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Forum: Mercury - Gemini - Apollo
Topic: NASA report: Apollo missions were a failure

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Message to Edit: HTML is ON UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend	Originally posted by Robert Pearlman on 10-04-2008 08:43 PM The Guardian: [URL=http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/oct/05/spaceexploration.humanbehaviour]Epic missions were flops, claims NASA[/URL] <BLOCKQUOTE>[i]A British study, commissioned by NASA, has concluded that many of the world's greatest expeditions, including the Apollo moon missions, were either short-term or long-term failures - or both. Although hailed as heroes, Raleigh, Shackleton and other explorers made less of an impact on world affairs than previously thought, says the report. ...Apollo achieved its goal of putting men on the moon before the Russians, but the equipment used had no application for other projects. The programme cost £70bn in today's money. NASA has since struggled to find a reason to put men into space; hence the interest [in the study by] executives setting up the Constellation programme which will take astronauts back to the moon next decade and later to Mars.[/i]</BLOCKQUOTE> From the specific focus of the study -- judging expeditions such as the Apollo missions by their ability to affect long term change -- "failure" may still be too strong a word. While Apollo did fail at pushing humankind further into the solar system, a fault that even von Braun recognized as it was happening (which in turn led to his own proposal to cancel the latter Apollo missions in favor of an immediate refocus on Mars), it would be hard to sustain an argument that Apollo didn't change the world in other ways ("...made less of an impact on world affairs than previously thought.") It would be interesting to see the full report on which this article is based...
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