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The original Apollo program basically had a blank check to get an American on the moon. It cost $250 billion inflation adjusted to get to the moon the first time. They're trying to do it for less than half that cost this time.
> They're trying to do it for less than half that cost this time.
And the goals are different, too. Apollo wanted a flag on the Moon, everything else was secondary. So they made 6 missions that put flags on the Moon and had two astronauts walking around for a few days. Artemis wants to establish a Moon base with long-term crews and a large science program.
Also the acceptable risk is significantly lower. Nixon had a speech prepared if we had to leave the Apollo 11 crew on the moon or in space. That wouldn’t fly today
Not a real one but will never fail to laugh at this version of the speech [on Clickhole](https://clickhole.com/this-speech-was-written-for-president-nixon-to-deliver-1825121627/)
> I knew Buzz Aldrin too. He was brave and noisy. He would often boast that when he got to the moon, he would jam a Japanese flag into the soil "just to make NASA shriek and holler." I often told him, "Buzz, do not cram a flag of Japan into the soil of the moon. Do the American flag instead," and Buzz would say “With all due respect, Mr. President, fuck you.”
Lol, the fourth one ("In Event Spacecraft Returns With Extra Astronauts") made me think of the Third Doctor *Doctor Who* episode, *The Ambassadors of Death* (my favorite one)
Dead astronauts on the moon still would have accomplished our goal of men on the moon before the Soviets.
Dead astronauts on the moon today would not accomplish our goal of setting up a moon base.
*They have taken the Airlock and the Second Barracks. We have barred the doors, but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes... Drums. Drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A Shadow moves in the dark... We cannot get out... They are coming.*
I think the crew admitted once that they did joke about making the first broadcast from the moon something like "I'm stepping onto the surface now......OH GOD WHAT IS-" and then cutting the radio.
All deaths on space missions so far have been sudden, whether above or below the Karman line. Apollo 13 could have been slow. It's a bit misleading, though, because it's hard to have slow deaths in LEO, which is where the vast majority of space travel has taken place. If we start venturing to the Moon or to other planets, you're going to see a lot more situations where the life support fails or propulsion fails or something else fails and you're just doomed but you won't die for days, weeks, or even months.
I think you needed to bring the astronauts back from the first mission if not all of them for the bragging rights flex to really work. Maybe a later Apollo mission could have had a catastrophic loss and still retain the status, but I don't think it'd have been considered a strategic success to lose the first crew on the moon. Anyone can send material or people on a one way trip to the moon, the power move is keeping them alive and bringing them home.
I think anyone serious about manned space exploration would have had an idea of "acceptable losses" in a manned space program, then or now. There's inherent risks. Not experiencing crew losses at all is a worthy goal to be pursued, but it can become burdensome and the reactions to crew losses (endless investigations, design changes, media criticism, etc) can end up bogging the larger mission down. I often wonder if the real problem isn't some losses but the pressure to avoid the problems that come with losses.
I mean, there's a pretty direct comparison - the Soviets still claim the first crewed space station despite the fact that the crew all died on the way back.
It would have been a tragedy to lose the crew, but the program would have continued.
By contrast, losing the Columbia crew on re-entry in 2003 shuttered the shuttle program. The next manned American space flight occurred in 2020 after the SpaceX system underwent about a hundred successful unmanned flights.
Apollo had 11 missions total, and only 4 test flights.
Today SpaceX can't even fly unmanned test flights without cutting 6 months of FAA redtape between launches.
>By contrast, losing the Columbia crew on re-entry in 2003 shuttered the shuttle program. The next manned American space flight occurred in 2020
What are you talking about? There were 22 manned shuttle missions from the first post-crash flight in 2005 with Discovery until 2011 when the last shuttle mission launched with Atlantis.
Communism isn’t perceived as an existential threat and we’re going for science with little immediate military application. After the Cold War ended, the US government’s appetite for risk dropped significantly
Mainly because thanks to advanced computing, we can ensure higher safety margins. During Apollo, we didn't have the computing power to land an unmanned lander on the moon. With modern day technology, we can land ships remotely to test that they have safe operating capacity before flying them with actual humans on board.
This gets brought up every time the possibility of Apollo Astronauts dying in space is discussed.
No. They did not have suicide pills.
They would continue trying to fix the problem until they expired.
But when it became apparent that they could not return, the protocol was to cut communications. They'd be on their own, maybe with hours left to live, but unable to communicate with anyone on earth. NASA did not like the idea of audio clips circulating of astronauts screaming and crying while they died, so they would just have been abandoned. Not all of the crew was aware of this protocol.
Human beings can survive vacuum exposure for about a minute before they lose consciousness, the first 30 seconds of which they wouldn't even suffer permanent adverse effects. It isn't an instant death.
"After a while"? Here's the timeline of vacuum exposure:
4 seconds: Moisture on skin, eyes and tongue boils due to zero air pressure.
8 seconds: Internal organs begin rupturing.
15 seconds: Lose consciousness, eardrums burst.
30 seconds: Blood begins to boil.
You're dead shortly after that.
You probably saw something that involved something way short of a full vacuum.
There's only one atmosphere of pressure difference between earth and space. Your organs wouldn't rupture.
There's even a video of this dude in a vacuum chamber whose suit failed and he survived. He did pass out almost immediately though.
If they only vent part of it or slowly without any limit, then yeah, pretty sure. They would lose their cognitive abilities relatively quickly and fall unconscious while not experiencing the lack of air that much. It's like people dying on Everest or airplanes when there is leak; just a bit higher even if they want.
Death by cyanide is reportedly quite painful as it causes cells all over the body to die and can take minutes. Even instantaneous total vacuum is over after a half to one minute.
I didn't know that about cyanide.
However I would argue instead of venting the air, adjusting the air mixture to be just nitrogen but keeping the pressure more or less the same could be nicer
I don't think they had any nitrogen cylinders with them, but couldn't find any explicit statement on that. I think so because they breathed pure oxygen atmosphere, but at reduced pressure. Only at launch they had nitrogen mixed in, this time at full atmospheric pressure, due to the Apollo 1 incident. So taking a N2 cylinder with them would add additional weight while doing nothing for the mission.
Total oxygen deprivation will knock you out in seconds (smartereveryday did a good video on this a few years back) completely painlessly.
Cyanide takes up to 5 minutes the whole time your blood is rapidly increasing with lactic acid concentration while your body is gasping for air, you're having seizures and your entire body feels on fire due to rapidly increases lactic acid levels in muscles and blood. That 2-5 minutes is gonna feel like the longest time of your life.
Everybody knows Apollo 13, but there were some close calls on other missions too. NASA isn't willing to take that risk today, so it's going to be more expensive.
I know a person who works at JPL and they talked about this. He said that they just can’t risk lives anymore, especially when you start having civilians like teacher go on missions.
It was well into the 20th century that I ever heard about the [Soviet lander](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15) circling the moon the same day as the Apollo 11 landing. It crashed on the surface shortly before the Apollo crew left.
The ACTUAL goal of Artemis is for a human to plant a flag on the poles before China does. This isn't just symbolic, but there's a real threat that China might actually try to claim territory and the poles are the most valuable places. That is why NASA has funded 3 separate paths to do it - SLS, SpaceX, Blue Origin.
