We can all agree: spaceflight is cool.

 

It’s fun to dream about being an astronaut. Missions like the Artemis program are good things. And we can all be happy about the successful completion of this mission.

But.

As we’ve been through before, the economic case for near-term deep-space missions is almost nonexistent. The economic (and, for that matter, the scientific) case for manned space missions beyond low orbit is effectively nonexistent.

It has long been an open secret at NASA that the important work is on the unmanned side of the organization. The primary reason for doing manned missions—though it was seldom said out loud—was that this was the glamorous side, the part that got people excited and, in fact, subsidized the real work.

The reaction to Artemis both confirms the soundness of that take and its limitations (the administration proposed cuts even as people were cheering the splashdown). It also illustrates our deep nostalgia for the Space Age.

There is a legend that has been a long time in the making, but which truly grabbed the public imagination in the 21st century, nurtured by countless TED Talks. It tells of how we were once a nation that dared to dream, inspired by visionary leaders—but, as with all golden-age myths, we lost this precious spark.

The centerpiece of these stories is the idea that we went to the Moon because of a speech John F. Kennedy gave in the early ’60s. The truth is not nearly so lofty. The primary driver for Apollo, and the Space Race in general, was the Cold War. The program also received a tremendous boost when Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson—Washington’s leading advocate for manned space exploration—became president.

There is considerable truth to the idea that Americans dreamed bigger in the postwar era, that there was a greater sense of possibility, but the idea that those big dreams led to the exciting technology of the era gets the causality almost exactly wrong.

To be clear, the postwar era really was an amazing time in terms of technology changing people’s lives, at least in certain parts of the world. In terms of future shock, it was only exceeded by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These advances, however, had virtually nothing to do with motivational-speaker-style pablum, and everything to do with economics, politics, government policies, military priorities, and some fortuitous scientific breakthroughs that either occurred in or shortly before 1945.

There are things we can do to replicate some of these conditions—things that would almost certainly lead to more breakthroughs and would probably pay for themselves in cost–benefit terms. Unfortunately, manned spaceflight is not among them.

In the years following the missions, there was a heavily promoted piece of common wisdom that the Apollo program had more than paid for itself indirectly through advances in fields like materials science and computing. While the specific claims were not false, the argument itself was, at best, half true. It is still an open question whether these new “space-age” products and capabilities actually pushed the program beyond the break-even point in terms of cost. Still more damning, the return on research dollars from other public and de facto public research—such as DARPA, the Department of Agriculture, and blue-sky labs such as Bell Labs—tended to be much greater.

You could make a good case that DARPA alone was the primary foundation for the tech economy of the 21st century, with Bell Labs coming in a respectable second. (Remind me to get around to a post on Thomas Edison’s proposed “DARPA before DARPA,” and how even his reputational capital wasn’t enough to overcome the military’s interdepartmental rivalries and overall resistance to reform.)

I don’t want to come off as entirely negative here. Programs like Artemis are inspirational, and this kind of manned exploration does produce real science. But particularly these days, when so much of our discourse and decision-making are driven by silly memes and pathological con men, we have to be honest with ourselves about even the coolest of endeavors.