'We choose to go to the moon'

On Jul 13, 7:21 am, Davoud wrote:
Jack:

This attitude is what makes America great and other countries
mediocre!

What a load of jingoistic nonsense!


I have heard speculation that if the US had not been drawn into WW2,
that Germany, building on its V2/A4 technology might have eventually
been the first to land on the moon. Germany used the rocket for
terror and destruction, the USSR used it for propaganda, the US used
it for exploration and science.

Oh, yeah, and the US didn't stop after Apollo 11, but went on to
launch six more missions.

wrote:

Germany used the rocket for terror and destruction,

As did the Allies. Germany's were just bigger. If the Allies had
access to a V-2 class missile, they would have used it. As it was,
the Allies were stuck doing their terror and destruction the
old-fashioned way: firebombing the snot out of the enemy in
Lancasters, B-17's, B-24's, B-25's, and B-29's. Dresden, Hamburg,
Toyama, and over half of Tokyo ended up looking very similar to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki when all was said and done.

the USSR used it for propaganda, the US used
it for exploration and science.

The US wasn't paying for exploration and science. It was paying for
propaganda that just happened to be exploration and science. Give
credit where credit is due: the Soviets beat the US to every major
space exploration milestone /except/ landing people on the Moon.

Oh, yeah, and the US didn't stop after Apollo 11, but went on to
launch six more missions.

....that were originally planned to be nine more until America got
bored with it and decided to spend its money elsewhere.
--
Dave

"Rick" wrote:

"Jack" wrote

This attitude is what makes America great and other countries
mediocre!

Kennedy's speach in 1962.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that
goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and
skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,
one we are unwilling to postpone and one which we intend

Kennedy couldn't care less about going to the Moon or space until
the Bay of Pigs debacle. Then he needed to make a face saving let's beat the
Ruskies at something move.

There was a bit more to it than that. At that time, we had Khrushchev
banging on the podium saying, "we will bury you!", then lofting
satellites into orbit which could just as easily have been nuclear
warheads with which to accomplish his stated goal--a capability that
the US lacked at the time.

Kennedy needed to show Americans--and the world--that we took notice
and weren't going away. Landing men on the Moon was simply the
nearest space program goal for which Werher von Braun thought we had a
"sporting chance" at beating the Soviets--because he knew the US had
already lost the others, even if they hadn't yet taken place. Well,
that and the fact that von Braun desperately wanted to send stuff to
the Moon. He capitalized beautifully on the political midden in which
the administration found itself.

Talk about lack of political foresight on the part of the
administration, though. Von Braun had suggested to the Eisenhower
administration that a 4th stage could be added to a Jupiter-C missile
to place a satellite in orbit. He told them that the design work was
already done and that he could have a satellite up in six months. The
administration utterly poo-poo'd the idea. "Who cares about space?",
they asked.

That was a year and a half before Sputnik 1 was launched.
--
Dave

On Jul 13, 1:24 pm, Sam Wormley wrote:
wrote:
I have heard speculation that if the US had not been drawn into WW2,
that Germany, building on its V2/A4 technology might have eventually
been the first to land on the moon. Germany used the rocket for
terror and destruction, the USSR used it for propaganda, the US used
it for exploration and science.

Oh, yeah, and the US didn't stop after Apollo 11, but went on to
launch six more missions.

You certainly used polarized glasses.

The USSR program seemed to be more concerned with "firsts" (some
rather unimportant) and was prone to a great deal of secrecy, while
the USA was more open and had longer-range plans.

Other countries only got into space years later, in more limited ways,
after the USA and the USSR showed that such things were possible and
practical.

Chris L Peterson wrote:

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:52:16 GMT, "Michael Toms"
wrote:

The US is
probably still
paying for the whole 60's and early 70's space program too.

That's an interesting question, and one I'm sure would be extremely
difficult to fully analyze. However, I suspect that the American
investment in space has paid itself back many times over, so in terms of
the big picture we aren't still paying for anything.

