You’re right that, if overdone, it can lead to complacency. But if you treat every generation as a blank slate, you abandon the valuable capital of experience.
it has nothing to do with how you treat each generation. it's whether or not you have a continuous shared work experience from the elders to the youngsters over and over.
if your company abandoned big projects for small local stuff and then a few generations later suddenly decided to go big again, you'd suck at it.
if you're good at it, it's because the people right before you were doing it already and passed on their experience.
(this doesn't mean something can't be done the first time - it just means if you don't have institutional knowledge, you have to suck at it first and then get better).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2012/03/31/more-th...
He killed a lot of things to save Apple.
I wouldn't read too much into it.
For the same reason, Apple doesn't celebrate anniversaries.
Oh boy we're already there
The trouble arises when it’s 2025 and the last great achievement you can point to was 150 years ago. Then you have a problem and referencing the past becomes a misguided attempt to rest on old laurels. Like (to use popular American movie tropes) a popular high school captain of the team, boyfriend to the head cheerleader, who has been out of high school for 30 years and still talks about a goal in a game as the best moment of his life. That’s the “we already won!” attitude.
An open question as I really don’t have an answer either way: what’s the last mega project the U.S. succeeded in completing that wasn’t directly tied to a short term business plan? Something for future generations or a major environmental project or a transportation or infrastructure project, etc.
We might even be better to have no one advancing space travel than to have only the billionaires doing it. At least then they can't find some way to use it to screw us over.
SpaceX is majority owned by billionaires.
The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our parents is absurd.
It’s kind of like a FIRST Robotics Challenge for nations. The specific goal really doesn’t matter and can just as well be different than the moon. That’s not the interesting part.
I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Apollo at its height commanded 0.8% of the entire US economy.
True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.
(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.
> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)
Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.
(And yes, the government can give labels to the debt, but that's more of a political exercise than fiscal reality.)
This is inaccurate. Here [1] is a nice table showing US military spending over time, inflation adjusted. Up, up, and away! And it's made even more insane because what really matters is discretionary spending. Each year lots of things are automatically paid - interest on the debt, pensions, medicare, social security, and so on. What's left over is in those giant budgetary bills that Congress makes each year that cover all spending on education, infrastructure, and all of the other things people typically associate government spending with.
And military spending (outside of things like pension) is 100% discretionary, and it consumes about half of our entire discretionary budget! And this is again made even more insane by the fact that discretionary spending, as a percent of all spending, continues to decline. This is because we're an aging population with a terrible fertility rate. So costs for social security, medicare, and other such things are increasing sharply while new revenue from our children is barely trickling in. Notably this will never change unless fertility rates change. Even when the 'old people' die, they will be replaced by even more old people, and with even fewer children coming of age.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
Perhaps I wasn't quite clear when I said "spends less of its total income". I meant as as a proportion of GDP.
I agree that the US has some weird distinction between discretionary and mandatory spending. And I also agree that much of the 'mandatory' spending needs a reform, and should probably not be on the government's balance sheet at all. Eg a fully funded pension system that invests globally is both off the government's balance sheet, and doesn't care about domestic fertility.
(Of course, you still want to have a means tested welfare system to catch those people who couldn't earn enough for retirement and other poor people in general.)
Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - governments can't ever control their spending, so the funds always end up getting plundered. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a great example. It was created after massive oil reserves were discovered in Alaska resulting in a huge windfall of money to the government. The government proceeded to completely waste all of that money with nothing to show for it, which made people less than happy. So the idea of the APF was to create a fund that could provide social dividends in both the present and even after the oil eventually runs out.
But as the government started, again, blowing money, they started dipping into the fund and eventually changed the law to normalize it and it's gradually turning into a joke. This years dividend was $1000, compared to $3300 (inflation adjusted) at its peak in 1999. The problem with 'well just make it where you can't do that' is that the same people that make that law, are the exact same that can unmake that law and give themselves lots of other people's money, which they will do, sooner or later.
Why not? I think it's close to the only useful metric across time.
> The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending.
Laws aren't god given. They can be changed. The political processes are slightly different, but if the voters want it, they can get it.
> Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - [...]
I'm not alluding to any sovereign wealth funds. What makes you think so?
I suggested to get pension systems out of the hands of government, not into them.
As for money vs GDP, our discussion on mandatory vs discretionary spending is already one reason why $$$ is far more informative. Dollars can, after inflation, be compared and paint a relatively clear picture. Percent of some other metric, which has often changed wildly over time, is instead more likely just to mislead.
So for instance we now spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on the war machine than we did during the Cold War when we were facing a very viable threat of nuclear annihilation. That's an extremely valuable metric that does mean a lot. Why are we spending so much on war?
The fantasy about it creating some sort of unstoppable war machine has clearly been clearly shattered. It's not even clear that would have been desirable if true. One thing this administration got completely right was renaming the Department of Defense to its old moniker of Depart of War, because that is what it really is.
This reality is completely muddled if you start trying to frame things as percent of some other metric, be that budget, GDP, or whatever else.
The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.
The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596462...
