Comment by recursivedoubts

> There are other indices if you want to compare historical prices relevant to moon programs

Could you please expand or give a few pointers on those indices? Or where could I learn more about this.

>The quality of our education has fallen in addition to the rising costs.

Maybe as an average because more people are being educated, but I find it hard to believe that our top students now are any less educated than the top students in the past.

Sending money also increases the risk of nuclear war in which even more people will die and lose their freedom.

Chamberlain would be proud of you.

Minor nitpick, but Ukraine does not have many young man fighting for it, the average age of the combatant is over fourty.

> Doesn't sending weapons to a country at war ensure more death and destruction?

Well, if you send weapons, instead of killing people you have the aggressor's army just pumping cheeks and pretending to look fierce. No death, no destruction, just maybe threats. No?

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

I believe NASA is targeting something like 99.5% reliability with Starliner. I agree that ability to accept risk has decreased, but my guess is that Starliner in reality has more like one nine of reliability.

If you look at the first flight test of Starliner, everyone talks about the timing problem that caused them to fail to achieve the proper orbit. What is more rarely discussed is that after this happened, they did a top to bottom code review while the Starliner was in orbit, and found a bug in the crew/service module undocking procedure that would have caused the service module to strike the crew module after undocking, most likely damage the heat shield, and cause the capsule to burn up on reentry. They applied a hot fix in orbit for this.

Had the timer problem not happened, the code review wouldn't have happened and this wouldn't have been caught.

With the number of gremlins that have come up on every Starliner flight, there are certainly many more lower probability defects that will eventually lead to a loss of crew.

My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright. These days that talent generally doesn't go to those places. IMO the main reason SpaceX has been so successful is that a lot of those people really wanted to work on rockets but didn't want to work for NASA/Boeing.

The cost/benefit analysis was probably seen differently back then. At that point it was a space race against the Big Bad and winning was more important than a certain threshold of safety. Now? I can't see the benefit of risking the life of the Starliner crew. What would it prove now that NASA has had so many crewed launches and returns?

All the evidence you need is that even in the present day, advanced countries have repeatedly tried to send probes to the moon and failed, when we did it with humans in the 1960s. All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario (i.e. The first moon landing when Neil Armstrong changed the landing site at the last minute, or the events of Apollo 13).

> And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically.

Yes, recall that Apollo 1 incinerated the capsule crew, that would have canceled the entire program today, back then it was "press on..."

We did continue with the Space Shuttle after its accidents, but that was decades ago now, and I'm sure that played into any discussions there might have been about extending the program.

It might sound cynical but it's accurate. There was a big political will to go to the moon because the USSR was beating us at every important space milestone. That galvanized the American government sufficiently to spend massive amounts of capital to win the space race.

After a decade or two, and the loss of any real competition, the US lost the political will to keep pushing boundaries. The primary reason we don't still have the immediate capability to put people onto the moon isn't technical, it's political. We are only now reigniting that desire, and again, it's because of another great power starting to push things in space.

It was CCCP pushing us then, it's the CCP now.

I personally can't really imagine anything less inspiring than repeating a feat we managed over 50 years ago.

Well, the Moon is an entire world.

We're still doing science on the planet Earth, because there's still plenty to learn, and we actually live here with billions of people.

We've only sent a handful of folks to the Moon so far. We've literally barely scratched the surface, and only a few tiny patches of it as that.

Exploring new places has always lead to all sorts of interesting new discoveries. No reason to think a whole new world mightn't hold a few interesting (and/or potentially lucrative) surprises.

We have no idea what's under the surface of the moon. We literally know nothing. It could be that the moon is secretly a gold mine of rocket propellant 5 meters under the surface, but we simply never looked deep enough.

We built the first railways on earth 200 years ago. We could build railways on the moon this century. Think about this. The time between the beginning of industrialization and a space civilization could be just 300 years.

Your grand kids would experience the space age, but only if you start working on it today.

The latest (series 9) Apple Watch has (up to) 2 GB of RAM and can do billions of instructions per second.

In 1966, the mainframe to use was the CDC 6600, able to do ~3 million instructions per second (MIPS), with kilobytes, possibly a megabyte of RAM. The US government had a good number of mainframes, of a wide variety, but they wouldn't be able to reach the Apple Watch's computing power.

Faster than a Cray 2.