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
We easily could of we were willing to spend the same kind of $$.
It’s still real a ton of energy and a phenomenally hard engineering project all which makes it crazy expensive still. Hard to overstate this. Back then the US was desperate to prove our tech was better so Russia didn’t risk nuclear war. The NASA budget was 7-8% of the US budget almost all focused on Apollo vs <1% now and more focused on telescopes & the ISS which are cheaper and have clearer science goals.
We’ve only launched ~100 vehicles to orbit a year (until Falcon 9 dropped the cost significantly) and only a handful to the moon in total. Compare that to hundreds of millions of cars a year and you can see why rockets haven’t improved as much. So why spend all that $$ just to grab a few more rocks? NASA is only returning with bigger goals of a base and gateway to Mars and beyond, making it even harder and more expensive. Even now, it’s not that obvious it’s worth it.
This and a bunch of smaller reasons: Low risk tolerance, no post-war manufacturing economy, less commitment to science, the list goes on.
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