chew on that one for a while. I’m sure PZ will come up with some typically predictable nonsense about how religion has poisoned even the moon. (Actually, the “poisoning” of the moon happened much earlier than that, but I’ll let you find when and how for yourselves.)
DSM:
1) Citation please? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
2) The fact that religious people can sometimes overcome the destructive influence of religion and accomplish great things is uncontested. In almost all situations, however, religion has been at best a poor substitute for more human motives, and far more commonly an active handicap.
3) I’ve heard speculation to the effect that if the Dark Ages and the church’s active suppression of science hadn’t happened we might have landed on the moon as early as the 1500s. Any thoughts on that?
Born in ’55, I dated daughters of contributors to the space program, and was first weaned away from woo towards science. When my relationships seemed permanently capped at three years duration, a very patient father, whose daughter and I got on famously, had contributed to the powdered aluminum alloys that kept the Apollo capsules from frying their occupants on reentry. Later, I dated the daughter of a Grumman scientist from Long Island who was known as “Mr. Epoxy,” a nice Jewish chemist who had co-workers who had first plied their craft in Germany, in their Faustian bargain to achieve Frau im Mond. He would bake his honeycombed epoxy compounds in an affort to shave pounds and ounces off the Lander, and when his batches were done, his German co-workers would get on the intercom and demand that he “…, report to ze ovens, immediately!”
We did it because we could. The money didn’t get shot up into space, it was spent here among communities of people who worked together to achieve something bigger than they were, that they could be proud of. As a fourteen year-old in 1969, it was the only thing that made me proud of my country, the one that I fully expected to turn around and participate in global nuclear annihilation any minute. At least we would have left a tombstone in the Sea of Tranquility. By the time Apollo-Soyuz was studying the Sun from low-earth orbit, I started painting cells on Superfriends cartoons in the San Fernando Valley in Quonset huts, with co-workers who had fallen into that kind of work because there were no more factory jobs wrapping wires on Apollo components. Cartoons were what the market was supporting after Apollo, even though NASA’s budget from Mercury through Apollo was spent every three days waging the Viet Nam War, from which we also appear to have learned little. Buzz Aldrin clocking that Moon-Hoax moron who’d called him a liar? Priceless.
Going to the moon was the right thing to do at the right time for the wrong reasons, and done in the wrong way. We’ve done so much more with robotic missions to the planets, and wasted so many resources doing so little with low-earth orbit missions. What I think is worth doing is turning the Moon into an industrial manufacturing and scientific observatory, which becomes the space station that opens up the rest of the solar system and others to human exploitation, allowing the earth to remain a biological preserve. There is no ecosystem to destroy on the Moon. Launching robotically manufactured products down the gravity well to earth is more cost-effective than bringing everything with us from here while trashing the Earth, which we’re likely to do whether we get off of this planet or not.
Instead, all we’ve achieved is the militarization of low-earth orbit for now. Eventually, Chinese and Indian space programs may challenge us to compete again in space, but that would require an educated populace, something not terribly prized in America these days.
I’m off to tie my white hair into a Lucius Malfoy ponytail, explain my goatee with a snarled, “Don’t ask me about shaving in Azkaban.” I’ll deploy a tinkertoy in my long black silk coat’s pocket as if it were a wand, in a Benicia Bookstore HP Party where I’ll pick up book 7.
Caledonian, do you like music? Do you like museums?
We spend a lot of money on these things, with little to no “return on investment”. Are they a waste of money?
phat
Poison? I suppose DSM refers to the Luna and Ranger probes that crash-landed on the moon as many as ten years before the first manned landing.
It is plausible that Aldrin did take communion on the moon. I find it difficult to confirm or deny this to my own satisfaction by way of Google alone.
Assuming he did, it was a personal choice, a personal act, a personal experience, neither good nor bad in and of itself. I don’t see what difference it makes. There’s really nothing to “chew on” here, DSM. What’s your point? Or are you just trolling? If not, please clarify. Thank you.
Caledonian:
The Native Americans might not have been exterminated, and George W. Bush wouldn’t exist.
I see both these possibilities as improvements.
