Why does it seem so challenging now to send a manned crew to the moon, when we were able to accomplish this over 50 years ago?
In: Economics
In 1969 humanity sent a few people to the Moon for a short period of time.
Imagine going on a weekend vacation with your family. (Analogy obviously)
Now we are sending people on vacation but we are using the trip as a preparation for moving out to another city. Logistics are different, budget is different, the vehicle is different
The best analogy I can think of is that it’s also challenging to reproduce the Great Pyramid now, even though it was something that was accomplished 4000 years ago.
It’s not that we don’t know how to do it, it’s that our priorities have changed. We’re not willing to spend the money it would require, and we’re not willing to take as many risks with human lives as we were then.
But we COULD do it.
Space travel is always challenging, but I would argue it has more to do with motivation. After the Apollo missions, there just hasn’t been a need or want to go back. We all have our sci-fi desires, but until there is money to be made (even on research), there hasn’t been a point to go back. That mood encouragingly seems to be shifting and a manned mission may be on the horizon again.
AFAIK, it’s a relatively low cost to benefit ratio.
In other words, it would cost A LOT of time & money to make it happen, with not a lot of benefit.
That being said, there are plans to use the moon as a ‘base’ for further exploration (to Mars for example). So if/when it comes time for that, there will be much larger benefits to having people on the moon, so it will be likelier to happen.
We no longer have any active Nasa employees who worked on the moon missions. Plus, we worked for about ten years sending test rockets which would make sure that we had the adequate technology and expertise to make sure we got it right. Right now, we are starting from ground zero again. We have no active rockets capable of this mission and we have no employees capable of this mission and we have no proven technology capable of this mission.
In large part it’s because the politics have changed. Fifty years ago we were scared of the communist threat, and constantly in competition with the USSR (communist Russia). Russia was trying to send men to the moon, so we had to do it first.
Nowadays there’s not as much funding or government/public interest in space exploration, so it’s kind of fallen to the wayside.
The technology is different, the focus of the mission is different (establishing a long term presence near / on the moon instead of visiting it for a few days), and we need to get people trained for that sort of a mission again. NASA also shifted focus to other types of space exploration, so they need to re-acquire or develop the equipment needed to reach the moon.
I love everything about space, and I recently visited cape canaveral. The two things that blow me away are that the Apollo rocket is really small. I imagined the rocket towering to the sky, and in reality it’s a little bigger than a semi truck standing on end. The second thing is that the lunar module is really cramped. I can’t imagine staying in that thing for an hour much less three days there and three days back.
I don’t think that it is “challenging” in terms of technical capacity the same that it was fifty years ago. Back then, the concern was whether or not we could actually build rockets that successfully brought astronauts to the moon and could bring them back. Today the challenge is more monetary and convincing policymakers that sending people to the moon is worth it. Especially in light of the economic recession, it is challenging to convince lawmakers that they should allocate large portions of funding to walk on the moon when the vast majority of their constituents probably won’t see immediate benefits.
It costs a lot of money.
JFK didn’t want to send people to the moon, but he also didn’t want the US to lose the space race against the USSR. During the Apollo program (The US Moon landing program), it was heavily criticized for costing too much. Of course now that it’s over, we all look fondly at it and are quite proud of it. But that wasn’t the feeling during the the process before we landed on the moon.
There’s also the fact that a lot of the people who worked on the Apollo program are either retired or dead. So it’s not so easy to do another moon landing, as tons of experience from the prior ones is now inaccessible. Documents and technical drawings are still available, but those don’t tell the full story.
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