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
1-it was never easy
2-Nasa had a metric shit ton of money to work with back then, I believe their budget has gone from about 4% of the us’s total to about 0.4%, and even then Nasa is trying to further cut costs The apollo program ate basically all of Nasa’s funding (+ more), Nasa doesnt have the funds to yeet anymore and optimisaiton is hard
3-The original apollo mission was basically “stick a flag on and leave”, now they’re trying to establish moon bases and long term shti
4-the apollo mission was, by all accounts, a fucking miracle. Risk tolerance is much lower now, Remember, the apollo mission basically had the expected outcome of “there’s a pretty good chance you’ll die” to the point Nixon had a fucking speech preprepared for if apollo did an oopsie. Nowadays, suicide missions are seen as less cool.
5-the development of rockets has just been way slower than the development of say, computers. computers develop exponentially, because they’re readily sellable. rockets are done. rockets dont really make profits, they’re liable to blow up and nuke tons of funds, and it’s hard to market a fucking rocket to like, a 12 year old. or at least the 12 year olds dont have the money to buy one.
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