Why is it difficult even today to land on the Moon when the US did it almost 50 years ago with 50 year old technology?
In: Engineering
The original Apollo program basically had a blank check to get an American on the moon. It cost $250 billion inflation adjusted to get to the moon the first time. They’re trying to do it for less than half that cost this time.
It’s not hard to get to the moon. It’s just expensive. When we landed on the moon in ~~1968~~ 1969, NASA’s budget was around 8% of all federal spending. By today’s standards that would be around $400B. We could easily get to the moon again if we spent that again. What’s hard is the private sector trying to do it on 1/1000 the budget.
Edit: fat fingered a digit. Ya’ll are over thinking this
because of safety standards. today we wont even attempt a moon mission unless success is almost 100%, with basically 0 chance of losing a crew.
vs 50 years ago where it was more like 1/7 attempts failed.
combine that with lack of funding, and limited pratical value, and why would we?
Basically none of the relevant physics or technology changed much in those 50 years, so it’s just as hard now as it was then
The US didn’t maintain the capability, so it must be mostly reinvented from scratch to do it again – the plans either don’t exist or reference parts and materials that are no longer made, at least in those exact versions; people left, aged or passed away
In addition to what others have said, we also just don’t want to go to the moon, nearly as hard, as we did in the 60s. That desire back then was a huge motivator, of nearly every person working on the project.
Because nobody wants to spend money on doing it. Back in the 60’s the USSR was pushing the US in a “Space Race” and it was some idiotic one upmanship. Today there are more important things to spend money on …. like sending weapons to other countries… to fight against the … Russians….
We haven’t found a way to monetize the moon yet, and landing on and getting back it is pretty super expensive. I’m wondering more why we aren’t sending big robots there to work on it.
Money, almost every reason things are done, not done, or done a certain way boils down to money.
In this case, they don’t have the funding that they had 50 years ago. It would be trivial (comparatively) to go to the moon if some agency had unlimited budget. But the question is why. Why do we need to go there? What would we gain that we don’t already know? How many billions of dollars are we willing to spend to ‘just do it again’?
While some technologies have developed exponentially in the last 50 years, like computers, other technologies like rockets have not had much improvement.
Not all technological development is exponential like computers.
One key difference is that computers are small and mass produced. So each small improvement to cost or power is improving millions of computers. Which leads to more money in finding improvements.
Rockets are made in much smaller quantities and have a high risk of failing destroying valuable satellites or killing their passengers. So any improvement, also has the risk of causing catastrophic failure. A single failure could cost over a hundred million dollars. So rocket manufacturers haven’t taken many risks to improve the rockets or even save on costs.
We went to the moon. It costs a fortune. There was nothing there. No real reason to go back. In another 50 years we might have the technology to put a base on the moon, but as of right now? Its cost 500 billion dollars to go play in some dust.
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