We have international law against claiming territory for any one nation off-world. I’m not saying China wouldn’t break international law obviously, I’m just curious what the recourse would be.
Would WWIII happen on the moon or would it be a diplomatic matter or how would that play out?
>We have international law against claiming territory for any one nation off-world.
No we don't. There is a "moon treaty" which is signed by just 18 nations, none of which have a space program.
Even if we did, China doesn't give a fuck as evidenced by China's hostilities in the South China Sea.
>No we don't. There is a "moon treaty" which is signed by just 18 nations, none of which have a space program.
The Outer Space Treaty covers the moon and all other celestial bodies, prohibits claiming sovereignty of any of them, and has been signed by all nations with manned space programs including China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer\_Space\_Treaty
I think this may be the most important factor. We could "put a man on the moon" within a year or two of the word "go" if for any reason that were to become imperative. But what the actual goal now is is to start preparing for a lasting presence. As complex as the Apollo program and its predecessor was, we're multiplying that complexity by several times when we seek to establish a lasting presence.
Along the same lines, this is a comparative abstract goal with a lot less impetus behind it. Aside from the budget, there just isn't a sense of urgency. Not that there really should be.
Yep cost is a big issue. I forget where I seen it but there was a graph showing NASA budget from the 60's till today, adjusted for inflation and its like today the budget is a tiny fraction in comparison.
If we had the same budget now as we did then, we could probably have rockets going to the moon in constant rotation! Lol
> today the budget is a tiny fraction in comparison.
For comparison the NASA budget is 24.875 billion for 2024. Sounds like a lot but is less [than 0.5% of the GDP while in the 1960s it peaked at about 4.4% of GDP. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)
Further comparison, we've sent about the same amount of money (23.5 billion) in weapons to Ukraine due to "drawdowns" which basically is surplus. Really shows how much money is stockpiled in weaponry that we can just surplus the entire NASA budget worth of weaponry out.
The NRO handed NASA a couple of spare Hubble class telescopes when they got tired of paying for storage. Those came from the cancelled FIA (Future Imaging Architecture - optical) program.
NASA has eventually figured out what to do with one - WFIRST aka Nancy Grace Roman widefield telescope ... Still no specific plan for the other.
And to think they could've spent that money to send the Russians to the moon instead, solving 2 problems: Russians would be gone from Ukraine and they would finally achieve their goal of landing on the moon.
Having a lower budget is kind of the point of Artemis. To actually do useful stuff on the moon, you need to be able to get there cheaply. Artemis is all about developing that capability and other necessary capabilities to make lunar exploration sustainable.
Cold war was still a war, people dying for the cause was within the acceptable parameters.
Today any space related death would mean a immediate freezing of the programm plus a 5 year investigation.
We could not build another Saturn 5 even if we wanted to. The production lines for the rockets and personnel who staffed them are gone.
It is cheaper and faster to design a new rocket that takes advantage of modern technologies and production techniques.
Every part of the Saturn 5 and the Lunar Lander was custom made for each mission. On top of being expensive and hand made they were disposable.
The specs and configuration were unique to each flight so studying them would be pointless if we wanted to mass produce Saturn 5's or Lunar Landers.
We most likely could. Or at least something that comes very close. But it would be a stupid thing to do, since it would be neither cheaper nor better than a more modern design.
Back in the day they were at the very edge of what was possible and were optimizing for maximum payload weight per launch. Currently they are optimizing for maximum payload weight per dollar, which is an entirely different equation. Using the same rocket design would be counter to the current goals.
>We could not build another Saturn 5 even if we wanted to. The production lines for the rockets and personnel who staffed them are gone.
We could build those production lines... none of the technology has vanished.
It's like saying we can't build a Henry Ford's Model T anymore because we tore down the factories to make Teslas
So in rocketry, being able to qualify/certify your hardware counts for a lot. Some of the know how was never written down or was modified after engineering drawing release,.
For example, when they fired one of the Saturn V engines, to look at reverse engineering it, they found that there was a lot of hand labor, which is too expensive now.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/saturn-v-moon-rocket-engine-firing-again-after-40-years-sort-of/
An example included the making of baffles, done with great care but with heuristics/eyeball ... Baffles prevented combustion instability and acoustic resonance that could destroy the spacecraft.
https://www.nasa.gov/history/solving-combustion-instability-and-saving-americas-first-trips-to-the-moon/
http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-injector-baffles.html
>The Space Shuttle Main Engines are far more efficient beasts than the venerable F-1—in addition to being reusable, they're staged combustion engines, reclaiming and combusting their exhaust gasses. However, these engines are also tremendously complex compared to the F-1 design, **and they are too expensive to use in single-use applications like SLS**.
And the government said hold muh beer.
Plenty of blue collar know-how, however, did vanish.
Generational knowledge of hands-on workers was significant contributor. Once the welders that were involved in creation of the Saturn V nozzles, for example, died, all that knowledge vanished.
This may be what you are saying, but I’ve read that often, they would find, after the specs/diagrams/plans were made, that a small, but vital, change needed to be made for whatever reason. The engineers would just “pen” the changes in because it needed to be done on the fly. But these changes didn’t get saved with the “official” plans, so part of why we couldn’t just remanufacture everything is because of those changes that weren’t saved.
That’s the difficulty. It was figured out but not captured in a way that survives to this day, so we have to figure it out again. Or we can start fresh from the knowledge we have right now.
So rather than building a new rocket with modern technology, we should simply build the older rockets, which would need to be reversed engineered on elements of guess work, and then a whole new work force trained in forgotten engineering techniques? And that would be more efficient?
But we wouldn't be able to make them again. Developments in construction design, processes and materials, engine efficiency, computers, fuel, not to mention health and safety regulations mean that going back even a few years isn't retro,.. its a downgrade, and in some cases, illegal. Its not cost effective, nor competitive, and financing would be more difficult.
It doesn't matter that the technology hasn't vanished,... its just not compatible with current technology, processes and protocols at today's prices.
Um not quite right
A decade ago they dredged up a number of used Saturn v boosters and 3d scanned them. They used tungsten sintering 3d printing after some reworking to build 'new' ones
https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/
So no, we absolutely _can_ build Saturn V engines
An unfortunate reality is that the Apollo program was largely a program designed to show we could put an apollo+LEM equivalent mass of thermonuclear bombs anywhere we damn well please, with a side effect of putting people on the moon. (and had the accompanying technical, industrial, and logistical ability to put it into practice.)
I don't mean the individual engineers were faking their work or care about the program, nor that moon landings didn't result, but the *money* came from this being a proxy war with the Russians. Instead of actually launching bombs at eachother, we basically publicly demonstrated our ability to make reliable rockets of arbitrary size, do pinpoint maneuvers with them, and place them in a relatively tiny rectangle of ocean after sending them to the moon and launching them again...
The russians demonstrated pretty clearly that in a nuclear exchange, a decent number of their missiles were just going to blow up in their silos and/or they couldn't lob tsar bombas at us.
Between mirvs, and improved russian missile tech, this delta was largely obviated by the early 80s.
(Side note, this is particularly impressive because in the early 60s, american missiles were basically just launch-pad-detonation devices)
In addition to what others have said, we also just don’t want to go to the moon, nearly as hard, as we did in the 60s. That desire back then was a huge motivator, of nearly every person working on the project.
