The moon landing was a tool to create a different emotion, though. It was to stir up some national pride and put a happy face on the rocket tech that nearly led to a total nuclear annihilation during the cold war.
Also the Moon landing was at least as much defense spending as it was science spending. The Soviets derived a lot of national pride from holding all the major space achievements and beating them had great propaganda value. Also without knowing how useful the moon would be it was deemed unacceptable to risk the Soviets gaining a foothold, exploiting all its resources and defending it as their territory.
That's half the truth. The rest of the truth is: We went to the Moon out of sheer terror.
In fact, the Moon trip itself was a side effect. The space race took the form of a race to the moon because "the race to the Moon" was a much more joyful marketing slogan than "the race to design and build the next generation of ICBMs that will enable cities and towns like yours to be destroyed with even greater precision."
Remember that the Moon race was conceived in the early 1960s. ICBMs were a brand new technology. Everybody knew that we had to build more of them, keep improving them, stay ahead in them -- they'd seen the H-bomb tests. People who had lived through the 1940s -- Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Nanking, Bataan, Dresden, Nagasaki -- naturally found it difficult to have faith in human decency and restraint; they all thought World War III was inevitable, and probably imminent. This was several years before the Cuban missile crisis and a decade before the ABM treaty.
But it was hard to stay cheerful when talking about the world's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals, so the space race was portrayed as a game to get astronauts and/or cosmonauts to the moon, and everyone had a lot of fun playing along. Enormous quantities of money were poured into rocket research, the military on both sides of the Cold War got their high-tech missiles and spy satellites and electronics, and in the end we got to watch some truly amazing pictures of people walking on the moon and feel proud. Smiles all around. A big win for everyone.
But the Moon itself was a secondary goal. A Macguffin. The Soviets didn't even bother to go, and their effort seems to me to have been rather halfhearted. By 1969 they had long since achieved the important goal anyway: Better rockets. The USA followed through but quickly got bored with the actual "moon" part. The Apollo 13 movie talked all about that: Mere months after the first moon missions, the remaining ones attracted scant public interest.
So I find the space race fascinating, and I understand the nostalgia for it, and I'm glad some good came out of the cold war, but I don't want to live through anything like it if I don't have to.
Without the context of cold war one-upmanship, almost certainly. What did landing on the moon actually give us? A slightly better understanding of early earth geology perhaps? It was mostly an excercise in building national pride and sticking it to the Soviets. In that role, it was effective.
Spaceflight has contributed very, very little technology to earth. The reality is that anything we fly into space is already generations behind the equivalent earth technology.
Put it another way: What were the obvious benefits of the Apollo program?
Even if you could argue that Apollo was nothing more than a "PR Stunt", what is the issue with it being that? From a nationalism perspective, there's a tremendous advantage to be gained from plugging an entire generation with patriotism from a moon landing.
> when I recently watched Apollo 11 I was quite moved by the spirit pervading the whole enterprise - this idea that we sent people to the moon with hopes for the whole world. That everyone was watching, hoping, praying for the success of the mission. That is a sort of unity that is awfully hard to find today.
I'm not sure this is historically accurate. The Moon landing was the culmination of the nationalistic Cold War Space Race.
"While most Americans were proud of their nation's achievements in space exploration, only once during the late 1960s did the Gallup Poll indicate that a majority of Americans favored "doing more" in space as opposed to "doing less". By 1973, 59 percent of those polled favored cutting spending on space exploration. The Space Race had been won, and Cold War tensions were easing as the US and Soviet Union entered the era of détente." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11#Cultural_significanc...
Was WWII similarly significant in your "feelings"? Because that's what I feel putting a man on the moon with 1960s technology was similar to: a war effort, dangerous, expensive and ultimately, hard to justify. (Though of course peanuts in comparison to WWII.)
The US didn't fake the moon landings, the American politicians faked that it was about anything but beating the USSR. They supported it and sold it as a research project to further humankind, as dipping our toes in the cosmic ocean.
Then, after the Russians were beat, the interest among the decision makers cooled off.
The moon landing I tend not to care about either way, because the impact of that event didn't result in terrible things for the US (like decades of war in the middle east.)
Not only that but the moon missions happened during the height of the Cold War. The Soviets were watching very closely and would have loved to have shown the world the US faked the moon landings.
The moon landing was pushed by Cold War politics (and funding). Those projects take huge amounts of money, and NASA had them. After that, the interest tapered off.
Yes, as both incidents are part of the political climate of the time, and are a part of history. They are not the proudest moments, but it is doubtful if, without the spectre of Communism or the USSR, the US would have tried to land on the moon.
As a citizen of the United States (who came of age well after this event took place), I've only ever been told that this was an act of heroic success, something to be proud of, something that America should be proud of. I'm curious what the reception to this was outside of the U.S. Especially, e.g., to someone living in the USSR, what was it like hear that someone else had put a man on the moon?
Well the us and Soviet space programs were more about building advanced ICBMs than going to the moon. The latter was a nice side effect for patriotic ends. If you can get a rocket into space without issues, you can slap a warhead on it and hit any target you please. The space race was a pissing contest over nuclear launch capability.
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