One thing all this space research ruined for me is the phrase "Moonshot" to mean research initiative. I recently read the phrase "fusion moonshot" and all I could think of was "spend a huge amount of money on fusion to find a way to technically make it work with no regard to whether it's economically viable." Like, the fusion equivalent of a Saturn V would be a gigantic 200B$ tokamak that works for about a week.
Apollo was basically political, which explains why it was done in a way that was almost impossible to keep doing. Earlier plans had called for a longterm space infrastructure to make for large repeatable scientific expeditions. But the Moonshot was done for politics, so it focused on winning, not utility.
@ZachWeinersmith Was Soonish (2017) an Audible exclusive? I can't find it on Libro.fm. I do see A City on Mars available for pre-order (for publication on 2023-11-07) there, though, so thanks.
@ZachWeinersmith This is also the premise of #ForAllMankind, where a loss in the race to the Moon keeps the political support going well past Apollo 17
@ZachWeinersmith I think that's basically right. There were AMAZING plans for more space stuff even in Gemini days, a program that was just a proof-of-concept for skills/hardware needed for Apollo. You surely ran into DSF Portree on your book journey - he catalogs a lot of that on his blog (several homes over the years): https://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com
@VE2UWY Portree is one of the best. His dense book on the history of Mars landing proposals is great. One of those "somebody actually did the work" books.
@VE2UWY My take is the Von Braun and Faget ideas, to have a space station and re-usability were a better way to get Moon science, though I think it would've been basically impossible to justify the cost. Von Braun tried to justify it on military grounds (I believe his term was "space supremacy"). Still, given how much money was thrown away by the way Apollo actually shook out, who knows...
@dontgetthursdays Basically read any scholarly or highly detailed history, not pop stuff about Apollo. The classic is The Heavens and the Earth by Mcdougall. More recent is Operation Moonglow by Muir-Harmony. Maybe also Logsdon's books, and the one on Kennedy's decision-making in particular.
@ZachWeinersmith Unlike whole-of-society problems with complex stakeholders, astronauts don't periodically need to be convinced or coerced to stay inside the rocket.
@JoeUchill The one thing I would add, and this is nerd heresy, but Apollo (while undebatably fucking awesome) was probably a bad idea. The Soviets would've lost on tech/economics anyway even if they got to spent the 60s gloating. Humans in space just doesn't matter that much. Kennedy himself wanted to do desalinization tech, but thought the public wouldn't care.
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