As the title says, we have made huge advancements; we are even selling space tourism nowadays. But what is always at the back of my mind is how come we never returned to the moon after 1969. It has been over 55 years, and I’m positive we have better technologies for research etc. Was it just a space race, and that’s it? We maintained an orbitting space station for almost 30 years in the name of research, does the moon have nothing to offer?
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Not really, no. We don’t have the tech or money for a base there. We can ‘get people to the moon’ but that doesn’t really accomplish anything.
Lack of public interest overall, while being incredibly expensive and relatively dangerous. A lot of experiments in space could be accomplished in the International Space Station.
But with technological improvements bringing down the cost and making it safer, we should start to see more moon based feats again.
The main reason is why? The Apollo program happened because there was the political will and funding to spend a ridiculous quantity of money to (some what simplified) give a colossal fuck you to the USSR
The another is also NASA’s acceptable tolerances for risks have significantly decreased, the Apollo era missions weren’t quite Yolo but they were a long way from safe.
We are planning to go back to the Moon. In fact, NASA’s Artemis program is actively working on this, with the goal of returning astronauts to the lunar surface, including the first woman and the first person of color, in the coming years. Artemis I (an uncrewed test flight) already launched successfully in late 2022, and Artemis II, the first crewed mission around the Moon, is scheduled to fly soon.
We did return to the moon after 1969. Five times.
It’s expensive, dangerous and we need something to do there beyond junk around and collect rocks.
*edit*
really need to emphasize the danger part. in the 60s, you blow up a rocket or burn up a crew, they are hailed as heroes and martyrs to the great cause. now? the opposite side of the political spectrum is going to bang every drum about how you murdered those astronauts and wasted all that money. conspiracy theorists will have a field day.
The original project was driven by a strong political need to “win” against the Soviets. An enormous amount of money was put in to do it, and even now it’s still a difficult and dangerous thing to do. Once the space race was “won” there was no need to do it again in a hurry, certainly not with people.
Since 1969, electronics has gotten smaller and more robust too, so it’s easier than it was before to send special robots to harsh places in space to gather data. Why risk sending a human when you can send a machine; if it gets destroyed in an accident then it was still just a machine. You can make a new one. Training astronauts is much more time consuming and expensive, by comparison.
2 main reasons. Support for going to the moon waned because there was nothing there that the common man could get excited about… no magic rocks, no green cheese, no piles of Platinum. so people lost interest. Plus we beat the damned dirty reds…. so.. why bother, right? (people are stupid.)
The other reason is the development of the shuttle was coming along. it was never designed to go to the moon, but designed to earth orbit carrying payloads and performing experiments. The shuttle was a huge money suck with left no more money for moon programs.
All that said, recent observations indicate water on the polar regions of the moon, which is why there is some interest in going back. With water, a lot more can be done both for the advancement of the space program and for the advancement of science.
It’s very expensive, and there isn’t much reason to do it. That’s all.
There aren’t enough reasons to visit the moon to justify the cost. The first time was important because it was something we’d never achieved before.
Money and motivation.
Landing on the Moon was a technological race between the US and the USSR. When the US “Won” that race, public interest (and funding) drastically fell.
NASA shifted its focus to the Shuttle Program and “further out” projects.
If humanity depended on it (with unlimited resources) we could have probably landed on the Moon within a year of any point since the 1980s.
So yes, it was very much a politically driven competition with the USSR.
As for a EIL5 answer which isn’t political, It’s like asking why your parents haven’t taken you to Tokyo Disney again. You go to the neighborhood park all the time! Sometimes you go to the local water park! These are not remotely equivalent in terms of cost and complexity.
Any scientific research that needs a visit can be done much cheaper and safer using robots. Essentially the astronauts jobs were replaced by automation.
There’s a couple things that can explain it.
1st, public interest dropped sharply following those initial landings. Make it first? That’s incredible! But by the 4th and 5th landing, the race with the soviet’s to the moon was over, so that led to interest dropping because…
2nd, it was expensive. It cost billions of dollars and with decreasing public interest, it was an “easy” thing to cut.
Now, that’s why we stopped – why haven’t we been back?