It's a drop in the proverbial bucket. Ballpark $10 billion a year (in
today's dollars) over 15 years for Freedom 7 through Apollo-Soyuz.

Call it a thousandth of our GNP near enough. American women
collectively spend more than that on cosmetics each year.
--
Dave

On Jul 13, 2:25 pm, Dave Typinski wrote:
wrote:

Germany used the rocket for terror and destruction,

As did the Allies. Germany's were just bigger. If the Allies had
access to a V-2 class missile, they would have used it. As it was,
the Allies were stuck doing their terror and destruction the
old-fashioned way: firebombing the snot out of the enemy in
Lancasters, B-17's, B-24's, B-25's, and B-29's. Dresden, Hamburg,
Toyama, and over half of Tokyo ended up looking very similar to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki when all was said and done.

More explosives were probably dropped on V2 facilities by Allied
bombers, than V2s were able to deliver to the civilian targets in
Allied territory, which were chosen guidance of the V2 was not
accurate enough to hit smaller, military targets.
It wasn't a very good weapon, but it did kill quite a few Allied
civilians, not to mention many more in the slave-labor factories where
it was built.

And this isn't about what the Allies did versus what the Axis did
during the war, but about what each eventually did with V2 tech and
its derivative designs. Remember too, that the Axis started the war.

the USSR used it for propaganda, the US used
it for exploration and science.

The US wasn't paying for exploration and science. It was paying for
propaganda that just happened to be exploration and science. Give
credit where credit is due: the Soviets beat the US to every major
space exploration milestone /except/ landing people on the Moon.

I have stacks of old National Geos with articles about US scientific
missions; not much propaganda there, just science. The US could have
beaten the USSR into space by a year or so, and the Mercury 7 were
chosen well before Gagarin's flight; at the time, the USSR was only
slightly ahead in technology and Vostok1 was their last meaningful
"first."

Oh, yeah, and the US didn't stop after Apollo 11, but went on to
launch six more missions.

...that were originally planned to be nine more until America got
bored with it and decided to spend its money elsewhere.

Actually until Liberals decided that the money "could be better spent
on problems here on Earth" and then grudgingly approved the Space
Shuttle, maybe because its "reusability" appealed to their supposed
sense of "eco-awareness."

Michael Toms:
The US is
probably still
paying for the whole 60's and early 70's space program too.

Chris L. Peterson
That's an interesting question, and one I'm sure would be extremely
difficult to fully analyze. However, I suspect that the American
investment in space has paid itself back many times over, so in terms of
the big picture we aren't still paying for anything.

It is difficult to analyze, but the overall public debt data gives an
indication that we are not still paying for the space missions of the
1960's and 70's. After spiking during WWII the debt dropped and kept
dropping slightly or leveled off until 1981--though never again to
pre-WWII levels
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/USDebt.png.

The meaning of this is that we were on a pay-as-you-go basis at that
time; we did not have to borrow for the space program or even the
vastly expensive Vietnam war because tax rates were much more realistic
and equitable. That lasted until Reagan came along to enrich the rich
by lowering their taxes, borrowing virtually without limit, and sending
the bill to the poor -- with the promise that the rich would spill some
of their money and the poor would be able to just pick it up off the
streets. Only the first part worked; there were certainly more and more
poor people in the streets when Reagan left office, but there wasn't a
sou to be picked up. Now the public debt is five times what it was when
Reagan took office. The only decline since then was during the Clinton
administration.

Putting it in a longer perspective, from 1787 (the date of the founding
of the United States) to 1980 the people accumulated a debt of slightly
less than $2 trillion. In the eight years of the Reagan administration
the people ran up another $2 trillion in debt--more debt in eight years
than in the previous 200 with _nothing _to show for it. Clinton brought
it down in a decline that was as steep as that at the end of WWII, but
then Dubya added another two trillion--with nothing but shame to show
for it.