Unfortunately, I think that's the problem with some of the rhetoric like "the green revolution will be the next space race!" For better or worse, solar panels aren't as inspiring to most people as space is.
If the same resources were put into popularizing advancements in energy, you'd see more excitement. As it is, there are kids growing up excited about environmentalism like there were kids growing up excited about space.
Look at the cult of personality the Soviet Union built around Yuri Gagarin, yes people were always going to find space exploration interesting, but manufacturing a folk hero means even more people will, too, and it becomes something aspirational and seemingly attainable. The Soviets were not unique in doing this, the US did similar things.
There are already some related things in popular culture that seem to inspire younger generations, like new urbanism. The hope for a new way of living can be a huge motivating force.
Nah. You can argue that the goal "land on the moon" is artificial, but it being artificial doesn't make it fake or abstract. If you're the first to achieve it then you're the first, and that's it. What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.
Now, if you're not able to repeat it at all, that does say something. But if it takes you a few years longer, well, so what? It's not a race anymore, because it's already been won, by the US of fifty years ago.
The winner of the race to Mars is still undecided, though.
Despite you throwing the word "obviously" at it, that is an extremely untrue claim. Even if we hadn't forgotten a lot of the details, we're solving new engineering challenges with modern material science and manufacturing, and learning a lot of new things about spacecraft design. There is a ton of invention in doing another landing after so long.
But even as stated, I don't think your argument holds up. "What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new."
Even if it was technically possible to not invent anything new, that path is not going to be taken. It would be even more expensive and worse in every way. Nobody is going to launch a rocket with just 60s/70s technology ever again. A new moon launch will have lots of invention and learning, and claiming we can still do it does need proof.
Like I said, you didn't have to invent anything new. In this case you put yourself in the awkward situation of having to reinvent the wheel by your own incompetence. So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
>It would be even more expensive and worse in every way.
Worse and more expensive than what? The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
The "you're certainly not learning anything new" argument only works if we do reuse old techniques. "You don't have to invent anything new" is not sufficient to support the argument.
> Worse and more expensive than what?
Trying to reinvent old techniques and rebuild a bunch of machines and factories that used those techniques would be worse than inventing new things. You'd have to deliberately choose to not learn anything and to waste extra money in pursuit of that choice.
> The only rocket that has flown men to the moon is Saturn V. What exactly are you comparing it to?
We don't have a time machine, so the contenders are "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 1970" or "2020s rocket with techniques invented before 2030".
> So if you actually do do it, what have you proven?
If you actually do it, in a reasonable way, then in addition to the inventions and learning and any proof to do with that, you prove you can go to the moon, because saying "oh of course we can, we could use the old method" is not a particularly strong claim as industries change and workers retire over the course of more than half a century.
Are you in manufacturing? Because when following perfectly mature process, defect still happens.
Then, how do you even "do the same steps for the first one"? After 50y, lots have lost.
I’ve got to assume I’m misunderstanding the objection because it feels ridiculous to overstir the oxygen over semantics. Do we just need to call it Space Race 2?
Also unlike sports, space races are massively expensive and it's untenable to forever go from one to the next.
However I agree that manned space flight is a giant money pit with not much to show for. It should come out of our entertainment budget, not eat into our science budget.
If you want to do science in space, go unmanned.
You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.
The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.
Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
>But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
On the other side of the coin, it's such a huge expense just for bragging rights, that for any country it's not worth undertaking. It's much more preferable to just give the appearance that you could totally do it if you wanted to, but you just don't feel like it. I'd argue that the US is currently failing at this, but until anyone else flies a manned mission to the moon, it doesn't say anything.
Yes, you do.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-th...
In the sense that we don't need to do either, that's true. But if we want to claim we're still competent moon landers, we do need to repeat the task every once in a while to keep that capability. And there are good scientific benefits from continuing to do difficult space launches of many types.
This is sort of like saying Leif Erikson and the Icelandic Commonwealth won the "the new world race" in 1000AD. Whatever Columbus et al were up to would surely be of trifling concern to future generations.
(Although I think the moon landing is ridiculous there is no scientific reason for it).
It was to prove that your economic system could muster the correct machinery to get to the moon. Once we got to the moon, nothing significantly changed scientifically, but politically it was a bombshell.
The act of getting the moon now is, once again, not a scientific endeavor. It is once again a holistic test of whether the country still can do it.
And from the looks at it, maybe not. America is not all aligned like we were during the Cold War. Then again, the stakes during the Cold War seems higher.
But this isn't the 1960s and the US has burned through its goodwill and ruined its credibility. I think the rest of the world would rather have a Chinese base on the moon than an American one.