If Tom Hanks’ compelling HBO series (netflix the DVDs, you won’t be sorry), From the Earth to the Moon is a reliable source (and it strove to be), Aldrin was a Catholic who wanted to be the first man to walk on the Moon who was disappointed to be second; Armstrong’s atheism didn’t appear to trouble Aldrin. He had a little chalice and wafer and holy water he consumed with a brief ceremony after their landing, explaining to Armstrong’s mere raised eyebrow that it had been formally approved.
If it means anything, the first human footprint on the Moon belonged to an atheist.
Ken (#71) Fascinating comment, and hey that’s some resume you’ve got there, mister.
Long white ponytail? I love it!
Lumos!
Cal (#75)
Good answer.
I’m jealous; I didn’t get to see it. I was, however (so I’m reliably informed) sitting in front of the TV for the whole thing.
I was born 11 days later.
Caledonian:
Playing a bit fast and loose with the quote, there, aren’t you Caledonian? What I actually said was:
Not quite the same meaning as your partial quote. I’m sure it was inadvertent though (as was the disparaging comparison). Just an innocent slip of the mouse, no doubt.
Sorry about the quote – I hadn’t intended to alter its meaning.
However, the point remains – there are all kinds of ‘non-reality-based’ political and social decisions that don’t have useful, practical results, but that people feel good about. Making people feel good is not a proper use of societal resources.
Caledonian: Don’t you think that there might be a reasonable long-term payoff to humanity, as a whole, if an event such as the moon landing inspired people to consider scientific and technical careers? I read somewhere that more than 98 percent of the scientists who have ever lived are still alive, right now. Now granted that’s partly a function of human population growth, but still, don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, something like the moon landing might have contributed to that? I’m just sayin’…
The space program certainly wasn’t about making people feel good. I remember hearing a recording (released years later) by Kennedy in which he says that he wasn’t particularly interested in space exploration. The only reason he mobilized the nation to do it was to keep up with the Russians. The efficacy of his strategy can be argued but, in any case, I would argue that the 60’s space program was a good investment with practical consequences–by virtue of the fact that it inspired people to not only to appreciate science but to go into science as a vocation. That’s a good thing, no?
It’s all well and good to talk about efficient use of man and materials and acceptable return on investment, but it’s all empty rhetoric if the people you’re explaining the plan to have no interest in following through with it.
Sputnik. The Cold War. Paranoia. Militarization of Space. So, the Race to the Moon was a matter of National Security!
Hell – I’ll take that over a pre-emptive strike against the USSR and Cuba any day of the week.
Not all ROI shows up on the balance sheet.
Caledonian:
Thanks for the apology. Please accept my apology in turn for being snarky in my previous post.
First, why not? If you mean it’s improper to use that amount of resources just to make people feel good, fair enough. But I don’t see that making people feel good is an improper use per se.
Second, I’m looking at it from a viewpoint similar to Scott’s. I’ll grant that the immediate, practical, directly traceable benefits of the moon-landing program may not have justified the cost. I think the benefits were longer-term and harder to quantify, but still real and significant.
Unfortunately, that’s likely to always be a subjective judgement. Unless someone gets Azimov’s psychohistory to work, I don’t think we can hope to model what things would be like now if we hadn’t gone to the moon, or if we’d spent the same resources on some other project(s).
#64: I interpret this passage to mean “landing lights” on the display to indicate that the touchdown sensors had confirmed that a landing had taken place:
Aldrin: “At ten seconds we touched down on the lunar surface. The landing was so smooth I had to check the landing lights from the touchdown sensors to make sure the slight bump I felt was indeed the landing. It was.”
Practical consequences? A metal asteroid is worth roughly $1 x 10^12 on the current terrestrial metals market. There are asteroids much bigger than that. It might cost $1 x 10^15 to turn Mars into self-sufficient real estate, in the 22nd century, say, but after that it becomes profitable. The highest assessed real estate value of any county in the USA is currently Los Angeles County, where I live. LA County is the first to officially be worth over a trillion dollars. A terabuck here, a terabuck there — after a while you’re talking serious money.
The time may come when Earth, for all its nostalgia value, is a very small fraction of all value of human habitation.
As a realist, I am taken to be a techno-optimist. As with my mentors Richard Feynman and Herman Kahn, I believe that we have a 50% chance of saving civilization, barring bad luck or bad management.
