The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO.

Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don't dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don't take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can't make headlines don't get billions from Congress.

We're not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that's true, but who knows what we'll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?

"I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion."

With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)

The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.

And the planetary motions were discovered by somebody trying to prove that the 5 planets all fit inside a babushka doll of the 5 platonic solids. This says nothing of what would happen if these scientists had different creeds or different goals. Most scientific discoveries are indeed very boring. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter while trying study the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, a very simple and very down to earth goal that lead to a remarkable discovery. At the same time Jane Goodall’s big creed was that maybe it is OK to empathize with the individual animals you are studying.

Grand goals are neither necessary nor sufficient for making scientific advancements. And while some goals might be useful, others are just as likely to be a major distraction. There is reason to believe that a human mars landing falls in the latter category.

People tend to forget that we are still murdering each other over this planet.

Getting to Mars would either be a solution to that problem, or just an extension.

I guess, therefore, it matters who gets there first.

(See also: Psyche 16)

Prematurely shooting for Mars could literally bankrupt resources on Earth and still have worse odds than a more methodical approach.

NASA's budget during the Apollo era was about 10 times that of the Manhattan Project, about 1% of the entire US government budget. It could have turned into history's largest money incinerator if things had gone bad organizationally. I can't really think of any project like it that has been attempted before or since--not at such a huge scale and on such a short timeline.

The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster, and it was only diligence and commitment (and luck) at every level of NASA that allowed them to succeed given such a monumental goal. But the goal itself was very close to madness.

For All Mankind on Apple TV+ has a lot of fun extrapolating from the premise of the Soviet moonshot succeeding and beating the US to the moon. Then presenting an alternate history of how events unfold differently because of it.

Basically extrapolating the insanity of the Apollo program up until the present day, as USA and Soviet Union continually try to one up each other in the space race.

It's a lot of fun.

It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.

It's not that we can't, we just decided to redirect those resources to other areas (i.e. the Space Shuttle) and now those designs are very out of date.

We can build a replacement, more capable than Saturn-V, and less expensive even. But we cannot reproduce Saturn-V the way it flew in 1970s.

Speaking of military technology, humans lost the secret of "Greek fire" [1], which apparently was a medieval form of napalm, not extinguishable by water. All the current knowledge of chemistry did not help restore the recipe yet (because history studies have a smaller budget than the actual military, of course).

We haven't lost the ability to fly to the Moon, of course, because the principles remain the same, and the technologies advance. But we had to build completely different rockets, not reusing many, if any, bits of Saturn-V.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire

Has it though? These are requirements for our normal earth orbit satellites, surely these would have advanced at a similar pace without the moon mission.

> We can't even build a Saturn-V any more.

Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end?

Dead end, yes; engineering, no. More: we didn't need it for so long that everyone who was responsible has since gotten old/died.

And even then, only a dead end given the scientific and industrial position at the time; those can change to turn dead ends into open ends.

It was the power of the Saturn V being sufficient to get us out of the Earth's gravity well, plus the cleverness of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission plan that allowed us to pull it off. Once those two things were worked out and understood, the rest was just a matter of executing. But it was pure happenstance that the laws of Physics and the Earth/Moon orbital mechcanics lined up to make it possible.

Even the bloody 700 ton UR-500 which became the Proton eventually piggybacked on this, marked on paper as a 50-100 megaton warhead ICBM!

But looks like the Americans were thinking even bigger. :-)

And in general will make more people consider to get involved as this is real now, not another power point, computer model or study.

Even NASA "doesn't mind risking/losing some lives", in that while they drive the "probability of loss of crew" as low as feasible, they never can get it to zero. Possibly, a private SpaceX mission might have a higher go/no-go threshold for that probability – but if it adds up to (say) 50%, I really doubt they'll go ahead with the mission, they'll likely instead delay so they can invest further engineering resources in reducing it to a more reasonable level.

Then Kennedy came with "LETS DO A LUNAR LANDING LIKE RIGHT NOW, LOL!" & then got himself killed so it could not be taken back.

What followed was an ultimately successful mad dash with great emphasis on cost-is-not-an-option which did bring us some nice inventions but did not really help to build any real space infra or to lower the launch costs.

And arguably also entrenched the bad idea that space needs to be horrendously expensive and always will be. Not really, until you are on a mad dash with a singular unrelated objective.

But hey, it might still be useful experience next time a killer asteroid or hostile aliens show up.

That said, I'd love to hear what people who work at JPL and NASA have to say to your point.

The biggest flaw with the rovers is that they’re terribly slow, so they can only explore a small range around a landing site. If they could cover even 100km/day, which seems plausible on RTG or solar power, we could explore many sites.

It happened to Spirit, and it was moving at a glacial pace, with a team of people carefully reviewing its every move.

Sample return step 1 (collect samples) is already underway.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to expand what's possible with "actual machines", but that should be up to academia - and they're pretty clear that human space exploration isn't worth the money.

Edison and DC lost that battle.

At the time, whatever it was, it was warranted as being worthy of classification. Another tragic loss to the scientific community as I understand it.

"...not because it's easy, but because it's hard."

What Kennedy did not say, was "it's just hard enough". Hard enough that we can pull it off, and the Soviets can't, and the world can see that. Much better to gain a space upmanship victory than a shooting nuclear missile victory.

Now we are in a different place. Well, maybe not for too long, you never know. China has its own space ambitions, and military ambitions too.

But just doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things makes no sense.