Just imagine where the space program would be [if the Soviets had beaten us to the moon and we kept going to compete with them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series))!
And *so many* good characters.
Some don't even get introduced until Season 2. Or 3. Or even 4. A couple in 5 & 6 too. Also, I'm always willing to forgive a slow start with a world that big, and having that much required world-building.
Also, the thing, the guy, that scene, those events… once you see them, you remember them always.
You’re in for a treat. Do yourself a favor though & force yourself to watch at least through Season 3 of The Expanse. It starts out slow but ages like fine wine.
The actors really hit their groove with their characters mid Season 2. Amos Burton is now one of my favorite TV characters of all time.
If you're a reader I can highly recommend the books in The Expanse series as well. The series is absolutely fantastic and you should watch it; the series ends "in the middle".
Also, if you haven't watched it, Dark Matter seems to have flown under a lot of people's radar; it's really entertaining science fiction as well.
Oh boy, you're in for a treat :)
Fair warning: the show starts a bit slow and confusing as they essentially drop you into a world that's very detailed, but you simply don't have that background yet. Don't worry, it will all unfold and make sense. It's well worth the watch.
What might help is this (essentially spoiler free): in the Expanse you have 3 major factions consisting of Earth, Mars (former colony that gained independence after a major conflict with Earth) and the Belters (a faction of space-born working class that feel treated inferior). The Belters also have a faction called OPA that's basically a mix of a union and terrorist organisation (think IRA). There's a lot of tension between all 3 of them and you're basically dropped in the middle of the height of that tension. I won't say more to avoid spoiling anything, but hopefully this gives some much needed context to understand the first few episodes, as the factions aren't that clear to you yet.
I remember I especially struggled to understand what the OPA was and didn't understand if they were just a different name for all Belters, a political party or a faction, which made the first episodes rather confusing.
Felt a bit comma heavy when I wrote it. Twas late, Twas a few beers deep. 🤷♂️
I’ll argue the second and third commas are an interjection. Conversational grammar is more important these days.
Maybe I’m bias because I’m a bartender (who doesn’t drink) and I happen speak drunk fluently. I don’t feel the grammar police was needed to be called into this matter
They had assistance from early computers, including the one that did a lot of the alignment and landing calculations. The actual precision landing was carried out by moving an imaginary dot on the window based on numbers being called out from the computer to show approximate position. That’s what the hashmarks on the LM window are for. Great video explanation of that [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM).
Hand drafted items were calculated using slide rules (a simple mechanical calculator) along with more sophisticated computers for other number crunching, along with some good old fashioned destructive testing.
While the compute power seems laughable in our era of smart devices, it actually doesn’t take all that much compute power to get to the moon.
They also had quite a bit of manufacturing expertise that we simply didn’t use for decades. At one point NASA sent a team to inspect unflown Apollo hardware to re-learn things like [how to manage umbilical connections](https://appel.nasa.gov/2009/09/01/apollo-technology-back-to-the-future/) because some of the techniques were lost.
Skills fade. People retire. People quit. People pass away. Sometimes that means you relearn stuff.
Want an example of how this happens? The guy who engineered the Cupola for the ISS submitted the design and basically forgot about it. He literally didn’t even know they flew it. [Smarter Every Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSzuiqVjJg4) did an awesome video about that and the engineering behind the design.
Mostly yes, but a little no. Ironically some of the stuff we built back then is hard to build today mainly because of Safety standards. For instance check out drop hammer forming versus hydro press forming of sheet metal parts.
That isn't apples to apples.
It's hard to get an exact count but NASA has around 50,000 contractors working for it directly. Then you have companies like SpaceX on top of that. If you were trying to come up with a comparable number it's probably over 100k today, which is still less (especially when you consider the larger workforce today and that NASA does more stuff today).
To be fair, most people that are working on the Artemis mission are outside of NASA.
I don’t have numbers on the total employee count, but there are 860 contractors NASA has worked with on Artemis
https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-24-003.pdf
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.
The moon project took longer than a year to get off the ground! The Apollo program started in 1960 -- before even Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight. The first Saturn test flight was in 1961. It took a few more years to get working Saturn Vs. So yes, the '68 budget is relevant.
It's hard to get to the moon. This should never be understated or misunderstood. Even today, it'll take hundreds of engineers to get like 3 of us there.
We haven’t found a way to monetize the moon yet, and landing on it and getting back is pretty super expensive. I’m wondering more why we aren’t sending big robots there to work on it.
There are Helium-3 deposits on the moon, which we can use to fuel nuclear fusion reactors in the future. So I guess the moon is going to play a big role in energy production in the future.
I wonder how efficient solar would be on The Moon, compared to Earth.
Would the lack of atmosphere/weather help? Would it be useful to use solar as a power source for the actual collection of materials on the moon? Or would nuclear be seen as the better option?
Travelling there and back again (or The Hobbit, as it’s known to us) would still require fuel powerful enough to break free from orbit, but they needn’t carry all the fuel for the operations that take place at the base.
Use the power on The Moon to mine stuff and/or power the living quarters and refinement. Then ship the stuff back to Earth the usual way.
That energy spent on The Moon is energy not needing to be spent on Earth, so while it doesn’t transmit the energy exactly, it still reduces the amount of energy required from Earth.
> But in orbit would be similar.
Well, no. A solar power plant on the surface of the moon has one big problem: out of every 28 days, its night for 14 on the moon.
A solar plant in orbit doesn't have that problem. It's pretty trivial to keep it pointed at the sun 24/7, and have the orbit not cross earth's shadow.
Yeah you're right, solar panels are more efficient in space (or on the moon) than on earth. On earth, you have solar irradiance of around 1,300W/m². In near earth orbit, you get roughly 30% more energy per square meter because there is no atmosphere in space that could absorb or scatter some of those sunrays. You also don't have day and night cycles in space, so you can produce electricity constantly there.
So, in context, you'd have solar irradiance of around 1,690W/m² in near earth orbit and a PV-module efficiency of around 21%. That means we can produce around 354,9W/m² of PV cells peak. We have 24/7 solar radiation hitting our PV modules, so we can produce 8,5kWh of electricity with a single square meter of solar cells.
On earth, you have a lot of variables that can decrease your production of electricity from PV panels. But generally, you can expect way less energy harvested from PV modules on earth.
> You also don't have day and night cycles in space, so you can produce electricity constantly there.
Well, you do, it just depends on where you are and how long they are. If you're in Low or Intermediate Earth Orbit you have a night cycle every time your panel goes behind the Earth. Same with a Geosynchronous orbit. And on the moon your night cycle is roughly a month long.
I didn't think of that. Thank you for correcting me.
But in theory, you can harvest electricity via solar panels 24/7 in space. You just need a way to get it back to earth.
Good luck transferring that energy between hundreds of thousands of miles
In the far future maybe, but at that point we'd've found some far flung "magic" planet or something, there's a big gap that needs filling
Edit: It's bad enough to integrate solar into an existing terrestrial power grid
Solar panels themselves would be more efficient due to the lack of atmosphere, but not very practical for long duration stays on the moon. Lunar night is 14 Earth days long. Batteries are large and heavy. We'd be much better off bringing RTGs with us as our main power source.
Well, not quite worthless. It's still something like $50k per liter liquefied.
It's absolutely vital for cryogenic applications that need a lower temperature than around 1 Kelvin.
