When Astronauts Return to the Moon...

[benparry]

nice to hear from another lancastrian i was born in bacup and now reside in blackburn.

An honorary Lancastrian....I've been living in Lancaster since 1993. Just about long enough to be partially accepted by the locals....

accepted by the locals. Never

That's what I meant by cost--my goodness but tickets are expensive.

They're not always that expensive, but they can sometimes be extortionate. That was a particularly extreme example and I remember sitting there thinking that I could have had a good weekend in Barcelona for less. Including flights!

I'm no great fan of the UK train system...it's slow, clunky, full of arcane rules and it's not fit for purpose in many cases. However, I don't subscribe to the view that BR was better (I remember just how crap and plain dirty BR was). The network is also carrying far more people now.
Nor do I subscribe to the idea that the only idea is nationalisation. Witness that 58% of delays (by minute) are due to Network Rail issues, and they are government owned and operated.

Accepted by the locals. Never

[jfb]

Lurching back on topic...

If HBs and Flat Earthers were the kind of people who could be convinced on the basis of facts, they wouldn't be HBs and Flat Earthers in the first place.  Guys like cambo and Jr are too invested in "knowing The Truth^TM" to be anything other than reflexively contrarian when it comes to Apollo (or space flight in general).  No doubt this past weekend's successful in flight abort test of the Crew Dragon spacecraft is all part of the con in their eyes. 

HBs and Flat Earthers are, quite frankly, dumb as stumps.  Just not a whole lot of horsepower upstairs.  And they know it, and it eats at them, and the only way they can cope is to convince themselves that they're victims of a vast conspiracy to keep regular guys like them down.  It's like the gun nuts marching in Richmond on MLK day, variously lampooned on Twitter as "Hillbilly Hamas" or "Yokel Harum" (giving a new meaning to "whiter shade of pale").  They're losers, and the only way they can make themselves feel better is Rambo cosplay. 

[Bryanpoprobson]

How in the name of Noshabkeming did a moon mission thread become about BR timetables? WTAF?

It's all connected ... somehow.

Any minute now it will be the Speaker for Boskone!   

Wow a lensman quote, I thought E.E. Doc Smith was one of my old guilty pleasures.
Oops another tangent off the main thread.

[gillianren]

No doubt conspiracists would consider my defense of socializing any number of industries to be proof that I'll blindly defend the government.  They need to compare my responses here to my responses in a certain other thread--you can distrust the government plenty and still believe that they're better at certain things than private industry.  One of the reasons Apollo was possible was that there was no need for it to turn a profit.

[Zakalwe]

No doubt conspiracists would consider my defense of socializing any number of industries to be proof that I'll blindly defend the government.  They need to compare my responses here to my responses in a certain other thread--you can distrust the government plenty and still believe that they're better at certain things than private industry.  One of the reasons Apollo was possible was that there was no need for it to turn a profit.

I would think that it's a fairly safe bet to guarantee that Grumman, North American, Boeing and others didn't do it for free.

[Peter B]

No doubt conspiracists would consider my defense of socializing any number of industries to be proof that I'll blindly defend the government.  They need to compare my responses here to my responses in a certain other thread--you can distrust the government plenty and still believe that they're better at certain things than private industry.  One of the reasons Apollo was possible was that there was no need for it to turn a profit.

I would think that it's a fairly safe bet to guarantee that Grumman, North American, Boeing and others didn't do it for free.

Not for free, but I've read somewhere that the companies got a lot of unpaid overtime out of their workers, and IIRC the contractual arrangements between the government and the companies meant that the government got a lot of unbilled work out of the companies.

[gillianren]

And there's a large difference between "money was spent to make it happen" and "the mission made a profit," after all.  Individual contractors may have made profits, but that wasn't an expectation of the mission itself.  That was government spending to make it happen.  They weren't expected to find something on the Moon that would make up for the money spent.

[JayUtah]

Most major Apollo contracts were a cost-plus deal, with a fixed profit margin negotiated at (IIRC) 7%.  Since labor is a cost, then overtime labor would have ordinarily just been passed to the government at a cost.  However, the specific contracts may have had cost-limiting provisions such as limits on overtime, so I can see how it would be the case that a company would not bill overtime labor in order to stay under contractual limits, while at the same time requiring overtime work in order to avoid missed-deadline penalties.