I’m kinda confused… I see the Space X test launch approaching and I’m just mind blown.
We went to the moon in 1969 ya? Why is it so difficult to re enact that? Why is SpaceX doing it and not NASA? I’ve seen/heard of a few unsuccessful test runs but I’m not super up to date with our space journeys. But don’t we have this technology/engineering capability?
I don’t mean to be arrogant but can someone explain it to me?
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NASA is returning to the moon through the Artemis program. Space flight is a tricky business to be in. Lots of complicated stuff that’s has to happen perfectly and at the right time for it all to work safely. There’s inherently a lot of risk with any new system, both SpaceX and NASA are using a mixture of new and proven technologies in their moon/mars mission designs. Most of what’s being done right now is essentially proving the ability of the hardware/systems to perform as expected and safely. Artemis 1 that launched and landed last year did just that for NASA, proving that both SLS and the Orion space capsule work as intended. Previous disasters such as Apollo 1, Columbia, and Challenger have created an atmosphere of safety and created protocols to mitigate the risk of failures as much as possible. We totally have the ability to do it it just takes time to safely get everything in place to make it happen. There’s no rescue crew in space and rockets are pretty dangerous. Just look at SpaceXs recent explosion today, not sure if that was an intentional flight termination system or if some other catastrophic failure occurred but it’s not likely that someone would survive that had there been a crew on board. There are better safety systems in place today that didn’t exist in the pioneer days of space flight, can’t speak for spacex too much but I know that NASA’s SLS has a Launch Abort System (LAS) on the top that activates and shoots the crew compartment away from the rest of the launch vehicle in the event of a major failure.
Anyway, to summarize space flight is tricky and expensive. Each system needs a lot of time to be tested throughly before any humans and missions can be launched successfully. It’s all about risk mitigation and you do that through a lot of testing. Give it some time, within the next decade humans will return to the moon, then who knows? Maybe we will be “interplanetary” before the 2050s.
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