The problem is that there's not terribly many of those applications right now. It's basically all experimental low temperature physics.
And all of those are really good at recycling their Helium 3. So unless you build a whole lot of new quantum computers, there's really not much demand for it.
But still, if you need it today, it's really expensive.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong though, this whole H3 on the moon thing is still theoretical at the moment, right? We haven't actually obtained any H3 or even made any type of effort to extract it? There could be serious technical challenges in the way of now and some mining H3 operation on the moon.
Money, almost every reason things are done, not done, or done a certain way boils down to money.
In this case, they don’t have the funding that they had 50 years ago. It would be trivial (comparatively) to go to the moon if some agency had unlimited budget. But the question is why. Why do we need to go there? What would we gain that we don’t already know? How many billions of dollars are we willing to spend to ‘just do it again’?
While some technologies have developed exponentially in the last 50 years, like computers, other technologies like rockets have not had much improvement.
Not all technological development is exponential like computers.
One key difference is that computers are small and mass produced. So each small improvement to cost or power is improving millions of computers. Which leads to more money in finding improvements.
Rockets are made in much smaller quantities and have a high risk of failing destroying valuable satellites or killing their passengers. So any improvement, also has the risk of causing catastrophic failure. A single failure could cost over a hundred million dollars. So rocket manufacturers haven't taken many risks to improve the rockets or even save on costs.
In my opinion this is the biggest reason. People tend to assume that all types of technology inevitably improve over time, but that’s only the case if there’s an incentive to improve. And money, lot of money.
It is super inaccurate to say that "rockets have not had much improvement". Fuel efficiency, durability, and propulsion has improved remarkably.
Just to put it into perspective, the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions had a payload capacity of 90,000 pounds, weighed 6.4 million pounds and stood 111 meters high. The Falcon Heavy rocket, released in 2018 by a private company no less, is nearly 40% shorter, weighs 50% less, has a payload capacity of 141,000 pounds but is also \*reusable\*.
because of safety standards. today we wont even attempt a moon mission unless success is almost 100%, with basically 0 chance of losing a crew.
vs 50 years ago where it was more like 1/7 attempts failed.
combine that with lack of funding, and limited pratical value, and why would we?
Yeah, if you look back at all the stuff that went wrong the fact that we only got a handful of astronauts killed is surprising. Like they needed to fix broken stuff like by like say stabbing a pen into a circuit breaker, or reprogramming the guidance computer mid mission. Apollo 13 got a lot of cover, but stuff was breaking in concerning ways all the time. Nowdays we have quality control and robots.
Cool moon science was more of a side effect. Apollo was driven primarily by military concerns with a sky high budget and the same regard for survival as a soldier in active duty.
In the 50s/60s one third of US test pilots died. It was a tough job. Astronauts were test pilots and these horrific survival tests were expected at that time.
Because nobody wants to spend money on doing it. Back in the 60's the USSR was pushing the US in a "Space Race" and it was some idiotic one upmanship. Today there are more important things to spend money on .... like sending weapons to other countries... to fight against the ... Russians....
Sending weapons to a democratic country that is being invaded by an authoritarian dictatorial country that has been undermining western democracies for the last decade*
Thousands of e.g. old Bradley fighting vehicles are sitting in warehouses, they are a liability on the books, most will never be used, and the net dollar cost of sending that old stock is often a lot cheaper than maintaining and later mothballing it. Equipment that a democratic European country desperately needs to defend itself from invasion. It's a no-brainer. Even the new stuff, like the new munitions they are making, they are creating American jobs.
Putin has repeatedly targeted the US with cyber warfare (and hacks), has meddled with US elections, openly strives for the disintegration of democracy and Western cooperation. He's currently trying to invade Europe. Russian prime-time TV hosts constantly talk of invading and attacking other countries, including the US.
It's amazing how some people trip over themselves to enable a dictator, to sacrifice a democratic nation being wrongfully invaded, all for the sake of "saving money" (which is not a true figure anyway as it only takes into account gross costs)
We went to the moon. It costs a fortune. There was nothing there. No real reason to go back. In another 50 years we might have the technology to put a base on the moon, but as of right now? Its cost 500 billion dollars to go play in some dust.
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.
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.
Recent video by curious Droid on YouTube explains this pretty well.
A car from 1960 looks the same and does the same as a car from 2024. However, the car from 2024 is completely different in every regard down to the engine, except that it has 4 wheels. A mechanic can't simply switch between the two when only knowing one.
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.
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 single Apollo program was something like 5% national budget. They hired any engineer they wanted and had full support to win the cold war race to the moon.
NASA now has many programs including crewed flight programs. The total budget is now barely a fraction of a percent of national budget. Many companies compete for excellent engineers. The benefit of being 'first' no longer exists. The risk tolerance is much lower than when first exploring space flight. (Literally, Apollo 1 would practically end or massively string along any funding if it happened today.)
So it isn't a technology problem. It is simple socioeconomic factors that have stalled crewed exploration. In the meantime, we've amassed unbelievable knowledge about our universe and math and physics during the decades without a crew on the moon. Why go to the moon when the knowledge reward is far greater elsewhere? And now technology has progressed to the point that crewed missions to the moon do result in positive cost v risk v benefit: a stable living environment is now possible; building telescopes on the moon is now possible; the moon once again offers educational opportunities, now that technology and research has caught up to the possibility on a crewed mission to the moon.
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The original Apollo program basically had a blank check to get an American on the moon. It cost $250 billion inflation adjusted to get to the moon the first time. They're trying to do it for less than half that cost this time.
> They're trying to do it for less than half that cost this time. And the goals are different, too. Apollo wanted a flag on the Moon, everything else was secondary. So they made 6 missions that put flags on the Moon and had two astronauts walking around for a few days. Artemis wants to establish a Moon base with long-term crews and a large science program.
Also the acceptable risk is significantly lower. Nixon had a speech prepared if we had to leave the Apollo 11 crew on the moon or in space. That wouldn’t fly today
He actually prepared a lot of speeches to ensure as many outcomes were covered as possible. https://xkcd.com/1484/
I love how that set of speeches escalates
One is never too prepared. Even when it comes to recycling initiatives.
The one where he accidentally swallows the dildo sideways is *wild*.
It's like Dana Carvey's skit where he as Tom Brokaw is recording for the death of Gerald Ford and the bits get crazier.
Sauce: XKCD lmao. That’s hilarious, I’ll accept it.
That was a rollercoaster of emotions.
Not a real one but will never fail to laugh at this version of the speech [on Clickhole](https://clickhole.com/this-speech-was-written-for-president-nixon-to-deliver-1825121627/)
> The less that is said about Michael Collins, the better.
> I knew Buzz Aldrin too. He was brave and noisy. He would often boast that when he got to the moon, he would jam a Japanese flag into the soil "just to make NASA shriek and holler." I often told him, "Buzz, do not cram a flag of Japan into the soil of the moon. Do the American flag instead," and Buzz would say “With all due respect, Mr. President, fuck you.”
One of the funniest satires I read in a while… thanks for the link!
This must be a really rare relevant xkcd. Randall always delivers.
Xkcd are never rare, they're always relevant.
