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I’m surprised how “cheap” the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program were. It’s bizarre we put people on the Moon in the ‘60s for an amount of money similar to A
by afruitpie 2y ago
I’m surprised how “cheap” the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program were.
It’s bizarre we put people on the Moon in the ‘60s for an amount of money similar to Apple’s recent stock buybacks.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI think this comic says it all: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 2y agoOne takeaway could be that sending people to the moon wasn't as hard as we like to think it is.
- rvnx 2y agoIt's easier than self-driving cars, because toward the moon there are practically no variables and no other drivers.
- shmeeed 2y agoYeah, I guess the several hundred thousand people involved were just slacking off a lot on government money. Please don't forget to close such statements with an /s, lest some notorious software "engineers" on HN might be led to actually believe engineering the most powerful vehicle on earth mostly by hand was a negligible task.
- csomar 2y agoIt is not. The difficulty is that, mainly, we don't know lots of the variables there; and at the time the US was in a race to do it. But the moon is just a regular small planet that is much easier to escape its gravity than earth.
- tarsinge 2y agoOr it is but real good project management is overlooked. Sure regulation doesn't help, but if you look at recent big infrastructure or software projects failures it doesn't explain all. When I read about the Apollo project management it seems nowhere near the mediocrity of modern MBA corporate committee management.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoA number of crashed landers says otherwise. But these days, we have established infrastructure, to manage a lot of the things that the Apollo guys needed to construct from whole cloth. Also, the way that SpaceX does research is highly effective (and inflammable). Failing fast works, as long as we are set up to learn the lessons, and avoid doing things like sticking people on top of unverified tech. There was an interview, recently with either Ben Nelson, or his predecessor, where they mentioned that NASA (or its directly-managed contractors) would never have been allowed to blow up a whole bunch of boosters, just to finally arrive at a design that normalizes what used to be considered impossible. On the first crash, he would have been hauled up in front of a Senate investigation committee, and forced to explain why it would never happen again.
- dontreact 2y agoIt’s the difference between doing something transcendental a small number of times and doing something amazing billions of times.
- 4death4 2y agoAll this should tell you is that inflation is vastly under-counted.
- adtac 2y agoNo, it just tells me inflation isn't a single scalar multiplier for all kinds of items.
- wkat4242 2y agoThe US was much poorer back then. Much lower standard of living. So wages were also much lower even inflation-corrected. Also there was a war going in and people were drafted and had no choice but to work for a minimal salary. I think that explains a lot of it.
- ipnon 2y agoThe whole country had a mission, and the overwhelming feeling was that the US along with the Allies were in a conflict for survival, that without winning the war the existence of the US would not be possible. On December 6th 1941 public opinion leaned towards isolation from the “European” war. On December 8th 1941 Congress voted unanimously sans 1 vote to declare war against Japan. It is hard to overstate the fervor that immediately swept over the whole country. People are willing to endure the most demanding trials given the proper circumstances; at times the most realistic course of action is to do what once seemed impossible.
- galaxyLogic 2y agoIt seems obvious to me that authoritarian regimes have much more corruption than democratic ones because in a dictatorship there is no transparency and therefore corruption goes undetected. That means that power and wealth gets concentrated into hands of a small elite. There is less true innovation. What makes things cheaper is the progress of democracy.
- dTal 2y ago>That means that power and wealth gets concentrated into hands of a small elite It is with some restraint that I note that "democracy" per se does a piss-poor job of preventing this, when Tim Cook's net worth exceeds the yearly GDP of the Seychelles. This is particularly true in a world where capital controls information channels, and therefore public opinion. To really prevent capitalists from capitalizing on their capital to amass ever more capital, you also need a social infrastructure that redistributes wealth away from powerful individuals back to society, so that social issues can be addressed.
- londons_explore 2y agoI suspect it's because inflation has been underestimated for the past ~hundred years. Over time, that really compounds. A fairer way to look at it is how many years of the average citizens salary is it. The manhattan project was $2B in 1944, or 121,000 median-family-years of work using salary figures from the 1940 census. Apples stock buyback was $110B in 2024, or 122,910 median-family-years of work using figures from the 2022 census. So, the inflation figures under represent the cost by a factor of 3.5 over those 80 years.
- moneywoes 2y agois median family income a good measure since it represents the cost of R&D?
- MattGaiser 2y agoAverage family has a ton more in material goods, both in quality and quantity. So it isn’t that inflation is underestimated. The average family truly is richer. Far more house. Far more car. Far more and better food.
- chimpanzee 2y agoQuantity? Absolutely. Quality? That’s debatable; it’s highly dependent on the goods in question and how quality is measured.
