I've written about this extensively over the years (this, depressingly, is from almost a decade ago: https://t.co/4mnbzkPsvN), but the reason we didn't continue on from Apollo was that we did it the wrong way, the most expensive possible way, because of the "end of the decade"… https://t.co/BjXuPmKvgk
— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) April 2, 2026
“tethered to low Earth orbit”
At least that tether is supplied by Musk and his capitalistic Dragon program. If we’d relied on Apolloistic Boeing for the tether, the only way to go would be still be in a Soyuz.
Quite. Fortunately, by the “end of this decade” the ongoing transition from unaffordable governmentalism to private sector affordable abundance in space transportation should be all but complete and ready to kick into really high gear in the next decade. Then any members of the last two – not altogether unjustifiably – gloomy generations still inclined toward taking big chances for even bigger rewards “in the outer colonies” should be able to cinch up their big-boy pants and roll the dice as their ancestors did starting two centuries ago.
A sobering statement in Pinsker’s article is that nobody under the age of 55 ever witnessed the Moon landings. However, it’s worse than that. That means they were born within that era, not that they were cognitively able to understand what they were watching. The real age I put at about 63. So if you are less than 63 years old you were probably too young to understand what your parents were watching on TV if you remember it at all. Less than 55 and you wouldn’t even have had that experience. For you, it’s all just glossy photos in a history book or maybe you put up with the grainy slow-scan TV videos or the better color rover videos and the returned-from-the-moon color movie films on YouTube. How inspirational is that in the days of streaming media?
How do we get the young generation dreaming again? Does Doom scrolling kill the imagination?
“How do we get the young generation dreaming again?”
Do something new.
It will happen soon enough.
My father was in the Marine Corps, and he was stationed at an embassy in South America at the time. I was 11-13 at the time. We had no television, so I didn’t get to see anything live from Apollo until 14. But for that, until the end of 17, I was glued to the idiot box and having learned their lesson from Apollo 13, most of the activity was broadcast.
“The real age I put at about 63. So if you are less than 63 years old you were probably too young to understand what your parents were watching on TV if you remember it at all.”
That sounds about right.
I was three when Sputnik was launched, and on December 6. 1957 when we made our first satellite launch attempt with Vanguard. I remember watching that on live television, and seeing the rocket fall back on the pad and explode. I was seven when Alan Shepard took off on the first suborbital Mercury flight, and remember that like it was this morning. We watched it on a black and white TV one of the mothers had brought in to my second grade classroom, all sitting on the floor so everyone had a clear view. The moment the rocket left the ground was the moment I knew what I wanted to do with my life (build those rockets).
The first space event I can remember was watching either Shepard’s or Grissom’s Redstone flight at our neighbor’s house on their B&W TV that was on a wheeled cart. I think it was Grissom’s. I remember watching Glenn’s launch with my Dad on our B&W TV at home. The bright flame of the Atlas rocket was a bit too much for the video imaging tube used in the TV cameras of the time and tended to “flare” the image a bit. All very exciting.
I watched all the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the early Shuttle launches on TV (and Star Trek TOS first run). I also saw Apollo 14 on the pad a month before launch from the tour bus. It’s been sad to see us plinking around in LEO for so long. We are now entering the REAL space age.
I’m a few years younger than you and remember the Apollo program. I was cognizant of those things at about the age of four, certainly by five.
I remember the latter missions, especially 17. I remember staying up late for the night launch.
And NASA is still doing it the wrong way. In ten minutes yesterday I watched NASA dump ~$2-billion into the Atlantic Ocean.
ON PURPOSE.
To recreate a mission accomplished half a century ago.
It is the price we have to pay to let SLS slip off into the past.
Yes. That hardware is now literally a “sunk cost”. As long as it was hanging around, it was a giant funding sink, and someone would keep trying to find a use for it. Now it’s gone, and nothing like it will ever be built again. That’s perhaps the best outcome, even if it is a bit expensive.
And I must be getting more mellow in old age, because all the emphasis on the various crew “firsts” doesn’t bother me. Much. It’s good to get all of that out of the way, so that the next bunch are just people, and not ticking off boxes.
(And how much are shares of SpaceX going to sell for? Will it be possible to afford to buy single shares? )
Yes. With a bit of luck we’ll be rid of the SLS albatross within three years and, one hopes, Orion as well.
Good questions anent the SpaceX IPO. But I have confidence the shares will be priced within reach of ordinary mortals unlike, say, shares of Berkshire Hathaway which, as of this writing, are north of $716,000 apiece. Elon has said he may reserve as much as 30% of the offering for Ordinary Joe investors.
Have to find out what the stock name is so that I can buy some right away.
Victor Glover said much the same thing regarding firsts.
To recreate a failed mission accomplished half a century ago.
FIFY
Politicians use different metrics to measure the success of a government than we do. To us, success is measured in metrics like cost, performance, reliability, and delivery schedule. To politicians, the metrics that matter include money spend in their districts,
bribes campaign contribution garnered, family members and cronies enriched, and how long they can keep the grift going. The SLS and Orion would’ve been political success stories even if they never flew once. Throwing billions of dollars away with each launch is a feature, not a bug, because they’ll have to spend billions more for the next one.I wish this site had an edit feature.
Me too.
I think Apollo remains one of the great achievements of mankind, and America, and I have an enormous admiration for the men and women (which includes my aunt) who made it work.
But Rand is right that the way in which it was done had serious negative long-term consequences in how we have accessed space.
