I ran across this video[0] yesterday with Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about how it’s always been political. The first moon landing was more about global politics than science. As a child you likely weren’t concerned about that side of it, or were shielded from it.
It isn’t always the purist motivations that push the human race forward, but forward it moves us.
I don't think OP's problem with it is that it's "political" but that it's a product of pork and corporate welfare. The political thrust of the Apollo program was more "beat the Russians" and less "funnel money into dozens of already-rich corporations in favored districts." Even thought there was a lot of that, too. Modern space (and defense) projects seem to be almost 100% "pork funnel" and zero anything else.
It's not "almost 100% pork funneling" and I know this because....they're there! they are at the moon! I don't like pork either, but let's not blow this out of proportion.
How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.
also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.
Only 300b for the Apollo program? That sounds downright lean.
Not when you consider how we got lucky on some aspects
The pork funnel is going to exist unless something major changes; so I'd rather get moonshots out of the pork.
But how many Moonshots could we have got out of $100 billion of vegetarian non-pork?
Everything about SLS, and most of Artemis, has been dictated by Congress, often overriding expert advice.
Why not just give NASA the money and let them get on with it?
The same happens with the US military, Congress constantly deleting funding for programs they don't like to fund ones they do.
We're about to find out.
The new NASA administrator, Isaacman, seems to have done a very good job of convincing the various Senators to, if not get rid of the pork, allow him to allocate it in a way that benefits the lunar program.
The result was the Ignition event, which looks like it's planning to send up 17 small and 4 crew-capable landers by 2028, along with a fleet of orbital assets.
You can find out more https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/ , especially the "Building the Moon Base" section. The cost is $10B spread out over 3 years.
Also, if you dont think Apollo had pork in it, you're not aware enough of the history, the various assembly plants were placed mostly for political support, the shuttle and now SLS follows the same pattern.
Possibly none, until we can figure out how to engineer political institutions that function without pork.
We tend to look at pork as unambiguously bad because it's wasteful or often has more than a whiff of corruption, but the picture for political scientists is more mixed.
Turns out it's easier to bargain with legislators when policy can give them a win in their districts or states. It greases the wheels for negotiation or provides levers to flip opposition party members. Legislatures often become more sclerotic and dysfunctional after reforms to pork barrel spending.
I don't want to call pork good, but there are real trade-offs to pork-free government that we haven't figured out how to solve any other way
The reality is that "anything" can be pork - if you have large amounts of money sloshing around, someone benefits from getting it, and you can use that benefit for negotiations.
The first question for me is always is this a thing worth doing - which has an aspect of price involved, but isn't the definitive answer.
we've also got 50 years of baseline tech improvement to try out.
In the 60s we weren't going to land in the darkness because we couldn't see to land.
But the shadows are probably where the water might be, and that's where we're going next!
> The political thrust of the Apollo program was more "beat the Russians" and less "funnel money into dozens of already-rich corporations in favored districts."
Artemis feels a bit more "Beat the Chinese, and show the world we still got it." I think cost-effectiveness[1] is a fig-leaf for what are SpaceX fanboys: had the same mission been on a Starship, HN would be awash with how other companies (Blue Origin) were late to earth-orbit, and the gap had widened beyond Earth's orbit.
1. In contrast, I haven't seen any complaints about Military-Industrial pork on any of the Iran threads, even when contrasting the cost of interceptors vs drones. Let slone have pork dominate the thread.
Even if the Apollo program was similarly politically motivated, it at least was seriously cutting edge science and engineering. I mean, there were many people born before the Wright brothers’ first flight watching the moon landing on TV. Basically repeating Apollo 8’s much less iconic flyby decades later is obviously going to be less impressive.
> more about global politics than science
I had a great Prof during my bachelor from Russia - this is what he always told -> and it makes sense: Back then was cold war
this is why I mark the divide between the manned and unmanned space program. Historically the unmanned accomplishments have been less political (at least IMO) and made far larger advances. I don't need a human to take a photo of the dark side of the moon and then email it to me if a satellite can do it (with 1980's tech)
"far side of the moon"
It’s a weak take and here’s why. Huge tasks like going to the moon are made up of many different individuals that have different goals. Some are rocket scientists that want to innovate on the science of rocketry. Others are government admins with political goals.
So to call the entire thing “political” ignores the purpose of those involved and critical to the outcome at the expense of just labeling it all “political”.