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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Not sure why no one mentioned it, but NASA IS going back to the Moon with the Artemis program, planning a landing for 2025.
Not sure why no one mentioned it, but NASA IS going back to the Moon with the Artemis program, planning a landing for 2025.
The idea here is to make access to space massively cheaper, in this case to make colonising Mars affordable. The vehicles are designed to be fully reusable and to be cheaply mass-produced. Each rocket will launch many times so confidence can build up that it’s working well and reliably. In contrast, the Saturn V moon rocket was built in small numbers and everything had to be checked to be sure it was perfect before its first launch, making it very, very expensive. Then it was thrown away after that one launch.
NASA seems to have become conservative over the decades and was burned by its experience trying to build the Space Shuttle that was also supposed to be cheap by being reusable. SpaceX saw a different approach but couldn’t convince NASA or others and had to develop the technology themselves. A key strategy has been to take risks and learn by testing often, with frequent failures driving very fast development. NASA has grown to view testing failures as public relations disasters so they design everything to be perfect the first time. This makes for very conservative designs and extremely slow progress. SpaceX will change direction and redesign often but NASA will cling to old, dubious choices, often for political rather than engineering reasons.
The Apollo program was Very expensive for its time. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)
We were in a race to the Moon against the Russians with that as the goal. Once we got there it was hard to justify continuing that spending level. The technology that went into the Apollo could be reconstructed, but it would be more expensive as it depended on analog equipment that doesn’t exist anymore, and it was pretty dangerous, but the best we could do at the time. We hope to replace it with a more modern and more reusable system.
It is not difficult in the sense that we lack the knowledge or technology. The problem, as is in many cases, is who wants to spend the money to do it? NASA is no longer funded as lavishly as they were during the race to the moon (in percentage terms in those days, about what the US government spends on the military today) As far as priorities go, going back to the moon was just not a priority with the money they were allocated.
Then, of course, is what is the point? There have been a number of unmanned moon landings since and robotics and automation have become much more sophisticated and humans are just as fragile. So it is cheaper, less risky and nearly as productive just to send unmanned robots for any moon related research.
The “major” ideas going forward could be (a) learn how to colonize space and (b) send humans to more distant planets and (c) potential commercialization of space (tourism, mining, energy, etc). To do any of these, requires major improvements and development of technology. No one is interested in doing stuff the way it was done 50 years ago because the goals might be very different.
The idea here is to make access to space massively cheaper, in this case to make colonising Mars affordable. The vehicles are designed to be fully reusable and to be cheaply mass-produced. Each rocket will launch many times so confidence can build up that it’s working well and reliably. In contrast, the Saturn V moon rocket was built in small numbers and everything had to be checked to be sure it was perfect before its first launch, making it very, very expensive. Then it was thrown away after that one launch.
NASA seems to have become conservative over the decades and was burned by its experience trying to build the Space Shuttle that was also supposed to be cheap by being reusable. SpaceX saw a different approach but couldn’t convince NASA or others and had to develop the technology themselves. A key strategy has been to take risks and learn by testing often, with frequent failures driving very fast development. NASA has grown to view testing failures as public relations disasters so they design everything to be perfect the first time. This makes for very conservative designs and extremely slow progress. SpaceX will change direction and redesign often but NASA will cling to old, dubious choices, often for political rather than engineering reasons.
Not sure why no one mentioned it, but NASA IS going back to the Moon with the Artemis program, planning a landing for 2025.
The idea here is to make access to space massively cheaper, in this case to make colonising Mars affordable. The vehicles are designed to be fully reusable and to be cheaply mass-produced. Each rocket will launch many times so confidence can build up that it’s working well and reliably. In contrast, the Saturn V moon rocket was built in small numbers and everything had to be checked to be sure it was perfect before its first launch, making it very, very expensive. Then it was thrown away after that one launch.
NASA seems to have become conservative over the decades and was burned by its experience trying to build the Space Shuttle that was also supposed to be cheap by being reusable. SpaceX saw a different approach but couldn’t convince NASA or others and had to develop the technology themselves. A key strategy has been to take risks and learn by testing often, with frequent failures driving very fast development. NASA has grown to view testing failures as public relations disasters so they design everything to be perfect the first time. This makes for very conservative designs and extremely slow progress. SpaceX will change direction and redesign often but NASA will cling to old, dubious choices, often for political rather than engineering reasons.
>We **went** to the moon in 1969 ya?
Yeah that’s kinda the problem here. Pretty much the instant we did that public support for the space program plummeted. We were spending 5% of our GDP to basically learn how to build missiles before getting nuked by the Russians, and we did it with a very slim safety margin and exorbitant cost.
>Why is it so difficult to re enact that?
Basically because it was extremely difficult to do it the first time, and no one in 2023 wants to take on the same level of risk that the original crews did to be the 13th person on the moon.
>Why is SpaceX doing it and not NASA?
NASA is also doing it with Artemis II, but NASA’s budget is more interested in research and development rather than commercialization. NASA likes to be the first to do things, SpaceX is focused on being able to bring the cost and risk down to an acceptable enough level that they can offer tourist tickets to billionaires and maybe even mine other worlds for resources for Earth.
>But don’t we have this technology/engineering capability?
Besides the orbital math, most of the Apollo mission stuff is out of date. Building a spaceship capable of reaching the moon with 1965 tech and an effectively unlimited budget vs today tech with a commercial or slim research budget is a VERY different challenge, but at the end of the day, modern rockets will be more reliable, safer and cheaper.
>We **went** to the moon in 1969 ya?
Yeah that’s kinda the problem here. Pretty much the instant we did that public support for the space program plummeted. We were spending 5% of our GDP to basically learn how to build missiles before getting nuked by the Russians, and we did it with a very slim safety margin and exorbitant cost.
>Why is it so difficult to re enact that?
Basically because it was extremely difficult to do it the first time, and no one in 2023 wants to take on the same level of risk that the original crews did to be the 13th person on the moon.
>Why is SpaceX doing it and not NASA?
NASA is also doing it with Artemis II, but NASA’s budget is more interested in research and development rather than commercialization. NASA likes to be the first to do things, SpaceX is focused on being able to bring the cost and risk down to an acceptable enough level that they can offer tourist tickets to billionaires and maybe even mine other worlds for resources for Earth.
>But don’t we have this technology/engineering capability?
Besides the orbital math, most of the Apollo mission stuff is out of date. Building a spaceship capable of reaching the moon with 1965 tech and an effectively unlimited budget vs today tech with a commercial or slim research budget is a VERY different challenge, but at the end of the day, modern rockets will be more reliable, safer and cheaper.
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