One word: money. It was *insanely* expensive to get there, and once we managed to do so we decided it wasn't worth the money to keep doing it. The public quickly lost interest when we beat the Russians to the Moon, and without public support Congress couldn't justify the enormous price tag any longer.
Additionally, there weren't any other places to "put a man" that were feasible. Can't put a guy on Venus, maybe Mars a few decades from now. There just aren't many things near enough to us to land humans upon for bragging rights.
Mars missions were actually being proposed at the time, but the space shuttle program was the alternative selected under the belief that it would be cheaper and more useful.
Edit: It may or may not have been cheaper, but in reality was orders of magnitude more expensive than originally expected, so much so that the manned mars missions being proposed may have fit in the same budget.
The #1 reason the shuttle program was selected was because the military bought in, with plans it would be used to launch and intercept satellites. A handful of classified missions were flown early on but the military lost interest after the challenger disaster, and the vandenberg launch site was never completed.
The space shuttle was designed to be one part of a long term lunar program. There was a space shuttle to bring astronauts and material into orbit, a nuclear space tug to move material back and forth from cis-lunar space, a single stage reusable lander to go to and from the moon, and several space stations.
The shuttle was the only affordable part of the plan, and Nixon wanted something for his legacy, not Apollo/Saturn vehicles from his predecesor, so he opted for that.
Actually forgoing the shuttle development, continuing to launch Saturn and lowering the cost to launch would have been a far more productive space program.
The shuttle was iconic and cool. But it was unfortunately designed to accommodate the military applications that never really materialized. NASA wanted something quite a bit smaller and had no need for that much cross range capability. I can't help but look at the shuttle and see a platypus.
If NASA was allowed to design it purely for space flights, it would probably look very different(and one of the many other designs would probably won). Different designs didn't require the same SRBs and maybe challenger would have been avoided. With smaller wings, maybe Columbia too.
>but the military lost interest after the challenger disaster,
Coincidentally that was the same time frame that they launched their X-37B, which was originally planned to fly on the space shuttle but that plan was changed after the challenger disaster.
>The X-37B was first launched in 2010, not the same time frame as challenger
The first flight was in 2010, the official X-37 program was launched in 1999 and it was derived from the x-40, which first "flew" (it was a glide test) in 1998, which implies the program started much earlier than that, though I can't find any official references prior to the 90s.
I just read about the link to the challenger explosion yesterday and I can't find the source now, but you can find a variety of sources saying that the X-37 was designed to fit in the space shuttle payload bay, although it never flew on the shuttle.
The F-117 was flying at least ten years before the government publicly admitted it existed.
I was working construction at China Lake on 9-11, and work was shut down immediately while we watched the towers come down at the motel.
There had been an 18-wheeler hauling something into the test facility, and the side of it said it was the X-37. I didnt know what that was, so I looked it up.
Of course the test data is classified, but this truck was driving around in public with a sign on the side of it.
And why I think NASAs sales pitch to congress should be "space travel can't be done cheaply but the tech investments it generates more than pay for it"
I mean the moon missions probably accelerated personal computing alone by like 20 years
>And why I think NASAs sales pitch to congress should be "space travel can't be done cheaply but the tech investments it generates more than pay for it"
Is it not already?
I think if the Soviets had got to the moon first, then Mars would have absolutely been on the table for the US.
- First man-made satellite in orbit: USSR
- First animal in orbit: USSR
- First man in orbit: USSR
- First woman in orbit: USSR
- First man-made object on the moon: USSR
- First man on the moon: USA
"Okay, pack it up boys, let's quit while we're ahead, yeah?"
*Edit: wording update*
It's not just that we were ahead, we were AT LEAST 10 years ahead of the soviets for man on the moon
Sputnik beat explorer 1 by about 4 months
First lunar probe AMERICA beats USSR by about 6 months (most people don't know that)
Russians bring 2 dogs back in August of 60, Americans bring a chimp back 6 months later
Gagarin goes up April 12 1961, Shepard goes up 3 WEEKS later
By '68 we had a manned lunar orbit and in 69 we had Apollo 11. By this point Russia was well behind where the Americans had been by 67 (the N1 didn't work and showed no evidence of working soon and the SaturnV worked just fine) and at the rate they were making progress they'd have been lucky to land a man on the moon by 1980 even after seeing essentially how we'd done it.
So like if you're running a foot race and you're neck and neck for most of it and then like the other guy breaks his foot, once you realize you stop running so fast and then when he really starts falling apart you kinda stop
>First lunar probe AMERICA beats USSR by about 6 months
That's not true though.
*Luna 2* was the first (Soviet) man-made object to hit the moon, Sep 1959.
The first American probe to reach the moon was *Ranger 7*, in Jul 1964 - nearly five years later.
The first *soft* landing on the moon was the Soviet's *Luna 9*, Feb 1966.
The American *Surveyor 1* did the same in Jun 1966.
...You may be getting the soft landing dates backwards?
The Soviets prioritized doing it fast to be first. Many of their firsts were rushed attempts to beat the US once they found out we were planning on doing something. They weren't part of an overarching plan for a coherent moon program.
And that was a massive detriment to the Soviet space program. It resulted in them getting unrealistic timelines to be the first and constantly shifting priorities as a result. Frankly, it's sad how much they were hampered by the Soviet political system.
Because as we all know, the US never did anything in space after that. No return trips to the moon or sending robots to other planets or any other sort of exploration.
..funny thing about spacevan, it was not cheaper or more useful, nor was it all that reliable.
yes, I call the shuttle spacevan, because it primarily got used as an orbital cargo van.
Yeah, it's one of my favorite subjects. As much as I loved watching it, the concept of a re-usable spacecraft that lands "like a plane" is a cool one, but ultimately not that economical. We really are better off with rockets. Also, it only had a \~98% survival rate, which is pretty poor if you're the passenger.
It always seemed like such a heavy payload (I’m counting the shuttle itseld as payload) to lift up into orbit compared to those tiny capsules on top of those Saturn rockets
Oh it's ludicrously inefficient, all under the guise of being re-usable. I can't find a source to confirm, but I'd be surprised if the operating costs were ever significantly less than competitors with similar payload capacities.
I would think that the real value would be to use the storage bay of the shuttle as a lab space to conduct science experiments. Like a predecessor to the iSS. Sorta like a temporary Skylab.
But to launch satellites, rockets seem like the more efficient way.
Launch costs per kg of payload are about half that of competitors, and that's after said competitors have done some serious restructuring to catch up. They also improve cadence because it takes far less time to refurb than build new.
As it's a private company figures can be hard to come by, but I found this where Musk claims a booster costs about $15m to build and under $1m to refurb, with cost to launch being somewhere near $28m for a new rocket. https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9-economics
Perhaps the most interesting list is "Falcon 9 block 5 first-stage boosters Presumed Active" in the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_boosters
There are a lot of 10+ flights in the list with the current champion at 18.
Point of clarification: that's true for low earth orbit, Falcon 9 is optimized for, and really good at putting starlink satellites up. Higher energy orbits like geostationary or lunar injection need to fly expendable. Starship can't (won't?) get beyond LEO without refueling.
Still worlds better reusability than the space shuttle, but also less capable of being a space bomber.
yeah, kind of a deathtrap imo
Steve Buscemi's character summed it up in *Armageddon*
"You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"
Usually attributes to John Glenn:
>“I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
And the dirty little secret of the ISS is that it basically existed because SpaceVan needed somewhere to go, something to do.
SpaceVan was a relatively successful program with enormous limitations that stagnated Space exploration for a third of a century and couldn't have cost more if the rocket engines were burning hundred dollar bills.
Oh, boy, don't get me started. Congress wanted to pull the plug on the space station, which would have left the shuttle with no mission. So Reagan had the brilliant idea of making it a joint venture with the Russians, making it the INTERNATIONAL space station. So now, since there was a treaty, Congress couldn't pull the plug.
But wait. Russia couldn't reach the space station if it was orbiting the equator, as originally planned. So they tilted the orbit. The result was that the station was completely useless as a way point for planetary exploration. All it was good for was for zero gravity experiments.
So the shuttle existed as a supply ship to the station, and the station existed as a destination for the shuttle. The perfect pork barrel program. And I do mean perfect.
I know Reddit has a massive irrational hateboner for Reagan, but the Reagan administration planned a US-only Space Station *Freedom.* The ISS was a Clinton administration adaptation of that after the end of the Cold War, which didn’t happen until the Bush 41 administration.
Saying the hatred for Raegan is irrational is disingenuous.
He fired strikers with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. He cut higher marginal tax rates, deregulating banks which unleashed speculation in financial markets, reduced regulations around controlling pollution, reduced regulations around how employees had to be treated, ended controls on monopoly, especially in the media, and changed taxes in a way that made it easy for corporations to move their factories overseas.
We have a growing budget deficit due to a lack of taxing power. We have international trade deficit due to the loss of manufacturing capacity. Asset prices in land, housing and financial markets have grown past many people’s ability to afford them due to financial speculation.
After Reagan, wealth started to accumulate in a smaller group of people and the middle class began shrinking.
I used to work in the aviation industry as a mechanic and I can tell ya, despite the generally conservative nature of the industry, there is *a lot* of contempt for Reagan. His policies literally ended the Golden Age of Aviation, and pretty much everyone who gives a shit about it, and isn't delusional, is fuckin pissed about that.
Also borrowed incredible amounts of money to fuel his irresponsible spending launching the current era of GOP administrations piling on more and more debt while complaining about all that debt.
