NASA didn't really go to the moon. North American-Rockwell did.

[Saboburns]

That's who was paid billions to design and construct the Lunar module for Apollo by the US Government. NA did it for profit.

So too did Boeing, who built the Saturn V first stage. North American also built the second stage of the Saturn V. Douglas (today's MacDonnell-Douglas) built the third stage. These companies perfected the incredible engineering challenges in part by building missiles designed to lay nuclear waste to nations on the other side of the globe. In 30 minutes or less. And they did it for money.

The Jet Propulsion Lab hasn't really landed anything on Mars, but Lockheed has, four times.

I understand the ire towards Branson and Bezos. Getting wealthy because you own a corporation is not a noble trait. Being the first to ride your company rocket is not the best PR.

BUT IT'S THE ONLY WAY OUR SPECIES IS ABLE SO JOURNEY AMONG THE COSMOS.

Like it or not, 100 years from now Bezos and Branson, and especially Musk, will be lauded as great humans.

I don't expect to change anyone's opinion with this post. I just thought I'd add my two cents.

[leftstreet]

1. And none of these corporations got fed money? wow n/t

[lagomorph777]

9. Did you read past the subject line?

[leftstreet]

12. Yeah, it didn't make sense

"NA did it for profit."

Who is NA?

[lagomorph777]

17. "North American"

The OP did make a boo-boo though; the LM was built by Grumman.

[leftstreet]

19. Oh! I see n/t

[Hugin]

2. Well, if you're going to split hairs.

It was Grumman who built the lander.

They also billed NA for the tow home on Apollo 13.

[GregariousGroundhog]

13. Grumman's towing invoice to North American was sent in jest

Grumman never received payment, nor did they expect to.

[Hugin]

18. I know.

In my humble opinion, one of the genius moments in all of recorded punkery.

Yet, another product of the space program.

[joetheman]

3. I can't even put Bezos and Musk on the same human plane.

[Budi]

20. 👍 Elon Musk is the Billionare who SHOULD be ripped on.

He is dirty as it gets.

He makes Bezos look like the altar boy of billionares.

Musk give nothing back for all the filthy lithium exploitation in impovershed countries, alone.

And that's just a smidge of his dirty dealings.

Gross 🤢

[The Magistrate]

4. We're Not Going To 'Journey Among The Cosmos' Sir

And certainly these little squibs make no contribution to that dream

Which, if we have anything like a basic understanding of the universe, is going to remain a dream.

[leftstreet]

7. Maybe Amazon could end up with some defense contracts

guaranteed 2 day delivery

[Johonny]

16. They already have defense contracts via Blue Origin

[USALiberal]

8. Feel same about spacex??

[The Magistrate]

10. The Re-Useable Booster System, Sir?

That is useful for servicing orbital devices, which have some terrestrial importance.

It is not a gateway to the universe.

[Dial H For Hero]

32. Starship (if it works out) will be a gamechanger. It can open up the inner Solar System to us.

[The Magistrate]

34. By 'Inner' Sir, You Mean Mercury Through Mars?

Roughly speaking, anyway. Asteroids I expect would come into the definition.

And by 'opening' you mean commercial exploitation?

[Dial H For Hero]

37. Well, access to Mercury takes an awful lot of delta V. So Luna, Venus, Mars, and the asteroids.

I'm actually thinking of manned exploration. Commercial exploitation is going to take a while. With the possible exception of Luna, I don't think it likely that substantial money is to be made outside of Earth orbit for at least a century or so.

I certainly wish Musk the best getting to Mars, I'd love to see it in the next decade or two.

[The Magistrate]

40. Fair Enough, Sir

You will gain some sense of my attitude by contrasting the 'Starship' name with what is actually proposed. 'Planetship' would have at least a truer ring. There's too much of booster-ism in the exaggerate names tagged on these things for my taste.

The value of research can never be anticipated, and that more knowledge will be of value is certainly my default position. It is, however, hard to see what advantage a human crew might bring to research directed towards Venus and Mercury, given their extreme conditions. I suspect Mars will prove a far more dangerous place than people with the bug to go there expect.