Ditto. I’m in New Zealand.
i had a conversation with a colleague today - we both said that we'd feel more comfortable to visit China over the US, and for his next vacation where he would have to fly via the US he's now considering to take a different flight-path which avoids the US.
as someone from europe one of my dreams as a kid was to visit the great United States. 20 years later this has drastically changed, still never been to the US, but would now rather visit other places.
people are trying to migrate away from US tech to other alternatives.
just last weekend i was joking with the person i watch Formula1 with - the last race was in the US. anyways, we joked that we used to laugh at races and events being held in Azerbaijan, just because it seemed weird to hold western sports events in dictatorships, similar to the football world cup in Qatar. now a world cup and F1 race in the US feels at least as bad as the other options.
but that's my POV. another friend still wants to visit the US for a third time and wants me to go with him and someone else i now even recently got married in the US.
but for me and the people around me - yes, the status of the US has taken a hard nose-dive, especially in the last 1-2 years.
also doesn't help to grow up and learn about the US history, by which i mean the overthrowing of foreign governments, global NSA scandals, needless wars for oil, trade wars etc. etc. etc.
no ill will against the average american citizen, but writing this comment made me a bit angry again. your country's government and some parts of the population cause so much pain on a global scale, but y'all seem too isolated and privileged to realize that. add to this that not even US citizens seem to benefit from this, i mean even y'all get swindled.
you know, i still feel like visiting the US. i want to meet the people and get to know the culture which influences my life in a big way. it just feels wrong, almost like visiting Germany in the early 1930s or late 1920s as a tourist. hope y'all calm down sometime, you'll maybe catch me on Route66, in one of the big cities or wherever.
that's kind of the essence of my rant i think. i could list soooooo many places in the US i'd like to see. but right now and since a couple of years, i'd rather not. the world is big, nice places everywhere. y'all have some great marketing, that's for sure.
As the old Soviet joke goes, "everything for the citizen... and I've even seen that citizen!"
They're far from the only countries on my no go list though.
Now try again, except imagine everyone is a horse.
the point is to exemplify how over-generalized and stupid it is to mention the universal human feelings of xenophobia and paranoia that occur when people witness an adversary during a war-action, land expansion, or anything near those concepts as if it was somehow a uniquely American/Chinese phenomena.
But -- the question asked was 'what will the world-wide discussion look like', not 'How will the Americans respond and feel?'
So, with that in mind, how about an answer to the question asked?
My personal opinion is that there will be a frenzy to remove the groups in power at the moment without much thought of who will fill the vacuum, and then about 40 years of bellyaching from the globe after the cards fall where they may.
A lot of commercial tech was spun off from Apollo, and generated a bit of GDP a for a good while.
Incremental progress via building up infrastructure, including space station in Earth and Moon orbit, paving way to a lunar surface base. Also ways to make this affordable were explored, including reusable first stages, etc.
Then all focus switch to racing the Soviets and and anything that did not contribute flags and footprints on the lunar surface ASAP was skipped, opting for the fastest possible solution at all costs.
So no wonder that after the race was won, it was hard to do a meaningful followup with the architecture chosen.
One might even argue we would be further along space infra wise if the race did not happen or involved other objectives (possibly even including in space military buildup by both sides).
If the point was to prove which economic system is better, the outcome was clear: totalitarian dictatorship with a solid education system far outcompetes capitalism with strong government intervention. In fact it seems that the more there's a guy at the top forcing everyone to work towards an achievable goal, the more likely the goal is to be achieved. There are other reasons to dislike totalitarian dictatorships, of course.
Whether we can do it faster than China is the question. A question many people are in denial about because of patriotism. Many people can’t handle it if the answer in actuality was that China will be better.
JWST is actually a good example. The (slow) unfolding of the telescope was a long-term nail-biting experience, because even very trivial problems that could have been easily fixed with a screwdriver or a finger poke on Earth could doom one of the most sophisticated pieces of scientific equipment ever produced.
We were lucky in the end, but if anything went wrong, the result would be immense frustration and the most expensive piece of space junk per unit of weight.
But in general, you probably don't need human bodies for such maintenance on the Moon, "just" very sophisticated and versatile robot mechanics. IDK what is easier.
Maybe you can save a lot on the equipment itself (because it does not have to be 99,99999% reliable - those extra nines cost a lot) and thus can also deploy more equipment, and instead of a single telescope you can have several farms thereof.
So not only do we still need to have an incredibly high degree of reliability for core critical parts of the mission, that mission is now massively larger, and it's now human lives on the line if things go wrong.
Can't we still have farms of telescopes if we wanted even if a few of them don't deploy perfectly?
Can't we just have a humanoid robot go and turn the screws for us?
That would indeed be the best solution, if we can build such robots. Notoriously, computers are much better at "thinking" (or simulating thereof) than at folding laundry.
"it's now human lives on the line if things go wrong."
That is quite normal in many professions. Programmers are usually somewhat sheltered, so the very idea of risking your life on a job is shocking to them. But I grew up in a mining town and, well, some people will take that bargain for money. Some people even like the bit of a thrill.
I'm just pointing out the risk of failure and its impacts on the overall program is much higher when we're talking about humans experiencing a massive sudden depressurization event compared to a foil sheet failing to unfurl. If you think its expensive trying to get a foil sheet to reliably unfold once, imagine how expensive it'll be to design a door to properly seal and unseal hundreds of times with sharp, hard, and fine regolith constantly working its way into the seams and hinges and seals. If you think it'll be difficult getting public support after your telescope isn't perfectly functional, imagine the reluctance of funding you'll get when you accidentally kill seven people in a horrific way.