Well we have! Well, not humans, but rovers have landed as recently as March of this year! Truth is, rovers can do a ton of what humans can, and are a fraction of the cost (relatively speaking) to send to the moon, and space in general.
So basically, we initially had to send humans because we were not technically advanced enough to send robots, but now that robots/rovers are more advanced, we send them instead.
>But what is always at the back of my mind is how come we never returned to the moon after 1969.
We returned to the moon five times between 1969 and 1972 with Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17.
It’s expensive and there are not many benefits to be on the moon as of yet.
We are technologically too far behind from being able to set up a permanent base there, and sending people for short stints is too expensive and dangerous. You can get the same scientific results by sending unmanned probes and rovers.
There’s nothing up there that we can justify the cost of getting someone/something there that we can’t observe with telescopes and the like for much cheaper
I asked this exact question at dinner last night lol
We have been back to the moon multiple times since 1969.
Apollo 11: 1st landing, 1969.
Apollo 12: 2nd landing, 1969.
Apollo 14: 3rd landing, 1971.
Apollo 15: 4th landing, 1971.
Apollo 16: 5th landing, 1972.
Apollo 17: 6th landing, 1972.
Apollo 18, 19, 20 were canceled due to expense and waning public interest.
We haven’t been back because 1) it’s extremely expensive – estimated 26B in 1960s money, up to 3% of the annual federal budget at the time. 2) been there, done that. 3) very little to be gained in returning, aside from setting up a permanent base for habitation and/or a stop on the way to Mars.
There has been a handful of missions to the moon after 1969, and a whole bunch of people walked the surface. Last one being Apollo 17, 1972.
Because the people who are in charge never saw any point in spending the money to go back.
And I REALLY hate to say it, but they were kinda right about that. There’s just not much up there, right now, that merits spending the money.
Now, from a human achievement and continuity standpoint, I think we really ought to send another few people up before all the past people who went up die. We should always have people who have walked on the moon around just to prove we are capable of great things.
But there’s not a lot of research that requires a human presence, it’s a long way away and really expensive so it needs to be worth spending the money.
And, also pretty important: the Apollo program didn’t leave behind any infrastructure that made getting back to the moon easier or cheaper.
All we got out of the Apollo program was the rockets that got people up to the moon, that’s it.
No space station. No Earth to orbit reusable launch vehicle. Nothing but some extremely expensive single use rockets.
That’s not NASA’s fault, they wanted to spend the time and money to do it right and get some serious infrastructure built. But the people in Washington were more interested in beating those pesky Commies to the moon than in science and getting us a foothold in space.
There’s another factor as well: there’s no financial payoff.
Put satellites in orbit, you get back money in all sorts of forms. Put someone on the moon? You get back… moon rocks at best. I don’t like the fact that the profit motive is so important a factor in human endeavor, but it is.
That’s why space colonies, whether orbital or lunar or Martian, are fairly unlikely in the near future. The only thing the nation spending all the money to build them will get is prestige.
TL;DR: There’s nothing keeping us from going back to the moon, but no one wanted to spend the money because there wasn’t much benefit they saw to going back.
It’s not worth it. The first few times it was an important milestone, it was politically valuable (space race USA vs soviet union) and also a very interesting goal for science and technology.
Now that we already were to the moon a couple of times, there is not much to really justify going again. It’s economically not viable and scientifically there is not enough to gain anymore to justify the cost.
AFAIK there are currently some plans to return to the moon but just as an intermediate step to test the technology to go to mars.
A few things together.
It WAS a political stunt at the time, and was important geopolitically especially with the US-Russia relationship at the time.
Modern technology allows rovers to do a tremendous amount of scientific exploration without actually requiring the risk associated with putting a human there. Same reason we now often use robots to defuse bombs instead of human bomb squads. Robots have gotten better, so we can subject ourselves to less risk.
Putting a human on the moon was/is EXPENSIVE. If there is little to gain politically or scientifically by going back, who’s footing that bill?
Because its very difficult and expensive for very little reward….