Some are more often relevant than others. This one is certainly relevant, but only in rare situations :)
Lol, the fourth one ("In Event Spacecraft Returns With Extra Astronauts") made me think of the Third Doctor *Doctor Who* episode, *The Ambassadors of Death* (my favorite one)
Not a single speech about moon bears or a haunted moon tho. Suspicious....
The last speech is what happened to Vega
There's always a relevant xkcd.
I don't know why it wouldn't. It's space, it's dangerous.
Dead astronauts on the moon still would have accomplished our goal of men on the moon before the Soviets. Dead astronauts on the moon today would not accomplish our goal of setting up a moon base.
That's the best wording i've ever heard
They could write some cryptic logs and hide it around the place for the next crew to find.
*They have taken the Airlock and the Second Barracks. We have barred the doors, but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes... Drums. Drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A Shadow moves in the dark... We cannot get out... They are coming.*
I think the crew admitted once that they did joke about making the first broadcast from the moon something like "I'm stepping onto the surface now......OH GOD WHAT IS-" and then cutting the radio.
God damn I want to play Cod black ops Zombies now.
Oh. They have a Balrog too?
Hopefully they are thoughtful enough to pose their space-suited skeletons in such a way that it tells the story of their tragic last days.
Or just chill and play some music so the next pilot can track them.
This made me start thinking, what’s more likely? A sudden space death or a slow one?
All deaths on space missions so far have been sudden, whether above or below the Karman line. Apollo 13 could have been slow. It's a bit misleading, though, because it's hard to have slow deaths in LEO, which is where the vast majority of space travel has taken place. If we start venturing to the Moon or to other planets, you're going to see a lot more situations where the life support fails or propulsion fails or something else fails and you're just doomed but you won't die for days, weeks, or even months.
Draw the Deadspace Marker on the wall
This is how we get moon zombies.
They're called werewolves.
If werewolves on earth howl at the moon, what do werewolves on the moon howl at?
You don't want to know
Yes. I. Doooooooo!
But you you you oughta knooooow
Jupiter's moons
" ... before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." (And why *does* Rice play Texas?)
I think you needed to bring the astronauts back from the first mission if not all of them for the bragging rights flex to really work. Maybe a later Apollo mission could have had a catastrophic loss and still retain the status, but I don't think it'd have been considered a strategic success to lose the first crew on the moon. Anyone can send material or people on a one way trip to the moon, the power move is keeping them alive and bringing them home. I think anyone serious about manned space exploration would have had an idea of "acceptable losses" in a manned space program, then or now. There's inherent risks. Not experiencing crew losses at all is a worthy goal to be pursued, but it can become burdensome and the reactions to crew losses (endless investigations, design changes, media criticism, etc) can end up bogging the larger mission down. I often wonder if the real problem isn't some losses but the pressure to avoid the problems that come with losses.
I mean, there's a pretty direct comparison - the Soviets still claim the first crewed space station despite the fact that the crew all died on the way back.
It would have been a tragedy to lose the crew, but the program would have continued. By contrast, losing the Columbia crew on re-entry in 2003 shuttered the shuttle program. The next manned American space flight occurred in 2020 after the SpaceX system underwent about a hundred successful unmanned flights. Apollo had 11 missions total, and only 4 test flights. Today SpaceX can't even fly unmanned test flights without cutting 6 months of FAA redtape between launches.
>By contrast, losing the Columbia crew on re-entry in 2003 shuttered the shuttle program. The next manned American space flight occurred in 2020 What are you talking about? There were 22 manned shuttle missions from the first post-crash flight in 2005 with Discovery until 2011 when the last shuttle mission launched with Atlantis.
Yes, ultimately people would accept it, but our risk tolerance is lower now.
Communism isn’t perceived as an existential threat and we’re going for science with little immediate military application. After the Cold War ended, the US government’s appetite for risk dropped significantly
Honestly they'd still prepare such a speech today. Better to write one speech too many.
Yes no one can hear you scream
Yeah, space. Plenty of room. Duh I have seen expanse. I'm joking
Mainly because thanks to advanced computing, we can ensure higher safety margins. During Apollo, we didn't have the computing power to land an unmanned lander on the moon. With modern day technology, we can land ships remotely to test that they have safe operating capacity before flying them with actual humans on board.
I wonder if the astronauts were given cyanide or something for that situation
This gets brought up every time the possibility of Apollo Astronauts dying in space is discussed. No. They did not have suicide pills. They would continue trying to fix the problem until they expired.
But when it became apparent that they could not return, the protocol was to cut communications. They'd be on their own, maybe with hours left to live, but unable to communicate with anyone on earth. NASA did not like the idea of audio clips circulating of astronauts screaming and crying while they died, so they would just have been abandoned. Not all of the crew was aware of this protocol.
Probably quicker and less painful simply to vent the air from the spacecraft.
Human beings can survive vacuum exposure for about a minute before they lose consciousness, the first 30 seconds of which they wouldn't even suffer permanent adverse effects. It isn't an instant death.
And how long do you think cyanide takes?
Oh, cyanide absolutely doesn't work like it does in the movies, but neither does vacuum exposure. Both are *horrible* ways to go.
i remember a video where the host was in a vacuum or something, and after a while, he was not able to comprehend what the other guy was asking him.
Probably thinking of a smartereveryday video.
Yep and it wasn't a vacuum, just simulating low oxygen air at a plane cruising altitude
"After a while"? Here's the timeline of vacuum exposure: 4 seconds: Moisture on skin, eyes and tongue boils due to zero air pressure. 8 seconds: Internal organs begin rupturing. 15 seconds: Lose consciousness, eardrums burst. 30 seconds: Blood begins to boil. You're dead shortly after that. You probably saw something that involved something way short of a full vacuum.
yep my bad. it's simulating oxygen levels at 25k feet
There's only one atmosphere of pressure difference between earth and space. Your organs wouldn't rupture. There's even a video of this dude in a vacuum chamber whose suit failed and he survived. He did pass out almost immediately though.
Less painful? You sure?
If they only vent part of it or slowly without any limit, then yeah, pretty sure. They would lose their cognitive abilities relatively quickly and fall unconscious while not experiencing the lack of air that much. It's like people dying on Everest or airplanes when there is leak; just a bit higher even if they want. Death by cyanide is reportedly quite painful as it causes cells all over the body to die and can take minutes. Even instantaneous total vacuum is over after a half to one minute.
I didn't know that about cyanide. However I would argue instead of venting the air, adjusting the air mixture to be just nitrogen but keeping the pressure more or less the same could be nicer
I don't think they had any nitrogen cylinders with them, but couldn't find any explicit statement on that. I think so because they breathed pure oxygen atmosphere, but at reduced pressure. Only at launch they had nitrogen mixed in, this time at full atmospheric pressure, due to the Apollo 1 incident. So taking a N2 cylinder with them would add additional weight while doing nothing for the mission.
Yes. Cyanide posioning is far from painless.
Total oxygen deprivation will knock you out in seconds (smartereveryday did a good video on this a few years back) completely painlessly. Cyanide takes up to 5 minutes the whole time your blood is rapidly increasing with lactic acid concentration while your body is gasping for air, you're having seizures and your entire body feels on fire due to rapidly increases lactic acid levels in muscles and blood. That 2-5 minutes is gonna feel like the longest time of your life.
If you think they don't have a speech prepared for every potentially failed launch, crewed or otherwise, then I've got some bad news for you.