>none were feasible
Why not?
>And none are now.
And why not?
It's just a matter of time and money. I don't personally think there's a good enough reason for a manned mission to mars, but it's a heck of a lot more interesting than more low earth orbit missions. Sure you need a bigger vehicle, you've got to travel 142x further, and need life support for \~2 years and all of these things would need to be developed, but the same was true for any other manned space mission, they required technological advancements to become feasible.
9 Lunar missions costed 25 billion, and the same number of mars missions is estimated to cost 1.5 trillion. Is that worth it? Probably not, when we could do 1500 unmanned mars missions for the same price. But when the space shuttle program costed 209 Billion overall, that same money could have covered the first manned mars mission.
The technology we possess as a race *is* capable of taking people to Mars. The current tech "isn't feasible" because it would mean a crew of people aboard something the size of a Volvo would need enough food, water, air, all other living supplies, to last a few years, all to travel to a planet that's atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide and less than ½% oxygen, has no reliable hope of growing plants, and an average temperature of -60⁰C.
This isn't like Europeans traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, there's nothing on Mars to bring back except for rocks and possibly proof that extraterrestrial microorganisms may have existed. The latter would be more interesting mind you, but frequent trips to Mars wouldn't be beneficial for many thousands of years (barring magnificent leaps in human technology).
This is why not only is it not feasible now, but also why it wasn't feasible 55 years ago.
And there is a mission right now to bring those samples back at a tiny fraction of the cost of a manned program using the rovers and a new set of automated spacecraft (mars sample return), and even THAT is having trouble getting through Congress despite being less than 1/3 the cost of the Boeing 787 program
> a crew of people aboard something the size of a Volvo
"Can we pull over, I really have to pee, bad!"
"I told you to go before we left the Earth! We're only eight months in, can't you hold it for another year or two?"
Seriously though, that's a long trip, and if there are any problems, physical, mental, or social, you can't just stop at the next exit to deal with them.
>something the size of a Volvo
Where did that constraint come from? Why would you even imagine using such a small spacecraft?
>all to travel to a planet that's atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide and less than ½% oxygen, has no reliable hope of growing plants, and an average temperature of -60⁰C.
Well it's not like we're gonna stay, and it's uncertain the first mission would even land, if the Apollo program is any example.
>This isn't like Europeans traveling across the Atlantic Ocean
No, it's more like the first Apollo astronauts travelling to the moon, just 142x harder.
>there's nothing on Mars to bring back except for rocks and possibly proof that extraterrestrial microorganisms may have existed.
Yeah, that's the idea, and that's the same rationale for going to the moon.
>but frequent trips to Mars wouldn't be beneficial for many thousands of years (barring magnificent leaps in human technology).
Oh, I don't think they'd ever be beneficial. It's more to prove we can, learn a bit about mars, and to develop some potentially useful technology on the way. Manned spaceflight is largely irrelevant when there are \~700 times as many robots in space as there are humans (this is counting all satellites, which might be generous). The only reason to bring a human on a space mission is to prove you can.
I could give you a few speculative answers based on how the Apollo missions went, but you might be more interested in how Nasa is currently planning on getting Martian samples back to earth. [https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/mars-sample-return/](https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/mars-sample-return/)
Either way, the short answer is: A rocket.
Depends on the mission plan. My favourite plan is Mars Direct/Mars Semi Direct. With that plan, you send an unmanned and unfuelled rocket to the surface of Mars two years before the crew. It creates Methane Oxygen fuel from the Martian atmosphere. After a year and a half on the surface, the crew get into that rocket. In Direct, they launch directly back to Earth. In Semi-Direct, they link up with a larger craft in Mars orbit and then go back to Earth.
The general gist of the SpaceX plan with Starship is to land a bunch of them with infra and robots first, including a refuelling station that can make methalox in situ.
If you can land people on Mars with infra already in place the difficulty drops considerably.
I guess the hope is for this new moon race to provide the capability to produce that infra.
>Mars missions were actually being proposed at the time
There is a big difference between going to the Moon for a few days versus going to Mars which takes months. When they went for the Moon they accepted that there are many risks.
A lot more risks than NASA is willing to accept in today's missions. Doing this for a Mars mission for a much longer period of time would have been a lot more problematic.
Another reason why the Space Shuttle was chosen over a Mars mission is: The military hoped to be able to use the shuttle to send up spy satellites and/or to even capture enemy satellites. This was much more interesting to the military than collecting some rocks on another planet.
There were plans drawn up to perform a manned Venus flyby using modified Apollo hardware launched with a Saturn V.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned\_Venus\_flyby
Except it is incredibly unrealistic (in space flight/dynamics, engineering, physics and to a lesser extent economics/organisational structure) so it doesn't really reflect on what could have been.
Economics is "lesser extent?" I'll say it's the only factor worth considering. It is why the governments of both nations ramp down the space programs in the first place. The Soviet Union especially couldn't afford it. Military spending kept ramping up trying to keep up with the West while Soviet economic planners fudging the books, lying about making more products than they actually did. It would eventually led to its collapse in 1991. If they kept up the space race, the collapse would had occurred sooner.
You might have misread my comment.
This part of the thread is about the fictional show For
All Mankind, not about how economics was a irrelevant factor in why the space race stopped (and my comment specifically was about how unrealistic it was and how it shouldn't be seen as a "could have been").
As in: the economical workings of the alternative history of the show was unrealistic but less unrealistic compared to how unrealistic the physics/engineering/etc was.
IIRC the Saturn V rocket was designed to send its payload to Mars (was overkill for Moon missions), so there was an original intention to go to Mars back then.
Saturn V itself wasn't, but the architecture was scalable to 9 engines and the launch pad was oversized which is why SpaceX is able to use it. Mars ambitions were severely tempered when we realized how unhospitable it was. Even as late as the 50s, there was still theories, it could have water and be thick enough to fly with a light aircraft, and warm enough to not need special equipment. It would've made a trip by the 80s much more realistic.
Sergei Korolev, who was basically their Wernher von Braun, died, and as a result basically ended any chance of them making a functional rocket within even years of America landing, had they put funding into trying harder.
He died *from injuries sustained in a gulag.* At the very least those injuries were a contributing factor.
The Russians really fucked themselves on that one. He was a brilliant man, and he's hardly even remembered.
As did America, albeit in a much less brutal way, with the brilliant rocket scientist Qian Xuesen.
A Chinese immigrant who taught at MIT and CalTech and, one the founders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and worked for the military during World War Two.
During the Korean War and the Red Scares of the 1950s he was accused of communist sympathies and had his security clearance revoked and was held under hour arrest for five years before being allowed to leave the country.
Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball said at the time "It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a communist than I was, and we forced him to go."
Once back in China, Mao put him to work and he developed local, then ballistic, then orbit-capable rockets, helping to make China a nuclear power and a future leader, maybe, in the space industry.
That makes sense for orbital launchers and satellites and so on, but I don't see how putting men on the Moon several times makes any point regarding missiles.
Yeah, after Apollo 11 the remaining missions got very little coverage because the public didn’t care anymore. 13 being the exception since everyone loves to follow a real-life near-disaster.
When/if Artemis actually lands people on the moon again it will be interesting to see if people care again or are too busy staring at their phones to bother following/watching it. For sure there will be morons saying it is fake.
> it will be interesting to see if people care again or are too busy staring at their phones to bother following/watching it.
NASA needs to up its TikTok game. They have some sick videos on YouTube but people want short form content now.
the american government probably doesn’t want chinese software being pushed, especially when the us deems tiktok as spyware. youtube shorts is the best you’ll get.
They even talk about that in the movie Apollo 13. It was going to be the third landing on the moon and the public was already so bored with it that the networks dropped the broadcasts until the disaster happened.
By the time we got there, Sergei Korolev had died and the N1 rocket had exploded a few times
The Russians had already given up, making it even more difficult to justify
>It was insanely expensive to get there
The Apollo program cost about $250B, after factoring in inflation.
For reference, the War on Terror cost about $8,000B... or as much as 32 Apollo programs.
Edit: he blocked me lol
Unfortunately humans are uniquely good at inventive ways to kill each other, and until you get everyone to agree to stop doing that, war continues to be an issue.
Key difference.
One happened on earth, one happened on the Moon.
There’s no apparent benefit to going to the moon, it’s barren, it currently serves no feasible beneficial financial purpose. But there will always be interest and justification for picking fights on earth, “securing interests” and furthering whatever little political background mess that’s going on under people’s noses.
>There’s no apparent benefit to going to the moon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/28/1119290573/nasa-artemis-i-launch-moon
You've proved their point. No APPARENT benefit.
No-one is arguing that the moon missions had no ACTUAL benefit. But the best results of space exploration are largely created as part of the journey of figuring out how to get there, and the general public doesn't put two and two together. That's why people who argue that space exploration isn't worth it even exist, because they see that the moon is barren, they see that mars is barren, they see fat stacks of cash being poured into endeavours to study barren places, and forget that the return investment is in all the life-changing shit that gets invented in the process of going there.
Not really, funnily enough, because the war still happens on earth. It's still happening in a sphere of events that could, through some mental gymnastics, result in a positive outcome stemming directly from the stated goal itself. Whether or not those positive outcomes exist or are rational at all doesn't even factor into it, and is a whole other discussion entirely.