Nothing there worth the incredible cost of going. The only real value of manned space flight is nationalist science/engineering posturing. “We can do this and you can’t, because we’re better than you. Buy our stuff…”
Which is why Artemis. China and India are getting there. Red Queens race- we have to show were still better. There will be a Mars mission.
A) It’s expensive
B) It’s dangerous
C) We can send robots these days
Money and interest. People were excited about the first landing (Apollo 11). By the time they reached Apollo 13, the voyage was no longer televised, and people were already questioning the money spent, including by President Nixon, who wanted to reduce federal spending. Also worth considering is that the Space Shuttle started being designed BEFORE the moon landing, and included in its potential design another lunar program. NASA just didn’t have the budget or capital to do both.
We hit a golf ball on it, ate an egg on it, what else is there really to do with it?
Its been said by others, but its extremely hard to justify going to the moon. Theres very little that can be done on the moon by people that can’t be done by robots, which are far easier to get there. And there are also very few experiments that need low gravity that can’t be done in low earth orbit.
ultimately…what is the motivating factor?
Why do you want us to go to the moon?
The moon landing back then cost $270 billion (in todays money). It likely won’t be that much, but maybe $100billion(?)
Now….tell me….what else could you do with that money that might be more important to solving a human condition problem?
It took a few confirmatory visits but we conclusively determined it was not made of farmable cheese!
The US returned 5 times after the 1969 moon landing.
We won the space race and as a result…
Political will to keep writing NASA a blank check dried up. This was exacerbated by the Apollo 13 mishap as people in congress started to get cold feet about taking greater risks. The program had already resulted in 3 very avoidable deaths before even getting off the ground
Public opinion on the risk and cost of the missions also shifted. There was intense public pressure to get to the moon but after we got there, people got bored of it. This helped contribute to the funding issue as it made it easier for the detractors in Congress to build support.
Richard Milhouse Nixon. The first two points explain why we stopped going, Nixon explains why we didn’t go back. NASA submitted 2 master plans to Nixon at the end of the Apollo program: 1) Continue crewed deep space exploration and build towards a Mars mission in the 90s 2) The space shuttle. Nixon chose the shuttle because his defense department liked the defense/reconnaissance potential and it was viewed as much safer. We all know how that went. Shuttle killed 14 people in 2 accidents objectively cause by human negligence.
Okay, it wasn’t really all Nixon’s fault. He definitely set us on the ‘wrong’ path but any administration after him could have reversed course. The biggest reason they didn’t is that it’s fucking expensive to rebuild all that program architecture. It’s not just building a rocket. That’s maybe the easiest part. When we started building SLS, the idea was to use as much shuttle architecture as possible and they did. But for everything else, they had to start from scratch. It takes a long time to build the machines that build the machines. My point here is that the time/cost of restarting a lunar program from scratch is a tough sell. It’s really only because we’re now racing China to the moon that there’s enough political will to spend the money on it and just barely at that.
I hope that helps your understanding.
Going to the Moon is much harder than going into orbit. We do have technology that we didn’t have then, and that does help.
However, the Apollo program took up something like 5% of the Federal budget just in direct costs. And because of the circumstances, NASA was willing to take risks that wouldn’t be acceptable today. They did extremely impressive work to bring down the risk, but it was still quite risky in a way we wouldn’t accept today.
So yes, we could do some things more safely and cheaper today, but “cheaper than 5% of the federal budget” is still a lot of money, and NASA’s budget has been cut to a tiny fraction of what it was then.
So NASA doesn’t have the money to go to the Moon, and there’s not much point in going there. Why should we expect vast resources on going back to the Moon? What would be the point?
>Was it just a space race, and that’s it?
It’s really expensive.
During that era, the US was spending more than 4% of the entire govt budget on the moon program, which is several times what it has ever spent since.
The space race is the reason we spent that money, but if it was cheaper we probably would have gone back for other reasons.
>We maintained an orbitting space station for almost 30 years in the name of research
The ISS is much cheaper and the costs are shared by other countries.
>we are even selling space tourism nowadays.’
Blue Origin tourism is just a quick up and down, not even to orbit. This is much cheaper and easier. SpaceX goes to orbit, but this is also significantly easier and cheaper than going to the moon. Both developments are really quite recent, and neither can be directly scaled up to a moon mission anyway. They aren’t really big enough and don’t have the range to get there.
