Forty-five years later, does it matter?
To the degree that people have learned the false lesson from it that we cannot go beyond low earth orbit without building giant rockets, it was a setback.
30 thoughts on “We Once Landed On The Moon”
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it was a setback
Exactly and for the reasons you state.
Imagine if von Brauns EOR plan won, with Gemini-Agena type incremental steps and much smaller launchers.
Agreed. I always thought it made a lot more sense from a systems point of view than Apollo. For long term manned presence in space you will need to learn how to do docking. If you are able to use the same components for satellite, LEO space station, transport to the Moon you get economies you could not get with a gigantic rocket.
Still I think the worst mistake of them all was dumping Apollo propulsion technology by the wayside after spending so much effort on it. I doubt the EELV program would have been necessary had the technology been used to build smaller launch vehicles. No reason why they could not make a rocket with a single F1 engine rather than five.
They had the concept that Shuttle could replace everything so why bother recycling Apollo technology. It was a mistake.
The flaw is more basic than the shuttle. The flaw is government opportunity cost because a single choice is made that must succeed. Instead lots of choices should be made, by private concerns, where most fail. We need failure in order to make the fastest progress.
Those failures are not a big cost because they happen quick… unless government again gets involved with bailouts.
Repeat after me… Government is the problem. Govt. is the problem.
It’s worse than that. Even when govt. does succeed it quits and throws away what it has achieved.
Shouldn’t the intelligent among us stop this behavior of government dependence? Are we totally incapable of silencing the ignorant nanny state mob? We’d better figure it out.
To be fair, von Braun vastly underestimated the ease at which a reusable launch vehicle could be fielded.
Reusables in context of Apollo are almost completely irrelevant.
A certain Peenemünde based rocket team, which von Braun was sort of affiliated with, already had demonstrated sufficiently high launch rates with expendable launch vehicles. They continuously improved their success rates or manufacturing “yields” too.
Ironically, right around the time when the “worlds first reusable launch vehicle” was entering service with aspirations of flying about 60 missions a year, our old Soviet comrades were launching to orbit about once a week with good old expendables.
right around the time when the “worlds first reusable launch vehicle” was entering service with aspirations of flying about 60 missions a year, our old Soviet comrades were launching to orbit about once a week with good old expendables.
Sorry, but that’s pretty much a non sequitur in this conversation.
Sorry, did you want to talk about von Braun’s EOR plan or not?
You do realize that it was a plan for a reusable spaceplane serviced space station, right?
When people say EOR wasn’t doable within Kennedy’s deadline, they don’t mean it was just a close thing. They mean first Moon landing by 1985.
There were multiple versions of what might be called von Braun’s EOR plan. What’s being discussed here was the 1950s incarnation. But then there was his last pre-Apollo plan, Project Horizon of 1960. About half a dozen smallish Saturns would have been required for each mission, the exact number depending on the choice of propellants. An LEO assembly station was part of the plan, but it was no where near the 1950s rotating-wheel station in size and sophistication. The Saturns were to be partially re-usable, or at least salvageable, and the first moon landing was set for 1966. That was no doubt that was optimistic, but the whole things seems more plausible than the 1950s plan.
Then there was the 1961-62 version of von Braun’s EOR plan, in which two Saturn C-4s or C-5s we needed for each Apollo mission. This would have introduced the idea of LEO assembly or re-fueling but also would have established the big-rocket paradigm just as firmly as the real LOR Apollo did.
Sorry, did you want to talk about von Braun’s EOR plan or not? You do realize that it was a plan for a reusable spaceplane serviced space station, right?
No. You are talking about fantasies.
EOR vs LOR decision story is discussed in the brief article below, but it would do you good to study a bit more history than that. The key date where the history was made was 7th of June, 1962 in Huntsville, AL. Unfortunately, the history took a wrong turn on that date.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/262/1
The big dumb rocket was a product of the race mentality. We had to get there before the Russkies, so whatever worked (even if it wasn’t sustainable) was what we did. Unfortunately the big dumb rocket also came with a big dumb bureaucracy that outlived the rocket by a couple of generations. Pournelle’s Iron Law pretty much guarantees that this bureaucracy won’t be focused on much beyond its own survival.
Telecommunication operations for the FAA (which includes phone lines to radar and radio) used to be a single person with a phone at each regional office. Then it became the fourth largest phone company in the nation at one time. Then they got a contract with Sprint I believe (if memory serves) that moved them back to that single person with a phone. We could hope NASA turns into a single office building with a good phone system.
No tech improvement travels the ideal path. We went there and I’m happy for it. To a like of the non-tech-savvy people it seemed impossible and magical. Even a lot of tech savvy people felt that way.
Yes it’s possible we might have increased our capabilities, faster, in a better thought out way.
But you cannot guarantee it. You really cannot predict what path we would have traveled. You don’t KNOW how it would have turned out otherwise.