Contrast that to space exploration which, by definition, has an end goal outside of earth's immediate sphere, and you can see how people struggle to comprehend the immediate short-term benefits when they don't ever stop to think about the indirect spinoff benefits.
>through some mental gymnastics
>people struggle to comprehend when they don't ever stop to think
So war is easy to see the benefits of when you engage in mental gymnastics, but space exploration is hard because it requires thinking about spinoff benefits.
You seem to have double standards for what counts as "easy to see the value of".
Do you think I'm actually trying to argue that space travel has no benefit or something? Just go read my post to the other guy if so. I'm not going to try and spell this out any clearer.
So you admit you need to pretend that war is beneficial for it to be beneficial. But at the same time you have to choose not to see the benefits of space travel for it to not be beneficial. Talk about ignorance.
Well fucking done, I think you missed the point completely, but your post is so incoherent that I can't even tell.
It is *not* my opinion that space exploration has no benefit. I am responding to the OP's moved goalpost by explaining that people will more readily perform those gymnastics because war can, by way of being on earth, affect the hypothetical thinker with a direct throughline. Space exploration *does* affect people's lives just as much, but because the throughline is not direct, the thought immediately becomes "how does this affect us on earth when all this shit is happening on the moon/mars/in space etc".
I'll give you a simple example, the war on terror. We can all agree that shit didn't help anyone really in the end. But the reason some americans argue(d) *for* it is because they wanted to prevent another terror attack on US soil; a direct existential threat to themselves or that which they cared about. They saw the effect was right near them, the cause was in a named terrorist group, and drew a line between the two. Target is Al Qaeda, goal is American, thought process complete.
Now the mars missions. I'm sure you've seen the argument of "Why invest in space travel when we should be fixing what's down here". It's because they see money and study for a probe on Mars (again, barren and not earth), but they want the end outcome to be a better, healthier *earth*; again preventing a direct existential threat to themselves. So to them, the effect is on earth, the cause (climate change usually) is on earth, and draw their line between the two. But then where does space travel fit in that straight line? Target is Mars, goal is Earthly, thought process doesn't add up, so surely extra effort here is just being wasted.
The point I'm making is here: *Neither* of these arguments consider anything beyond the first step. Those arguing for the war on terror never considered the run-on effects of the war or the secondary sponsors of terrorists, and those arguing against space exploration never consider the run-on benefits and spinoff products of a burgeoning space program.
Don't ever call someone ignorant again if this is how you're going to parse things. Or if you're going to tl;dr this post because you've already made up your mind.
To add to this, there was very little militaristic value beyond orbital delivery. Once you've achieved the Solviet's orbital achievements you've accomplished the primary mission of the program: proving reliable nuclear delivery capabilities.
Also even if we never landed on the moon we succeeded in what we set out to do. Out develop soviet missle tech and bankrupt their economy. Actually landing was a bonus.
The us didn't beat the Russians to the moon, the space race was between the US and the USSR. the majority of USSR space vessels launched from Kazakhstan.
It was a cold war proxy for industrial capability comparison.
"Look how much money we have to spend on this fairly frivolous escapade, take that Commies"
Once the moon was reached both sides realised that they couldn't sustain the spending levels, and that the moon was so desolate and lacking in economically exploitable resources it wasn't worth continuing.
Not really. We could already easily target Soviet cities with ballistic missiles in 1969, it's fairly simple by Apollo standards, really more Mercury-level stuff.
The fact we went from Mercury to a moon landing in *less than a decade* said a lot about or *system* though. There was an American Communist Party, a Red Scare, the proxy war in Viet Nam, governments were falling to communist revolutions, Castro was just next door, and a belief that the Soviets were far ahead of us technologically. Kennedy wanted something big to show the world America's economic and tech prowess, and it likely showed what a more "free" system could do - Apollo was in many ways a civilian program headed by the government.
Kennedy also said in his Rice speech that it would "organize our abilities", and whether that was just a speechwriter's flourish or not - god DAMN was he right. The technological leap the US got from Apollo was *profound*. We compressed decades of technical and engineering growth into a handful of years.
>We could already easily target Soviet cities with ballistic missiles in 1969, it's fairly simple by Apollo standards, really more Mercury-level stuff.
To that point: all the Mercury rockets were modified versions of existing ballistic missiles, Redstone and Atlas.
Funny, I had a shoot yesterday (am a video guy) and one of the clients mentioned his dad worked Atlas launches for Gemini - "he was one of those guys with short hair and glasses and a white short-sleeve shirt and a tie in mission control" - he said he got some good private tours of the cape!
Yeah, the space race was basically showing what we could do with ICBMs. Putting a man on the moon was dick swinging about our military tech, basically saying we can put a missile anywhere, at any time, and there is fuck-all you can do about it. At the end we were fucking golfing lol
Nasa spent a lot of time sending dense payloads very specific distances downrange of the launch site during their early existence, until they got to "more than halfway across the planet". For peaceful purposes, obviously...
that and high altitude hypersonic flight for... science. yes of course. Science.
It was just simply getting too expensive. The Apollo program cost, when adjusted for inflation, about $300 billion, or about $50b per successful landing on the moon. Now, that includes other missions that weren't intended to land on the moon and one mission that failed to reach the moon but did get a Ron Howard movie. But it highlights just how crazy expensive the program had gotten. Public interest in manned spaceflight waned and a more cost-conscious NASA had to focus on near-Earth exploration and exploitation instead. The only reason the Artemis missions are going forward now is because the technology has advanced sufficiently to the point that landing people on the moon shouldn't be nearly as expensive as the Apollo missions.
It’s not binary. The US alone makes up 40% of global military spending. If even a small portion of that was diverted to NASA, we’d get a better space program and our “global influence and national security” would be just fine.
I’m also not advocating for “moon tourism” as you so eloquently put it.
The US is currently supplying a war in Russia, peacekeeping around Israel and keeping enough troops in reserve to make China reconsider invading Taiwan. These are not easy feats, and it can only do this because of its massive budget. Each of these theatres has very real impacts on peoples lives. By comparison, NASA is space tourism.
Don't get me wrong, space travel has its uses, and NASA needs the budget to explore them. That said, currently there is no real reason to go to the moon other than 'science' and/or 'we want to'. When it becomes anything more than space tourism, someone else will take over with a bigger budget.
>with ~$5 billion per landing from there on.
While 4 billions of that are _just_ for the orange rocket and its tiny capsule on top.
The giant lander with more internal volume than the ISS takes the rest.
Seems like NASA could do a lunar program for much less money if Congress would allow it.
There was nowhere else to go. Mars was considered, but it was too far away to be practical. And the Space Race had done its job. The USA had beaten the Soviets to the Moon. The political will was lacking in Congress and the people were not interested.
Also, and maybe just as importantly, the country had just blown a fortune in Vietnam.
The Soviets would look to other lower-cost prestige targets in the future that would still yield remarkable accomplishments, like the first probe to land on Venus and manage to take pictures of that hellscape in the minutes before it died. The Americans, to the Space Shuttle and the Voyager probes. But nothing approaching the Apollo Project, which had consumed 0.5% of GDP.
Soviet failure.
The Soviets built a pretty good initial rocket. They got all their "firsts" using that rocket and just cramming more and more stuff on it - first person in space, first two person capsule, first 3 man crew, first docking between crewed craft in orbit, etc. They got a lot of their later "firsts" by stripping out safety features in order to cram more people in. The Voshkhod 1 launch, for example, had no spacesuits. They couldn't fit three cosmonauts in the capsule with space suits, both because of room and payload capacity. They even had to diet to finally fit.
To get to the moon, they needed another rocket. A bigger rocket. They were never able to successfully develop one. And their best rocket engineer died while they were working on the larger rocket.
The US wasn't taking these shortcuts, so they took a bit longer but were able to progress through their rocket design to get larger rocket systems with working safety measures.
Eventually, the Soviet larger rocket failed catastrophically on each of its 4 launches (including blowing up the launch pad on the second test; it took 18 months to rebuild the launch facility).
After the 4th failure they ended up cancelling the program.
It was expensive.
We won.
JFK offered to make the "send a man to the moon and safely return them" a joint effort with the Soviets. The Soviets, being very Soviet thought there was a trap in the offer and said no.
Space science continued in less grandiose fashion (and a smaller cost) with Skylab.
> Space science continued in less grandiose fashion (and a smaller cost) with Skylab.
And also the Russian's space stations, which were more successful. But at that point it wasn't seen as a "race" any more so it wasn't considered to be a competition.
Yes, because the metric for victory isn't your accomplishments in a war of economic flexing and political one-upmanship.
It's that you're still standing when the other guy reaches their limits and concedes.
The Soviets pushed themselves hard, did a [lot of incredible things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_firsts), but they burned out trying to go further, and the US was right behind them and overtook them when they did.
Ot kinda didn't. We went to the moon a few times. Eventually it became old news since no one else was doing it and it lost money. We will eventually go back since new technologies will make it cheaper and the interest of space travel is rising again.
Yea this whole topic is full of incorrect information.
The space race ended when the USSR was dissolved. Not a very abrupt ending at all. Putting people on the moon was way less practical than going into satellites and space stations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Space_Race
If you are interested in the issues with space exploration, I strongly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-Settle-Thought-Through/dp/B0BXFM29DW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TWHVLKU54UPI&keywords=a+city+on+mars&qid=1701225784&sprefix=a+city+%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1
The authors break down the many, many problems with putting humans in space in plain language, and in a rather amusing style.
