The problem with expensive launch in the past wasn't due to propellant cost.

"Following the use of integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) in 1963, IC technology was later adopted for the AGC.[17] The Apollo flight computer was one of the first computers to use silicon IC chips.[4][8]"

A lot of money went to IC technology thanks to that, directly leading to the phones you mention. It is quite likely that without just these specific Apollo investments into ICs, we would be quite a few years behind on computer technology.

But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.

[1] - https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-h...

It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.

Crewed landing is a massive achievement, but it being the finish line of the race is the US framing, primarily due to getting beaten in all other firsts.

That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed.

You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...).

Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight.

The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.

I get fulfillment via work.

> Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.

A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.

I wonder what this would look like. I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.

“the superfluous is highly necessary”

– Voltaire

Or you could use hypothetical a nuclear power power plant that would be incredibly expensive to build, ship, run and maintain on a foreign planet.

You were right about the radiation! Kind of. There's "only" 50x more radiation on Mars' surface than on Earth's. You said this was less than what astronauts on the ISS are exposed to. How is that a meaningful comparison? You're talking about people living their entire lives in this environment, and presumably making babies who grow into adolescents and adults, all the while threatened by an amount of radiation we have no idea if a human child could live through.

The atmosphere on Mars is so thin that exposure to it will kill you. The level of radiation is so high that exposure to it will kill you, unless you lived essentially your entire life underground or in a bunker. The cold temperatures will kill you. The soil has perchlorate in concentrations that will kill you. There's basically nothing to do there -- no walks outside without a space suit, no nature to look at, no living beings (except perhaps soil microbes that would be instantly destroyed in the process of extracting water) -- nothing more available there than here on Earth except looking at the stars and dying. [1]

Every argument I've seen people make for colonizing Mars in the near term has been emotional. The arguments are all the more emotional for insisting that they are rational. We have no idea if we could grow food in a closed system indefinitely, or reproduce in space or on another planet, and the amount of research going into these literally existential questions is close to zero. Nor do the billionaires who claim to be obsessed with getting us to be a multi-planet civilization seem to give a shit about them. Colonizing Mars isn't a plan; it's a meme.

Finally, there's no thought given to how to deal with inevitable social problems that will arise if there are large (1000+) populations away from Earth: what to do with people who have psychological breakdowns? how do you prioritize if more people need to be sent home than there's space for on a return rocket? what are your responsibilities toward colonists who need expensive permanent care? what if they can't survive Earth's gravity due to physiological changes from growing up off-planet? What if an entire space colony will never be self-sustaining and they need to be supported with expensive shipments of food and supplies from Earth forever -- who will pay? Or will we?

Look, if you want to colonize Mars or other planets because you think it's a cool thing to do, at least that's an honest, personal opinion. But if you think putting a ton of resources into going to Mars anytime soon is a good investment -- when we aren't even mitigating an ongoing climate disaster here on Earth, the one environment to which we are exquisitely adapted and which is non-existent literally anywhere else in the known universe -- then you are fooling yourself.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/26/nasa-curiosi...

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

Incidentally, we tolerate this kind of "slavery" just fine when we charge people rent for basic shelter. The cost of maintaining the asset (the house) is far less than the cost we actually charge people, so in your sense when I pay rent I am being enslaved by the landlord to support their lifestyle.

Finally, you brought up slavery. The guy I'm replying to just said "work is good". I don't think it's good that we make people destroy their bodies in amazon fulfilment centers. People know what's good for them, if they want to do work let them do the work they want. But to say "no, you have to do the work I want you to do" under the hypothesis that we have plenty of stuff to go around (and we absolutely do) is just sick.

I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up.

Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw

> planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.

There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.

And left to die in orbit.

> Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.

Recent sci fi novels I've ready have been really depressing because while maybe some colony planet is doing OK the Earth is a used up husk, and I'd like to think that we could have both: a planet we chose to make last and successful footholds on other bodies (water moons and water planets make more sense to me)

[1] New York Times, 9 weeks before the Kitty Hawk's first flight (https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/svc/tmach/v1/refer?pdf=true...)

The experiments done on ISS suggest that for optimum health a gravity of at least two thirds of that of Earth is necessary, which disqualifies almost all the bodies from the Solar System, because they are either too small or too big.

On a rotating spaceship it is possible to create any level of artificial gravity. In theory, one could make an underground rotating living space on Mars, to increase the apparent gravity, but that would consume much more energy and it would complicate entering and exiting, in comparison with a rotating spaceship.

Obviously, something like this will not be built any time soon, but nonetheless an expansion into the Solar System is possible even without living on the surfaces of other celestial bodies.

Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with.

It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc...

Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations.

If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.

I get it though. This is just how naturalism looks like when runs out of arguments in its favor.

Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer.

Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.

For the record, I would definitely visit such a hotel, even better if it included a super high altitude railway, Jungfrau Railway style!

Moon was that in 1960s. Now we're talking about a McMurdo station, not a dash to the South Pole with temporary storages along the way.

I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century.

> mankind already needs more land than Earth has

By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse.

> more energy than Earth can spare

Earth doesn't provide energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium.

The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land the US currently uses to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants.

What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery, in fact it makes both problems significantly worse.

So, SpaceX?