It seems to have become my full-time job to correct this kind of thing. As for the notion that the new space policy “ends human spaceflight,” I feel like I’ve been playing whack-a-mole with that nonsense since February.
8 thoughts on “Debunking The Space Policy/History Myths”
Comments are closed.
Thanks for continuing to whack that mole!
How different things would be if they just set an RFP for a half dozen ships (each a different design from a different respondent) with a minimum internal volume and delta V to use existing systems to be put into orbit and assembled. One billion to be given to each winning design and another three billion once completed in orbit.
Call it a jobs bill.
Funny, I was thinking of using the whack a mole analogy for what happens when one responds to the trolls over at Space Politics. Glad to know this little bit of culture is so deeply impressed into our minds.
Zond Rand, not Vostok. Zond, a stripped-down Soyuz on Proton, was what Apollo 8 was responding to.
To be fair, we wont be launching humans into space via NASA vehicles. That is an end to a particular type of human space flight. One that Rand and many other people agree with (at least when Ares I is concerned).
IMO, the taxpayers have every right to be critical of the paradigm shift currently underway even if they don’t get all of the terminology exactly right.
Be happy people are starting to pay attention. The space community needs new voices especially ones that are not industry insiders.
“Zond Rand, not Vostok. Zond, a stripped-down Soyuz on Proton, was what Apollo 8 was responding to.”
And sometimes I wish they’d pulled off that circumlunar flight first, if only so that the Soviets could not later make the claim (readily believed by so many) to never having been in a ‘race to the Moon.’ (as well as giving less ammunition to the Moon hoaxers ‘why didn’t anyone else go?’ argument)
All other events likely would have unfolded the same way, a successful manned Zond would not have changed their inability to make the N-1 work.
Rand, no doubt history will record you as the Great Athanasius of “Apollo won us the battle but lost us the War”
theory.
Sadly Apollo was one of the most Soviet things we did during the cold war, and it’s seen as a triumph of capitalism.
The more apt alternative history would have been if the Soviets eventually succeeded in getting to the moon first (sometime in the mid 70s probably) with a big planned flags-n-footprints program followed by a robust space launch and colonization infrastructure sprouting up organically in the US, leading to a permanent manned presence in orbit and on the Moon. Sadly, instead we got Apollo, which captured and expended much of the US’s space capability on a one-off event, and set the expectations for a return to the Moon at the level of a multi-billion dollar effort.