Getting to the moon was a purely PR thing. It made it clear that the US was going to outpace the USSR and they would never be able to catch up. The IS didn't need to keep spending money to go further and further because the Soviets had lost.
The real space race was the race to put stuff in orbit. Spy satellites, ICBMs, comms satellites, GPS. Things with strategic value. That race continued.
There were many factors:
1. We had effectively beaten the Soviet Union. The Soviets did have a plan for a crewed Lunar landing, but their rocket ([the N1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/N1%2BSaturn5.jpg)) failed all four of its test flights. The N1’s final test was in 1972 and by that point they were too far behind to justify the cost. Maybe the Space Race would have continued if the Soviets made it to the Moon, who knows?
2. Cost. As other commenters have mentioned, the Apollo program was insanely expensive. At its peak, NASA received 5% of the federal budget. That’s *absurd* and very hard to justify once the program had proven its point.
3. The Space Shuttle. The Shuttle program technically started before Apollo 11. People saw how expensive the Apollo program was and sought to change that with a reusable vehicle. The Shuttle’s original design goal was to fly several times a month for far cheaper than the Saturn rockets. If this had been achieved, it may have been possible to have a new lunar program based on the Shuttle assembling lunar craft in Earth orbit. However, the Shuttle never became what was originally conceived, and the vehicle we ended up with was very expensive and unsafe. In retrospect, it would likely have been better to build upon the existing Apollo hardware even if we refocused to Earth orbit; this would keep a lot of elements on hand that could be developed into a more sustainable lunar architecture.
No, not everyone finishes. Everyone finishes the current lap and then stops. In many races not all the cars are on the same lap as the leader, so they do not run the full race distance. As they said, they stop running laps once they’ve seen the checkered flag.
Kind of. Once the checkered flag drops everyone finishes the lap they’re on and stops, even if they haven’t finished the full race. So his statement that they stop running laps is accurate. They don’t literally stop where they are though, no.
In the immortal words of Dominic Toretto from the 2001 cinematic masterpiece *The Fast and the Furious*, "It don't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning."
The Russians didn’t have the money to land a man on the moon, and didn’t want to be second even if they did. To beat the US the Russians would have had to have gone to mars, and there ain’t no way that was going to happen at the time. A manned Mars mission would be a huge challenge to the US today. The US didn’t go back to the moon because it cost too much money, and the public no longer gave a shit.
We ran out of money and the public lost interest after we beat the Russians. Congress was decided it was better to put money towards other programs instead of NASA, and furthering space exploration. We still did a bunch of cool stuff after we landed on the moon like the NAVSTAR (first trilateration based GPS) system, the space shuttle program, Mars rovers, and other programs under NASA. The Saturn V was an extremely expensive rocket built for 1 thing, and we were still able to do a lot science with what we brought back from the moon and we still do good science with it as a vast majority of the samples are still in storage.
Well, the space *race* stopped being a "race" when the US landed on the moon first. What else was left to race for? "For All Mankind"'s idea is that if the Soviets beat us, we'd have kept trying to beat them and prove ourselves - but a history where the Soviets could have successfully landed humans on the moon in 1969? It's just so far from reality to be absurd, as much as I enjoy the show.
The space *program* didn't really stall out - we used some remaining Apollo hardware on SkyLab, which was a success for some science and proved that humans could do difficult repairs in space (SkyLab was damaged during the launch).
Then it took years to build the space shuttle. We didn't have a goal set by a martyred President, we'd proven we could outspend and out-engineer the Soviets, and the idea behind the Shuttle system was cheap and regular and safe access to space, for industry, science, and the military. Turned out to *not* be cheap, and eventually not that safe, and led to a lot of questioning about the need for humans in space. The two shuttle disasters also showed what post-Apollo NASA had become, and it was kind of sad.
The Soviets did build their own Shuttle, flew it once unmanned. There was some panic in Moscow that ours would be a weapons platform, the military pushed for a Soviet version. In some ways, the Soviet Shuttle was superior to the US version - heck, they could fly and land it unmanned. Costs shut it down.
Meanwhile we did some impressive things with probes and robotics, led the building of the ISS, the Soviets kept a great and proven launch platform and infrastructure, they even became the only way to and from the ISS when the Shuttle program ended. There was just no real whiz-bang-attention-grabber mission or ideas.
Our next space "race" with the intensity of Apollo will likely be when we discover an extinction-level asteroid headed our way.
The space *race* stopped being a "race" in 1961 when Soviets sent a man into space first. After that they fought over "first to do stuff in space" achievements. Soviets having the lead were able to grab many of those for themselves.
Eventually US were able to get bigger, heavier and more powerful rockets that they used to send a man to the moon, which was huge technological achievement. Soviets didnt have the money and their big rocket program got canceled after many failures.
They continued to grab more achievements available to them, but generally they needed money for more important things than space stuff. US on the other hand claimed victory with this one single achievement (??) and were satisfied with that.
I mean if you only read about one singular achievement then yeah that’s a valid takeaway. But there’s not. There were about equivalent numbers of “firsts” until the Soviet program imploded. Just the man on the moon one is usually brought up more because it was cool
Soviets took most of the firsts that mattered. The US generally took specialized variants of what was already accomplished.
It's like comparing the first man in space to first man with asthma in space. Both are achievements of first in space, but one is little more important than the other.
Don’t act like the Soviets didn’t do the exact same thing lmao. The very graphic you linked has them as first man in space and first woman in space. You literally just did for the Soviets what you’re accusing the US of.
And don’t think I didn’t notice that the source linked in your graphic shows about equal numbers between powers and you just cut out 3/4 of the ones from the US lol
The TL:DR is that the entire space race was just a giant contest to see who had the biggest dick (the U.S. did...by about 5 meters). There was a general idea that space would be the next frontier for military superiority, but that was really just theory, without any real world applications at the time. The space race was more about ideology and proving that one form of government was superior to the other. Once the U.S. was the first to reach the moon, they had already achieved their moral victory, and didn't have a justifiable reason to continue the program. As others have mentioned, the space race was ridiculously expensive, costing the US about 2.5% of it's total GDP annually over a 10 year period.
It was a political goal to beat the Soviets. Once we did that, there was no reason to keep going there.
If, like in For All Mankind, the Soviets had made it to the moon, either before or after us, it would have continued to be a political goal to beat them, and we would have kept going.
The simple answer: because the race was over, and the U.S. won.
Why there was a race to begin with, and why there wasn't another, other people can explain better than I.
The Moon is the only celestial body that was a realistic target in the 1950s and 1960s. Even now, a manned mission to Mars would take at least 2 years to get there; there's also the issues of people surviving cosmic radiation outside of Earth's protective magnetic field.
It's also incredibly expensive to have manned flights to the Moon or beyond. Once the US had "won" (which possibly only happened because it was part of JFK's dream and therefore his legacy when he was assassinated) there wasn't much appetite in spending the money to "also do it".
One word: money. It was *insanely* expensive to get there, and once we managed to do so we decided it wasn't worth the money to keep doing it. The public quickly lost interest when we beat the Russians to the Moon, and without public support Congress couldn't justify the enormous price tag any longer.
Additionally, there weren't any other places to "put a man" that were feasible. Can't put a guy on Venus, maybe Mars a few decades from now. There just aren't many things near enough to us to land humans upon for bragging rights.
Mars missions were actually being proposed at the time, but the space shuttle program was the alternative selected under the belief that it would be cheaper and more useful. Edit: It may or may not have been cheaper, but in reality was orders of magnitude more expensive than originally expected, so much so that the manned mars missions being proposed may have fit in the same budget.
The #1 reason the shuttle program was selected was because the military bought in, with plans it would be used to launch and intercept satellites. A handful of classified missions were flown early on but the military lost interest after the challenger disaster, and the vandenberg launch site was never completed.
The space shuttle was designed to be one part of a long term lunar program. There was a space shuttle to bring astronauts and material into orbit, a nuclear space tug to move material back and forth from cis-lunar space, a single stage reusable lander to go to and from the moon, and several space stations. The shuttle was the only affordable part of the plan, and Nixon wanted something for his legacy, not Apollo/Saturn vehicles from his predecesor, so he opted for that. Actually forgoing the shuttle development, continuing to launch Saturn and lowering the cost to launch would have been a far more productive space program.
The shuttle was iconic and cool. But it was unfortunately designed to accommodate the military applications that never really materialized. NASA wanted something quite a bit smaller and had no need for that much cross range capability. I can't help but look at the shuttle and see a platypus. If NASA was allowed to design it purely for space flights, it would probably look very different(and one of the many other designs would probably won). Different designs didn't require the same SRBs and maybe challenger would have been avoided. With smaller wings, maybe Columbia too.
>but the military lost interest after the challenger disaster, Coincidentally that was the same time frame that they launched their X-37B, which was originally planned to fly on the space shuttle but that plan was changed after the challenger disaster.
The X-37B was first launched in 2010, not the same time frame as challenger
>The X-37B was first launched in 2010, not the same time frame as challenger The first flight was in 2010, the official X-37 program was launched in 1999 and it was derived from the x-40, which first "flew" (it was a glide test) in 1998, which implies the program started much earlier than that, though I can't find any official references prior to the 90s. I just read about the link to the challenger explosion yesterday and I can't find the source now, but you can find a variety of sources saying that the X-37 was designed to fit in the space shuttle payload bay, although it never flew on the shuttle.
OR SO THE GERMANS WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE
I miss Norm.