After all, we had the remarkable, reasonable and step-wise progression of the X machines and the NF104 and MOL. We had the Von Braun Plan, the Incremental plan etc.
But all of those were tossed aside. It’ s not like they weren’t thought of. It’s not like there weren’t intelligent people thinking about things. Ok so we did the expedient, political, thing. That’s how things work sometimes. Be glad we did anything at all.
Look at cars – some of the very first cars were electric. But the tech wasn’t ready (still isn’t) and they were tossed aside. Yet money and time was spent on them. And they did help push the tech if even just a little bit. And yes I know that example works both ways – you could say the big brains saw how bad the electric car path was and changed direction unlike our Space brains. But at least, there, you had market forces in play – unlike Space.
Early electric cars were better than gas powered cars for one reason: No difficult hand cranking to start. What killed the electric car was the electric starter.
If they hadn’t thought to use the electric starter motor they may have worked harder on better batteries and charging systems. We may have become the jetsons instead of the flintstones by now. Ok no, but it’s a thought.
It would be nice if people understood the opportunity costs government puts on us.
I think the reason is that Henry Ford’s mass production assembly lines lowered the price of gasoline powered cars to a point far below what any electric car cost to build. Electric cars might’ve been acceptable in cities (and that’s mostly the case today as well) but their range, operational limitations and cost of owership killed electric cars back then. Those factors are serious impediments to electric cars today even with $7500 subsidizies.
It wasn’t electric cars that the electric starter put out of business, because they were even less practical than modern ones. It was the steamers.
Electric starters were a factor in the demise of the Steamers, but cost was likely an even bigger one. From the Wikipedia entry on the Stanley Steamer:
In 1918, after F.E. Stanley’s accidental death, F.O. Stanley sold the interests to Prescott Warren. The company then endured a period of decline and technological stagnation. As the production specifications show, no models with a power output higher than 20 hp (15 kW) were produced after 1918. Far better cars were available at much lower cost – for example, a 1924 Stanley 740D sedan cost $3950 ($54357 today), compared to under $500 ($6881 today) for a Ford Model T. Widespread use of electric starters in internal combustion cars eroded the greatest remaining technological advantages of the steam car.
Efficiencies of scale, a lack of effective advertising and general public desire for higher speeds and less fussy starting than were possible with the Stanley technology were the primary causes of the company’s demise and the factory closed permanently in 1924.
People weren’t willing to pay 8 times as much for an inferior car. Imagine that. Cadillac introduced an electric starter in 1912 and they were on Model Ts by 1919, but the first car with an electric starter was the 1896 Arnold built in England.
Also, keep in mind you couldn’t just hop in a steamer and go. First you had to build up steam. I do envy Jay Leno who actually drives his around.
Those ways were tossed aside because of expediency. It’s not that they didn’t work, it was that they wouldn’t have worked in time to get men into space (and on the Moon) before the Russians. So the big dumb rocket won the funding sweepstakes and the slow and steady idea was tossed aside. While we can’t know for sure how things would have turned out had the Von Braun/Collier’s Magazine road to space been taken, it’s hard to argue that the path we did take was better. 40 years is a long time to be stuck in Earth orbit.
Forty-one years and counting. And no prospects of getting out any time soon with current Congressional plans.
Well Rand in opinion, the reasons we are still locked in Earth Orbit is not soley because of LOR. and Saturn V’s.
In fact I think Congress and NASA had a lot more to do with it since the last Moon Landing than the methodology of the moon landing.
So we take congress out of the loop!
Kennedy’s artificial deadline forced NASA into the “waste anything but time” mentality. They’ve never recovered from that in the sense that they waste money hand over fist. Only, they now waste incredible amounts of time as well.
To the congress-critters who give them the (our) money, their primary function is to spend it (in areas where said congress-critters can buy votes with it) anyway. So by doing nothing, they are not really wasting time. They are making sure the money gets spent and avoiding the risk of actually trying to do something. It’s a bureaucratic win/win.
You’re right, of course. Politicians have different measures of what constitutes a successful government program than the rest of us. To politicians, if a program contributes to their reelection (or even better, election to a higher office) while enriching themselves and/or their cronies, then it’s a success regardless of the actual results. Once we accept this bitter reality, so much of the absurdity in government spending makes perfect sense.
I’ve long thought that if the State must spend taxpayer money on space stuff, we should turn the Moon into a colony for statists and other practitioners of coercion, sort of like Robert Heinlein’s Coventry. Trying to steal your neighbor’s money? Doesn’t matter if the means were legal or extra-legal (and of course in a truly free society, there would be no legal means for stealing)–off you go! To paraphrase Ralph Kramden: “To the moon, Baghdad Jim! To the moon!”
Good idea: The moon for statists. Mars for liberty lovers.
Isn’t this kinda like Obama still complaining about the mess Bush left him?
We have a winnah!
Are you implying that regardless of the past we have choices about our future? I don’t know… I’ll have to check… but I don’t think, thinking is allowed?