The motivations to send humans to other bodies at this time are political; to prove who is and isn't a superpower of the 21st century.
After all, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Not one dollar was spent in space during the first space race.
What precisely is the difference? Where was space-race money spent that shouls be reallocated? My point is you eventually need to put the research into practice.
And yes, it’s probably also about certain aspects of anxiety and probably some panic about the prospect of American decline after so many decades of squandering everything and letting itself both be bled dry and run off a cliff by a subversive element within.
After everything is all said and done, I wonder if it would be possible to build out a data project tracking the people and the decisions that led to the outcome and also where all the wealth went. I guess this is impossible because too many people are unnamed figures just doing their part succumbing to inertia.
For a bit of perspective, I just saw that James O'Keeffe just published a video yesterday that is related to that topic regarding the 8(a) set-aside fraud that he says amounts to $100 billion annually alone. Having some direct knowledge about that area in particular, I would not be surprised if it was even more than $100B annually, and that's just one of such schemes where I would guess about 80% of the money is full on defrauded by various means and methods, and of the remaining 20%, probably 15% are for things that are simply utterly useless, unproductive, pointless efforts; often even to do work in support of some other agency/department's work that is also utterly useless and inconsequential, i.e., a kind of circular fraud.
In case you are interested in the O'Keeffe video, even though it may be boring to some and utterly shocking to others [1]. Just remember, he is highlighting just one company and one tribe running this scheme/fraud, there are hundreds or even thousands of companies doing exactly that, and that is just one scheme/fraud of several that exist in federal contracting; even beyond just open and blatant corruption and nepotism and fraud you would not believe me if I told you, because you would not be able to square the fact that something so blatant could be occurring without law enforcement doing their jobs.
Motorola was the first to create a handheld mobile phone, Apple just did not get that memo... :)
If we want to put people on Mars, we must prove we can put people on Moon, again.
It’s like saying visiting the marianas trench and Everest are the same because they’re both on earth
Mars would need water, air, energy, raw materials, fuel and everything else for (basically) ever.
There is zero to be gained (here) from a Mars colony. Mars lacks a magnetic field, air to breath, water to drink or cultivate crops, a temperature suitable for plant or animal life, fuel sources to build industry, supply chains for the construction or maintainence of the simplest electrical systems.
Talk of Mars is purely a PR play. Someone will be first. Yay. But Mars will play no part in Earth's future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Ceres
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_asteroid_b...
For spaxe infrastructure however - sure, stuff mined and manufactured on the Moon can definitely help any planetary missions.
but we have satellites for that
High resolution photographs of the entire earth (as opposed to tiny pieces of it) would have a massive positive emotional effect on people. The Earthrise photo's enduring popularity is proof of this. There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS. We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.
Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand and jaded 'it's just a rock, who cares' nay-sayers on the other.
Well, when US is not running out of money.
We already have this, it doesn't require being on the moon.
> There's water on the Moon; we could have bases there by now, even if they were limited in functionality and size, like the ISS.
The scale of going to the ISS versus the moon is massively different. Most of the research we'd be doing on the moon that isn't just for robots to do like digging in the dirt could still be done on an orbiting space station (like, how to mitigate effects of microgravity on the human body, how to cultivate plants in low gravity, studying microorganisms and chemistry in space, etc.)
> We could have remote-control or autonomous moon rovers and bipedal robots exploring there 24-7.
This doesn't require a human presence on the moon. We've had nearly uninterrupted robots on Mars for decades and haven't had a human on it.
> Instead we have Moon landing denialists one one hand
You had moon landing denialists even right after we landed. Us continuing to be on the moon isn't going to get rid of these naysayers. People are arguing the earth is flat, that anthropogenic climate change can't be possible, that the earth is 40,000 years old, and vaccines are mind control agents.
I get it would be cool and there probably is some science that could only be done with humans on the moon that I don't know about (I don't know everything, for sure). I think it would do a lot to push our engineering forward to have this kind of constant investment towards operating in space. But outside of being a means to funnel public funds to engineering firms to essentially find cooler ways to burn money I'm not sure it's all worth it.
Not saying we shouldn't have a space program! There's still lots we don't know about the universe and lots of cool science to learn. But do we need actual humans on the moon to achieve these goals?
I'm a tourist at the moment and everything looks like it is falling apart. The existing roading infrastructure is crumbling (apparently there's an Instagram about the worst examples). Everywhere I've driven, the roads are worse than earthquake hit Christchurch. Yet there is so much amazing old infrastructure that reeks of massive past investment.
Commonly I see power poles listing tipsily (or even broken); cable wires loose or hanging.
One bridge over the Mississippi has rust patches everywhere and needs a paint.
Is it just New Orleans, or a more general issue across the US?
Everything is so car oriented and spread out, that there isn't enough value to tax to pay for the maintenance on all the spread out infrastructure. So states and cities are always on the brink of default, scrambling to maintain all this stuff.
Happy to meet anyone else too.
