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The Space Race



I just saw “First Man”, the Neil Armstrong biopic. It was quite good, but there were moments that were hard to watch. Because I was a boy who grew up in the 1960’s, I knew when the movie was approaching a point where something bad was going to happen. The movie did a good job making me like the characters (real people) so that made their deaths hard to take.

People did die during the space race. They died firstly, because space travel is inherently dangerous. There is just no margin of error. NASA backed up whatever components that could be backed up, but there were many mission critical components (components that, were they to fail, would result in the loss of the mission). Some components simply could not be backed up. If your main engine shuts off: loss of mission. If your fuel tank ruptures: loss of mission. They tried to plan for everything they could think about, but that leads me to the second reason people died during the space race: it was a race. You can do a good job planning for known risks. It is hard to plan for unknown risks. If you are trying to beat the Russians to the moon (or get to the moon by the end of the decade as John F. Kennedy proposed), you are going to push the envelope. I won’t say that NASA knowingly cut any corners, but if you have a deadline, it changes your approach. You simply don't have time to test for every possible contingency.

If you were methodically planning a moon landing without a deadline, you would probably do a lot more testing of systems. You would, as a logical interim step, build a space station as a staging platform. You would also probably just spend a lot more time in space, (and on the ground) learning what the unknowns are. It probably would have cost less too, or at least the cost would have been spread out over many more budget cycles, instead of cramming all of it into an eight year period.
In any event, it worked. We did get a manned mission to the moon before 1970. It was an enormous achievement. I don’t think people who were not alive in the 1960’s can fathom the truly awe-inspiring feeling that suffused the world when Neil Armstrong finally set foot on the moon. They did all this without modern computers. Oh, they had computers; clunky machines that took up whole rooms and probably had less computing power than my phone. But they did it. The cost was high in dollars, and the cost was high in human life. America lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire. The Russians lost cosmonauts during this period as well.

To be sure, history shows us that space is still hazardous even when you are not racing. I continue to think that space is worth exploring. It is our human nature to try to understand things and you can only understand new things by exploring them. But let’s not race to the Moon or Mars, or anywhere else. Let’s do it methodically and cost effectively.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Link to Star Liner

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