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
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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