There’s plenty of bad management around. In the long run, colonizing another planet is a hedge against bad luck. And an exoplanet hedges against less local bad luck.
There are contrary arguemnts. Charles Stross got over 700 comments on his blog thread to that effect. But I’ve made my investment, in education, 20 years in Aerospace, and in raising a son. I want return on my investment. And, Caledonian, there is value in some intangibles. Why else would I spend at least an hour every day doing publishable Mathematics? It doesn’t pay the bills. But it’s up there with music, pretty sunsets, and the love of my family.
I’m kind of curious what Caledonian uses as a definiton of “feel good” because really the average professional cellist wouldn’t likely be a professional without large investment from public funds.
And there’s even less practical outcome from any subsidising of a local symphony than say, sending men to the moon.
If you don’t want Apollo, based on your particular arguments, than you really can’t argue for the Metropolitan Opera or a local symphony.
phat
I don’t know what Nassim Taleb thinks about manned space exploration, but he does have some interesting views on scientific research in general that I think are relevant:
http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_5.html#taleb
“Yet my problem is that when those who accept the evolutionary argument look at a computer, at a laser beam, at a successful drug, at a surgical technique, at the spread of a language, at the growth of a city, or at an commercial enterprise, they tend to fall for the belief that its discovery or establishment partook of some grand design. …
Alas, we are victims of the narrative fallacy — even in scientific research (but while we learned how to manage it in religion, and to some degree in finance, we do not seem to be aware of its prevalence in research). The pattern-seeking, causality producing machine in us blinds us with illusions of order in spite of our horrifying past forecast errors. I hold that not only discoveries are also largely the result of a random process, but that their randomness is even less tractable than, and not as simple as, biological evolution.”
One of the benefits of the space program that hasn’t been mentioned already: The organizational techniques that had to be devised in order to make it all work. Up until Apollo, most/all of the largest and most complex projects in history had been military assaults (see also: Operation: Overlord…). Apollo taught us how to do massively complicated things for *peaceful* (or at least “not overtly destructive”) purposes. This is “worthless”?
I consider it the only proper use of societal resources.
Practical consequences? A metal asteroid is worth roughly $1 x 10^12 on the current terrestrial metals market.
But it’s not, is it? Adding that much metal to the market would dramatically reduce the price, so it would be worth very much less. Assuming that it was even feasible to extract the metal in the first place.
Forget asteroid mining. It’s a fantasy. Maybe a hundred years from now it will make sense economically and technologically. Maybe. But for the foreseeable future, it doesn’t.
What we need is a Mars Direct-type mission to the Red Planet. And before that, lots more experience with human exposure to long-term periods in space. We could probably do that for around $100 billion. That’s doable politically and economically.
Caledonian –
I just wonder how your balance sheet reflects the Hubble Space Telescoope, the WMAP or the Chandra X-Ray Observatory? Are they a waste of societal resources to get pretty pictures of the way the Universe was billions of years ago? After all, we can’t do anything about what happened some 13.7 billion years ago. I mean, really, what is the benefit of knowing how the cosmos work when we can never reach much farther than our local region; and that only centuries from now.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun, so there is nothng to gain from exploring.
We spend a lot of money on these things, with little to no “return on investment”. Are they a waste of money?
Or what about this site? How much time is being spent on this site when it could be spent at work or somewhere else? The site may actually be putting a huge dent in the GNP.
Let’s try to quantify that. Some of these figures are wrong for sure, but lets say 10k hits per day at 10min wasted. That’s 100k min per day or 1666 hrs per day. At an average nominal rate of $20/hr, thats $33k per day wasted, or $733k per month, or $8.8 million per year! This site a huge waste of our nation’s resources! Should the US Gov fine PZ to compensate? Probably not, since there is advertising revenue. As long as he doesn’t go back to his own site, like that Moran fellow (splitter!).
Why do you think the resources should have been invested in unmanned exploration, healthcare, or whatever, if not ultimately to make people feel good?
Nonsense. “Pure reason” can give us no motivation to do anything. Whatever you think the goals of society should be, they can only be justified by appeals to emotion, such as compassion, a self-interested desire for comfort and security, scientific curiosity, etc. Emotions should be informed by reason, not beholden to it.
