It’s long past time to abandon it.
It’s hard to do, though. Many just can’t imagine any other way to do human spaceflight. And of course, those in Congress don’t want to lose all their opportunities for graft.
5 thoughts on “The Apollo Model”
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Spaceflight development has long suffered from a terminal case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. If something was achieved via one method once then that became the de facto way to do it forever. If some new technique failed in the first attempt then it became widely known that that route was impossible (“wile e coyote engineering” to quote Henry Spencer).
If you intentionally designed a system to restrain the development of spaceflight you would have a tough time doing better than this.
Add to that the fact that the political shenanigans LBJ pulled to get Apollo running are still with us today. Carried through the Shuttle program and SLS, weighing down manned spaceflight like an anchor.
And people wonder why we don’t have colonies on Mars yet.
“Graft” is loaded language. There are plenty of legal means to funnel money to decision makers. In the United States, we’ve managed to legalize payment for political access and much of it is received tax free. In a sense, buying a policy is an “all-pay” auction where competing interests vie for their preferences. For policy to change, the entrenched interests need to be outbid by using either money, votes, jobs, the pillory or some other currency that the decision makers care about. All of these currencies are convertible into each other to some extent. As the unseating of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor showed, an underdog can prevail against an overdog when being outspent 10-1. It’s challenging to gather resources as an outsider because the entrenched interests have locked in astonishing money flows.
Graft is “illegal” only if the legislature declares the particular activity so. It is be definition corrupt and corrupting.
The Apollo Model, like the Manhattan Project Model before it, works well for specific objective ASAP cost no object projects. As the cost of tremendous waste. For sustainable, flexible, on a budget capability it is rubbish.
It’s actually rather shocking how different the Apollo model and the Manhattan Project model are. With the Manhattan Project there was a crap-ton of experimentation and legitimately novel research. With Apollo, much less so. The Manhattan Project pursued multiple bomb designs, multiple types of fissile materials, and multiple methods of producing fissile materials. In the end they produced two working designs using two different fissile materials and 4 different methods of producing fissile materials. Along the way they were forced to abandon several promising pathways including gun-assembly of Plutonium, use of Thorium bred U-233 as a fissile material, and use of centrifugation as a means of enriching natural Uranium (which was the odds-on favorite going into the program).
The Manhattan Project was parallelized, research heavy, and iterative. In comparison Apollo was serialized, engineering heavy, and carefully planned up front. The Manhattan Project methodology led later to vastly increased weapons efficiency, miniaturization, thermonuclear weapons, MIRVs, and many other innovations, all due to ongoing R&D and iteration. Apollo led to a dead end and a frontier left abandoned for 4 decades.