From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".
Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels. Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at least cost savings where it matters.
Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem.
Yes, the plan might be to carry much more equipment in fewer launches, but if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If this amount of people are saying that something is lost in spirit and some stuff is not done in an optimal way, I tend to believe them.
> From my understanding, nobody is telling that "We should use Apollo as-is", but "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".
The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.
While arguably today there are comparable tensions, countries no longer have to prove anything to the world, and space exploration is mostly a scientific endeavour fueled by private companies that want to make a profit. There's less of an urgency to get to the moon, which can explain that difference in spirit that you mention.
FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go. The fact world superpowers achieved what they did in a couple of decades of the last century, a mere 60 years after flying machines were invented, is nothing short of extraordinary. But it was a special time, and we shouldn't feel pressured to repeat it.
> Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem.
That doesn't seem like a bad approach to me. There is a lot of value to be gained by gluing existing technology together, and if anything, Docker is proof of how wildly successful that can be. Most scientific breakthroughs are effectively a repurposing or combination of previous ideas, after all. I don't think this is a valid criticism of Docker, nor of this approach.
For anyone interested in this, Apple TV's "For All Mankind" is a wonderful exploration of what could have happened if the space race never ended. It's not a historical treatise or anything, but it's still a fascinating take and makes me hope we see real progress in the coming years.
>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.
Well, money wise they now spend much more budget (inflation adjusted) it seems. Technology wise, one would expect they have more of it now, than back then. So, what, they lack some mystery motivation factor?
I'd say it's rather general modern bureucratic incompetence, overdesign, plus losing the people who knew how to build stuff and had actual Apollo-era experience, with a huge period in between without Moon missions that meant they couldn't pass anything directly to the current NASA generation (a 40 year old NASA engineer today would be negative years old back then), which obliterated all kinds of tacit knowledge.
It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.
>FWIW I don't think that's a bad thing. Space exploration is the most difficult human endeavour, and taking the time to do it right seems like the optimal way to go.
Isn't the whole point that they're not "taking time to do it right", but waste enormous amounts of money and time while doing it massively wrong?
Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget.
And Apollo program itself was, IIRC, over half of it.
Never since NASA had such funding and political will to just let them try to get a stated goal. History of projects since Apollo is full of every attempt at making things simpler and more reusable either getting canceled, blown with congressional requirements for pork-barrel (SLS), damaged by needing to beg for money from organizations with different goals (Shuttle is a great example), smothered by budget cuts resulting in reuse plans getting canceled skyrocketing per-mission cost (Shuttle, Cassini), and that with NASA being effectively prevented from doing iterative approach and ending having to gold-plate everything to reduce risks on the often "once in a lifetime" launch.
It's important to remember that Apollo was one of Kennedy's signature political projects at the time he was assassinated, which was an important factor in its political viability.
>Apollo program got to the point that NASA budget was >4% of total federal budget
Given the figures in TFA, that points to a much smaller federal budget and much smaller government expenditures in general, than to less absolute (inflation adjusted) money for this over Apollo.
>It's like they had the people who designed UNIX back in the 70s, and a room full of JS framework programmers in 2024, plus all kinds of managers "experts" in Agile Development.
Does it mean Artemis is the Electron of space missions?
There is a space race now, between the US and China. It is tempered by China being only a non-NATO regional security threat, especially in the form of forcibly uniting Taiwan with the PRC. The modern space race is one branch of a many-faceted technological rivalry. So it doesn't have to make business sense or scientific sense in any strict way. But it also can't consume a large fraction of the GDP, or blow up a crew if that can be avoided.
>The political climate in the 1960s was far more tense than it is today, which fueled the space race in ways that forced both sides to give their absolute best efforts to move space exploration forward.
I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser. NATO is now talking about putting "trainers" into Ukraine, and US-made weaponry is being used to kill Vatniks; China is using water cannon on Philippine ships in the South China Sea; Iran is shooting missiles at Israel and the Houthis are trying to knock international shipping out of the Gulf of Aden.
It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less competent today. (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were still worried that the USSR would overtake the West economically.)
> I'd say the climate is as tense today, and it is getting tenser.