The problem with religion is not that people can find it inspiring, but that it makes claims which aren’t true. There is nothing wrong per se in holding certain goals to be inspiring, exciting, or “sacred” if you want to call it that, so long as you don’t start to think you have some privileged access to truth which automatically elevates your beliefs over others’.
Please realise that in the eyes of us true believers, your churlish bean-counting arguments are demolished by simply reading Johnathan Vos Post’s transcript from the first Apollo landing, which give us just a glimpse of the feeling which must have gripped the world at the time. That feeling of inspiration will continue to be a foundation of space exploration, even when practical benefits are questionable. Maybe this makes you feel like an atheist in a megachurch – in which case you have my condolences – but take comfort from the fact that the “religion” of exploration won’t try to save your soul or condemn you to Hell.
Mike Haubrich:
Ah, I see that you haven’t quite grasped my point. Whatever the value of the pure information derived from such studies, the unmanned telescope is how the information should be accumulated. Would you do x-ray studies by sending human beings into space with Polaroids?
If you want to learn about other celestial bodies, sending humans there is not how to accomplish that goal.
The whole space endeavor wasn’t kick started in the first place by mere emotionalism and ‘feel good’ rhetoric. If the goal of “To put an American on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade. ..” hadn’t been seen at the time as a practical use of resources then it wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. I would argue that people were more practical minded back then than now. Disparaging, in hindsight, its profitability may be valid, but it doesn’t reduce the whole enterprise to mere entertainment. They weren’t just amusing themselves.
Also, I’m not in disagreement about the practicality of sending robots, whatever gets the best bang for the buck. Besides, robots are so cool. :-D
Landing on the Moon was humanity at its best. Just think, if humans manage to destroy them selves (perhaps due to supernatural meme infestation) and become extinct, those artifacts on the Moon will still be there for millions of years. Perhaps the next sentient species to evolve on Earth will eventually re-discover science and develop the technology to go back to the Moon, and discover that we existed, then wonder what went wrong. That is why Apollo is so important, it is humanities first small steps out into the Cosmos.
Apollo confirmed that the Moon and the Earth were once the same, balls of molten rock, cratered by the continuous bombardment of rocks left over from planet formation. The Moon froze in place that time (about 3.7 billion years ago) while the Earth evolved until a species worked out how to leave the planet and visit.
David Scott, the commander of Apollo 15 was exploring a spectacular valley of Appenine Mountains of the Moon, when he came upon a rock that had been thrown up from an ancient collision, he said “Just think, that rock has been sitting there from before fishes swam in the oceans of the Earth.”
Next time you look at the Moon, spend just a few minutes thinking what it would be like to be on the Moon looking back at the Earth, and appreciate being a decedent of those fishes.
If the nonavian dinosaurs had a space program, they might not be extinct. The history of life on earth is that extinction always happens to a species, mass extinctions happen every 60-100 million years or so, and there are a lot of asteroids and comets in orbit around the sun.
The long term payoff from a successful deep space colonization program is immense.
1. More baskets and eggs increases the probability of long term species survival.
2. There are 200 billion-1 trillion stars in the galaxy. That is a lot of potential real estate and as far as we know, it is all vacant right now and free for the taking.
The short term payoff in dollars isn’t obvious. But money is just a way of keeping score. What good is it to have a trillion dollars if an asteroid slams in somewhere?
It may or may not be true, but I’ve read that many people in China gave up their religion due to the moon landing. Their religion said that the Jade Emperor’s daughter went to live on the moon to get away from the Monkey God. Looking at the barren lunar landscape on TV convinced them that was a myth. Maybe that is a benefit which Cal will appreciate?
Colugo @ #88:
Thanks for the quote. I’ve been trying to say something similar, about how actual “design” work looks a lot like evolution in my experience (trial and error, lucky accidents, incremental changes to previous versions, survival in competitive marketplaces). I’m glad to see someone agrees with me.
Caledonian (kind of like this bolding idea, whoever started it.)
Perhaps I didn’t fully grasp your point. But, as in the Seed article from which I quoted in #41, a startling number of discoveries in space have been made by people in their downtime, and many of their discoveries couldn’t not have been anticipated by a pre-programmed unmanned probe. Of course, I don’t think that the WMAP, the HST or Chandra should be manned. But your denigration of the value of humans in space as emotional, poetical longings only misses the body of scientific research that would have been completely missed had we limited our exploration to unmanned probes.