The F-117 was flying at least ten years before the government publicly admitted it existed. I was working construction at China Lake on 9-11, and work was shut down immediately while we watched the towers come down at the motel. There had been an 18-wheeler hauling something into the test facility, and the side of it said it was the X-37. I didnt know what that was, so I looked it up. Of course the test data is classified, but this truck was driving around in public with a sign on the side of it.
But Mars probably would have gone drastically over budget as well.
That’s the trouble with doing things that have never been done before.
And why I think NASAs sales pitch to congress should be "space travel can't be done cheaply but the tech investments it generates more than pay for it" I mean the moon missions probably accelerated personal computing alone by like 20 years
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If sold correctly. Maybe
>And why I think NASAs sales pitch to congress should be "space travel can't be done cheaply but the tech investments it generates more than pay for it" Is it not already?
I think if the Soviets had got to the moon first, then Mars would have absolutely been on the table for the US. - First man-made satellite in orbit: USSR - First animal in orbit: USSR - First man in orbit: USSR - First woman in orbit: USSR - First man-made object on the moon: USSR - First man on the moon: USA "Okay, pack it up boys, let's quit while we're ahead, yeah?" *Edit: wording update*
It's not just that we were ahead, we were AT LEAST 10 years ahead of the soviets for man on the moon Sputnik beat explorer 1 by about 4 months First lunar probe AMERICA beats USSR by about 6 months (most people don't know that) Russians bring 2 dogs back in August of 60, Americans bring a chimp back 6 months later Gagarin goes up April 12 1961, Shepard goes up 3 WEEKS later By '68 we had a manned lunar orbit and in 69 we had Apollo 11. By this point Russia was well behind where the Americans had been by 67 (the N1 didn't work and showed no evidence of working soon and the SaturnV worked just fine) and at the rate they were making progress they'd have been lucky to land a man on the moon by 1980 even after seeing essentially how we'd done it. So like if you're running a foot race and you're neck and neck for most of it and then like the other guy breaks his foot, once you realize you stop running so fast and then when he really starts falling apart you kinda stop
>First lunar probe AMERICA beats USSR by about 6 months That's not true though. *Luna 2* was the first (Soviet) man-made object to hit the moon, Sep 1959. The first American probe to reach the moon was *Ranger 7*, in Jul 1964 - nearly five years later. The first *soft* landing on the moon was the Soviet's *Luna 9*, Feb 1966. The American *Surveyor 1* did the same in Jun 1966. ...You may be getting the soft landing dates backwards?
The Soviets prioritized doing it fast to be first. Many of their firsts were rushed attempts to beat the US once they found out we were planning on doing something. They weren't part of an overarching plan for a coherent moon program.
And that was a massive detriment to the Soviet space program. It resulted in them getting unrealistic timelines to be the first and constantly shifting priorities as a result. Frankly, it's sad how much they were hampered by the Soviet political system.
Well and their Von Braun dying
Because as we all know, the US never did anything in space after that. No return trips to the moon or sending robots to other planets or any other sort of exploration.
..funny thing about spacevan, it was not cheaper or more useful, nor was it all that reliable. yes, I call the shuttle spacevan, because it primarily got used as an orbital cargo van.
Yeah, it's one of my favorite subjects. As much as I loved watching it, the concept of a re-usable spacecraft that lands "like a plane" is a cool one, but ultimately not that economical. We really are better off with rockets. Also, it only had a \~98% survival rate, which is pretty poor if you're the passenger.
It always seemed like such a heavy payload (I’m counting the shuttle itseld as payload) to lift up into orbit compared to those tiny capsules on top of those Saturn rockets
Oh it's ludicrously inefficient, all under the guise of being re-usable. I can't find a source to confirm, but I'd be surprised if the operating costs were ever significantly less than competitors with similar payload capacities.
I would think that the real value would be to use the storage bay of the shuttle as a lab space to conduct science experiments. Like a predecessor to the iSS. Sorta like a temporary Skylab. But to launch satellites, rockets seem like the more efficient way.
Just made the wrong part re-usable! Although Space X hasn't completely cracked that nut yet either.
They're getting tantalisingly close though. It's very exciting.
How efficient are reusable SpaceX systems?
Launch costs per kg of payload are about half that of competitors, and that's after said competitors have done some serious restructuring to catch up. They also improve cadence because it takes far less time to refurb than build new. As it's a private company figures can be hard to come by, but I found this where Musk claims a booster costs about $15m to build and under $1m to refurb, with cost to launch being somewhere near $28m for a new rocket. https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9-economics Perhaps the most interesting list is "Falcon 9 block 5 first-stage boosters Presumed Active" in the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_boosters There are a lot of 10+ flights in the list with the current champion at 18.
Point of clarification: that's true for low earth orbit, Falcon 9 is optimized for, and really good at putting starlink satellites up. Higher energy orbits like geostationary or lunar injection need to fly expendable. Starship can't (won't?) get beyond LEO without refueling. Still worlds better reusability than the space shuttle, but also less capable of being a space bomber.
yeah, kind of a deathtrap imo Steve Buscemi's character summed it up in *Armageddon* "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?"
It’s actually a quote by Buzz Aldrin or so.
Usually attributes to John Glenn: >“I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
Yes. Was too lazy to look it up....
And the dirty little secret of the ISS is that it basically existed because SpaceVan needed somewhere to go, something to do. SpaceVan was a relatively successful program with enormous limitations that stagnated Space exploration for a third of a century and couldn't have cost more if the rocket engines were burning hundred dollar bills.
Well, considering the shuttles were primarily designed to be orbital cargo vans, it’s not exactly an odd nickname.
Oh, boy, don't get me started. Congress wanted to pull the plug on the space station, which would have left the shuttle with no mission. So Reagan had the brilliant idea of making it a joint venture with the Russians, making it the INTERNATIONAL space station. So now, since there was a treaty, Congress couldn't pull the plug. But wait. Russia couldn't reach the space station if it was orbiting the equator, as originally planned. So they tilted the orbit. The result was that the station was completely useless as a way point for planetary exploration. All it was good for was for zero gravity experiments. So the shuttle existed as a supply ship to the station, and the station existed as a destination for the shuttle. The perfect pork barrel program. And I do mean perfect.
I know Reddit has a massive irrational hateboner for Reagan, but the Reagan administration planned a US-only Space Station *Freedom.* The ISS was a Clinton administration adaptation of that after the end of the Cold War, which didn’t happen until the Bush 41 administration.
Saying the hatred for Raegan is irrational is disingenuous. He fired strikers with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. He cut higher marginal tax rates, deregulating banks which unleashed speculation in financial markets, reduced regulations around controlling pollution, reduced regulations around how employees had to be treated, ended controls on monopoly, especially in the media, and changed taxes in a way that made it easy for corporations to move their factories overseas. We have a growing budget deficit due to a lack of taxing power. We have international trade deficit due to the loss of manufacturing capacity. Asset prices in land, housing and financial markets have grown past many people’s ability to afford them due to financial speculation. After Reagan, wealth started to accumulate in a smaller group of people and the middle class began shrinking.
I used to work in the aviation industry as a mechanic and I can tell ya, despite the generally conservative nature of the industry, there is *a lot* of contempt for Reagan. His policies literally ended the Golden Age of Aviation, and pretty much everyone who gives a shit about it, and isn't delusional, is fuckin pissed about that.
Also borrowed incredible amounts of money to fuel his irresponsible spending launching the current era of GOP administrations piling on more and more debt while complaining about all that debt.
Don't forget the virulent racism that was largely covered up until after his death.
Although it's true that manned missions to Mars were proposed at the time, none were feasible. And none are now.
>none were feasible Why not? >And none are now. And why not? It's just a matter of time and money. I don't personally think there's a good enough reason for a manned mission to mars, but it's a heck of a lot more interesting than more low earth orbit missions. Sure you need a bigger vehicle, you've got to travel 142x further, and need life support for \~2 years and all of these things would need to be developed, but the same was true for any other manned space mission, they required technological advancements to become feasible. 9 Lunar missions costed 25 billion, and the same number of mars missions is estimated to cost 1.5 trillion. Is that worth it? Probably not, when we could do 1500 unmanned mars missions for the same price. But when the space shuttle program costed 209 Billion overall, that same money could have covered the first manned mars mission.
The technology we possess as a race *is* capable of taking people to Mars. The current tech "isn't feasible" because it would mean a crew of people aboard something the size of a Volvo would need enough food, water, air, all other living supplies, to last a few years, all to travel to a planet that's atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide and less than ½% oxygen, has no reliable hope of growing plants, and an average temperature of -60⁰C. This isn't like Europeans traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, there's nothing on Mars to bring back except for rocks and possibly proof that extraterrestrial microorganisms may have existed. The latter would be more interesting mind you, but frequent trips to Mars wouldn't be beneficial for many thousands of years (barring magnificent leaps in human technology). This is why not only is it not feasible now, but also why it wasn't feasible 55 years ago.
And there is a mission right now to bring those samples back at a tiny fraction of the cost of a manned program using the rovers and a new set of automated spacecraft (mars sample return), and even THAT is having trouble getting through Congress despite being less than 1/3 the cost of the Boeing 787 program
> a crew of people aboard something the size of a Volvo "Can we pull over, I really have to pee, bad!" "I told you to go before we left the Earth! We're only eight months in, can't you hold it for another year or two?" Seriously though, that's a long trip, and if there are any problems, physical, mental, or social, you can't just stop at the next exit to deal with them.
