Newsgroups: sci.space
Path: utzoo!kcarroll
From: kcarroll@utzoo.uucp (Kieran A. Carroll)
Subject: Re: Scientific value of Apollo (was Re: Motives)
Message-ID: <1989Dec18.181605.7966@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Dec12.193633.28964@utzoo.uucp> <129351@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 89 18:16:05 GMT

jmck%norge@Sun.COM (John McKernan) writes:
> 
> In article <1989Dec12.193633.28964@utzoo.uucp>
>  henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> >accomplished much more than some of its detractors admit, and it would
> >have taken a very large and costly unmanned program to get similar
> >results.  It *may* be true that it would have been cheaper to do things
> >that way, but it is *not* a self-evident fact.
> 
> Our experience in space makes it empirically evident that unmanned space can 
> currently achieve as much or more than manned space for orders of magnitude
> less. Everything that Apollo accomplished (sample returns, pictures, etc)
> could have been done for less with unmanned technology. Given the greatly
> increased capabilities of unmanned technology that is even more true today
> than it was then.
>  

Simply repeating the contention that it would have been cheaper unmanned 
>still< doesn't make it a self-evident fact :-)

Seriously, >we don't know< if it would have been cheaper to accomplish all
that Apollo accomplished, using unmanned missions. Nobody ever designed 
a set of unmanned missions that would do what Apollo did; nobody has ever
costed out an unmanned version. There were elements of Apollo that would
have been very expensive to automate, such as putting a geologist on-site in
order to select which samples to return; it's likely that "telepresence"
>still< isn't good enough to allow the same amount of judgement to be 
exercised, despite 25 intervening years of technology development. 

Also, as Henry has pointed out earlier, the cost of Apollo itself
(i.e. developing the CM, SM and LEM, as well as the training facilities,
and support facilities required for supporting men in space) was quite
a bit less than the cost of (Apollo+Saturn). If a large number of >unmanned<
missions had been sent to the moon, they would have required a launch vehicle
too; maybe not as big as Saturn, but probably many more launches would have
been required in order to accomplish what Apollo did in six missions.
Do you attribute the cost of the launcher development to each program that
used the launch vehicle? By that measure, Voyager probably "really" cost a
couple of billion dollars (and Galileo "really" cost about 6 billion :-).
If you don't do it for unmanned missions, why do it for Apollo?

Sure, Apollo/Saturn was an expensive program. Too bad Congress decided to
throw away all the infrastructure the program had developed, just after
it had been payed for; otherwise, follow-on manned missions could have
been cheap enough to satisfy even Van Allen.

As far as I can tell, >nobody< on the net has addressed Henry's main points
yet.
-- 

     Kieran A. Carroll @ U of Toronto Aerospace Institute
     uunet!attcan!utzoo!kcarroll kcarroll@zoo.toronto.edu