[Dial H For Hero]

46. I wouldn't anticipate any substantial human presence in Venerian orbit, but a science platform

floating in the upper atmosphere where temperature and pressure are close to Earthlike? Mayyyyybe.

Regarding Mars, I haven't the slightest doubt that exploration and (hopefully) colonization will result in the deaths of many people involved in such endeavors. I'm also confident that such programs won't lack for volunteers.

As for the moniker 'Starship'....shrug. Marketing is going to play its part.

[The Magistrate]

48. A Pleasure To Conclude On Friendly Terms, Sir

We don't often do that.

I agree there will be no shortage of volunteers. In the words of the immortal Bo Diddley:

"I'm just twenty-two and I don't mind dyin'!"

Have you ever read Alfred Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'? It opens with an illustration of the volunteer principle in such matters, and is a ripping yarn into the bargain. You would probably enjoy it, obsolete as its future is.

[Dial H For Hero]

57. Likewise.

We don't often do that.

I will strive to do so more often in the future.

Have you ever read Alfred Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'? It opens with an illustration of the volunteer principle in such matters, and is a ripping yarn into the bargain. You would probably enjoy it, obsolete as its future is.

A rare class of Golden Age SF that I haven't read. I'll have to do so!

[The Magistrate]

58. Best Thing On That Line I Ever Read, Sir

Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space my dwelling place
The stars my destination

[USALiberal]

52. So why is NASA hiring SpaceX? Because they're terrible?

[The Magistrate]

54. Always Best To Read What You Reply To, Sir

Saves time and trouble all around.

[USALiberal]

60. Lol, ok! Nt

[LanternWaste]

43. Have you given any consideration to decaffeinated?

Any thought at all?


Twas bryllyg, and the slythy toves did gyre and gymble in the wabe...

[Silent3]

42. Why do you make it sound so impossible?

Aside from the big if about whether we destroy ourselves before we can escape from this rock, to me it seems almost inevitable that we will 'Journey Among The Cosmos'.

Die here soon, or spread out into space. It's one or the other.

Of course, there's a good chance the pesky laws of physics will continue to constrain how fast we can travel, that there's no warp drive or the like in our future. So it won't be like most of our sci-fi likes the depict a space-faring future. Maybe only long, slow trips for dedicated colonists who aren't coming back in their lifetimes. Or robotic probes, either carrying either nothing but our AI offspring, or AI along with everything needed to establish biomes on habitable/terraformable worlds.

The only thing that gives me pause about whether our technology will take us that far is the Fermi Paradox.

[The Magistrate]

44. Because It Is, Sir

It is a pleasant dream, and I will grant I'm enough of a misanthrope to have scant patience for such.


"Once upon a time, Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He didn’t know that he was Chou. Suddenly he awoke and was palpably Chou. He didn’t know whether he were Chou who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was Chou."

[Silent3]

49. I think that claim of impossibility requires a bit more elaboration.

Something a bit more than, oh, because you say so.

[The Magistrate]

50. I'm Bored

"I'm going home now. Someone get me some frogs and some bourbon."

[Saboburns]

53. You've been traveling through the Cosmos since you were born upon this wonderful planet.

We all have.

T'would be nice to be able to navigate and journey to where we would like to go someday, eh?

[The Magistrate]

55. Not Of Our Own Effort, Sir, Nor Under Our Own Control

That seems to be the crux of the matter. A staphylococcus colony has a claim to cosmic journeying equal to ours, by that standard.

[USALiberal]

62. lol, This thread is not going well for you. But nice try.

[The Magistrate]

63. You Really Think So?

Takes all kinds, I expect....