> It has been over 55 years, and I’m positive we have better technologies for research etc.
There have been some gradual improvements and there is some really new stuff that, if it works out, might actually make going to the moon again more likely for a reasonable price. In particular, launching and landing rockets has reduced costs of getting things to space for SpaceX, and others are sure to follow now that the path has been laid. That’s why you see these huge satellite constellations. But in general, for most of the time between Apollo and today, technology hasn’t improved nearly as much as you might have thought. It didn’t improve anywhere nearly as much as computing technology or biotechnology, or even as much as aerospace in the first half of the 20th century.
>does the moon have nothing to offer?
It’s got lots to offer, but not enough to push people into spending the enormous amount of money and resources needed to go there…unless those prices come down. Which they might actually do in the next decade or so.
Aside from the tremendous cost, there was very little left to be gained after the first couple of missions.
Going to the moon first was to say you did it. We weren’t entirely sure we could do it and now we know we can.
We know what’s up there, nothing, so there’s no reason to go back. Why other countries haven’t done it is really just a thing of because they know they can so why bother trying?
First you should learn that we have gone to the moon SIX times, five of them after 1969.
So, the first misconception to get out of the way is that we haven’t been to the moon since 1969. The last crewed mission to the moon was in 1972. That’s still a pretty long time ago, but the fact that we did put more people on the moon after 1969 sheds some light on why we aren’t anymore.
One big driving factor for the crewed lunar missions was the USA’s desire to one-up the Russian space programme. After the USA moon landing in 1969, the Russian space programme actually abandoned their attempts at crewed moon landings, making the first successful returning uncrewed moon landing in 1970. This made crewed moon landings effectively obsolete, but despite that the USA continued crewed moon landings as a way of showing off. Eventually the USA decided that showing off was not worth any more risk to human lives and started sending robots like the Russians did.
Honestly we just didn’t find much worth going back for.
Getting a set amount of weight out of atmosphere isn’t THAT much easier or cheaper than it used to be. We can do it more accurately, with smaller and better navigation systems and instrumentation but the brute force issue is still there and we haven’t discovered anything which revolutionized propulsion, really.
The moon is a long way to go for what amounts to samples we already have and bragging rights we lost interest in after the space race. Even if we did decide we wanted new samples or experiments, it’s easier and safer to send a machine without all that added mass of life support and return trip provisions.
Until we can either
A) boost real tonnage to orbit and retrieve it cost effectively
Or
B) Ensure the ability to manufacture whatever is needed with just a fairly small initial package
Then any kind of more substantive or recurring human presence on another body, be it the moon or mars or whatever, doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Preferably both, since that’s the combination that allows things like say…mining other bodies for materials hard to reach on earth to justify colony presence.
After getting to the moon, the Americans and Soviets both discovered there was not much there but a bunch of rocks and dirt and it was a generally inhospitable environment of rocks and dirt at that.
There’s little atmosphere, no water or oxygen, high levels of ultraviolet radiation, and often massive shifts in temperature.
After the end of the Space Race, it made more economic sense for the US and USSR alike to just use probes than send people. The probes were not cheap, but they nowhere near as expensive as using people and if their ship accidentally blew up or got lost forever, there’d be no grieving families or friends to have to comfort and assuage. Like it or not, humans to get much more sentimental about the loss of another human than a robot.
Just for accuracy: People have been to the moon several times since 1969. There were 9 Apollo missions. The question is why we haven’t been since 1972.
I read (on the internet somewhere… take with salt grains) that if you took all the gold on earth, and put it on the moon, it would cost more to go and retrieve it than the gold was worth.
Very very high cost, without much benefit at current.
I also assume that if we ever become a space faring species, that we would use the moon as a launching point, but that is purely sci-fi speculating.
We are going back in a few years. Look up the Artemis moon missions. Artemis 1 already flew
It’s ridiculously expensive. Sure there’s a lot to gain through research, but nothing of obviously exploitable financial value equal to what it’d cost to go. The original moon landing had this issue, but it was sidestepped politically because beating the Russians was more important than the financial value. We were also in a time when we placed more value on research for knowledge rather than definitive financial gain.
