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Comment by svantana | Hacker News Reader

> why it's so easy to underestimate long-term progress and overestimate short-term progress

I dunno, I think that's mostly post-hoc rationalization. There are equally many cases where long-term progress has been overestimated after some early breakthroughs: think space travel after the moon landing, supersonic flight after the concorde, fusion energy after the H-bomb, and AI after the ENIAC. Turing himself guesstimated that human-level AI would arrive in the year 2000. The only constant is that the further into the future you go, the harder it is to predict.

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With the exception of h-bomb/fusion and ENIAC/AI, I think all of those examples reflect a change in priority and investment more than anything. There was a trajectory of high investment / rapid progress, then market and social and political drivers changed and space travel / supersonic flight just became less important.

That's the conceit for the tv show For All Mankind - what if the space race didn't end? But I don't buy it, IMO the space race ended for material reasons rather than political. Space is just too hard and there is not much of value "out there". But regardless, it's a futile excuse, markets and politics should be part of any serious prognostication.

I think it was a combination of the two. The Apollo program was never popular. It took up an enormous portion of the federal budget, which the Republicans argued was fiscally unwise and the Democrats argued that the money should have been used to fund domestic social programs. In 1962, the New York Times noted that the projected Apollo program budget could have instead been used to create over 100 universities of a similar size to Harvard, build millions of homes, replace hundreds of worn-out schools, build hundreds of hospitals, and fund disease research. The Apollo program's popularity peaked at 53% just after the moon landing, and by April 1970 it was back down to 40%. It wasn't until the mid-80s that the majority of Americans thought that the Apollo program was worth it. Because of all this, I think it's inevitable that the Apollo program would wind down once it had achieved its goal of national prestige.

but think about that... If in the 70's they would have used the budget to build millions of homes.

The moral there is tech progress does not always mean social progress.

I think the space race ended because we got all the benefit available, which wasn’t really in space anyway, it was the ancillary technical developments like computers, navigation, simulation, incredible tolerances in machining, material science, etc.

We’re seeing a resurgence in space because there is actually value in space itself, in a way that scales beyond just telecom satellites. Suddenly there are good reasons to want to launch 500 times a year.

There was just a 50-year discontinuity between the two phases.

> I think the space race ended because we got all the benefit available

We did get all the things that you listed but you missed the main reason it was started: military superiority. All of the other benefits came into existence in service of this goal.

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