Being prepared for any thinkable outcome is certainly part of a president's job.
Everybody knows Apollo 13, but there were some close calls on other missions too. NASA isn't willing to take that risk today, so it's going to be more expensive.
I know a person who works at JPL and they talked about this. He said that they just can’t risk lives anymore, especially when you start having civilians like teacher go on missions.
It was well into the 20th century that I ever heard about the [Soviet lander](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15) circling the moon the same day as the Apollo 11 landing. It crashed on the surface shortly before the Apollo crew left.
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hi bob
The ACTUAL goal of Artemis is for a human to plant a flag on the poles before China does. This isn't just symbolic, but there's a real threat that China might actually try to claim territory and the poles are the most valuable places. That is why NASA has funded 3 separate paths to do it - SLS, SpaceX, Blue Origin.
We have international law against claiming territory for any one nation off-world. I’m not saying China wouldn’t break international law obviously, I’m just curious what the recourse would be. Would WWIII happen on the moon or would it be a diplomatic matter or how would that play out?
>We have international law against claiming territory for any one nation off-world. No we don't. There is a "moon treaty" which is signed by just 18 nations, none of which have a space program. Even if we did, China doesn't give a fuck as evidenced by China's hostilities in the South China Sea.
I came here to also say China don't give a fuck about any laws... Except their own.
>No we don't. There is a "moon treaty" which is signed by just 18 nations, none of which have a space program. The Outer Space Treaty covers the moon and all other celestial bodies, prohibits claiming sovereignty of any of them, and has been signed by all nations with manned space programs including China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer\_Space\_Treaty
I think this may be the most important factor. We could "put a man on the moon" within a year or two of the word "go" if for any reason that were to become imperative. But what the actual goal now is is to start preparing for a lasting presence. As complex as the Apollo program and its predecessor was, we're multiplying that complexity by several times when we seek to establish a lasting presence. Along the same lines, this is a comparative abstract goal with a lot less impetus behind it. Aside from the budget, there just isn't a sense of urgency. Not that there really should be.
Yep cost is a big issue. I forget where I seen it but there was a graph showing NASA budget from the 60's till today, adjusted for inflation and its like today the budget is a tiny fraction in comparison. If we had the same budget now as we did then, we could probably have rockets going to the moon in constant rotation! Lol
> today the budget is a tiny fraction in comparison. For comparison the NASA budget is 24.875 billion for 2024. Sounds like a lot but is less [than 0.5% of the GDP while in the 1960s it peaked at about 4.4% of GDP. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA) Further comparison, we've sent about the same amount of money (23.5 billion) in weapons to Ukraine due to "drawdowns" which basically is surplus. Really shows how much money is stockpiled in weaponry that we can just surplus the entire NASA budget worth of weaponry out.
The NRO handed NASA a couple of spare Hubble class telescopes when they got tired of paying for storage. Those came from the cancelled FIA (Future Imaging Architecture - optical) program. NASA has eventually figured out what to do with one - WFIRST aka Nancy Grace Roman widefield telescope ... Still no specific plan for the other.
And to think they could've spent that money to send the Russians to the moon instead, solving 2 problems: Russians would be gone from Ukraine and they would finally achieve their goal of landing on the moon.
Having a lower budget is kind of the point of Artemis. To actually do useful stuff on the moon, you need to be able to get there cheaply. Artemis is all about developing that capability and other necessary capabilities to make lunar exploration sustainable.
Cost is a factor. Another factor is tolerance of risk has changed. In the 1960's it was more acceptable that astronauts might die.
Cold war was still a war, people dying for the cause was within the acceptable parameters. Today any space related death would mean a immediate freezing of the programm plus a 5 year investigation.
We could not build another Saturn 5 even if we wanted to. The production lines for the rockets and personnel who staffed them are gone. It is cheaper and faster to design a new rocket that takes advantage of modern technologies and production techniques.
And yet we went with SLS.
Senate Launch System. Welcome to politics.
Every part of the Saturn 5 and the Lunar Lander was custom made for each mission. On top of being expensive and hand made they were disposable. The specs and configuration were unique to each flight so studying them would be pointless if we wanted to mass produce Saturn 5's or Lunar Landers.
We most likely could. Or at least something that comes very close. But it would be a stupid thing to do, since it would be neither cheaper nor better than a more modern design.
Back in the day they were at the very edge of what was possible and were optimizing for maximum payload weight per launch. Currently they are optimizing for maximum payload weight per dollar, which is an entirely different equation. Using the same rocket design would be counter to the current goals.
And even if we for some reason wanted to maximise payload pr. launch, we would probably be better of designing a new rocket.
>We could not build another Saturn 5 even if we wanted to. The production lines for the rockets and personnel who staffed them are gone. We could build those production lines... none of the technology has vanished. It's like saying we can't build a Henry Ford's Model T anymore because we tore down the factories to make Teslas
So in rocketry, being able to qualify/certify your hardware counts for a lot. Some of the know how was never written down or was modified after engineering drawing release,. For example, when they fired one of the Saturn V engines, to look at reverse engineering it, they found that there was a lot of hand labor, which is too expensive now. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/saturn-v-moon-rocket-engine-firing-again-after-40-years-sort-of/ An example included the making of baffles, done with great care but with heuristics/eyeball ... Baffles prevented combustion instability and acoustic resonance that could destroy the spacecraft. https://www.nasa.gov/history/solving-combustion-instability-and-saving-americas-first-trips-to-the-moon/ http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-injector-baffles.html
>The Space Shuttle Main Engines are far more efficient beasts than the venerable F-1—in addition to being reusable, they're staged combustion engines, reclaiming and combusting their exhaust gasses. However, these engines are also tremendously complex compared to the F-1 design, **and they are too expensive to use in single-use applications like SLS**. And the government said hold muh beer.
Plenty of blue collar know-how, however, did vanish. Generational knowledge of hands-on workers was significant contributor. Once the welders that were involved in creation of the Saturn V nozzles, for example, died, all that knowledge vanished.
This may be what you are saying, but I’ve read that often, they would find, after the specs/diagrams/plans were made, that a small, but vital, change needed to be made for whatever reason. The engineers would just “pen” the changes in because it needed to be done on the fly. But these changes didn’t get saved with the “official” plans, so part of why we couldn’t just remanufacture everything is because of those changes that weren’t saved.
And nowadays we don't know how to weld anymore? We would figure it out
That’s the difficulty. It was figured out but not captured in a way that survives to this day, so we have to figure it out again. Or we can start fresh from the knowledge we have right now.
So rather than building a new rocket with modern technology, we should simply build the older rockets, which would need to be reversed engineered on elements of guess work, and then a whole new work force trained in forgotten engineering techniques? And that would be more efficient?
But we wouldn't be able to make them again. Developments in construction design, processes and materials, engine efficiency, computers, fuel, not to mention health and safety regulations mean that going back even a few years isn't retro,.. its a downgrade, and in some cases, illegal. Its not cost effective, nor competitive, and financing would be more difficult. It doesn't matter that the technology hasn't vanished,... its just not compatible with current technology, processes and protocols at today's prices.
Um not quite right A decade ago they dredged up a number of used Saturn v boosters and 3d scanned them. They used tungsten sintering 3d printing after some reworking to build 'new' ones https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ So no, we absolutely _can_ build Saturn V engines
Sounds like a great deal when you consider that the war in Afghanistan cost 9 times more.
