A guest post from Joseph Friedlander on the NextBigFuture blog asks an interesting question: "What was the best way to use the Saturn V to reach the Moon -- in retrospect?"
Maybe you don't want to argue with success, but who knows? It seems that merely being happy with a successful outcome does not produce the optimal results. You could even pose this question: "Does anybody give a damn about optimizing results?" He mentions that we could have had a hell of a lot of hardware in space or on the Moon right now if we played our cards right. But we haven't so we don't.
Here's something that I didn't know. The S-IVB booster was impacted into the Moon on the Apollo 14 mission It was to check out the Moon's interior structure using the impact as energy source and the seismometers put there by Apollo 12 to record the impact.
Lot's of hardware right there. And it made it all the way to the Moon. Plus the lander and the astronauts and they made it back. Looks like this rocket may have been overkill. If the spending was optimized, we would have an entire new industry now and a lot of high paying jobs for Americans that do not exist, thanks to this wasteful spending.
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