What do you think has changed since the 1960s? There were high paying private industry union protected skilled jobs, but many people went to work for NASA.
The USSR had just beat the US to put the first man into space. The same USSR that was killing political dissidents en masse and building an arsenal of terrifying nuclear weapons. John F. Kennedy set out the ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and then he was assassinated.
People wanted to make that happen. So they did.
There hasn't been a lot to inspire people to work for the government like that lately.
While this is how this story is regularly retold it's not quite accurate. Polling around the Moon program tells that while there was a large minority of people vehemently in support of it, the overall response was mixed, and NASA was generally seen as a good target to cut funding from. [1]
I think there are lots of parallels between the Moon landings in the 60s and the idea of colonizing Mars today. In particular, most people don't think it's possible, and so they think it's a waste of money. The Apollo program only received majority approval once we landed on the Moon. People also tend to dramatically overestimate the cost of achieving great things in space. Polling suggested people thought the Moon missions were taking up about 22% of the budget. In modern times it's down to less than 0.5%, and that's with NASA blowing tens of billions of dollars of pork projects like the SLS.
Overall support for the Moon program only began to steadily rise in the years after human spaceflight was defacto completely cancelled by Nixon, and people were able to coolly reflect on what a ridiculous and important achievement that was.
According to your own link, the thing people don't like isn't space exploration, it's paying for it:
> "When you divorce it from the numbers and you ask people if they like NASA and spaceflight, people say yes," Launius told SPACE.com. "75 to 80 percent are in favor."
Because obviously; people don't like paying for anything.
If you ask someone without a lot of surplus in their life whether they'd rather have the money themselves in tax cuts or benefits or they want to spend it on astronauts, they want food on their table. Especially when they're overestimating how much the space program costs.
But the question was, did people want to work for NASA? And then you get to select your idealists from the >75% in favor of the space program.
No, it just aligned with elite interests ("If they can put nuke platforms above our heads and we can't put some above theirs, it doesn't matter how much better our economy runs, in theory.") There were plenty of people who would have loved to have put their energy and expertise towards a climate change moonshot, but our incredibly powerful corporate interests and the legislators that they own didn't want it to happen, so it didn't.
Also, you remove that second S and first R from that second sentence, and it would still be true. Our entry into the space race wasn't a matter of unmatched moral nobility.
> There were plenty of people who would have loved to have put their energy and expertise towards a climate change moonshot, but our incredibly powerful corporate interests and the legislators that they own didn't want it to happen, so it didn't.
The problem with "climate change moonshot" is that the answer isn't really a single target or anything suitable to a government spending program. You get the result you want by doing a carbon tax and then refunding fully 100% of the money to the population as a dividend so the tax doesn't trash the economy.
Then people reduce carbon to avoid the tax. Hybrid and electric vehicles become more attractive than gas (especially to people who drive more), diesel rail lines get electrified, coal power plants get shut down as uneconomical and replaced with solar/wind/nuclear/hydro, people replace furnaces with heat pumps, etc. You don't have to order anybody to do anything in particular or figure out how it should be done for them because everybody wants to avoid the tax so they do it themselves.
The reason that doesn't happen is the reason you say -- the oil and coal industries have captured too many legislators. But even if you had the votes, the way to fix it still isn't "NASA for climate change", it's just pricing carbon.
No, trying to financially engineer incentives to make all of those things magically happen would not have worked. They tried that with broadband rollout and healthcare and got middling results, at best. Public/private partnerships are a fool's gold standard and it's time to stop getting burned by that scam.
We wanted the government to get directly involved. To fund and empower a federal agency to hire workers, plan projects, requisition resources, and execute at a massive scale, as had NASA worked in the 60s, or the WPA in the 30s. I know that this terrifies certain people, and I revel in their terror. Things that are bad for their craven interests are good for the rest of us.
> No, trying to financially engineer incentives to make all of those things magically happen would not have worked. They tried that with broadband rollout and healthcare and got middling results, at best. Public/private partnerships are a fool's gold standard and it's time to stop getting burned by that scam.
