Pharyngula

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?

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 7:40 PM

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?

Posted by: Kseniya | July 20, 2007 7:50 PM

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

Posted by: Ichthyic | July 20, 2007 7:54 PM

Impeachment.

Posted by: Milo Johnson | July 20, 2007 7:59 PM

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.

Posted by: melior | July 20, 2007 8:04 PM

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

Posted by: Christian Burnham | July 20, 2007 8:05 PM

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.

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.

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 8:07 PM

That doesn't make the Moon missions any less pointless, though.

or your contention as stated any less moronic.

Posted by: Ichthyic | July 20, 2007 8:09 PM

Nah, we never landed on the moon. It was all a hoax. Phil should know that by now.

Posted by: jdw | July 20, 2007 8:15 PM

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.

Posted by: Nerull | July 20, 2007 8:23 PM

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.

Posted by: Jim Harrison | July 20, 2007 8:37 PM

Building the pyramids was highly meaningful to the folks involved.

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.

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 8:41 PM

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.

Posted by: craig | July 20, 2007 8:41 PM

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.

Posted by: Zeno | July 20, 2007 8:57 PM

"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?

Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | July 20, 2007 8:58 PM

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.)

Posted by: Christian Burnham | July 20, 2007 9:03 PM

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.

Posted by: RamblinDude | July 20, 2007 9:28 PM

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.

Posted by: raven | July 20, 2007 9:30 PM

Aw, you old people who say you watched the moon landing on tv crack me up!

Posted by: k | July 20, 2007 9:35 PM

the Moon missions were a complete waste of time and money, otherwise.

I got a space pen out of it. So there.

Posted by: Spooky | July 20, 2007 9:40 PM

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:

"If human beings can do much better science in space than robots, why does NASA make its astronauts do science like robots?" It does if the discoveries of Paul Scully-Power, an Australian-born oceanologist, are any indication.

Sent into orbit on a routine shuttle mission in 1984, Scully-Power, who had helped train earlier astronaut crews, saw unexpected things because he took unusual viewpoints. By watching the sea surface from a steep angle, looking into sun glare, he saw features of the reflected light that revealed telltale characteristics of the ocean: boundaries of currents, wind-induced roughness of the surface, standing waves passing through narrow straits, signs of pollution or plankton blooms, and other localized conditions. No automatic observation systems had ever noticed these features since they had been programmed to get the 'best' view by looking straight down. Only when someone was set loose, with instructions to "just look around," were these phenomena discovered.

Posted by: Mike Haubrich | July 20, 2007 9:42 PM

Aw, you old people who say you watched the moon landing on tv crack me up!

K: You get to wax nostalgic about 911 and the Iraq war. I'll take my early memories. : )

Posted by: RamblinDude | July 20, 2007 9:47 PM

But forgive me, how can any sensible person actually believe that the lunar landing was anything but a tremendous achievement?

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.

Posted by: raven | July 20, 2007 9:51 PM

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.

They were by no means morons... but you don't send test pilots to do selenologists' work. Geologists, even.

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 9:55 PM

Bah! I'm a moron. Please ignore the grammatical errors in the preceding post.

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 10:04 PM

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.)

which would nowadays leave me wondering if I'll be able to get up again,

Congrats to getting down, I guess. :-P

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | July 20, 2007 10:06 PM

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 :)

Posted by: Stephen Wells | July 20, 2007 10:07 PM

killing off the microbes of polio, smallpox, and measles is, or would be, an incredible series of encores.

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? ;-)

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | July 20, 2007 10:21 PM

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!

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 10:38 PM

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.

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 10:45 PM

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

Posted by: Kseniya | July 20, 2007 10:48 PM

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.

Posted by: Caledonian | July 20, 2007 11:40 PM

Caledonian: Have we started a new convention of bolding the names of fellow posters in our comments?

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!

Posted by: Zeno | July 20, 2007 11:54 PM

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...

Posted by: Kseniya | July 21, 2007 12:11 AM

And one of Buzz Aldrin's fi