When the common people can be persuaded to vote against their own
economic interests, all bets are off and chaos reigns--as we are now
seeing as a result of one Reagan and two Bush regimes.

Davoud

--
usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

On Jul 13, 2:47 pm, Dave Typinski wrote:
"Rick" wrote:

"Jack" wrote

This attitude is what makes America great and other countries
mediocre!

Kennedy's speach in 1962.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that
goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and
skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,
one we are unwilling to postpone and one which we intend

Kennedy couldn't care less about going to the Moon or space until
the Bay of Pigs debacle. Then he needed to make a face saving let's beat the
Ruskies at something move.

There was a bit more to it than that. At that time, we had Khrushchev
banging on the podium saying, "we will bury you!", then lofting
satellites into orbit which could just as easily have been nuclear
warheads with which to accomplish his stated goal--a capability that
the US lacked at the time.

Kennedy needed to show Americans--and the world--that we took notice
and weren't going away. Landing men on the Moon was simply the
nearest space program goal for which Werher von Braun thought we had a
"sporting chance" at beating the Soviets--because he knew the US had
already lost the others, even if they hadn't yet taken place. Well,
that and the fact that von Braun desperately wanted to send stuff to
the Moon. He capitalized beautifully on the political midden in which
the administration found itself.

Talk about lack of political foresight on the part of the
administration, though. Von Braun had suggested to the Eisenhower
administration that a 4th stage could be added to a Jupiter-C missile
to place a satellite in orbit. He told them that the design work was
already done and that he could have a satellite up in six months. The
administration utterly poo-poo'd the idea. "Who cares about space?",
they asked.

That was a year and a half before Sputnik 1 was launched.

There was some question about whether a satellite would be violating
foreign airspace, which might have made the US administration a bit
reluctant to open that can of worms. After Sputnik 1, the Russians
would have had no cause to complain about a US satellite.

On Jul 13, 3:11 pm, Davoud wrote:
Michael Toms:

The US is
probably still
paying for the whole 60's and early 70's space program too.

Chris L. Peterson

That's an interesting question, and one I'm sure would be extremely
difficult to fully analyze. However, I suspect that the American
investment in space has paid itself back many times over, so in terms of
the big picture we aren't still paying for anything.

It is difficult to analyze, but the overall public debt data gives an
indication that we are not still paying for the space missions of the
1960's and 70's. After spiking during WWII the debt dropped and kept
dropping slightly or leveled off until 1981--though never again to
pre-WWII levels
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/USDebt.png.

The meaning of this is that we were on a pay-as-you-go basis at that
time; we did not have to borrow for the space program or even the
vastly expensive Vietnam war because tax rates were much more realistic
and equitable. That lasted until Reagan came along to enrich the rich
by lowering their taxes, borrowing virtually without limit, and sending
the bill to the poor -- with the promise that the rich would spill some
of their money and the poor would be able to just pick it up off the
streets. Only the first part worked; there were certainly more and more
poor people in the streets when Reagan left office, but there wasn't a
sou to be picked up. Now the public debt is five times what it was when
Reagan took office. The only decline since then was during the Clinton
administration.

Putting it in a longer perspective, from 1787 (the date of the founding
of the United States) to 1980 the people accumulated a debt of slightly
less than $2 trillion. In the eight years of the Reagan administration
the people ran up another $2 trillion in debt--more debt in eight years
than in the previous 200 with _nothing _to show for it. Clinton brought
it down in a decline that was as steep as that at the end of WWII, but
then Dubya added another two trillion--with nothing but shame to show
for it.

When the common people can be persuaded to vote against their own
economic interests, all bets are off and chaos reigns--as we are now
seeing as a result of one Reagan and two Bush regimes.


And now of course we Obamanomics, for which only the Democrats can be
blamed.

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:20:09 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

And now of course we Obamanomics, for which only the Democrats can be
blamed.

Or credited g.

Actually, nobody has a clue whether the current policies will prove
effective or otherwise in the long term.
_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com