Background: I'm a geeky type open to everybody; I don't like being judgemental. Travelling because I retired as soon as I had the minimum necessary to have a basic house plus a small retirement fund (as soon as the SaaS company I helped found could meet that goal). I picked LA to travel to because I liked the sarcasm and honesty I received here previously. To avoid disappointment: I have an awesome girlfriend so I'm not fishing for a date.
Cheers
Was: Didn't get any SMS or iMessage and I've got no idea why. I've double checked everything, and I just forced Amazon to send me a verification SMS which I received on that number. I admit so far I've only had heartache with iMessage screw ups. Maybe due to dual eSIM : I have my roaming NZ number for SMS "two-factor" verifications and NZ calls, and my Metro/T-Mobile for data and US calls. I am avoiding doxxing myself since HN publishing feels so permanent. How about you reply here with a time and place for Thursday or Friday? I will check in the morning. I don't know why I'm continually surprised by my modern tech roadbumps -- I see everyone else struggle (regardless of age or skill)!
Edit extra: I really don't understand why it doesn't fallback to SMS if the number isn't enabled in iMessage... I'll also do a test tomorrow noonish from a friend's US phone. I've used dual SIM before without problems, but always in countries with lots of Androids, so I didn't need iMessage setting because SMS worked (and in other countries there's often a different messaging app that everyone uses so maybe I wouldn't notice iMessage failing)
For what it's worth, it's not quite so bad everywhere. In New England infrastructure decays faster due to the weather, so most of our infrastructure is more frequently maintained or replaced. There's definitely some blighted areas, but the image of quaint New England towns with covered bridges is not a lie, and gentrification has caused local governments in our richer cities to invest more in infrastructure. This leads to a dramatic difference in appearance between e.g. New Orleans and Boston.
Landing on the moon only become the end-all-be-all when the US achieved it and the USSR could not (for various reasons).
first satellite? all sputnik could do was beep, and it ran out of batteries in three weeks.
first animal? laika died.
first station? there were two attempts to crew it -- the first failed to dock and everyone on the second mission fucking died. the soyuz 11 crew remain the only human deaths in space.
first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.
the n1 was catastrophic. need i go on?
You are selecting goalposts that suit your team, and being disrespectful of the USSR (presumably because you don't want to acknowledge their successes).
Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space, first to orbit the earth.
To minimize these achievements is like saying the Wright Brothers test was meaningless because it only lasted 12 seconds. In truth each "first" represents a milestone, each required substantial effort.
In more recent times Russia alone was capable of manned space flight (2011 to 2020).
To return to your question, the USSR was critical to the space race. You cannot gave a race with 1 entrant. Without USSR constantly being in the news doing things first, there would not have been a space race at all.
Indeed, by the time of JFK's speech there was not much to race for except the moon. Once the Soviets stopped the US stopped as well. It's taken the talk of a Chinese mission for the US to even bother.
Earth satellites are an enormously valuable use of space. But very unsexy. Trips to the moon have pretty much no value. But they make for good PR.
Sure, for quite a while ISS depended on Russia for crew access, but China has been capable of human spaceflight since 1999, running many missions since & their own space station.
Atlas V can leave the pad it sits on because of the Russian RD-180 engine it uses.
I submit that a good candidate is: Space. It's in the name. It's not "the Moon race".
You know, getting a person to space and back. Yuri Gagarin, USSR, first successful crewed spaceflight, 1961.
Or, first artificial satellite in space. Sputnik, USSR 1957
I respect the USA's contributions to the space race too, but also I am amused by the USA under JFK picking something left undone, declaring that that as the only victory condition, doing it and then claiming total victory and celebrating it ever since. Got to salvage national pride somehow. Does that "steelman" it?
The eastern half of Europe took the first opportunity to run away from its grip, including my nation.
Happy (and naive) are the people who never lived under Moscow's rule.
* two big totalitarian systems, the USSR and the Reich, start the war together by dismembering Poland, then divide the region according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, very nice,
* the USSR spends two years providing the Nazi war machine with necessary resources, thus indirectly aiding our local subjugation,
* then, as usual with bandits, one turns on the other,
* four years later, one loses, the other occupies half of Europe and introduces their own dystopian totalitarian systems there.
The Soviet rule was better in the sense that they didn't consider us racial subhumans, but "liberation" contains the word "liberty", and personal liberty was an extremely scarce good in the Stalinist era.
Nazi Germany started the war. Full stop. The USSR did engage in appeasement from 1939-41, after the French and British sold out Czechoslovakia (and Poland opportunistically took a piece), which the USSR wanted to defend. The USSR knew that it was very high on the Nazis' target list (ideologically, Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks as his primary enemy), so Stalin decided to make a rotten deal with him to delay the war by as long as possible. Stalin was cowardly and opportunistic, but painting this as if the USSR started WWII is absurd.
If it weren't for the Red Army, the Nazis would have physically annihilated the entire Slavic population of Eastern Europe. That was their plan.
"The USSR knew that it was very high on the Nazis' target list (ideologically, Hitler viewed the Bolsheviks as his primary enemy), so Stalin decided to make a rotten deal with him to delay the war by as long as possible. Stalin was cowardly and opportunistic"
Of course the USSR knew, but they also knew that German forces would be engaged in the West, for some time at least. Moscow, together with everyone else, didn't expect France to fold so easily.