- bawolff 2y agoJust because something is higher quality does not mean it has higher subjective value. E.g. i still think i come out ahead with cheap clothes and a laptop then someone 100 years ago with higher quality clothes.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoI’d rather have a house than shitty fast fashion but your mileage may vary
- doug_durham 2y agoThey really weren't cheap. The costs were just pushed to the future. It's estimated that it will take between $16.8 billion and $550 billion to clean up the Hanford site. The Santa Susana facility where Apollo rockets were tested is going to cost billions to clean up (there are other things contributing to the cost there).
- virtuallynathan 2y agoI’ve heard stories from people who have worked at Hanford, and it seems like a lot of that money is being squandered. Excess caution, basically everything is radioactive waste, and just overall wasteful spending for decades.
- zaroth 2y agoIsn’t that exactly the point? “Clean up” is clearly a euphemism for some sort of money funnel. Hanford.gov even readily admits this! “In April 2009, the Hanford Site received a nearly $2 billion in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Contractors quickly hired thousands of new employees for temporary stimulus jobs in environmental cleanup.”
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoHanford was used for two decades after the Manhattan Project, so I wouldn't peg it for the full the cost of cleanup
- richardw 2y agoWhen you’re under the gun, bang for buck is crucial. When you have a relatively fat, wealthy and lazy society (compared to WWII and even the post-war 60’s) all the costs go up. Eg you could build roads or railways or ships back then. Now there are 100’s of rules, lobbyists everywhere and everyone wants their cut. Financial incentives matter far more now, since survival has been (temporarily) taken care of.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoI think the Manhattan project had a lot of consideration towards making it economical. (and huge government programs weren't quite so common back then) Plus, I think things that were returned/recycled weren't counted against the total. e.g. the $600 million worth of silver they borrowed to make calutrons, because there was a copper shortage.
- egl2021 2y agoEconomy was not really a consideration. The project developed two different bomb designs (plutonium and uranium) in parallel. They tried three different paths to fissile material: gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation for uranium and reactors for plutonium.
- MilStdJunkie 2y agoEverything about the official inflation calculation is almost totally borked in terms of generating useful information. Like, information that would be useful for someone doing something real, like future historians or Zombie FDR. There's probably dozens of mechanisms at work to explain "why??!!", but the root cause is - like so many other damn things in America - financialization, from its birth post-1972 with vehicles like EUROBOND, to its "pedal to the metal" moment with all the liquidated commie national assets, to the craptacular commodity runup crisis courtesy of Bush II wrecking the Levant and West Asia. Oh, right, and the financial system ending in 2008. When we seamlessly blended up - legally - private with public risk. Oh yeah. Sixteen years ago. Anyway, financialization. We don't account for money supply accurately, they're dynamic with price indices now, blabbity blabbity blah blah, 1962 dollars were probably worth waaaayyyyyyyyy more than we think they were.
- astrange 2y agoThere is no number of 1962 dollars that could buy you an electric car, HPV vaccine, or Nintendo DS, which means they're worthless if you want to buy those things. (Since you can't time travel from 1962 to a point where those existed. If you just waited for them, then presumably you've kept them in an interest-bearing account in the meantime, and so the value of the dollar doesn't apply.)
- 1oooqooq 2y agoit's almost as if we've been mislead about that big wasteful central planning government
- Rinzler89 2y agoThe government can switch to being really efficient and less corrupt when it's under the barrel of a gun and needs to fight for survival. See WW2 US or present day Ukraine. Less so after decades of unchallenged safety and prosperity where it switches to nepotism and rent seeking as the default MO. It's all cyclic.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoI guess that means we need more government funded Moonshots.
- ralfd 2y agoIt is noteworthy that Wikipedia gives as cost for the Artemis program a total sum of US$93+ billion (2012–2025). It is a bit difficult to compare, because NASA shuffles around cost, and the plan is that Artemis will do way more (moon base) than Apollo. But Apollo seems to have been not only a technological marvel, but exceptionally well managed? Regarding Manhattan project it has this mythical quality (the name alone is cool), but the Russians had the a-bomb only 4 years later and smaller countries (South Africa) are able to achieve it too.
- throwaway44773 2y agoRegarding the Manhattan project: you can't compare the cost of research and developing a novel device vs the cost of developing the same device using stolen secrets.
- randomdata 2y ago> but exceptionally well managed? Or did it simply benefit being done in a time where the critical components were less valuable? After all, projects like Apollo reveal to us new uses for materials, people, etc. so they tend to become more valuable afterwards.
- maxglute 2y agoManhattan is technically just the R&D component, the full Manhattan is the trillion+ US has spend on building out the nuclear force and 1T+ more it will spend to modernize in next 30 years.
- moosemess 2y agoThey weren't cheap, money just still had value back then. What's bizarre is how few people understand how currency has become devalued since its separation from the gold standard, and even more so in the last 5 years. These are the same fools who put their money into "high yield" savings accounts giving them 3% when official inflation is >5%.