Question: Man Hours for Apollo Most in History?

I recently heard that more man-hours went into landing a man on the
moon than any other single endeavour in human history-- in
particular, the great pyramid and the great wall of china were cited
as requiring far fewer man-hours than the apollo program.

If true, I find it very nice that a modern society could mobilize such
large resourcesfor such a huge undertaking. But is it true??

Has anyone else heard this claim? Can it really be true?

(Anonymous) writes:

I recently heard that more man-hours went into landing a man on the
moon than any other single endeavour in human history-- in
particular, the great pyramid and the great wall of china were cited
as requiring far fewer man-hours than the apollo program.

If true, I find it very nice that a modern society could mobilize such
large resourcesfor such a huge undertaking. But is it true??

Without looking up numbers, I doubt it very much. Just as one example,
take the interstate highway system. Like Apollo, it has a more or
less one sentence goal "Connect all the major cities of the USA by
good roads". The total resources spent, both man hours and dollars,
must far exceed the Apollo program.

Lou Scheffer

Louis Scheffer wrote:

Without looking up numbers, I doubt it very much. Just as one example,
take the interstate highway system. Like Apollo, it has a more or
less one sentence goal "Connect all the major cities of the USA by
good roads". The total resources spent, both man hours and dollars,
must far exceed the Apollo program.

Especially considering that Apollo is thirty years dead, while
construction and maintenance of the Interstate Highway System
continues apace.

D.
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In article , Louis Scheffer wrote:
(Anonymous) writes:

I recently heard that more man-hours went into landing a man on the
moon than any other single endeavour in human history-- in
particular, the great pyramid and the great wall of china were cited
as requiring far fewer man-hours than the apollo program.

If true, I find it very nice that a modern society could mobilize such
large resourcesfor such a huge undertaking. But is it true??

Without looking up numbers, I doubt it very much. Just as one example,
take the interstate highway system. Like Apollo, it has a more or
less one sentence goal "Connect all the major cities of the USA by
good roads". The total resources spent, both man hours and dollars,
must far exceed the Apollo program.

Indeed. It's not difficult to pick any "project" - "repel the German
invasion", say, or "develop economic nuclear power" - and make it
nebulous enough to have a truly immense scope :-)

My back-of-the-envelope guess suggests around a billion man-hours of
effort - I don't have the time or inclination to dig up solid numbers
just now, but I can play around with it later if you want - for Apollo.
The Great Pyramid is vastly variable wrt assumptions, but maybe an order
of magnitude less?

--
-Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray writes:

In article , Louis Scheffer wrote:
(Anonymous) writes:

I recently heard that more man-hours went into landing a man on the
moon than any other single endeavour in human history-- in

Without looking up numbers, I doubt it very much. Just as one example,
take the interstate highway system. Like Apollo, it has a more or
less one sentence goal "Connect all the major cities of the USA by
good roads". The total resources spent, both man hours and dollars,
must far exceed the Apollo program.

Indeed. It's not difficult to pick any "project" - "repel the German
invasion", say, or "develop economic nuclear power" - and make it
nebulous enough to have a truly immense scope :-)

That's why I picked the Interstate highway system - It's not nebulous at all.
See, for example,

http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/summer96/p96su10.htm

Just like Apollo, it was explicitly championed by a president, and authorized
by Congress with an explicit bill authorizing construction over a
12 year period. It only seems nebulous since, unlike Apollo, it actually
had some practical use, and hence has been continued. So there is no final
interstate corresponding the last Apollo mission (Interstate 17?). However,
its usefulness should not be held against it, but you could instead count
the total cost of all the highways authorized by the first, initial bill.
That would surely be a single project by any definition, and perhaps (I'm
not a historian) it might be even more of a single project
than Apollo, where the funding was year-by-year, if I recall correctly.

Lou Scheffer

Indeed. It's not difficult to pick any "project" - "repel the German
invasion", say, or "develop economic nuclear power" - and make it
nebulous enough to have a truly immense scope :-)

My back-of-the-envelope guess suggests around a billion man-hours of
effort - I don't have the time or inclination to dig up solid numbers
just now, but I can play around with it later if you want - for Apollo.
The Great Pyramid is vastly variable wrt assumptions, but maybe an order
of magnitude less?

Yes, I definitely wouldn't consider then interstate a "project" for
the purposes of this-- too many gradual goals: Half an interstate is
almost half as good as a whole interstate, and who can say when an
interstate is complete? And who was the charismatic leader who said
"We choose to build the interstate", etc. etc. etc.