I haven’t been following the details of the Artemis vehicles and their development, so when I heard the nasaspaceflight.com commentators mentioning that the service module is propelled by a single “gently used” OMS engine cannibalized from Atlantis, the mission finally made sense. They deliberately put four people in a feeble vehicle with ridiculously small delta-v and put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat right off the bat. Who were the ad wizards who thought this one up?
All this and way behind schedule and way over budget.
I just realized something. Apollo 8 was over Christmas but the return is over Easter.
I think kids are getting excited about it, actually.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sz3ANAWX7wQ?feature=share
Well, the ones that wear GoPro cams on their hats. Like I would have had they had GoPro cams back then. I had to settle for my really cool circular slide rule.
Saturn V -> Shuttle -> SLS
Rand, Apollo/Saturn was the most expensive possible way, but the government keeps trying to find an even more expensive way.
After the Shuttle was retired, someone added up the total cost of the program and divided that by the number of flights. It came to about $2 billion per flight. I wonder if that included adjusting for inflation from when it started around 1972 until it was retired in 2011, plus the closeout costs. If not, the average per mission cost was much higher. During most of those years, the Shuttle was a vehicle in search of a mission.
Disagree with me if you choose, but Apollo has to be viewed through the lens of the Cold War and as a demonstration of our military might.
One of the critiques of the atomic bombs used on Japan was, “Why didn’t we tell their generals we were going to blow one up on a Pacific island and come see for yourself what we have and you don’t, not for your scientists for lack of trying and you could ask them if you have any doubts. Why did we have to blow up people with it?”
Actually, we did conduct such a demonstration with Crossroads Able, which was a similar yield bomb, and we invited representatives of the Soviet Union to observe. The two Crossroads shots are the “stock footage” used to represent nuclear blasts because subsequent tests were for the most part kept secret to one degree or another. And the effect was Joe Stalin, from the reports, at the same time not being impressed while telling his scientists, “Build me some of those things.” This outcome, in a way supports Trumans terrible decision because a demonstration may not have had the required war-ending effect.
That said, Apollo could be viewed as a demonstration of our Cold War missile “deterrent”, not that the rocket boosters were anything like our Minuteman ICBMs but the Charles Stark Draper Labs guidance systems very much were. It can be viewed as such as Theodore Sorensen (OK, President Kennedy) issuing the “land a man on the Moon and bring him back safely” along with “We do these and those other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” This brave talk was in the aftermath of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Mr. Castro where our deterrence of Soviet ambition was at a low point.
All of this describes why Apollo was done as an expensive, crash program. But from people, especially on the Left who don’t think deeply about anything, Apollo became part of the mantra “If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we”, where “moonshot” is so much part of the language that the ECE Department and the College of Engineering unapologitically talks about “moonshots” about dumping funding into attracting Federal funding for University research conducted in the most expensive way possible.
Paradoxically, Mr. Nixon took the complaints that Apollo wasted money that could be better spent on other programs, NASA has been way underfunded in relation to the ambition of their goals and the political patronage pork needed to meet them, so here we are.
One of the critiques of the atomic bombs used on Japan was, “Why didn’t we tell their generals we were going to blow one up on a Pacific island and come see for yourself what we have and you don’t, not for your scientists for lack of trying and you could ask them if you have any doubts. Why did we have to blow up people with it?”
That argument has always been stupid on stilts. If Japan had immediately surrendered after Hiroshima was destroyed, it might have merit. Japan didn’t surrender, so another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. They still didn’t surrender for a few more days. When the Emperor decided to surrender, hardliners tried to stop him with a coup. Given what actually happened, how can anyone believe a demonstration detonation would’ve caused Japan to surrender? Wasn’t Hiroshima enough of a demonstration?
Dumbasses, one and all.
Roger that.
Something else to consider. Thursday I was chatting with a college freshman on engineering options. They are 18, thus born 2008. They have no real recollection of the Space Shuttle flying. They weren’t alive the last time we lost astronauts.
I was watching the live NASA coverage (which isn’t always live by the way), and I heard one astro call down to Houston and ask…
“Can you tell us where the electric razor is stored?”
I was aghast.
You’d never hear Borman, Lovell, or Anders make such a call. It sounded completely amateurish:
You don’t KNOW where it’s stored? You don’t know where everything is stored?
WTF?
Well, you know they were in a mad scramble to pack before this mission went off and they just… wait a minute.
Maybe the networks should have brought in their sports color commentary people?
I remember a San Francisco earthquake on the cusp of, was it a World Series baseball game, where the network anchor was tongue tied but sports commentator Al Michaels did a fantastic job describing what he was seeing “in real time” from a helicopter of fires breaking out.
I was in my apt in the SBEQ at Ft Knox getting ready to watch the game. My first thought when the broadcast went blank was earthquake…
Borman, Lovell and Anders didn’t use an electric razor on that flight–they were recovered looking like the explorers that they were.
That they didn’t shave wasn’t really my point.
‘NEW: The Artemis II crew experienced another issue with the spacecraft toilet overnight.
“We tried to vent the wastewater tank that’s attached to the toilet. We had problems with that due to suspected blockage, we think, probably due to ice.”‘
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2040551962609942618
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
Given the Amateur-Night-at-the-Bijou engineering evident in many other aspects of the Orion capsule I suppose one cannot be completely shocked that a cost-plus toilet was designed that could not function in all readily-anticipatable space conditions. One can only hope the SpaceX Starship engineers have taken no advice from allegedly “older and wiser heads” at NASA and its legacy contractors when it comes to outer space bathroom tech. Holding it all the way to even the Moon, never mind Mars, is not an option.