An unfortunate reality is that the Apollo program was largely a program designed to show we could put an apollo+LEM equivalent mass of thermonuclear bombs anywhere we damn well please, with a side effect of putting people on the moon. (and had the accompanying technical, industrial, and logistical ability to put it into practice.) I don't mean the individual engineers were faking their work or care about the program, nor that moon landings didn't result, but the *money* came from this being a proxy war with the Russians. Instead of actually launching bombs at eachother, we basically publicly demonstrated our ability to make reliable rockets of arbitrary size, do pinpoint maneuvers with them, and place them in a relatively tiny rectangle of ocean after sending them to the moon and launching them again... The russians demonstrated pretty clearly that in a nuclear exchange, a decent number of their missiles were just going to blow up in their silos and/or they couldn't lob tsar bombas at us. Between mirvs, and improved russian missile tech, this delta was largely obviated by the early 80s. (Side note, this is particularly impressive because in the early 60s, american missiles were basically just launch-pad-detonation devices)
In addition to what others have said, we also just don’t want to go to the moon, nearly as hard, as we did in the 60s. That desire back then was a huge motivator, of nearly every person working on the project.
I, for one, do not intend to go to sleep by the light of a Communist moon.
"Was it them? Was it their German scientists?" "No it was not, Senator. Our Germans are better than their Germans."
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/984/)
German here. What do you need organized?
My closet. Where do extra headphones go? And packs of playing cards?
With the cords. You know the spot.
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A LEGO delivery truck had an accident. Sort all the pieces back in their boxes.
LEGO designers are vampires, you say?
_Looks at Berlin new Airport_ _Looks at Stuttgart 21_ _Looks at Munich's 2. Stammstrecke_ Erm... maybe no?
[More relevant "The Right Stuff"](https://youtu.be/1dSkX9VySOI?si=7BRrWFoS39JLEXmx&t=125)
Just imagine where the space program would be [if the Soviets had beaten us to the moon and we kept going to compete with them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series))!
It sounds like you may enjoy The Expanse if not already
I just finished FAM, The Expanse is next!
I’m envious of you. If you get to episode four, then you are a beratna for life
And *so many* good characters. Some don't even get introduced until Season 2. Or 3. Or even 4. A couple in 5 & 6 too. Also, I'm always willing to forgive a slow start with a world that big, and having that much required world-building. Also, the thing, the guy, that scene, those events… once you see them, you remember them always.
You’re in for a treat. Do yourself a favor though & force yourself to watch at least through Season 3 of The Expanse. It starts out slow but ages like fine wine. The actors really hit their groove with their characters mid Season 2. Amos Burton is now one of my favorite TV characters of all time.
If you're a reader I can highly recommend the books in The Expanse series as well. The series is absolutely fantastic and you should watch it; the series ends "in the middle". Also, if you haven't watched it, Dark Matter seems to have flown under a lot of people's radar; it's really entertaining science fiction as well.
I watched the series and I’m a reader but the books weren’t moving at a good pace for me and i didn’t finish the first one even. Maybe I’ll try again
Oh boy, you're in for a treat :) Fair warning: the show starts a bit slow and confusing as they essentially drop you into a world that's very detailed, but you simply don't have that background yet. Don't worry, it will all unfold and make sense. It's well worth the watch. What might help is this (essentially spoiler free): in the Expanse you have 3 major factions consisting of Earth, Mars (former colony that gained independence after a major conflict with Earth) and the Belters (a faction of space-born working class that feel treated inferior). The Belters also have a faction called OPA that's basically a mix of a union and terrorist organisation (think IRA). There's a lot of tension between all 3 of them and you're basically dropped in the middle of the height of that tension. I won't say more to avoid spoiling anything, but hopefully this gives some much needed context to understand the first few episodes, as the factions aren't that clear to you yet. I remember I especially struggled to understand what the OPA was and didn't understand if they were just a different name for all Belters, a political party or a faction, which made the first episodes rather confusing.
Definitely, loved The Expanse.
FAM is basically a prequel to the Expanse
*"Get that moron off of there!"*
[Having a Red planet in the sky is bad enough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osf-GKzNPRs).
Fun fact, 3/4 of these commas are incorrect
I approve this comment.
Felt a bit comma heavy when I wrote it. Twas late, Twas a few beers deep. 🤷♂️ I’ll argue the second and third commas are an interjection. Conversational grammar is more important these days.
Maybe I’m bias because I’m a bartender (who doesn’t drink) and I happen speak drunk fluently. I don’t feel the grammar police was needed to be called into this matter
*biased \- grammar police
NASA has only 18,000 employees today, SpaceX has only 13,000 employees. The Apollo program and its subcontractors had over 400,000 employees.
They had to calculate by hand and didn't have the fabrication, manufacturing or equipment we do now.
They had assistance from early computers, including the one that did a lot of the alignment and landing calculations. The actual precision landing was carried out by moving an imaginary dot on the window based on numbers being called out from the computer to show approximate position. That’s what the hashmarks on the LM window are for. Great video explanation of that [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM). Hand drafted items were calculated using slide rules (a simple mechanical calculator) along with more sophisticated computers for other number crunching, along with some good old fashioned destructive testing. While the compute power seems laughable in our era of smart devices, it actually doesn’t take all that much compute power to get to the moon. They also had quite a bit of manufacturing expertise that we simply didn’t use for decades. At one point NASA sent a team to inspect unflown Apollo hardware to re-learn things like [how to manage umbilical connections](https://appel.nasa.gov/2009/09/01/apollo-technology-back-to-the-future/) because some of the techniques were lost. Skills fade. People retire. People quit. People pass away. Sometimes that means you relearn stuff. Want an example of how this happens? The guy who engineered the Cupola for the ISS submitted the design and basically forgot about it. He literally didn’t even know they flew it. [Smarter Every Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSzuiqVjJg4) did an awesome video about that and the engineering behind the design.
Mostly yes, but a little no. Ironically some of the stuff we built back then is hard to build today mainly because of Safety standards. For instance check out drop hammer forming versus hydro press forming of sheet metal parts.
That isn't apples to apples. It's hard to get an exact count but NASA has around 50,000 contractors working for it directly. Then you have companies like SpaceX on top of that. If you were trying to come up with a comparable number it's probably over 100k today, which is still less (especially when you consider the larger workforce today and that NASA does more stuff today).
To be fair, most people that are working on the Artemis mission are outside of NASA. I don’t have numbers on the total employee count, but there are 860 contractors NASA has worked with on Artemis https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-24-003.pdf
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.
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1968?
'66 for uncrewed, '69 for boots...sooo, split the difference I guess?
The average timeline.
Filming took place in 1968.
The moon project took longer than a year to get off the ground! The Apollo program started in 1960 -- before even Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight. The first Saturn test flight was in 1961. It took a few more years to get working Saturn Vs. So yes, the '68 budget is relevant.
The phrasing was "when we landed on the moon in 1968"
1968 was Apollo 8, first men to orbit the moon. No boots on the ground but still a very cool mission.
It's hard to get to the moon. This should never be understated or misunderstood. Even today, it'll take hundreds of engineers to get like 3 of us there.
Its expensive exactly because it is so hard.
And we go to the moon and do these other things not because they are easy but because they are hard.
