Was Apollo just a stunt?

Top Brit SF author Charles Stross has offered a fascinating opinion on the first Moon Landing on his blog, noting the reason why there isn’t a moon colony and why NASA didn’t continue the Apollo missions was because it was a stunt.“The real mission wasn’t to go to the moon,” the author of cracking SF novels such as Accelerando, Halting State and Saturn’s Children argues.

“It was to bring two astronauts and 100Kg of moon rocks back from the lunar surface and into lunar orbit (to rendezvous with the CSM stack for the journey home) — and it took a 3000 ton behemoth to accomplish this. Launching a bigger, more useful LEM (one that could carry 3 or 4 astronauts to the lunar surface, along with a decent-sized rover and supplies for a couple of weeks) would have added tonnes to the LEM payload … and hundreds, if not thousands of tons to the launch stack. With cost scaling as the cube of the vehicle mass, you don’t need to be an accountant to realize that the US government, stuck fighting a war in South East Asia, wasn’t going to give NASA the money to build in even one kilogram more of payload than was strictly necessary… The per-launch cost of even a minimal Apollo moon shot was $431M, in 1967 dollars — call that $5-10Bn today.”
His article is a fascinating read, also asking the obvious: could NASA go back to the Moon today?

“I want to believe,” says Stross. “But… Today we lack a vital resource that both Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev took for granted: thousands of engineers with the experience of designing, building, and launching new types of rocket in a matter of years or even months. We used to have them, but some time in the past 40 years they all retired.

“We’ve got the institutions and the data and the better technology, but we don’t have the experience those early pioneers had. And I’m betting that the process of rebuilding all that institutional competence is going to run over budget.

While NASA’s Constellation program might work, and while it could deliver far more valuable lunar science than Apollo ever did, it will inevitably cost much more than NASA’s official estimates suggest, because it’s too big a project for today’s NASA — NASA, and indeed the entire space industrial sector in the USA, would have to grow, structurally, to make it work.”

• Read the full article — we’ve paraphrased a lot — read his blog…