[CrackityJones75]

5. I grew up completely immersed in everything SPACE

I grew up completely immersed in everything SPACE. Like a lot of kids my age back then we thought there would be flying cars. Moon trips. All sorts of futuristic things. Heck we would probably be exploring deeper into space. Maybe to Mars and beyond…. Of course some of that has happened just not exactly the way we thought it might. But to get to there and to expand our knowledge and to really explore it is going to take someone with money. That’s unfortunate. And it sucks that Bezos takes advantage if tax laws and labor laws. I can on one hand think he needs to do better there and at the same time cheer for him to help pave the way for some other things. And I can press my representatives and other government officials to try to pass legislation that requires people to do the things that they apparently won’t do unless they are forced to.


But I can appreciate that he is working towards something that I was very excited about as a kid.

[lagomorph777]

11. Yup; it's not black or white.

Imperfect people can still do amazing things. And there is no legitimate reason we can't make them also do the right thing.

[lame54]

6. Somehow some way Bezo's will get those 2 cents...

Tax free

[Sherman A1]

14. So if I am correct

The American taxpayer went to the moon as we are the ones who paid for the project.

[Budi]

15. Especially MUSK? Was Elon on the Bezos mission?

That fker is the billionare who SHOULD be ripped on.

Dirty Elon.

[ChrisF1961]

21. The Lunar Module was designed and built by Grumman Aerospace Corporation

not by North American Rockwell.

[Stinky The Clown]

22. McDonnell Company built the Mercury and Gemini Capsules - First Free Man in Space

They later merged with Douglas Aircraft (McDonnell Douglas DC-9, later MD-80 airliners) and were later acquired by Boeing.

NASA let the contracts and supervised things (more or less) but a private company did the work.

[Klaralven]

24. Overall mission analysis, systems engineering and spacecraft integration was done by Bellcomm, Inc

Historical note

Bellcomm, Inc was a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) established in 1963 for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Bellcomm was originally organized to provide NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight with technical and management advice for the Manned Space Flight Program. As the NASA-Bellcomm relationship evolved, the latter became directly responsible for systems engineering and analysis and assisted in the overall spacecraft integration for the Apollo program. Bellcomm's Technical Library provided company personnel with immediate access to technical reports and studies dealing with a wide variety of topics affecting the American space program. When the Apollo Program ended in 1972 the company also ceased operation and the library was transferred to the National Air and Space Museum (NASM).

https://sova.si.edu/record/NASM.XXXX.0093

When the Apollo program ended, many of the industrial partners disbanded their spaceflight organizations and reassigned staff to other projects.

That was typical of the aerospace industry, where employment depended on funding of specific airplanes or rocket systems.

[Aristus]

25. The men who landed on the Moon weren't rich.

They drew a serviceman's salary instead. Neil Armstrong, a civilian, drew a modest NASA salary. And none of them had life insurance for their families if something went wrong up there. And no personal wealth to fall back on. (Alan Shepherd became a millionaire after Mercury, but he was exception.)

They took huge risks, and they did it for their country. They didn't even do it for the glory or bragging rights. Read the biographies of the Moon men, and find out how few of them actually bragged about their accomplishments, and how much pain, anguish, and disruption they experienced in their lives as a result of the space program.

Billionaire does big, expensive thing by riding on the shoulders of giants.

Big deal.

[DinahMoeHum]

29. +1000s

n/t

[PSPS]

26. LOL. Yes, let the billionaire parasite class continue to destroy society because ... cosmos!!!1111!!

[Buckeye_Democrat]

27. Nope.

Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrodinger, Edison and many others will be remembered long after those guys because they actually helped broaden human understanding.

They might be remembered at the same level of George Westinghouse, maybe, but even he takes a backseat to Nicola Tesla and his AC induction motor despite Westinghouse's investment in that technology.

[-misanthroptimist]

28. So what you are saying is...

...the US government landed people on the Moon by contracting out work to private corporations. None of those corporations would have (or could have) achieved a lunar landing without NASA. None.

[hunter]

30. My grandfather figured out how to make many little bits of exotic metal for the Apollo Project.

Mad skills he'd mysteriously acquired during World War II and the Cold War.

He was an Army Air Corp officer in World War II and was later hired by the Military Industrial Complex as an engineer.

He NEVER talked about that shit.