It was (and still is) fabulously expensive to chuck stuff out of the atmosphere with a life-support system for human beings aboard and a means to return them, and the Moon is basically 1000 times further away from the Earth than the ISS, which isn’t such a big deal in terms of travel time but kinda is in terms of fuel. The Saturn V was a testament to a lack of a sense of proportion that even the British can admire, it took a nation basically on war footing to do it….. and after that race was won, well …… why bother, we’ve got a load of Moon rock back we left the reflectors there, it’s not <that> hard to stick a rover on it, and low gravity research (which is important) is just as easily done on the ISS/MIR/Skylab etc… The reason to go back is to build a base capable of acting as the launch site for a Mars misison, but moondust makes that of debateable value….. for an interstellar launch with liekly tech from the next 25 years we need to be at the point of industrial bases on the moon to get Helium-three as fusion fuel for a Daedelaus project engine….. it’s the only thing on the moon valuable enough that we couldn’t more cheaply synthesise on Earth
There are people willing to go, and engineers and controllers able to do the work.
The people who write the checks are where the bottleneck is. The answer is: politics.
Because we discovered it isn’t made from cheese.
The first thing you have to realize is no, our technology hasn’t advanced enough in a way that matters here.
The ISS is 240 miles away. Hence why space tourism can reach the edges of space, it’s not necessarily that far with the amount of money being thrown around and what our current technology can achieve. Even then it’s still millions to do so.
But the moon is a hundred times that. 240,000 miles. This has not became a trivial distance to travel. And the resources required to travel that far, safely, with multiple human beings makes the cost scale exponentially. It’s a full week of travel just there and back – so you need a full week of food, water, oxygen for that along with your human cargo.
So you have to ask yourself two questions:
And the answers are purely prestige and nothing.
Robots can do everything we want to do on the moon for cheaper, longer, with less risk AND it’s not an international incident if anything goes wrong. If a robot is stranded no one cares. If a single person is stuck on the moon it’s a colossal failure for NASA. And no one really cares that we send people to the ISS regularly.
The risks are immense, both just in potential of loss of human life for effectively no real gain AND NASA just losing more funding because of public outcry when something finally goes wrong. It’s a no win situation for NASA really here, just because a portion of the population is overly fixated on sending people just for the sake of sending people since it’s the only thing they really understand.
So until we can safely have an entire supply chain to the moon with the technology to support people up there with little risk, humans have no business being on the moon or any other rock in the solar system.
And even then, once again – why have people there instead of robots? Likely at most we will only have people to repair things and little more if we have an established base. I don’t foresee it ever really being economical to fund a larger scale operation any farther than the ISS.
We’ve been to the moon 5 additional times since 1969!
In 1972, the Apollo 12 missions built the LSEP //SNAP-27 nuclear devices on the lunar surface which turned radioactive decay from the cosmos into workable electricity! It’s a fuckin trip to read about.
The better question to ask yourself is what vested interest did they have in omitting this from textbooks and conventional discourse regarding the moon landings.
Only use I can think of today is as a practice run for going to Mars
After Apollo Nasa switched to the space shuttle. It was a very expensive vehicle and incapable of going beyond low earth orbit in any way. Then there was ludicrously badly managed constellation/artemis program that consumed a lot of resources and provided almost nothing in return.
We did go back 5 more times. Last mission was in 1972
Humans are willing to put in a lot of effort into doing something for the first time as an exploratory venture, whether that’s to the moon or the Marianas Trench or to the earth’s mantle.
But after the first time or two, now there needs to be a return on investment OR the effort to sustain the presence is small enough that it is worthwhile to keep it going. So if we go to the moon, it now needs to be for some reason that will generate payback more than the cost. We go to the ISS because it’s orbiting on its own now and there’s nothing left to build on it and so the cost of using it is now smaller.
Expensive, complex and difficult, and many question the need to do so.. The political will to is not like getting there 1st all those years ago.