I think that all the examples you mentioned pale in comparison to the terror of global annihilation from nuclear weapons, a couple of decades after the bloodiest war in human history, during the peak of the Cold War. Conflicts exist today as well, and there is an increasing risk of a global conflict, but there is no urgency of beating an adversary ideologically because you can't fight them militarily. There was a nationwide competitive spirit back then that just doesn't exist today, which caused nations to accomplish things that seem impossible in hindsight.
> It's just that the US looks a lot weaker and less competent today.
I wouldn't say the US as a whole, since as a country it's still a leader in science and technology, and it has sufficient financial resources to invest in this project, if it wanted to. I think it boils down to the lack of urgency and political/public support, and perhaps managerial and competency problems at NASA itself.
> (But perhaps that is hindsight? In the 60s people were still worried that the USSR would overtake the West economically.)
By some measures, China has overtaken the US economically, and they have a space program with a focus on the moon, yet both sides are sloppy in their own ways. I think we'll get there eventually, but it will take more attempts, time and resources than we planned for. And, to be fair, it took 11 missions for Apollo to land on the moon, 10 Gemini missions before it, and many failures along the way. But if you take a look at the rate of progress, and time between missions, it's clear that getting to the moon was US' primary objective in the '60s, which is far from what it is today.
I certainly agree with the lack of political support, but the American public never supported Apollo. There was a brief moment, right when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, when just over 50% of Americans thought Apollo was a good idea. The rest of the time it was a majority opinion that it wasn't worth it.
asked of 58% of people who favored cuts in domestic spending, found 5% of people wanted cuts to "Space technology, Moon Shots, Scientific Research" (compared to 20% in welfare)
says 54% of people think the space program is "not worth it" in July 1967 and similar questions around that time get similar results. In April 1970 (after the 1969 success) Harris asks the question
You're probably right. I wasn't alive nor in the US during that period, so can only infer from what I've seen and read, but I would wager that even the staunchest opponents of the US space program back then couldn't have helped but feel pride of what their country accomplished in such a short time.
And even if the majority opposed it, I still think that overall the amount of supporters then would've been greater than the amount of people who support it today. We're living in a time of ignorance and public disinterest in science that Carl Sagan predicted in the '90s[1], which didn't exist in the '60s. That spirit of optimism was partly what enabled such grand scientific projects, and I think most Americans were deeply moved by the words of JFK in that historic 1962 speech[2].
Apollo was a development and technical marvel. I don't think I would necessarily consider it done in an "optimal way" except for optimizing for time at great expense.
Artemis certainly isn't fiscally optimal either, mostly driven by a bunch of stipulations in their budget placed there by senators from states where all of these Shuttle-derived parts are built.
> "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".
What if we don't have the same spirit any longer? Nobody is going to acknowledge that publicly at NASA but they are acknowledging it by their actions. What if people who had "spirit" went to make youtube videos, work for Musk, Wall Street or Google? It takes some time to gauge the stickiness and depth of bureaucratic muck, but after a few years people can see it, and move on to other things. Guess who's left? Those who don't have much spirit left.
> "why don't we use the same spirit when we were building these back then?".
Isn't that just personal opinion? If anything, the current era of spaceflight has finally restored the Apollo ethos that had been dead for decades. So the answer to your question is "we're already doing it". Lots of people seem to be going nuts and saying "but not like that!" as they seem to have some alternative weird vision for what Apollo was. My dad grew up watching Apollo launches, he even got to work on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in a small part. He's one of the people more hyped for SpaceX's mission/goal and Starship than anyone I know.
NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in 1968 declined to start the second production run. Nixon only assumed office in 1969, at which point the only question was how many of the remaining ten stacks would fly as part of Apollo. Under Nixon the final three Apollo lunar missions were cancelled, with one of those Saturn V stacks being used for Skylab instead. But even if all three had flown to the moon stagnation was inevitable as NASA's focus had already been directed to the shuttle.
Everything made/designed in Apollo are no short of marvels. Today we can do much better with lighter, smaller electronics, and should be able to do weight savings or at least cost savings where it matters.
Instead Artemis feels like "let's dig the parts pile and put what we have together, and invent the glue required for the missing parts", akin to today's Docker based development ecosystem.
Yes, the plan might be to carry much more equipment in fewer launches, but if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If this amount of people are saying that something is lost in spirit and some stuff is not done in an optimal way, I tend to believe them.