Public/private partnerships are an entirely different thing. There you still have the government dictating what should happen, even if the thing they require is inefficient or miserable, and then you invite a corrupt government contractor that satisfies none of the prerequisites for a competitive market to back their armored car up to the government's vault and suck out all the money.
A carbon tax does not involve any government contractors. You burn carbon, you pay tax. People avoid burning carbon to avoid paying the tax. All of the tax money goes back to the citizens; everybody gets a check cut in the same amount. The imperative is to eliminate space for corruption by leaving no exceptions to the tax and no discretion in where the money goes.
> We wanted the government to get directly involved.
You are implicitly asking for the thing you say you don't like.
In order to install solar panels, the government would have to buy land to put them on, and then buy solar panels. These things come from private sellers. But the government's purchasing process is thoroughly corrupt, so now you're buying solar panels and concrete and transformers from whoever's cronies have the in with the administration. You can't avoid this by trying to say "we'll make our own solar panels then" because for that you'd have to buy semiconductor wafers and fabrication equipment etc. The inputs ultimately have to come from somewhere and the somewhere is going to capture the government.
This is exactly what happened with the WPA and NASA. The term "boondoggle" was coined for the WPA's corruption and inefficiency. Around 90% of NASA's funding goes to government contractors. This is Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, etc. And it's not a new thing:
At the height of the New Deal in 1936, total federal spending, even adjusted for both population growth and inflation to 2024 dollars, was less than $500B. (In unadjusted 1936 dollars it was $8.2B). The current federal budget is over $6T -- right now it's more than twelve times as much in real dollars per capita than it was at the height of the New Deal. The "massive scale" you wanted is more than already happening, but it's not working, because the government doesn't spend money efficiently. It siphons it into the coffers of the connected.
That's a funny perspective. USSR just before that time mostly killed communist apparatus members¥ and with them innocent people. In such an environment, there naturally won't be too many dissidents, so I don't think they registered.
They did kill a lot of supposed sympathiers of pre-Soviet Russia, though.
¥ As they say, internal competition is the most fierce one.
Are you forgetting that the USSR took control of about a dozen other countries during and after the war? That led to events like Katyn, which had nothing to do with communist dissidents.
I think we're talking about highly-skilled precision welders who built things like the F-1 rocket engine. These people didn't work for NASA in the 1960s: they worked for private contractors like Rocketdyne. NASA doesn't build rocket engines, and never has.
> What do you think has changed since the 1960s? There were high paying private industry union protected skilled jobs, but many people went to work for NASA
We were spending more money. There was competition among contractors. And there were skilled low-level labourers from WWII.
Corporate culture changed radically in the 70s adopting Milton Friedman views that ethics and responsibility towards society have no place in the private sector, and as a consequence started maximizing profits in spite of everything else.
Corporations never had "responsibility towards society". In fact I much prefer corporations that don't pretend to have such a burden. It's almost always a false front.
Corps have a responsibility to deliver a product or service at a competitive price in order to sustain growth.
Friedman was an economist, not a corporate whisperer. To the extent that corps changed, they were forced to by market forces, most notably globalization, a force much bigger than one man and a force that was inevitable and even necessary in the wake of world war one and world war two.
Maybe, but somehow their behaviour and their products and services changed. Companies are made of people, and individuals had more freedom to put value in what they did, they took pride in the quality of their work. After Friedman everything got "optimized" for revenue, even if this meant screwing the customers (or the society). There are some things that cannot possibly work with this "self-regulated" market, so if we want to accept this way of doing business, we should move back some responsibilities to the public sector (healthcare, infrastructures, rehabilitation, education, research), because the search for "immediate gratification" of shareholders can't move the society as a whole out of local maxima that are far away from society best possibilities.
The Apollo project was the most ambitious engineering effort since the Manhattan project. What was next though? We didn't establish a moon base and instead opted for the Space Shuttle program which was considerably less ambitious than Apollo/Saturn V.