Beyond that, the study of the loss of bone mass has broad implications for us earth-bound types. Osteoporis treatment has advanced because of the rapid bone loss of astronauts, and the relationship between exercise and bone mass retention.
There are real, tangible benefits for us here on earth because of the fact that the space program includes a mix of human and unmanned exploration.
I remember that James Burke — any other Connections fans here? — provided the statistic that during the years of the Apollo program, American women spent as much money on cosmetics as NASA did sending human beings to the Moon.
Caledonian wrote:
Are you serious? Emotion — the desire to be happy, fulfilled, whatever — is ultimately what motivates the rest. Evolutionarily speaking, cognition exists only as another tool (like fast legs, venom, or big teeth in other animals) to help the emotionally-driven part keep getting gratified.
Rubbish. The senses of awe and wonder, of being part of something big and important, of connection with the universe, of anticipating a future you personally may not live to see, are part of our psychology (well, maybe not yours – in which case I pity you). The fact that religion co-opts those experiences does not devalue them, any more than the fact that so much music is religious devalues that whole field.
We do not reject the experience described by some as “sacred”; we reject the claims of objective fact made about it by the religious.
And this is probably the single stupidest thing you’ve said on this blog:
The point is to move beyond mere emotion to reason.
Jonathan Vos Post @#86, regarding my questioning the quote he posted that referred to landing lights:
Sorry, I should have quoted the passage I challenged directly. From your post:
That is certainly not a reference to the instrument lights. The rest of the post rings true to me, but I have to wonder if the author didn’t embellish things at times.
After posting #64, I went here to see if I could find a switch on the instrument panels that would control such landing lights, and the only switch I could find that referenced external lights was the one to control the rendezvous and docking marker lights.
Also, robotics was in it’s infancy back then. It wasn’t a viable alternative at the time, and time was awastin’.
Huge fan. I think all young people should watch that series.
Mike Haubrich:
Those developments were made by people in downtime because there was no systematic attempt to determine what positions/settings were best and little attempt to experiment.
That lack of system is due to the absurd lack of available opportunities and resources, and this is due to – surprise! – emphasis on investing limited resources on a few expensive, human-oriented missions instead of many cheap, unmanned missions.
You offered the example of looking at the ocean from an angle other than straight down. Why were the cameras limited to looking straight down? Because the designers made an assumption. Why did they make that assumption? Because they didn’t have enough resources to both experiment and fulfill their specific goals, and chose their specific goals over scientific experimentation.
A human-teleoperated moveable camera can experiment without preset purpose, just as a human in space can – but MUCH more cheaply.
Eamon Knight:
Ha ha ha ha! How do you expect to survive in the Space Age when you’re using a mind designed to minimally function in the Paleolithic?
It will be a pleasure watching you wither.
RamblinDude, in re James Burke’s Connections:
Rock on! I got the DVDs a few Christmases ago. Connections party at my place!
(I have a projector TV and a big wall.)
“Connections” party–woo hoo!
Your pleasure is simply not important. I’m more concerned with the practical consequences of his withering.
#70 Azkyroth
Well, seeing as someone provided a citation while I was sleeping, I’ll request – but not expect – an apology for your rather asinine assumption that I didn’t have a citation.
DSM has got us. We might as well concede defeat. The fact that astronaut, pilot, Buzz Aldrin performed a religious ceremony on the moon is indisputable refutation of evolution, and proof that much of science is wrong and the bible is right. After all, he did have the right stuff, now.
Your impeccable logic, DSM, is truly ordained, and administered, by God.
The religious kooks remind me of those fanatical, jabbering little pigmies in Diablo 2. (You’ve all played Diablo 2, right?). They run after you with pointy little knives and their only goal in life is to kill you, to stab you to death, much the same as the Jesus zombies are trying to stab science in the heart.
You can’t reason with them; you can’t reason with people who are trying to kill reason.
DSM: Now that that’s settled*, again I ask, “What’s your point?”
It’s cool (or appalling, depending on ones point of view) that Aldrin did that, but… so?