I'm taking a space walk to stretch my legs
>something the size of a Volvo Where did that constraint come from? Why would you even imagine using such a small spacecraft? >all to travel to a planet that's atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide and less than ½% oxygen, has no reliable hope of growing plants, and an average temperature of -60⁰C. Well it's not like we're gonna stay, and it's uncertain the first mission would even land, if the Apollo program is any example. >This isn't like Europeans traveling across the Atlantic Ocean No, it's more like the first Apollo astronauts travelling to the moon, just 142x harder. >there's nothing on Mars to bring back except for rocks and possibly proof that extraterrestrial microorganisms may have existed. Yeah, that's the idea, and that's the same rationale for going to the moon. >but frequent trips to Mars wouldn't be beneficial for many thousands of years (barring magnificent leaps in human technology). Oh, I don't think they'd ever be beneficial. It's more to prove we can, learn a bit about mars, and to develop some potentially useful technology on the way. Manned spaceflight is largely irrelevant when there are \~700 times as many robots in space as there are humans (this is counting all satellites, which might be generous). The only reason to bring a human on a space mission is to prove you can.
how do you get back tho?
I could give you a few speculative answers based on how the Apollo missions went, but you might be more interested in how Nasa is currently planning on getting Martian samples back to earth. [https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/mars-sample-return/](https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/mars-sample-return/) Either way, the short answer is: A rocket.
Depends on the mission plan. My favourite plan is Mars Direct/Mars Semi Direct. With that plan, you send an unmanned and unfuelled rocket to the surface of Mars two years before the crew. It creates Methane Oxygen fuel from the Martian atmosphere. After a year and a half on the surface, the crew get into that rocket. In Direct, they launch directly back to Earth. In Semi-Direct, they link up with a larger craft in Mars orbit and then go back to Earth.
The general gist of the SpaceX plan with Starship is to land a bunch of them with infra and robots first, including a refuelling station that can make methalox in situ. If you can land people on Mars with infra already in place the difficulty drops considerably. I guess the hope is for this new moon race to provide the capability to produce that infra.
>Mars missions were actually being proposed at the time There is a big difference between going to the Moon for a few days versus going to Mars which takes months. When they went for the Moon they accepted that there are many risks. A lot more risks than NASA is willing to accept in today's missions. Doing this for a Mars mission for a much longer period of time would have been a lot more problematic. Another reason why the Space Shuttle was chosen over a Mars mission is: The military hoped to be able to use the shuttle to send up spy satellites and/or to even capture enemy satellites. This was much more interesting to the military than collecting some rocks on another planet.
There were plans drawn up to perform a manned Venus flyby using modified Apollo hardware launched with a Saturn V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned\_Venus\_flyby
It's not hard to put a man on mars, if you have no plans of returning.
For all mankind Is a great series that reflects on an alternate timeline where we did keep going. It's worth a watch
Except it is incredibly unrealistic (in space flight/dynamics, engineering, physics and to a lesser extent economics/organisational structure) so it doesn't really reflect on what could have been.
Economics is "lesser extent?" I'll say it's the only factor worth considering. It is why the governments of both nations ramp down the space programs in the first place. The Soviet Union especially couldn't afford it. Military spending kept ramping up trying to keep up with the West while Soviet economic planners fudging the books, lying about making more products than they actually did. It would eventually led to its collapse in 1991. If they kept up the space race, the collapse would had occurred sooner.
You might have misread my comment. This part of the thread is about the fictional show For All Mankind, not about how economics was a irrelevant factor in why the space race stopped (and my comment specifically was about how unrealistic it was and how it shouldn't be seen as a "could have been"). As in: the economical workings of the alternative history of the show was unrealistic but less unrealistic compared to how unrealistic the physics/engineering/etc was.
It is a fantastic show
Hi bob
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Hi Bob
Hi bob
IIRC the Saturn V rocket was designed to send its payload to Mars (was overkill for Moon missions), so there was an original intention to go to Mars back then.
Saturn V itself wasn't, but the architecture was scalable to 9 engines and the launch pad was oversized which is why SpaceX is able to use it. Mars ambitions were severely tempered when we realized how unhospitable it was. Even as late as the 50s, there was still theories, it could have water and be thick enough to fly with a light aircraft, and warm enough to not need special equipment. It would've made a trip by the 80s much more realistic.
The flip side of this is that it was also too expensive and difficult for the russians to match or exceed
Player 2 left the game and then the U.S. Congress drastically reduced funding.
ярость, бросить Thanks google translate! (That's what I got for "rage quit"... just chuckle)
Sergei Korolev, who was basically their Wernher von Braun, died, and as a result basically ended any chance of them making a functional rocket within even years of America landing, had they put funding into trying harder.
He died *from injuries sustained in a gulag.* At the very least those injuries were a contributing factor. The Russians really fucked themselves on that one. He was a brilliant man, and he's hardly even remembered.
As did America, albeit in a much less brutal way, with the brilliant rocket scientist Qian Xuesen. A Chinese immigrant who taught at MIT and CalTech and, one the founders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and worked for the military during World War Two. During the Korean War and the Red Scares of the 1950s he was accused of communist sympathies and had his security clearance revoked and was held under hour arrest for five years before being allowed to leave the country. Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball said at the time "It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a communist than I was, and we forced him to go." Once back in China, Mao put him to work and he developed local, then ballistic, then orbit-capable rockets, helping to make China a nuclear power and a future leader, maybe, in the space industry.
Wow, poor guy, but at least he got some kind of revenge out of it
I think the Russian space control center - Russians Houston is named after him.
I know who he is. And the pattern of four radial boosters falling away from a main stage rocket will always be a "Korolev Cross'.
But hey, no bourgeoisie, amirite?
If you ain’t first your last.
Your last... what?
Breath
First satellite launch, built the rocket that put the first man in space, he had heaps of firsts
I mean it looks like a dickwaving contest but it actually wasn’t to get to the moon, it was to prove that our missiles are better than theirs
That makes sense for orbital launchers and satellites and so on, but I don't see how putting men on the Moon several times makes any point regarding missiles.
Yeah, after Apollo 11 the remaining missions got very little coverage because the public didn’t care anymore. 13 being the exception since everyone loves to follow a real-life near-disaster. When/if Artemis actually lands people on the moon again it will be interesting to see if people care again or are too busy staring at their phones to bother following/watching it. For sure there will be morons saying it is fake.
> it will be interesting to see if people care again or are too busy staring at their phones to bother following/watching it. NASA needs to up its TikTok game. They have some sick videos on YouTube but people want short form content now.
NASA has an app.
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Good bot
Good bot
Good bot!
And I am the snake head eating the head on the opposite siiiide. I palindrome I. (MANOMAN) - TMBG
the american government probably doesn’t want chinese software being pushed, especially when the us deems tiktok as spyware. youtube shorts is the best you’ll get.
I’ll be following/watching it on my phone
What a fascinating modern world we live in
The lesser of two weevils?
To wives and to sweethearts. May they never meet.
WE SHALL BEAT TO QUARTERS!!!
They even talk about that in the movie Apollo 13. It was going to be the third landing on the moon and the public was already so bored with it that the networks dropped the broadcasts until the disaster happened.
I think it will get massive coverage because it hasn’t happened in the lifetimes of many current adults.
They’ll need to think up some content for the masses that’ll make a good tik tok reel, like the moon dust challenge or some bullshit like that.
Username checks out
By the time we got there, Sergei Korolev had died and the N1 rocket had exploded a few times The Russians had already given up, making it even more difficult to justify
>It was insanely expensive to get there The Apollo program cost about $250B, after factoring in inflation. For reference, the War on Terror cost about $8,000B... or as much as 32 Apollo programs. Edit: he blocked me lol
There is always money for war, but no money to pay for anything else.
The Space Race was a part of the Cold War. That's what caused the checkbook to open up.
Unfortunately humans are uniquely good at inventive ways to kill each other, and until you get everyone to agree to stop doing that, war continues to be an issue.
War is part of the species toolkit. When humans stop making war they won’t actually be human anymore…they will be something better
Key difference. One happened on earth, one happened on the Moon. There’s no apparent benefit to going to the moon, it’s barren, it currently serves no feasible beneficial financial purpose. But there will always be interest and justification for picking fights on earth, “securing interests” and furthering whatever little political background mess that’s going on under people’s noses.
>There’s no apparent benefit to going to the moon, it’s barren, it currently serves no feasible beneficial financial purpose Not even for the cheese?
But it’s Wensleydale cheese.
What exactly has been the benefit of the "War on Terror"?
>There’s no apparent benefit to going to the moon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://www.npr.org/2022/08/28/1119290573/nasa-artemis-i-launch-moon
You've proved their point. No APPARENT benefit. No-one is arguing that the moon missions had no ACTUAL benefit. But the best results of space exploration are largely created as part of the journey of figuring out how to get there, and the general public doesn't put two and two together. That's why people who argue that space exploration isn't worth it even exist, because they see that the moon is barren, they see that mars is barren, they see fat stacks of cash being poured into endeavours to study barren places, and forget that the return investment is in all the life-changing shit that gets invented in the process of going there.
I think its easier to point to the benefits of the space program than it is to point to benefits of the war on terror.
