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Notes -
From French's article:
It's always this line of thought that leftists use against the right. They were poorer in the past, sure. But they also had more functional governance. People knew how to build things in the 1950s and 1960s, they didn't sit around in committees all day umming and ahhing about boxticking and getting permission from stakeholders. They had superheavy spacelift capability we're still struggling to replicate.
Crime was lower in the 1950s, it just was. Despite a younger, poorer population and police with less forensics and CCTV, despite doctors less capable of turning 'murder' into 'grievous bodily harm', Western countries had a more stable social system. Not all aspects of the 1950s should be copied (after all, we ended up where we are today), only the useful parts. Denying that anything was ever better in the past than today is ahistorical, literally Orwellian too.
And French never even justifies his theory that the justice system we have today is peak justice, he mentions Jim Crow and ignores the staggering level of black-on-white crime the US enjoys today. The black jurors statistically favouring their own race, this ridiculous 'he deserves a thirty-second chance' de facto jurisprudence, this incredible homage going to Emmett Till while random black thugs go around shooting white kids for zero reason and never get any kind of serious scrutiny beyond a fairly small part of twitter...
Why would French need to justify it when he enjoys this huge framing advantage, where all the schools (not just in America but around the world) teach his historical narratives, assert the vibes he relies on? He can just wave the magic wand of 'Jim Crow' and that's good enough, no further logical argumentation is needed. Truly the only way to fully oppose this is to deny the whole frame, 'no French, your fantasy world does not exist and never has, it has been debunked by me and mine. The facts are mine, I have chosen them and only I get to decide what is important and relevant. The narrative is mine, the premises and vibes are mine. Your books are not reliable sources, you are spouting pseudoscience.'
To be fair and kind to the modern struggle, Apollo spent around three times as much (inflation-adjusted, as are all of the numbers below) as we're spending to replicate it, considering "we" to mean the Constellation + Orion + SLS + ground systems + public HLS expenses. We have higher-quality tools to make work cheaper these days, but quantity has a quality all its own; also, salaries these days have to be at least somewhat competitive with modern private tech salaries, and people cost more than tools.
To be fair and somewhat unkind to the modern struggle, you can already see some of its cracks just by looking at that brief description. Constellation (around $13B sunk cost, starting in 2004) was cancelled for being over budget and behind schedule, after estimates suggesting that continuing it would have taken more like two thirds of the Apollo budget. We have to separately consider Orion (around $25B, mostly complete except the heat shield is a little iffy, development started 2006), SLS (roughly $35B for "Block 1", plus a marginal cost that makes "Block 2" look increasingly unlikely, development 2011), and HLS ($8B public, for two landers, starting work in 2021 and 2022) as three programs, because it's really hard to call something a single coherent program if you spend ten years building a super-heavy launcher for lunar exploration and then realize you probably want to start working on some sort of lander to go with it. Oh, and also the primary lander comes with its own super-heavy launch system, whose development will either fail (in which case we have at least a three year delay with nothing to do but fly around the Moon while waiting for the backup lander), partly work (in which case it's twice as powerful as the one we spent nine times as much on, sending five or ten times as much payload cislunar, in a spacecraft better than the one we spent another six times as much on, for half the marginal cost), or work to design (in which case make that a twentieth of the marginal cost and twenty times the embarrassment, as we realize that from the beginning we should have been struggling to surpass Apollo, not replicate it).
I thought the Saturn V was just outright cheaper and more powerful than SLS (at least the SLS in current condition)? I guess it's more complicated if you consider the Apollo project as a whole but on the other hand, there would also be cost savings from experience going to the Moon and doing all that stuff for the second time and not the first time. $35 Billion for the project and a billion per launch, inflation adjusted, for Saturn V, whereas SLS 1 has already cost just as much to develop and is more expensive to launch, while providing less lift.
Sounds like an epic case of grifting and laziness on behalf of trad aerospace companies. Then again, I'm not really a space guy so there may well be more to it.
You've got the right of it. There's more, sure, but "more" really just boils down to the meta-boondoggle that was the space shuttle, the latest fruit of which is another iteration of
graftboondoggle that is the SLS and its shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters and engines. If anything, calling that epic grifting sells it a little short, I think!More options
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Like many people, French is stuck in the perception of his childhood and still runs high on the liberal's nostalgia for the Civil Rights movement. One could say he groans for a nation that never existed.
And, in a very human error, he overindexes on his personal experience of being insulted for adopting an African kid and ignores the broader context of crime disparities.
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There are black people like Jesse Lee Peterson who even say that blacks had it better under Jim Crow laws compared to what they have today. Especially when looking at crime, family dynamics, fertility and abortion, drug and alcohol abuse etc. The argument is not dissimilar to what is often heard from South Africa after fall of apartheid and impact on living situation of black majority.
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