The original moon missions were done not for scientific but for political reasons. So NASA had basically an unlimited budget. After Apollo 11, the novelty factor was gone, and people lost interest, so the budget was severely reduced every single time. So much that several missions were completely cancelled. After that, there was no interest in a moon landing until the the early 2000. But this time, with a budget that was not nearly enough.
Now with the rise of private space companies, the cost came down enough to make it feasible again.
And this was the heavily shortened version, without all the political games and goal post changes.
It was a dick measuring contest in the 1960s. Americas dick ended up being bigger that the Soviet Union. Once it’s measured, no need to remeasure
We went to the moon for politics. Now we are going back for politics, but we are going to lose the race this time.
Why would we? Actually a serious answer – what would be learn or otherwise gain from going back to the moon?
Same reason we don’t go to the bottom of the Mariana’s trench anymore, ain’t shit there
Make no mistake – the moon landing was a military operation not for Space exploration. After we won…well we won.
The surface of the moon is so cold it would freeze your dick off if you actually landed there
The same reason we don’t regularly go to the very bottom of the ocean or to remote areas of Antarctica.
It’s very dangerous and expensive and there is little value to be gained in doing it.
we went there to win a bet, piggybacking on the ICBM program.
we’re not competing for frontiers anymore because the world is running out of food as a result of a century of pretending all resources were limitless and the planet wanted us to leave.
We’re too dumb for space.
What is gained from moon exploration? Are there better space targets?
What a strange question, we went to the moon like 5 times with crewed missions after 1969 (Apollos 11, 14, 15, 16, 17) and have gone several times since with robotic missions. Crewed missions are planned to occur again in the next couple of years (Artemis 2 will orbit the moon, Artemis 3 is planned to go to the surface).
Went there, found rocks, rocks weren’t really interesting, we decided it wasn’t worth going back just to look at rocks again.
Because the moon people told us not to come back.
FYI we landed 5 times between 1969 and 1972. But it’s expensive and dangerous to send astronauts, who will generally do less work and gather less data than a probe. So modern moon missions are unmanned.
Short answer: we forgot how. Honestly—the apolo plans disappeared and NASA had to rebuild everything from scratch
We’re in the process of establishing a moon base right now. No reason to “go back” with manned crews just yet.
They’d been up there heaps and the budget switched to the Space Shuttle.
Ok, so the primary reason for eaching the Moon back in the day was only to beat USSR and get a Single Win in the Space Race, and reaching the Moon would be the Final Win as well, so even thought the Soviet reached every other milestone First, USA was very willing to invest into this win. So it became a competition of pride, a pissing contest. But the reality of the matter is that, what little on the moon that is valuable enough to mine, is hard and expensive to set up a base for, as well as sending it back to the earth.
However, unless you are luanched there via something like a drop pod, a trip to the moon gonna take 3 days, even with modern advancements. But with a drop-pod, it could be a one way trip, but it would take less then 9 hours, and you would only need to survive an impact of 13 million gs, easy clap, right.
But Really, beyond the sheer costs, there is few compelling reasons to go back
First, ask why we wanted to go in the first place. There was no real scientific or economic motive. We just wanted to beat the Soviets, while also showing the world that we can fire a very large rocket to hit a very small moving target.
Found out it wasn’t made of cheese. No point in going back after that.
Imagine it was really, really, expensive and fairly dangerous to get to a small area of rural Nevada that we’d already explored. Do you think we’d keep trying to go back?
NASA has landed people on the moon multiple times. And the USSR, china, India, and Japan have all landed spacecraft on the moon.
Because it’s not a question of going there again
I know there’s lots of reasons not to. But it definitely feels like we should be doing SOMETHING. At least doing surface visual scans and subsurface digs or whatever. Shit… Just robotic testing facilities even. SOMETHING. Stagnant ass human race …..
it’s just a big rock. The big mystery is why anyone bothered in the first place.
there’s nothin for us in space, we’re not gonna find another planet… we wont be able to get to another planet.
the moon is a giant rock in a freezing vacuum. its a cool feat they went there n back but its been done.
what could it offer? test things to see how they react on moons specific gravity.
we are ON the best spaceship we can ever dream of. the one we evolved on. and we need to put our imagination to making it green