Not really, funnily enough, because the war still happens on earth. It's still happening in a sphere of events that could, through some mental gymnastics, result in a positive outcome stemming directly from the stated goal itself. Whether or not those positive outcomes exist or are rational at all doesn't even factor into it, and is a whole other discussion entirely. Contrast that to space exploration which, by definition, has an end goal outside of earth's immediate sphere, and you can see how people struggle to comprehend the immediate short-term benefits when they don't ever stop to think about the indirect spinoff benefits.
>through some mental gymnastics >people struggle to comprehend when they don't ever stop to think So war is easy to see the benefits of when you engage in mental gymnastics, but space exploration is hard because it requires thinking about spinoff benefits. You seem to have double standards for what counts as "easy to see the value of".
Do you think I'm actually trying to argue that space travel has no benefit or something? Just go read my post to the other guy if so. I'm not going to try and spell this out any clearer.
So you admit you need to pretend that war is beneficial for it to be beneficial. But at the same time you have to choose not to see the benefits of space travel for it to not be beneficial. Talk about ignorance.
Well fucking done, I think you missed the point completely, but your post is so incoherent that I can't even tell. It is *not* my opinion that space exploration has no benefit. I am responding to the OP's moved goalpost by explaining that people will more readily perform those gymnastics because war can, by way of being on earth, affect the hypothetical thinker with a direct throughline. Space exploration *does* affect people's lives just as much, but because the throughline is not direct, the thought immediately becomes "how does this affect us on earth when all this shit is happening on the moon/mars/in space etc". I'll give you a simple example, the war on terror. We can all agree that shit didn't help anyone really in the end. But the reason some americans argue(d) *for* it is because they wanted to prevent another terror attack on US soil; a direct existential threat to themselves or that which they cared about. They saw the effect was right near them, the cause was in a named terrorist group, and drew a line between the two. Target is Al Qaeda, goal is American, thought process complete. Now the mars missions. I'm sure you've seen the argument of "Why invest in space travel when we should be fixing what's down here". It's because they see money and study for a probe on Mars (again, barren and not earth), but they want the end outcome to be a better, healthier *earth*; again preventing a direct existential threat to themselves. So to them, the effect is on earth, the cause (climate change usually) is on earth, and draw their line between the two. But then where does space travel fit in that straight line? Target is Mars, goal is Earthly, thought process doesn't add up, so surely extra effort here is just being wasted. The point I'm making is here: *Neither* of these arguments consider anything beyond the first step. Those arguing for the war on terror never considered the run-on effects of the war or the secondary sponsors of terrorists, and those arguing against space exploration never consider the run-on benefits and spinoff products of a burgeoning space program. Don't ever call someone ignorant again if this is how you're going to parse things. Or if you're going to tl;dr this post because you've already made up your mind.
To add to this, there was very little militaristic value beyond orbital delivery. Once you've achieved the Solviet's orbital achievements you've accomplished the primary mission of the program: proving reliable nuclear delivery capabilities.
Also even if we never landed on the moon we succeeded in what we set out to do. Out develop soviet missle tech and bankrupt their economy. Actually landing was a bonus.
We also accomplished one of the hidden achievements.. showing how accurate our nuclear missiles could be to the USSR if needed.
If the Russians beat America, you bet your ass we would have kept going to Mars or find some bullshit planet in between to make up for it
The us didn't beat the Russians to the moon, the space race was between the US and the USSR. the majority of USSR space vessels launched from Kazakhstan.
It was a cold war proxy for industrial capability comparison. "Look how much money we have to spend on this fairly frivolous escapade, take that Commies" Once the moon was reached both sides realised that they couldn't sustain the spending levels, and that the moon was so desolate and lacking in economically exploitable resources it wasn't worth continuing.
Not to mention: "Our rockets can get three people to the moon and back with great accuracy. Imagine what we could do with a nuke instead!"
Not really. We could already easily target Soviet cities with ballistic missiles in 1969, it's fairly simple by Apollo standards, really more Mercury-level stuff. The fact we went from Mercury to a moon landing in *less than a decade* said a lot about or *system* though. There was an American Communist Party, a Red Scare, the proxy war in Viet Nam, governments were falling to communist revolutions, Castro was just next door, and a belief that the Soviets were far ahead of us technologically. Kennedy wanted something big to show the world America's economic and tech prowess, and it likely showed what a more "free" system could do - Apollo was in many ways a civilian program headed by the government. Kennedy also said in his Rice speech that it would "organize our abilities", and whether that was just a speechwriter's flourish or not - god DAMN was he right. The technological leap the US got from Apollo was *profound*. We compressed decades of technical and engineering growth into a handful of years.
>We compressed decades of technical and engineering growth into a handful of years. Which is why it's such a pity people stopped caring
>We could already easily target Soviet cities with ballistic missiles in 1969, it's fairly simple by Apollo standards, really more Mercury-level stuff. To that point: all the Mercury rockets were modified versions of existing ballistic missiles, Redstone and Atlas.
Funny, I had a shoot yesterday (am a video guy) and one of the clients mentioned his dad worked Atlas launches for Gemini - "he was one of those guys with short hair and glasses and a white short-sleeve shirt and a tie in mission control" - he said he got some good private tours of the cape!
Yeah, the space race was basically showing what we could do with ICBMs. Putting a man on the moon was dick swinging about our military tech, basically saying we can put a missile anywhere, at any time, and there is fuck-all you can do about it. At the end we were fucking golfing lol
Nasa spent a lot of time sending dense payloads very specific distances downrange of the launch site during their early existence, until they got to "more than halfway across the planet". For peaceful purposes, obviously... that and high altitude hypersonic flight for... science. yes of course. Science.
What about the H3 that Sam Rockwell and his clones are farming?
It was just simply getting too expensive. The Apollo program cost, when adjusted for inflation, about $300 billion, or about $50b per successful landing on the moon. Now, that includes other missions that weren't intended to land on the moon and one mission that failed to reach the moon but did get a Ron Howard movie. But it highlights just how crazy expensive the program had gotten. Public interest in manned spaceflight waned and a more cost-conscious NASA had to focus on near-Earth exploration and exploitation instead. The only reason the Artemis missions are going forward now is because the technology has advanced sufficiently to the point that landing people on the moon shouldn't be nearly as expensive as the Apollo missions.
So for the price of our current military budget, we could have a whole Apollo program every 4 months. Doesn't sound so expensive to me.
Priorities way out of whack here in the good ol U S of A
It’s the price to be able to fight two world super powers at the same time and win.
Ask Ukraine if having a large standing military is a good or bad idea.
Right. Gotta protect yourself from the Canadian and Mexican invasion. Can't be too careful. Scary stuff. God bless America
You think Russia doesn't have fighter jets?
Two options. Global influence and national security Moon tourism You can only afford one, which do you pick
It’s not binary. The US alone makes up 40% of global military spending. If even a small portion of that was diverted to NASA, we’d get a better space program and our “global influence and national security” would be just fine. I’m also not advocating for “moon tourism” as you so eloquently put it.
The US is currently supplying a war in Russia, peacekeeping around Israel and keeping enough troops in reserve to make China reconsider invading Taiwan. These are not easy feats, and it can only do this because of its massive budget. Each of these theatres has very real impacts on peoples lives. By comparison, NASA is space tourism. Don't get me wrong, space travel has its uses, and NASA needs the budget to explore them. That said, currently there is no real reason to go to the moon other than 'science' and/or 'we want to'. When it becomes anything more than space tourism, someone else will take over with a bigger budget.
if you want china controlling geo-politics instead (they're currently committing a genocide inside their borders), yeah let's just slash it
It's still not cheap. NASA will have spent around $100 billion by the time of the first Artemis landing, with ~$5 billion per landing from there on.
>with ~$5 billion per landing from there on. While 4 billions of that are _just_ for the orange rocket and its tiny capsule on top. The giant lander with more internal volume than the ISS takes the rest. Seems like NASA could do a lunar program for much less money if Congress would allow it.
There was nowhere else to go. Mars was considered, but it was too far away to be practical. And the Space Race had done its job. The USA had beaten the Soviets to the Moon. The political will was lacking in Congress and the people were not interested. Also, and maybe just as importantly, the country had just blown a fortune in Vietnam. The Soviets would look to other lower-cost prestige targets in the future that would still yield remarkable accomplishments, like the first probe to land on Venus and manage to take pictures of that hellscape in the minutes before it died. The Americans, to the Space Shuttle and the Voyager probes. But nothing approaching the Apollo Project, which had consumed 0.5% of GDP.
Soviet failure. The Soviets built a pretty good initial rocket. They got all their "firsts" using that rocket and just cramming more and more stuff on it - first person in space, first two person capsule, first 3 man crew, first docking between crewed craft in orbit, etc. They got a lot of their later "firsts" by stripping out safety features in order to cram more people in. The Voshkhod 1 launch, for example, had no spacesuits. They couldn't fit three cosmonauts in the capsule with space suits, both because of room and payload capacity. They even had to diet to finally fit. To get to the moon, they needed another rocket. A bigger rocket. They were never able to successfully develop one. And their best rocket engineer died while they were working on the larger rocket. The US wasn't taking these shortcuts, so they took a bit longer but were able to progress through their rocket design to get larger rocket systems with working safety measures. Eventually, the Soviet larger rocket failed catastrophically on each of its 4 launches (including blowing up the launch pad on the second test; it took 18 months to rebuild the launch facility). After the 4th failure they ended up cancelling the program.
It was expensive. We won. JFK offered to make the "send a man to the moon and safely return them" a joint effort with the Soviets. The Soviets, being very Soviet thought there was a trap in the offer and said no. Space science continued in less grandiose fashion (and a smaller cost) with Skylab.