BTW I don't consider Stalin particularly cowardly, just psychopathic and evil.
"If it weren't for the Red Army, the Nazis would have physically annihilated the entire Slavic population of Eastern Europe. That was their plan."
True, I acknowledge that, and yet I loathe the USSR.
Imagine a girl caught by a murderer. A rapist comes along, saves her from the murderer, then proceeds to chain her in his house and rape her for several decades. Would you tell the girl "be at least somewhat respectful to your rapist, he saved your life"?
Heck no.
This is a complete rewrite of the history of WWII. The USSR did not initiate WWII. It was Nazi Germany that drove the escalating conflict and aimed to conquer Europe.
The argument you're making could be turned around to say that Poland co-started WWII when it conspired with Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia - something that Poland actually did in 1938. And by the way, at that time, the USSR was willing to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia from Nazi aggression, and it was Poland that blocked that idea by refusing to cooperate with the USSR. But that argument would be equally wrong as your argument: Poland simply acted opportunistically, while Germany was the one driving the conflict.
After the British and French sold out Czechoslovakia, the Soviets did an about face and decided to make a deal to save their own skin. Stalin was deathly afraid of a German invasion of the USSR, and wanted to make sure that Germany did not launch its war against the USSR first. Again, the driving factor in this was the knowledge that Germany was preparing for aggressive war. Without that, there simply would not have been WWII. The USSR was not planning any offensive war, nor was it in any position to launch one. Stalin was busy purging the Red Army officer corps.
Stalin was absolutely a coward on this issue. He was paralyzed by fear of a German invasion. He refused to accept the many different strands of intelligence which indicated that a German invasion was imminent. He kept sending supplies to Germany until the day of the invasion, in order to buy off the Germans. He was even told the exact date of the invasion by Richard Sorge, and he ignored it. The Red Army was caught completely flat-footed. Most of the air force was wiped out on the ground. That's not the sign of a country ready for an imminent war. Again, it was Germany driving events.
I do think you should be thankful to the USSR for saving you and your country from annihilation and extermination. They sacrificed millions of people to do so.
Nazi Germany was stronger and could plausibly plan continent domination, true. But the USSR was an active, albeit smaller participant. Why precisely did they attack Finland and attack and conquer the Baltic States? Hitler made them do it again?
No, that was pure imperial expansion, finding some weaker and richer states to loot and control.
I will not defend the Western powers on Munich, they betrayed us completely and reaped the whirlwind.
"I do think you should be thankful to the USSR for saving you and your country from annihilation and extermination."
Intent behind your action matters and if the intent is to enslave you, that is a very bad, criminal intent. I noticed that you didn't address my analogy with a rapist that saves you from a murderer in order to chain you down in their dungeon. This is why I will not be thankful to the USSR as a country and a system. Immediately after the front units, "SMERSH" secret police units murdered and abducted people who were on Stalins hit list, should I be thankful for that as well? Should their families be thankful for such "liberation"?
"They sacrificed millions of people"
Stalin sacrificed millions of people. He also did so on other occasions, like the mad purges of the 1930s, destroying kulaks by artificial famines or deporting various minorities into barely survivable deserts and polar regions.
Death of millions was Stalin's thing, in peace or war.
"to do so."
Again, our survival mattered to Moscow only to the extent that most rational slave masters are interested in keeping their slaves alive and productive. (The Nazis were irrational in this regard.)
The Soviet Union did not see Central Europe as sovereign nations, but as a bounty to be conquered and abused, basically colonies for extraction. This view survives today in Russia. Visit any Russian-language forum where discussion turns to Ukraine and plenty of people will express the idea that we are their escaped property that, through negligence of Gorbachev, could find itself a new "master" (voluntary alignment between countries just does not register in this worldview) and now are being used as "pawns" against "the Russian civilization".
The view that smaller nations hate their previous subjugation by Moscow and don't want to repeat it is just incomprehensible to them. In their view, we should be thankful for being liberated from Hitler, and nothing else that happened afterwards counts.
You also seem to be of the idea that nothing else that happened afterwards counts... why?
I can at least see an argument to be thankful to individual Soviet soldiers who fought Hitler. They were often driven so by the threat of penal batallions, but still. But the USSR as a system was an evil totalitarian entity intent on occupying, looting and terrorizing everyone within their reach. Only the extent of their effective reach varied, from very weak in the 1930s to rather large by 1950. No thankfulness to this abomination, ever, that is what I will die upon.
Just like the Western Allies, the Soviets were acting in reaction to the insanely aggressive moves that Germany was taking. They viewed it as a life-or-death issue. Germany, the strongest state in Europe, had conducted a massive military buildup and was bent on conquering the continent.
Demonstrably false. The British aim was never to annex Iceland into the UK. The British did not establish a puppet government like the Soviets tried with the Finnish Democratic Republic. Nor did they start murdering Icelandic political and societal leaders to make it unselfgovernable, like the USSR did everywhere across Eastern Europe, nor did the British start resettling people to wipe out Icelandic culture and identity. Iceland's government continued to operate independently until the British forces withdrew in 1941. Russia still hold on to the ~11% of pre-war Finland that they grabbed and they've wiped out the native population.