The Great Pyramid strikes me as a really well-defined 'project'. The
Great Wall of China is trickier, because it was built by so many
different people over so many different time periods, and of course,
it had no clearly defined completion point.

WWII did strike me as probably being the 'activity' that had the
greatest number of man-hours, but it's not exactly a project per se.
I'm hard pressed to think of anything else that could even come close
to apollo. Human genome??? Some ancient building??

So how did you come to estimate apollo at 1 billion and great pyramid
at 1 million man-hours?

(Derek Lyons) wrote in message ...
.... while
construction and maintenance of the Interstate Highway System
continues apace.


Not nearly apace-enough, based on the amount of time US-ians
waste in traffic! (Whichever candidate prioritizes highway
expansion henceforth gets my vote).

- Ed Kyle

"ed kyle" wrote in message
om...
(Derek Lyons) wrote in message
...
.... while
construction and maintenance of the Interstate Highway System
continues apace.


Not nearly apace-enough, based on the amount of time US-ians
waste in traffic! (Whichever candidate prioritizes highway
expansion henceforth gets my vote).


You might want to rethink that. In general many "highway expansion"
projects only serve to increase congestion. Why? Mostly socialogical. Now
that there's a nifty new way to get from point A to B, more people want to
go from Point A to B.

I keep telling people who oppose using 1 penny from the gas tax for mass
transit/Amtrak that they should support it. The more people they can get
off the roads the more fun driving becomes again.


- Ed Kyle

In message , ed kyle
writes
(Derek Lyons) wrote in message
...
.... while
construction and maintenance of the Interstate Highway System
continues apace.


Not nearly apace-enough, based on the amount of time US-ians
waste in traffic! (Whichever candidate prioritizes highway
expansion henceforth gets my vote).

Road building just leads to more congestion, but wouldn't decent roads
have saved the original Galileo mission?
--
Rabbit arithmetic - 1 plus 1 equals 10
Remove spam and invalid from address to reply.

In article ,
(Anonymous) writes:
Indeed. It's not difficult to pick any "project" - "repel the German
invasion", say, or "develop economic nuclear power" - and make it
nebulous enough to have a truly immense scope :-)

My back-of-the-envelope guess suggests around a billion man-hours of
effort - I don't have the time or inclination to dig up solid numbers
just now, but I can play around with it later if you want - for Apollo.
The Great Pyramid is vastly variable wrt assumptions, but maybe an order
of magnitude less?

Yes, I definitely wouldn't consider then interstate a "project" for
the purposes of this-- too many gradual goals: Half an interstate is
almost half as good as a whole interstate, and who can say when an
interstate is complete? And who was the charismatic leader who said
"We choose to build the interstate", etc. etc. etc.

Dwight David Eisenhower. The Interstates were built for a specific,
and strategically important purpose - to allow the transit of military
forces and vital supplies from one coast to the other faster and more
reliably than was possible with the old jacklegged network, which
wasn't capable of supporting trancontinental truck travel at a better
rate of advance than 35 mph. (Yes vou can go faster in spots, but your
average for a fuel-stop only, hat-bunking drivers trip was 35.
The Interstates were intended to be, and are, a vital part of the
U.S.A.'s logisticical infrastructure. (It's worth pointing out at
this juncture that we had an integrated Airways System long before we
had an integrated Highway System.

It's not at all a coincidence that Ike was the General Staff Observer
for the first U.S. Army Trancontinental Truck COnvoy in 1919. (If
you'd like his personal views on the trip, read the chapter "Through
Darkest America with Truck and Tank", in "At Ease") The trip took 3
months, (June 4, 1919 - Sept 5, 1919), and the largest imepdiment to
effective travel was the poor roads.

The Great Pyramid strikes me as a really well-defined 'project'. The
Great Wall of China is trickier, because it was built by so many
different people over so many different time periods, and of course,
it had no clearly defined completion point.

But the Great Pyramid is only one of dozens of Pyramids, built over a
span of time. Saying the Great Pyramid was a well defined
project, (And the evidence suggests that it wasn't - they kept moving
the location of the burial chambers inside - How'd you like to be
handling the ECOs on _that_ one? It looks like the Great Pyramid was
a Block I Pyramid) Is like saying that the Gemini capsule was a well
defined project - it was a component in an open-ended scheme.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster