I watched the Artemis launch last night from my very grounded bar stool. I tried to analyze my emotions and came up with anger. And a touch of sadness or melancholy.
In the summer of 1971, I stood on a beach just south of Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and watched a massive Saturn V rocket launch Apollo 15 to the moon. I was 19, at a military academy, and so proud of our country. Only two years earlier Neil Armstrong had set foot on the moon and I saw it in the middle of the night in black and white. And my uncle had been part of the team that put that TV camera together. And between those two events, Apollo 13 suffered its catastrophe, and American ingenuity, bravery and ultimate can-do attitude brought our astronauts back safely.
Mercury. Gemini. Apollo. The US meant business, was in space, on the moon and headed out further. Apollo 17 went back to the moon in December, 1972.
Then, America lost its way. Vietnam, War on Poverty, urban unrest, whatever it was, it was a Jimmy Carter-like malaise. I remember at the time some of the arguments – if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to eradicate poverty. That was a big one.
After watching the launch last night, then staying up late to watch the maneuvering testing in the capsule (no toggle switches, analog instruments, nor mechanical controls! All touch screens, tablets and a thumb controller!), I asked Grok to compare figures for me. If we had continued NASA funding at Apollo-like funding (it peaked in 1966 at 4.4% of the federal budget. Today it is 0.35% of the federal budget), we would have spent somewhere between 6 and 9 trillion dollars (in 2024 dollars) on the space program. Yikes. That sounds like a lot of money. But that was supposed to have given us sustained lunar bases, early Mars missions, larger space stations, all per the original post-Apollo plans.
Let’s compare that to the “War on Poverty”: Since the end of the Apollo program (roughly after 1973), the U.S. has spent an estimated $15–25+ trillion (in inflation-adjusted dollars) on means-tested anti-poverty and welfare programs.
Given recent stories about massive fraud in social programs, one would have to think that a significant portion of the $15-25+ trillion was wasted or stolen.
And have we “won” the war on poverty? Hardly. Stanford University said:
our findings indicate that the growth of antipoverty policies has reduced the overall level of poverty, with substantial reductions among the elderly, disabled, and blacks. However, the poverty rates for children, especially those living in single-parent families, and families headed by a low-skill, low-education person, have increased. Rates of deep poverty (families living with less than one-half of the poverty line) for the nonelderly population have not decreased, reflecting both the increasing labor market difficulties faced by the low-skill population and the tilt of means-tested benefits away from the poorest of the poor.
https://inequality.stanford.edu/publications/media/details/war-poverty-measurement-trends-and-policy
So, you tell me – should I be angry seeing that we wasted 54 years before going back to the moon? That we are still a one-planet, all our eggs in one basket species living on a rock in space that routinely over millennia gets bombarded with life-destroying objects? That we wasted trillions of dollars on “the poor”, who will always be with us? I hope we become a true spacefaring species again. Low Earth Orbit is great, but there is more out there.
God-speed to the Artemis crew.
KatNap Fever! 