Comment by pwndByDeath
13 hours ago
As a long time space nerd, I'm not sure what this accomplishes by repeating the previous stunts that failed to usher in the promised space frontier.
Apollo was, IMO, not successful at changing the course of human history. A really cool footnote, sure, but everything else that was to follow, nope, just a bunch of neat, interesting but ultimately meh science missions.
An exciting change would be more like Delta-V/Critical Mass, but NASA is not going to deliver that, at least not in any form it has taken thus far.
The guidelines ask us to avoid being curmudgeonly. I'm sure you didn't mean to come across that way, but could you try not to make Hacker News the kind of place that responds with “meh” to a successful space mission?
My pessimism comes from a hindsight that the Apollo missions, while amazing failed to create the future they promised. Looking at how the missions were designed, the political focus, the academic infighting of NASA scientists trying to keep niche research funded. I fail to see how this time, the same strategy will produce a different result.
I also don't expect benevolent billionaires to fill that either. I hope I would in their place, but I'll not likely get the chance.to find out.
To end on an optimistic note, tang and Velcro are pretty dope.
I blame the "space race" narrative - it made everything unsustainably expensive just to beat the goal of landing on the Moon by the end of the decade and before the Soviets. That also made the program even more dependant on political whims and easy target for budget cuts in the Vietnam era.
I recommend looking into the space flight plans from the pre Apollo - while tere were bonkers ideas like Project Horizon, most of the plans sounded quite sensible, with incremental building of space infrastructure and emphasis on cost and reusability (in the 1960s).
Of course when it became a race all the sustainability and infrastructure went out of the window and got sacrificed in the name of speed. :P
We can't build a TV from 50 years ago, much less a space rocket.
Because we stopped, we get to do everything over again with hardware from this century.
My point is this path doesn't lead to the future, it leads to the sad state of space between Apollo and this Shark Jump.
The first Orion (nuclear pulse) has a much more interesting story and would have made us an interplanetary species before we had the iPhone. But it was killed by Kennedy, became space wasn't what he was worried about.... And maybe hundreds of nukes in space might make some countries edgy.
They can't just build Apollo 18 and resume the program as if there weren't a 50 year hiatus.
Imagine if your employer wanted to start using a software system it retired in 1972. What would you do?
Just another monday in any big old company adjecent to finance or airline industry ? ;-)
What is delta v/critical mass?