Comment by dyauspitr
2 days ago
Why does it seem like we can’t do shit anymore? Was it always like this and there was no news coverage of all the failures? If not what is the main cause of failure right now? Is it onerous regulations and bureaucracy? Stressed work environments?
The Apollo program budget was immensely large, and the objective was clear: put people on the moon before the Soviet Union.
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
The budget is actually not that much worse. If you adjust for inflation.
On avg NASA budget was about the same as now. But now we do more things now. But between Constellation/SLS and Orion this new Shuttle based architecture has as much money as Apollo while having done almost non of it. Before it is where Apollo ended up, it will cost much, much more then Apollo.
But even if what you said was true, a gigantic amount of infrastructure that was paid for in the 1960s is still in use today. A huge amount of fundamental research that was required is already done. That alone should make it much cheaper.
Same goes for development, Artemis is not developing any new engines, while Apollo had to develop many new engines.
> The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor.
Except of course that Korea/Vietnam were much more expensive then what were are doing now.
The budget is very much different, as % of the total federal budget (4% vs 1%) and in USD adjusted for inflation (60B vs 20B).
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And we can't forget the nationalism at the time. Everyone was rallied behind the program and wanting to beat the Soviet Union. I mean, sputnik scared the hell out of everyone.
I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!
Actually less than half at best were behind Apollo and most thought it cost too much and that social programs were worth supporting more, and after the landings succeeded we didn’t continue anywhere because even that support waned.
Artemis was never a "return to the moon" program. NASA had one of those; congress killed it and replaced it with a "keep shuttle jobs going" program. There has always been and will always be pork spending, but in this case keeping the gravy train going has been the primary if not sole driver, as opposed to programs like Apollo where it was a means to an end. People have known it was a problem from day one and probably most people thought it would get cancelled and replaced by something more sound long before this point.
No... Orion has always been aiming for travel to Mars. The moon is a sales tactic and a gimmick that works as a stepping stone towards the larger mission goal.
Orion was never aiming for anywhere. It was always meant to be a flexible module that could be used for whatever some future plan would come up with. It was developed as part of the Crewed Expeditionary Vehicle program explicitly as a flexible platform. Orion block 1 was originally supposed to be a shuttle replacement for transit to the ISS. The constellation program under which Orion started to be built ostensibly had ambitions beyond just going to the moon, including missions to both Mars and Near Earth Asteroids, but those follow on targets were never really fleshed out. The SLS was created after constellation was cancelled with no clear mission defined; its intent to keep supplier contracts going was clearly stated at the time. Artemis was a program created to give the SLS destinations to go to, none of which are Mars.
I feel the same. The Golden Gate Bridge took 3 years to build, start to finish. It was the biggest suspension to have ever been built at the time. Compare that to any modern public works project of today. There are countless examples of how we used to be able to build things before 1970.
Per Wikipedia, the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed in 1917, approved by the state for design in 1923, funded in 1930, started construction in 1933, and completed in 1937.
The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.
11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We have onerous safety requirements and red tape which is why everything is so slow. Very few people die on construction sites now. Do we want 11 dead people or do we want things done extremely slow? I guess as a society we have answered that question.
We've probably answered wrongly. Even money aside, how many more people die in traffic accidents due to the extra miles driven because of delays in construction?
Some regs are worth it, certainly, but being overly cautious is in itself unsafe.
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I think the narrative is more difficult now, as is visibility of goals. “Land a man on the Moon and return him safely” is a clear objective, while “decarbonize the global economy” or “make AI safe and useful” are fuzzier, and don’t give you a single flag‑planting moment.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
We're doing really complicated stuff. And think about it though, in the 60s/70s we had one organization - NASA. That was it. Today, we have RocketLab, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and NASA, plus Boeing I guess.
Basically because we don't feel like it.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
Way more safety and rigid testing procedures and a better understanding - the Apollo program was all done by the seat of the pants engineering that somehow worked all based on the ideas of the team that built the German V2.
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
This complete nonsense. The Apollo team was much, much, much, much larger then any V2 team. And mostly Americans.
And their testing procedures were actually very high quality. You don't just accidentally land on the moon and return. That doesn't just happen 'somehow'. That is truly idiotic level analysis.
> Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
And that this works was established with lots of both experimental testing and lots of theoretical work.
So much so that F1 is one of the most reliable engines ever used in space flight history.
> Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
Except of course that the RS-25 engine used by NASA today is known to be less safe then F-1. Having had more failures and generally causing more minor operational problems.
It seems you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. In fact, NASA own analysis before they were forced to pick SLS by congress indicated that a updated version of F-1 (still relying on the analysis of those people in the 1960s) would be a much better rocket.
Apollo worked because engineers from the top to the bottom made smart engineering focused decisions taking responsibility for their part of the stack, and close working together in teams on a shared goal while having very solid testing procedures for everything.
That doesn't imply that it was faster though. It just implies they didn't have the technology to simulate it, nor CNC machining to do it another way.
I mean does it sound like that was faster then what we can do today?
it's because we "destroyed the technology" :^)
Essentially, neoliberalism. The goal of everyone on the project is now higher and higher profits. Delivering a working product doesnt necessarily mean best profits anymore. Spacex would rather drag the project along with ships that dont work than to just make something that works. The government has privatized so much of their workload into so few specialized companies that they really can't stop them from doing this.
This is just nonsense. First of all, the companies in the 1960s were all there for profit and all made profit. And the politicians in power back then also tried to get contracts to companies in their districts. Why do you think the NASA control center is in Houston?
SpaceX is on a fixed price contract. Dragging the project along is literally costing them money.
By literally any analysis you can do, you will see that in the last 15 years SpaceX was by far and away (its not close) the best contractor to NASA in terms of delivering what NASA wanted.
In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
It isn't a fixed-price contract. They've been granted multiple "milestone" extensions as well as new contracts for things they're not capable of, clearly. One thing is for sure, no matter what happens to the mission (it'll probably fail), Elon and his buddies will still get to scrape a couple hundred million for themselves while telling the rest of us we need to be "more hardcore" and preach more austerity bullshit.
Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.
>In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?
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