Why is there suddenly a great interest in a new moon landing after more than 50 years?
In: Planetary Science
Back in the 60’s, with the tech at the time, it was possible to send people to the moon by spending a huge amount of resources and being willing to deal with a fair amount of risk to the astronauts. And the political situation at the time made the US government willing to spend that money and face that risk of failure. But although it was possible to send some humans there for a couple days, the technology wasn’t really good enough to do much more there than look around and collect rocks. And so outside of political posturing it was hard to justify all of the expense and risk. So once the US got the political payoffs of being the first to accomplish it, they lost interest and decided to stop spending so much money. Basically the US was able to send people on a trip to the moon, but nothing about the Apollo project was really fiscally sustainable over the long term.
Now it’s over 50 years later, and there’s a couple things at play. First off there’s once again starting to be some political incentives to space exploration, but also we’ve got more than 5 decades worth of general technological progress that allows us to make much more capable spacecraft and also accomplish a lot of tasks for significantly cheaper than was possible in the 60’s.
The $1500 PC that I’m typing this comment on is capable of powering 3D design software and/or running simulations that are orders of magnitude more complicated than anything that all of NASA had available to them back in the 60’s. These advancements in tech have gotten the point where we’re approaching some thresholds where launching stuff into space is getting cheap and routine enough that it’s starting to look possible to potential do things like build outposts on the moon and maybe Mars, and do so in something approaching an economically sustainable way.
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