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
In addition to what everyone is saying about motivation, money and so on, there is some good amount of technology we’d have to re-familiarise ourselves with in order to go back to the Moon.
Like, say, landing on the Moon. If you want to train people on sometihng more than a simulator, you need to build the training lander. But the Moon’s gravity is 10% of Earth’s, so you need to adjust that. You can’t just make the lander 10x stronger since your angle of descent would be all wrong (much steeper due to the gravity). So you need to make a rig that does a 90% downward thrust at all times and then have a lander that can operate in that 10% gravity condition.
It’s been done before, but with it beign mothballed for 50 years (nobody needed to train on it for that long!), barely anyone would remember the engineering to make that work, so you’re almost starting from scratch.
Now repeat that for everything else you’d need, bigger engines to move the lander to the Moon, suits usable on the Moon, the lander itself, etc.
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