The talking point about threat from Germany is also hollow, to put it mildly. The USSR and Germany were allies at the time, and their secret protocol had assigned Finland to the USSR for conquest. To support Germany's invasions under their agreement, the USSR supplied massive quantities of raw resources (such as oil, cotton and grains) to bypass the economic blockade of Germany and bolster the German war machine in 1939-1941. The USSR was delivering 140 000 tons of oil each month as Luftwaffe was bombing London and was short on fuel.
I will never understand why people living in free countries become apologists for the worst murderous regimes in history, but it is, as it is.
Given that this forum has some rules about being polite, I will just stop here without saying something awful.
It is very unfortunate that Stalinist apologia is still somehow acceptable in the West. It is a direct consequence of the fact that Stalin's concentration camps were never liberated by an external force that would forever document their horrors.
But at least I know whom I was talking to.
You need to quit your revisionism and Soviet apologia. The USSR was oppressive and expansionist. Not quite as much as the Nazis, but they weren't that far behind. You painting them as friendly liberators who really had no other choice but to invade and conquer, is exactly the kind of propaganda that Putin uses today to justify his wars.
The main reason that the USSR's role in the start of WW2 has been ignored for so long, is because they were part of the victorious side, and their contribution was absolutely vital to the defeat of the Nazis. But they did launch offensive wars, against Poland, Finland and the Baltic states. They're traditionally not seen as part of WW2 only because the Nazis weren't involved and they were initiated by one of the victors of the war, but they happened at the exact same time, while Germany was invading Poland and Scandinavia.
Russia's conquest of eastern Europe was no liberation.
This is an insane statement. Driving out the genocidal Nazi rule was absolutely liberation. Practically no one in Eastern Europe would be alive today if the Soviets had lost the war.
And continued after the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Priboi
And sure, the Nazis were even worse, but we should really stop pretending that the Soviet occupation was great.
The Soviets were nothing like the Nazis at all. The Nazis would have murdered virtually everyone in Eastern Europe.
>first animal? laika died.
Yes, but Belka and Strelka lived. They were the first to go to orbit and back. USSR too.
>first *naut? yuri gagarin didn't even have manual controls.
And Alan Shepard didn't even had a bath. I say this one doesn't count too.
In fact - nothing counts until your nation\program can't deliver a human to Alpha Centauri and black alive and well. Ideally in less than a year.
A real challenge, wouldn't you agree? :)
We need to land on the moon once a generation just to prove that we are still capable of landing on the moon.
Claiming that the new mission to the moon is a waste of time because "we already won the space race" is backward. Withholding an entire generation (multiple actually) from the awe and wonder that is associated with such an endeavour just because "it's been done before" is borderline criminal imo.
And frankly, the fact that the US is struggling to get it's rocket in the air, let alone get a human on the moon, even after they did so already and literally wrote the tutorial on how to do it, is very embarrassing.
Want to impress the world? End poverty. Advance cancer treatment. Build a viable nuclear fusion power plant. Make an HIV vaccine and sell it affordably across the world. We could be done with the Cold War-era rocket-waving.
China didn't _end_ poverty but they did lift hundreds of millions of people out of it and i've literally never seen anyone outside of China give them props for it
How so? Because you decided that reaching the Moon equals winning? Why not Mars?
Same way we can say that USSR won the race because they were the first ones to put man into space and bring him back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy_H2BeE_Nk Neil deGrasse Tyson on topic.
Isn't that what the next goal is, but we're so far away from it now?
America does keep reinventing itself. It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways. In that way it is the same ship.
But is it the same ship? Can it win a space race today that a previous manifestation of America could? Maybe it’s not the same ship and what it could do in the 60s it can no longer do today.
I certainly don’t think it’s a question that demands an answer. Perfectly valid to choose not to show up to the starting line. But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
> I think it’s apt because the Ship of Theseus as a thought experiment is unanswerable.
It is answerable, you just need to go meta a little. You can argue that the Ship of Theseus doesn't exist (and didn't existed) because it is just a lot of wood. You can use reductionism further and say that wood doesn't exist, it is a bunch of atoms or quarks or whatever. The ship is just a leaky abstraction people are forced use because of their cognitive limitations. But if it is an abstraction, not a "real" thing, then I see no issues with the ship existing (in a limited sense) even after it changed all the atoms it consists of.
The other approach is to declare that a ship is not a thing, but a process. Like you do when talking about people, who change their atoms all the time, but they still keep they identity in a "magical" way. If you see people as a process, then it doesn't matter how often it replaces its matter with another matter. Like a tornado, which exists while exchanging matter with environment all the time and still being the same tornado. Or like a wave on a water surface, it doesn't have any atoms moving like a wave, but still a wave exists.
> It has few of the same parts as before, but it still resembles some concept of “America” in many ways.
It doesn't matter if there any old parts left, what matters is a continuous history.
> But is it the same ship?
It is the same ship, but its properties are changing over time. Like when people become older, some of them become wiser for example, some become physically weaker.