____________________________________________
* At least, I think it’s settled. My googling returned remarkably few hits, and many of the confirmations seem to be circularly-referential.
Hit post too early.
Yeah, never mind that religion – Christianity in particular – has influenced and driven most of the greatest scientific discoveries over the past several hundred years. Look up the religions of the greatest scientists and you will find a preponderance of Christians: Galileo, Kelvin, Pasteur, Newton, Faraday, Linnaeus, Pascal, Kepler, etc. If you honestly think these people only accomplished the things they did after they overcame “the destructive influence of religion,” you’re a fool. These people put their faith first in all things, including science, and it never hurt or hindered them.
My thoughts? I’ve heard speculation that Bigfoot and the Yeti exist, too. Speculation doesn’t make them real. See, there’s this misnomer among militant atheists like yourself that the Dark Ages were “dark” because “religion ruled the world.” This is ridiculous since religion still rules the world. Are we then not still in the Dark Ages? No. See, they’re called the Dark Ages because of the lack of historical records from that time. Nothing more. (I particularly like this write up of the misconception on Wikipedia: Dark Ages: Modern popular use.)
Look, you can speculate about anything you want, but speculation isn’t proof. There’s no more proof that religion – what you really mean is Christianity – hinders science than there is that atheism advances science.
All traits of an organism exist for one ultimate purpose: to perpetuate the organism.
To accomplish that end, evolution has provided a series of ways to understand and respond to the world of ever-increasing complexity.
To elevate emotion above reasoned thought is to forsake the more subtle and sophisticated method for the lesser. Why don’t you try running a planetary civilization on your reflexes while you’re at it? I’ll bet stimulus-response will work wonderfully at keeping your species alive and functional.
RamblinDude (appropriate name):
Oh, look. Reverse trolling. Can I disemvowel you now?
Actually, it’s you who has got me and I need to concede defeat. The fact that astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, was an atheist is indisputable refutation of Christianity and proof that religion has hindered scientific progress since the Dark Ages. Why, atheism should be made mandatory for all scientists so we can finally invent warp drive in the next 5 years and meet all those aliens out there in the universe.
Atheism isn’t mandatory for all scientists. Strict adherence to the facts, is. You can believe whatever you want as long as it doesn’t interfere with the scientific method, or dim your reason and pollute your results.
Disbelief in invisible, supernatural creatures doesn’t mean that there is no sense of wonder and a feeling of questions unanswered.
Galileo’s scientific inquiries and the promulgation of his conclusions weren’t hindered by the Church? That’s a new one.
However, I must agree on some level. Thomas Cahill maintains that during the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church help create an environment in which the seeds of scientific inquiry could geminate and sprout. That said, the assertion that the Church did not subsequently suppress or otherwise “hinder” conclusions that conflicted with Scripture is simply unsupportable.
Also, you may be confusing correlation with causation. I believe all those scientists you named were European, caucasian males. What does religion (or Christianity) have to do with THAT?
Faith vs. reason, pick one? No no.
Black vs. Grey vs. White. Pick one! :-p
Hmmm, I wasn’t clear on the “correlation” point. All I’m (ineptly) trying to say is that arguing that those scientists were all Christians is pretty similar to arguing that some of the greatest scientists of all time – like, say, Newton – weren’t Darwinists. How many white European males who’ve lived over the past 1,200 years weren’t Christians? How many scientists who preceded Darwin were Darwinists? The correlation, though true, may not mean what you imply. It may not mean anything at all.
Which is not to say that you’re completely wrong. I pick “grey”.
I’m still wondering what your point is re: Aldrin.
Caledonian wrote
And, if I may be so bold, some of us have been doing that for years…
I’ve heard that also. Apparently, not all of the popes were unreasonable theocratic dictators. But obviously some were.
I’m just glad that we are not held hostage today by such whimsy.
We’re not? *coughstemcellscough*
:-)
Oh yeah, way to bring me down…
Today, 21 July 2007, is the 38th anniversary of the forst moonwalk. And the most famous dropped word in any human speech.
Re: #105
I am confident that YOU ARE RIGHT. The author linked to, in the below passage, probably misunderstood what he was seeing. Or was being metaphorical. Either he was interpreting sunlight passing through gaps in the kicked-up regolith dust, or light from the descent engine.
