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
Like many have said here, it’s easy to get to the moon, the problem is the price tag. NASA is Insultingly underfunded, and have a lot of projects that need that funding. There isn’t a lot of incentive to go to the moon, compared to during the Cold War when the US and Russia were measuring penis sizes.
Its not so much we can’t as we just aren’t motivated to.
The original space race was a massive flexing contest between the USA and the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. And the moon missions were both insanely expensive and insanely dangerous(and very lucky).
Once that was over, there wasn’t exactly much reason to return to the moon. There’s currently no substantial monetary or political motivation, and purely for the sake of scientific curiosity doesn’t exactly win over the budgets of politicians. So for the last 50 years, nobody has really saved plans or been developing improved technology to go to the moon, and any attempts to do so today are likely to be met with a much more limited budget and stricter standards on safety on top of having to basically redo a lot of the planning and work from the original missions.
50, years ago they had the unwavering support of an entire nation to put a flag on the moon. Today they have the mild interest of quite a few people to build a whole base.
The USA had a goal and that goal was to land a man on the moon before the Soviets did no matter the cost. As a result they played it very fast and loose with safety standards. These days we are far more risk adverse because the motivations and payoff are not what it once was.
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Difficult? Not really. We could do it. However, the Apollo program was extremely expensive, and it wouldn’t be cheaper today. They is no big benefit of going to the moon, other space missions (such as the James Webb telescope) give much more bang for the buck,
It was a different time. The moon wasn’t the objective of the mission, the objective was to get there before the Soviets. It was, quite literally, a space race. Money was not an issue, they got what they pointed at. That situation is gone.
NASA has only 18,000 employees today, SpaceX has only 13,000 employees.
The Apollo program and its subcontractors had over 400,000 employees.
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.
Only problem is the funny made up paper with numbers on it. It’s basically the only thing standing in the way of most problems
How much would it cost today, to build the program with the exact same technologies as theybused back then?
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