> But having run that race under the same banner generations ago doesn’t tell us much about the America today.
Yeah, with this I can fully agree. BTW we don't know was the Ship of Theseus becoming better or worse after repairs, but I'd bet that its maximum speed was changing due to repairs.
They arguably footed the bill.
(Unless you borrow from foreigners, which taps resources from outside the country that later have to be paid back. But I'm not sure the Apollo programme was financed with foreign loans?)
If one part of society sells bonds to another part of society, no real resources from the future have traveled back in time.
This approach was always going to have holes in it and sure enough we're now facing a difficult and uncertain endeavor, for example, to ever be able to make the best chips in the world on American soil again. (Or as in the headlines today, to source and process rare earths for all manner of production.) It turns out that, surprise surprise, there was tons of process knowledge and tons of capacity for innovation in the people who were closest to the actual work of production, now those people are no longer American and couldn't care less what America can and cannot do. So we're in a bind. Americans keep claiming they can build all the things but they haven't actually done so in many years.
There's no way to solve the problem other than to try, and that entails clawing back as much of the people, processes and materiel as you can by whatever means you can until you start cobbling together some genuine innovation. My gut tells me enough of the political class supports the idea that the financiers will just have to get used to capitalizing a lot of production on domestic soil again, politicians will of course be happy to print billions more dollars of free money and hand it to them for this.
Like, the whole story of the Industrial Revolution is that we invested continually in technology, training, process and plant, and the cost of producing things as measured by both dollars and labor decreased by orders of magnitude. It never stopped. It kept on working right up until we stopped trying and shipped production overseas. In fact even though they have cheaper labor and don't care as much in some of these overseas locations, usually it STILL happens. Technology, training, process, machinery, all get better, per unit cost of production just keeps on falling. Bring it back to America and focus on these four things and it will happen in America again too.
The failure to see this comes from putting the bean counters in charge. A bean counter can't model innovation. They don't know if and when a 10x cost reduction is going to happen somewhere in the industry and then spread. It's not their job to know, and they don't care. They see they can slash a cost by 20% right now by sending those jobs and factories offshore so that's what they do.
In most industries in America today the cost of production is still getting cheaper, but what's ballooning is management and administrative costs. They've grown so much that consumer prices are actually going up even as the cost of the essential process of producing the thing has gone down. That's the bean counters replicating.
It's all smoke and mirrors and lies. The forces that drove industrialization never stopped working. End the IP regimes, actually make stuff again, fire the bean counters, create competition for the consumer dollar in places where it was all acquired and consolidated into oblivion. The innovators will step in, deploy the next generation of plant, train the next generation of workers, stuff will get cheaper, and wages will actually be decent to boot because new and better processes create demand for new and scarcer skills.
https://youtu.be/L9f5SQQKr5o?feature=shared
Like this isn’t just manufacturing. If you go to China if you visit the tier one and tier two cities they look and feel Like cities of the future. You can’t even compare with US cities. One Chinese friend of mine visiting Los Angeles told me he didn’t realize that los Angeles was the country side.
He says it because The country side of China is literally just like Los Angeles. He’s talking about the backwardness and level of tech and density of the population.
https://youtu.be/AJ6a2vpLxGA?si=k7n9ibMlV6fIeNgz
This all happened in the last decade so it’s not surprising to see people who don’t get it. It’s a total paradigm shift in the balance of power.
The entire mindset of separating the world into "winners" and "losers" in the first place seems unhealthy to me.
because they has so much resource they can spend an multi billions effort on intangible things like this
Have you worked for a company where they never win at anything? Been in meetings where people want to hear about 'wins'?
Maybe you don't, but I do. I like to work for a winning team.
An alternative perspective on both space races, companies and life in general would be a collaborative one. I like to work on a productive, effective, successful teams, but I don't view that in terms of "winning" and "losing".
By the same logic, also no moral burden for its transgressions?
(Not making a claim one way or the other, just noting an asymmetry.)
Though "zero points" is also probably a bit too harsh. I think Americans should be proud of their peoples' past accomplishments, but should recognize that they're distinct from their own accomplishments and kind of irrelevant to the current race.
The current space race is really just about the US trying to show that it isn't in decline, that it's still more capable than a rising China. So, "my grandfather was alive when America set foot on the Moon, so we've already won!" is kind of a sad statement.
Even at the time people suspected that - but at least there was a chance of finding something unexpected.
As to the knowledge is has been done, and therefore could be done again - sure that's valuable, but that knowledge belongs to the whole world not just to America.
And in terms of national prestige or uniting goal - wouldn't it be better to have a goal to create a long term sustainable energy economy for example. I think that has more strategic value than putting a man back ( or women for the first time ) on the moon.
Also while He-3 doesn't produce radio-active by products, doesn't the reaction require much higher temps than a D-T one?
Perhaps it might be wise to get one working first before investing too much in a moon shot.
Today’s America scores zero points for its accomplishments of the past. But I think one way it can be a good thing is the, “we’ve done it before, we can do it again” attitude. Which is somewhat opposite to “we already won!”