The descent engine used UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine) for fuel and nitrogen tetroxide for oxidizer. This is a hypergolic fuel/oxizizer combination, familar to us from Titan missile launches, and thus as modified to Gemini launches, with the red smoke.
“Like a prehistoric predator, its two windows like beady eyes above the four dangling legs, the Lunar Module now hovered 30 feet (9 meters) above the surface, instruments and astronauts desperately searching, trying to probe the lunar dust for a clear spot to land. *** Brilliant searchlights*** sent piercing shafts of light through the lunar dust. Armstrong could see boulders and rocks sticking up out of the blanket of dust blasting away from their rocket motor. A hard white surface appeared through the dust, followed by black shadows of the approaching legs and spindly probes.”
While still a boy in Brooklyn Heights, New York, I used to speak with a Grumman engineer who worked on the LEM design and construction.
He told how they used (literally) gold-plated equipment (gold foil as the shiny thermal wrapping on the LEM), and gold solder in some of the electronics.
He said that workers intentionally dripped lots of the gold solder on the floor, then (after the supervisor left) swept it up, pocketed it, took it home, then sold it.
Which reminds me of the people stealing Titanium from Boeing and Rockwell when I worked on the Space Shuttle and other projects, amid what I learned too slowly was parasitically compromised by ongoing criminal enterprises, which I later reported to the NASA Inspector General’s office (and he, as a political appointee, refused to accept my 6,000 pages of documentation), but that’s another story.
Jonathan Vos Post: Interesting story. Always a balancing act between the ideal and the real.
RamblinDude:
You cannot ‘balance’ reality and unreality.
Can you juggle them?
No.
Can you swap them in and out of your DVD player?
But I’m a Libra.
The Scales, eh? Well!
I was born under the Sign of the Miscalibrated Barometer.
Caledonian replies to me:
Same way you will, you supercilious twit. Because unless you’re a robot or a genetically-enhanced superman, you’ve got that mind, too. Those who ignore that fact and try to live like Vulcans or robots have a tendency to wind up in psychiatrists’ offices.
Which means that: you use your cognition to find the most rational way of reaching a goal (or even if that goal is achievable). But the goals themselves, we choose ultimately because we damn well like them: because they’ll fun, or fulfilling, or exciting, or give us a warm feeling on our death bed that we did something with our life. So sure: if your goal is to gather information, use robo-spacecraft to the max, because they’re way easier (for a myriad of reasons I’m sure I don’t need to belabour here) to build and send to wherever, and are getting increasingly smarter. But that doesn’t rule out also setting a goal of sometimes sending humans to those places, too — to found colonies, or do a few things that AIs can’t (yet) do, or just because we damn well feel like it.
Here’s an idea: send robots to do the science, but the human astronauts should all be artists who can write great poems and symphonies for the rest of us about how totally awesome it is to stand on the edge of the Valles Marineris, or watch a sulphur volcano on Io with the Great Red Spot in the background.
Well, gee: you do have emotions. And what exactly is the utility of your anticipation of my slow decline?
Eamon Knight:
No, I have the same general brain as the paleolithic people had. Mind is a subtler thing – software can change far faster than hardware ever can.
You’re explicitly embracing the less-sophisticated forms of thought that compete with formal processing – it’s like choosing to go through life with 20/70 vision because when you wear glasses they pinch your nose.
Holy cow! And Zoiks! I am a Zodiac ignoramus. Hmmm…pictures, and lots of symbols, too. lemme guess…that Leo symbol is a pretty sad looking barometer… Sagittarius?
/, No, no, lessee…barometer=indicator, judge of…I admit it, I’m hopelessly stumped. And sleepy, so very, very sleepy…
Caledonian. quoth:
The main barrier to people ditching religion is that they see the godless viewpoint as lacking in just such a sense. Many of us have been arguing for some time that is isn’t so, that the sense of the sacred can be found in the adventure of discovering the world that is.
The Moon landings inspired a generation (me included) to scientific and technical pursuits. The raw data returned might well have been gotten cheaper by unmanned missions, but the inspiration factor would not have been there. You can argue that people should be just as excited about the success of robotic missions, but the point is that people aren’t built that way.