I could always engage him in talk about the space program. He was immensely proud of that work. The other stuff was just a dirty job that had to be done.

I've got his Apollo Eight "metal flown to the moon" medallion.

[NickB79]

31. Given the pace of climate change from rampant consumerism

In 100 yr global civilization will be largely gone for large swaths of the planet and we'll struggle just to get satellites into orbit.

It would take a miracle for us to set up self sufficient lunar and Mars colonies before this mass extinction event we've started kills half the world's population thru famine, disease and resource wars.

The vast majority of the planet's population in 2121 won't know or care about what Bezos or Musk did in space. They will care about the destroyed ecosystems they left behind for future generations, all in the quest for profits.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

33. Not to mention that trying to survive...

... on the Moon or Mars, even with such an Earthly catastrophe, will remain an even bigger struggle.

Humanity will likely need to leave the entire solar system to find a more Earth-like planet or moon, and that's an impossibility too at this point.

Traveling near light-speed is a major obstacle, but also the risk of colliding with even a tiny speck of dust at such velocity. It would be like a major explosion since kinetic energy is proportional to the velocity-squared.

Scientists are currently searching for Earth-like planets elsewhere in the cosmos, whereas Elon Musk and others don't seem to have a decent grasp of the big picture.

If some geniuses discover wormholes or the like, which is a major fantasy for quickly traveling to other parts of the cosmos at this point in time (and perhaps forever), it certainly won't be discovered by some money-obsessed clowns who value power and influence more than understanding.

[Dial H For Hero]

39. Just terraform Mars and/or Venus. How hard can it be?

Although simply dropping some icy bodies in the 10 to 20 km diameter range onto Mars would make it considerably more benign over the course of a few centuries. Hm....

[Buckeye_Democrat]

51. Lol, I've seen some ideas about it already.

The terraforming of Venus was especially funny to me!

Mars:

Venus:

And people like Elon Musk can't even properly think through the problems of his "hyper loop"! So he's certainly untrustworthy about his ideas of colonizing Mars. He's a rich guy with big plans, but without the years of dedication to better understanding REALITY. His dedication was to wealth and influence.

Hyper loop craziness below, in which Musk finally altered the plan to essentially a wheeled-train in a tube! And ultimately, trying to wipe references to the nonsense from his website entirely.

[misanthrope]

56. I was going to post something similar

Except your outlook is even rosier than mine. I don't think there will be enough left of civilization for even satellite maintenance or launches. Air travel won't exist anymore and the humans left will be scraping together survival on a subsistence level.

Our species had our chance and we've blown it.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

59. Depending on the severity of the damage, you might...

... be correct.

Nuclear weapons could hasten a dystopian future too. It's another one of those unpleasant possibilities that many people ignore for the sake of their personal sanity, to varying degrees based on their emotional maturity.

[Dial H For Hero]

35. Many people seem to want motives for going into space similar to those expressed in Star Trek TNG.

(silly science aside)



It ain't happening.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

36. It's quite likely never happening, ever.

Profit motives or not.

[Dial H For Hero]

38. For clarification, I'm not predicting warp drive. Presuming that humanity continues to progress at

more or less the present rate, I think we could colonize much of the Solar System in the next millenium. Getting to other stars, though....tiny, automated probes, going a small fraction of lightspeed? Perhaps. Passenger liners? Not so much.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

41. I think colonizing our solar system is more...

... of a pipe dream than fixing the destruction caused by humans on this planet. Completely wipe the Earth of life and our atmosphere, and then the other bodies of our solar system might be on more even ground for sustaining people.

[Dial H For Hero]

45. Well, I certainly don't expect it in my lifetime. One can dream, though.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

47. There's scientists working on it.

It's mostly observational right now.

Thankfully, several of them pursued science because of a strong desire to understand the world. Unlike the Michio Kaku types who admit that science fiction was their motivation years ago, and it still shows from his fantastical ideas.

[brooklynite]

61. This was a lovely piece of dialogue, which has no bearing in reality...