Question: Man Hours for Apollo Most in History?

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

In article , Anonymous wrote:

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.

Ike.

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??

Some of the old Mesoamerican buildings might have had quite staggering
manpower requirements, but AIUI there's not much in the way of surviving
evidences to work from. That said, there's probably a book on it g

The HGP probably had very low man-hours - it was heavily a computer
effort, IIRC - and I can't offhand think of contemporary efforts. Wonder
how much time the polio/smallpox vaccinations took out...

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

Sadly, I did it at the other end of the country, so I don't have the
numbers, and I've got the flu just now so I can't guarantee I'm thinking
straight :-)

(An order of magnitude less, BTW, would place it at ~hundred-million
(10^8) hours, not ~million (10^6)...)

Great Pyramid:

~20 years, almost entirely during the flood season - it was built by
farmers unable to work in the fields, mostly. So, about 120 days a year
for 20 years. I've seen an estimate of 20,000 labourers - for reference,
this is about a fifth of what Herodotus claimed g - which seems
plausible.

Lord knows what the Egyptian working day was, but let's say ten hours;

20*120*10*20000 = ~5x10^8 man-hours. It would be a bit higher if you
estimated for "off-season" work, but that wasn't AIUI significant.

(This figure looks a little higher than I originally got. Hmm.)

Apollo:

I'd want to dig up better details, but the Science Museum quotes a NAA
estimate of 5x10^8 man-hours - it doesn't say if this is just the
capsule, though, or the program overall.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-l...w/apollo10.asp

"A staggering 15.5 billion man hours were spent on the Apollo project
during its first decade" - although I have my doubts on this figure. An
article on slashdot agrees with it, and you're at liberty to decide if
that's a good or bad thing.

http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/article...onlanding.html

--
-Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray writes:

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

How about this argument? Apollo cost $25.4 billion in 1960s dollars.
Basically this all went to salaries since the cost of the raw materials
was negligable on this scale. Most of the work was skilled labor, and
skilled labor at that time cost perhaps $20/hour. So that would
imply the whole program took about 1.25 billion man-hours. This estimate
should be reliable within a factor of 2 or 3.

Apollo:

I'd want to dig up better details, but the Science Museum quotes a NAA
estimate of 5x10^8 man-hours - it doesn't say if this is just the
capsule, though, or the program overall.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-l...w/apollo10.asp

This seems possible. It seems high for just the capsule, and low for
the whole program, though.

"A staggering 15.5 billion man hours were spent on the Apollo project
during its first decade" - although I have my doubts on this figure. An
article on slashdot agrees with it, and you're at liberty to decide if
that's a good or bad thing.

http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/article...onlanding.html

This is almost surely bogus - it would imply that the average wage of
all Apollo workers was less than $2/hour. Given that it was skilled work,
and not manual labor, this seems impossible.

Lou Scheffer

A number that was bouncing around coincident with the Apollo 11 launch was $500
per person in the US. I looked at some numbers once that seemed to agree with
this fugure.

So yeah, the moon landing was a big deal. More than the 2 slices of pizza per
person per year to go to Mars. Pizza!