If you’re truly being pragmatic you’ll take that into account; pragmatically, the choice of making manned moon missions a priority had a very real and desirable effect on a generation of young minds, especially young American minds. The same effect, in fact, that Yuri Gagarin’s orbit had earlier had on young Russian minds – and if you think Sputnik’s beeping was as inspirational as “I am Eagle!” then you’ve forgotten what it is to be a kid.
Basic goals and motivations always precede rational decision making (e.g. why breed?). The trick is not to get hung up on goals which prevent rational decision making.
We all know Neil Armstrong, but does anyone remember the last astronaut on the moon?
How are we going to accomplish our next miracle, do you think?
It has already been done: the sequencing of the human genome.
Awake again, ah, lopsided scales–I get it, simple. I’m too astrological : -/
But I’ve been thinking about balancing reality-unreality. It could be argued that to make sense of reality we reduce everything to concepts, a thought process, which would blur the line between the real and the imagined. So, at least in our minds, the two could be juxtaposed, compared and balanced in a way that alters our decision and, thus, our reality.
But maybe for another post, and another day…
The next miracle…Artificial intelligence?
I’d be more impressed if humans figured out natural intelligence.
What we see here is a lot of free-range intelligence.
But in terms of return-against-investment, the Moon missions were pathetic.
Humans walked on the frickin’ Moon! The Moon! It’s a whole other planet! In outer space! It would be worth doing again, even if it cost twice as much.
Look, the government is going to waste money. That’s a given. I say waste it on Moon landings and Universal Health care, rather than wars for profit and screwing up the environment, but hay I’m weird like that.
Putting aside the practical benefits (which are huge), there’s the psychology of the matter: it gives us something big and grand to believe in. If we can walk on the Moon, we can tackle global warming, fossil fuels and HIV. Anything is possible because the Moon is no longer the limit, it’s just a mile post towards bigger and better things.
Keith:
I realize that it is impossible to logically demonstrate something to people who have renounced logic, but there may well be some of you who are sufficiently clear in your thinking to be ashamed of your hypocrisy.
Why are arguments like Keith’s not immediately rejected by you as absurd irrationalities?
Calling the moon a planet is a little far-fetched, for one thing.
I think we need to make a distinction here–then and now. We didn’t go to the moon just to be able to gloat about it. That was NOT the reason. Going to the moon, physically walking on it, in the 60’s was the right thing to do for a number of reasons, not all of them accessible to accounting logic, or 21st century reasoning.
When I was growing up versions of, “That ain’t gonna happen any more than men are gonna walk on the moon!” were commonplace. Actually walking on the moon was a HUGE, world wide paradigm shift that’s hard to appreciate now. It led to BIG changes, practical changes, not the least of which was to force home the message, “Don’t tread on me” with the Russians. That seemed really important back then.
It’s understandable, today, being irritated at the ‘gee whiz’ factor of moon travel, after all, it’s not like it’s impossible. And if all that self congratulatory back slapping is interfering with our sobriety and ability to make wise decisions then it is energy misplaced. Agreed, we do need to get on with the business of using our technology and resources to pursue practical matters in the most efficient way possible, but at the time it seemed like that was what we were doing. We didn’t go to the moon in the first place simply because it was ‘cool’–but it was.
And one addendum: There were naysayers back then, too, complaining about wasted resources, but I’m glad they didn’t win the day. Going to the moon was far more than just a psychological device to shore up our self esteem. It was a profound, reality altering way of testing and proving the technology of the time, primitive technology by our standards today, technology that had to be proven for very practical reasons.
I must have missed the part of New Year’s 2000 where reason switched from the 20th-century version to the 21st.
Don’t you mean New Year’s 2001?
I was referring to the 2000-2001 celebration. Is it customary to refer to the year you’re entering, or year you’re leaving, when you name a New Year’s Eve? I tend to go with the preceding year – so it would be New Year’s 2000.
Maybe reason thought New Year’s Eve 1999 was the millenial turnover, and so that’s why I missed the change. :cP
Really? How could you have missed it? It got drunk on its ass repeatedly and then got ‘saved’ and became a Methodist. Since then it’s been behaving most unreasonably.
Oh, it threw up all over perspective, and that got changed, too.