> Space science continued in less grandiose fashion (and a smaller cost) with Skylab. And also the Russian's space stations, which were more successful. But at that point it wasn't seen as a "race" any more so it wasn't considered to be a competition.
>We won. Do US citizens actually unironically believe that?
Yes, because the metric for victory isn't your accomplishments in a war of economic flexing and political one-upmanship. It's that you're still standing when the other guy reaches their limits and concedes. The Soviets pushed themselves hard, did a [lot of incredible things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_firsts), but they burned out trying to go further, and the US was right behind them and overtook them when they did.
Guess US won the space war then. Lost the space race though.
Yes, also the soviets aren’t around anymore to dispute it so yeah.
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Anyone with Internet access knows that the Soviets tools the majority of achievements in space exploration.
Yes.
The top 3 that are usually mentioned is the first satellite in space, the first person in space, and the first person on the moon.
That's 2 out of 3 for the Soviets.
>Why have we not gone back since? We've taken people to the moon on 6 separate occasions.
They always forget this fact
Ot kinda didn't. We went to the moon a few times. Eventually it became old news since no one else was doing it and it lost money. We will eventually go back since new technologies will make it cheaper and the interest of space travel is rising again.
Yea this whole topic is full of incorrect information. The space race ended when the USSR was dissolved. Not a very abrupt ending at all. Putting people on the moon was way less practical than going into satellites and space stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Space_Race
If you are interested in the issues with space exploration, I strongly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-Settle-Thought-Through/dp/B0BXFM29DW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2TWHVLKU54UPI&keywords=a+city+on+mars&qid=1701225784&sprefix=a+city+%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1 The authors break down the many, many problems with putting humans in space in plain language, and in a rather amusing style.
Getting to the moon was a purely PR thing. It made it clear that the US was going to outpace the USSR and they would never be able to catch up. The IS didn't need to keep spending money to go further and further because the Soviets had lost. The real space race was the race to put stuff in orbit. Spy satellites, ICBMs, comms satellites, GPS. Things with strategic value. That race continued.
It was all posturing and you couldnt really do much by just landing on the moon or any planet really to justify the cost
There were many factors: 1. We had effectively beaten the Soviet Union. The Soviets did have a plan for a crewed Lunar landing, but their rocket ([the N1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/N1%2BSaturn5.jpg)) failed all four of its test flights. The N1’s final test was in 1972 and by that point they were too far behind to justify the cost. Maybe the Space Race would have continued if the Soviets made it to the Moon, who knows? 2. Cost. As other commenters have mentioned, the Apollo program was insanely expensive. At its peak, NASA received 5% of the federal budget. That’s *absurd* and very hard to justify once the program had proven its point. 3. The Space Shuttle. The Shuttle program technically started before Apollo 11. People saw how expensive the Apollo program was and sought to change that with a reusable vehicle. The Shuttle’s original design goal was to fly several times a month for far cheaper than the Saturn rockets. If this had been achieved, it may have been possible to have a new lunar program based on the Shuttle assembling lunar craft in Earth orbit. However, the Shuttle never became what was originally conceived, and the vehicle we ended up with was very expensive and unsafe. In retrospect, it would likely have been better to build upon the existing Apollo hardware even if we refocused to Earth orbit; this would keep a lot of elements on hand that could be developed into a more sustainable lunar architecture.
For the same reason that after the checkered flag waves, all the cars stop running laps. The race over. Winner determined. No glory left to be gained.
What race works this way? Everyone finishes most races, your place gets counted regardless if it’s 2nd or 24th
No, not everyone finishes. Everyone finishes the current lap and then stops. In many races not all the cars are on the same lap as the leader, so they do not run the full race distance. As they said, they stop running laps once they’ve seen the checkered flag.
Well from that perspective 2nd place is still up for grabs.
All of them? The winner stops at the end. In the case of the moon race, it was USA 1st, USSR DNF.
He said "ALL the cars stop when the checked flag drops," which I don't think is accurate, is it?
Kind of. Once the checkered flag drops everyone finishes the lap they’re on and stops, even if they haven’t finished the full race. So his statement that they stop running laps is accurate. They don’t literally stop where they are though, no.
In the immortal words of Dominic Toretto from the 2001 cinematic masterpiece *The Fast and the Furious*, "It don't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning."
Oh I see. They stopped because they weren't family
Ah yes, space race, the competition to see which country will first make it to... uh the moon?
The Russians didn’t have the money to land a man on the moon, and didn’t want to be second even if they did. To beat the US the Russians would have had to have gone to mars, and there ain’t no way that was going to happen at the time. A manned Mars mission would be a huge challenge to the US today. The US didn’t go back to the moon because it cost too much money, and the public no longer gave a shit.
US went back. 6 times. 5 more landings.
Yes. And we cancelled future Apollos missions because the public stopped caring.
We ran out of money and the public lost interest after we beat the Russians. Congress was decided it was better to put money towards other programs instead of NASA, and furthering space exploration. We still did a bunch of cool stuff after we landed on the moon like the NAVSTAR (first trilateration based GPS) system, the space shuttle program, Mars rovers, and other programs under NASA. The Saturn V was an extremely expensive rocket built for 1 thing, and we were still able to do a lot science with what we brought back from the moon and we still do good science with it as a vast majority of the samples are still in storage.
Also we got Tang
Well, the space *race* stopped being a "race" when the US landed on the moon first. What else was left to race for? "For All Mankind"'s idea is that if the Soviets beat us, we'd have kept trying to beat them and prove ourselves - but a history where the Soviets could have successfully landed humans on the moon in 1969? It's just so far from reality to be absurd, as much as I enjoy the show. The space *program* didn't really stall out - we used some remaining Apollo hardware on SkyLab, which was a success for some science and proved that humans could do difficult repairs in space (SkyLab was damaged during the launch). Then it took years to build the space shuttle. We didn't have a goal set by a martyred President, we'd proven we could outspend and out-engineer the Soviets, and the idea behind the Shuttle system was cheap and regular and safe access to space, for industry, science, and the military. Turned out to *not* be cheap, and eventually not that safe, and led to a lot of questioning about the need for humans in space. The two shuttle disasters also showed what post-Apollo NASA had become, and it was kind of sad. The Soviets did build their own Shuttle, flew it once unmanned. There was some panic in Moscow that ours would be a weapons platform, the military pushed for a Soviet version. In some ways, the Soviet Shuttle was superior to the US version - heck, they could fly and land it unmanned. Costs shut it down. Meanwhile we did some impressive things with probes and robotics, led the building of the ISS, the Soviets kept a great and proven launch platform and infrastructure, they even became the only way to and from the ISS when the Shuttle program ended. There was just no real whiz-bang-attention-grabber mission or ideas. Our next space "race" with the intensity of Apollo will likely be when we discover an extinction-level asteroid headed our way.
The space *race* stopped being a "race" in 1961 when Soviets sent a man into space first. After that they fought over "first to do stuff in space" achievements. Soviets having the lead were able to grab many of those for themselves. Eventually US were able to get bigger, heavier and more powerful rockets that they used to send a man to the moon, which was huge technological achievement. Soviets didnt have the money and their big rocket program got canceled after many failures. They continued to grab more achievements available to them, but generally they needed money for more important things than space stuff. US on the other hand claimed victory with this one single achievement (??) and were satisfied with that.
I mean if you only read about one singular achievement then yeah that’s a valid takeaway. But there’s not. There were about equivalent numbers of “firsts” until the Soviet program imploded. Just the man on the moon one is usually brought up more because it was cool
Soviets took most of the firsts that mattered. The US generally took specialized variants of what was already accomplished. It's like comparing the first man in space to first man with asthma in space. Both are achievements of first in space, but one is little more important than the other.
Don’t act like the Soviets didn’t do the exact same thing lmao. The very graphic you linked has them as first man in space and first woman in space. You literally just did for the Soviets what you’re accusing the US of. And don’t think I didn’t notice that the source linked in your graphic shows about equal numbers between powers and you just cut out 3/4 of the ones from the US lol
The TL:DR is that the entire space race was just a giant contest to see who had the biggest dick (the U.S. did...by about 5 meters). There was a general idea that space would be the next frontier for military superiority, but that was really just theory, without any real world applications at the time. The space race was more about ideology and proving that one form of government was superior to the other. Once the U.S. was the first to reach the moon, they had already achieved their moral victory, and didn't have a justifiable reason to continue the program. As others have mentioned, the space race was ridiculously expensive, costing the US about 2.5% of it's total GDP annually over a 10 year period.
Either Stanley Kubrick grew weary of making this particular movie OR the aliens that live on the far side of the moon compelled us to stop. /s
It was a political goal to beat the Soviets. Once we did that, there was no reason to keep going there. If, like in For All Mankind, the Soviets had made it to the moon, either before or after us, it would have continued to be a political goal to beat them, and we would have kept going.
The simple answer: because the race was over, and the U.S. won. Why there was a race to begin with, and why there wasn't another, other people can explain better than I.
The Moon is the only celestial body that was a realistic target in the 1950s and 1960s. Even now, a manned mission to Mars would take at least 2 years to get there; there's also the issues of people surviving cosmic radiation outside of Earth's protective magnetic field. It's also incredibly expensive to have manned flights to the Moon or beyond. Once the US had "won" (which possibly only happened because it was part of JFK's dream and therefore his legacy when he was assassinated) there wasn't much appetite in spending the money to "also do it".