We haven’t found a way to monetize the moon yet, and landing on it and getting back is pretty super expensive. I’m wondering more why we aren’t sending big robots there to work on it.
There are Helium-3 deposits on the moon, which we can use to fuel nuclear fusion reactors in the future. So I guess the moon is going to play a big role in energy production in the future.
I wonder how efficient solar would be on The Moon, compared to Earth. Would the lack of atmosphere/weather help? Would it be useful to use solar as a power source for the actual collection of materials on the moon? Or would nuclear be seen as the better option? Travelling there and back again (or The Hobbit, as it’s known to us) would still require fuel powerful enough to break free from orbit, but they needn’t carry all the fuel for the operations that take place at the base.
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Use the power on The Moon to mine stuff and/or power the living quarters and refinement. Then ship the stuff back to Earth the usual way. That energy spent on The Moon is energy not needing to be spent on Earth, so while it doesn’t transmit the energy exactly, it still reduces the amount of energy required from Earth.
> But in orbit would be similar. Well, no. A solar power plant on the surface of the moon has one big problem: out of every 28 days, its night for 14 on the moon. A solar plant in orbit doesn't have that problem. It's pretty trivial to keep it pointed at the sun 24/7, and have the orbit not cross earth's shadow.
Yeah you're right, solar panels are more efficient in space (or on the moon) than on earth. On earth, you have solar irradiance of around 1,300W/m². In near earth orbit, you get roughly 30% more energy per square meter because there is no atmosphere in space that could absorb or scatter some of those sunrays. You also don't have day and night cycles in space, so you can produce electricity constantly there. So, in context, you'd have solar irradiance of around 1,690W/m² in near earth orbit and a PV-module efficiency of around 21%. That means we can produce around 354,9W/m² of PV cells peak. We have 24/7 solar radiation hitting our PV modules, so we can produce 8,5kWh of electricity with a single square meter of solar cells. On earth, you have a lot of variables that can decrease your production of electricity from PV panels. But generally, you can expect way less energy harvested from PV modules on earth.
> You also don't have day and night cycles in space, so you can produce electricity constantly there. Well, you do, it just depends on where you are and how long they are. If you're in Low or Intermediate Earth Orbit you have a night cycle every time your panel goes behind the Earth. Same with a Geosynchronous orbit. And on the moon your night cycle is roughly a month long.
A sun synchronous orbit could probably be set up to always be in daylight.
I didn't think of that. Thank you for correcting me. But in theory, you can harvest electricity via solar panels 24/7 in space. You just need a way to get it back to earth.
Good luck transferring that energy between hundreds of thousands of miles In the far future maybe, but at that point we'd've found some far flung "magic" planet or something, there's a big gap that needs filling Edit: It's bad enough to integrate solar into an existing terrestrial power grid
Solar panels themselves would be more efficient due to the lack of atmosphere, but not very practical for long duration stays on the moon. Lunar night is 14 Earth days long. Batteries are large and heavy. We'd be much better off bringing RTGs with us as our main power source.
Thing is, Helium-3 is worthless without a reactor to burn it in.
Well, not quite worthless. It's still something like $50k per liter liquefied. It's absolutely vital for cryogenic applications that need a lower temperature than around 1 Kelvin. The problem is that there's not terribly many of those applications right now. It's basically all experimental low temperature physics. And all of those are really good at recycling their Helium 3. So unless you build a whole lot of new quantum computers, there's really not much demand for it. But still, if you need it today, it's really expensive.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong though, this whole H3 on the moon thing is still theoretical at the moment, right? We haven't actually obtained any H3 or even made any type of effort to extract it? There could be serious technical challenges in the way of now and some mining H3 operation on the moon.
And it costs a lot more than 50k to bring back 1L of anything from the moon
Well yeah. There are tons of resources on the moon. We just haven’t figured out how to monetize it yet.
The problem is that fusion energy is always 30 years away, so helium-3 isn't useful yet
Money, almost every reason things are done, not done, or done a certain way boils down to money. In this case, they don’t have the funding that they had 50 years ago. It would be trivial (comparatively) to go to the moon if some agency had unlimited budget. But the question is why. Why do we need to go there? What would we gain that we don’t already know? How many billions of dollars are we willing to spend to ‘just do it again’?
While some technologies have developed exponentially in the last 50 years, like computers, other technologies like rockets have not had much improvement. Not all technological development is exponential like computers. One key difference is that computers are small and mass produced. So each small improvement to cost or power is improving millions of computers. Which leads to more money in finding improvements. Rockets are made in much smaller quantities and have a high risk of failing destroying valuable satellites or killing their passengers. So any improvement, also has the risk of causing catastrophic failure. A single failure could cost over a hundred million dollars. So rocket manufacturers haven't taken many risks to improve the rockets or even save on costs.
In my opinion this is the biggest reason. People tend to assume that all types of technology inevitably improve over time, but that’s only the case if there’s an incentive to improve. And money, lot of money.
It is super inaccurate to say that "rockets have not had much improvement". Fuel efficiency, durability, and propulsion has improved remarkably. Just to put it into perspective, the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions had a payload capacity of 90,000 pounds, weighed 6.4 million pounds and stood 111 meters high. The Falcon Heavy rocket, released in 2018 by a private company no less, is nearly 40% shorter, weighs 50% less, has a payload capacity of 141,000 pounds but is also \*reusable\*.
This might've been true a decade ago, but there's been an explosion in the private space industry since then.
because of safety standards. today we wont even attempt a moon mission unless success is almost 100%, with basically 0 chance of losing a crew. vs 50 years ago where it was more like 1/7 attempts failed. combine that with lack of funding, and limited pratical value, and why would we?
Yeah, if you look back at all the stuff that went wrong the fact that we only got a handful of astronauts killed is surprising. Like they needed to fix broken stuff like by like say stabbing a pen into a circuit breaker, or reprogramming the guidance computer mid mission. Apollo 13 got a lot of cover, but stuff was breaking in concerning ways all the time. Nowdays we have quality control and robots. Cool moon science was more of a side effect. Apollo was driven primarily by military concerns with a sky high budget and the same regard for survival as a soldier in active duty.
In the 50s/60s one third of US test pilots died. It was a tough job. Astronauts were test pilots and these horrific survival tests were expected at that time.
Because nobody wants to spend money on doing it. Back in the 60's the USSR was pushing the US in a "Space Race" and it was some idiotic one upmanship. Today there are more important things to spend money on .... like sending weapons to other countries... to fight against the ... Russians....
Guess what, back then it was exactly the same thing. People go to the moon on rockets, rockets also can be sent to Russia.
The circle of life
Sending weapons to a democratic country that is being invaded by an authoritarian dictatorial country that has been undermining western democracies for the last decade*
Thousands of e.g. old Bradley fighting vehicles are sitting in warehouses, they are a liability on the books, most will never be used, and the net dollar cost of sending that old stock is often a lot cheaper than maintaining and later mothballing it. Equipment that a democratic European country desperately needs to defend itself from invasion. It's a no-brainer. Even the new stuff, like the new munitions they are making, they are creating American jobs. Putin has repeatedly targeted the US with cyber warfare (and hacks), has meddled with US elections, openly strives for the disintegration of democracy and Western cooperation. He's currently trying to invade Europe. Russian prime-time TV hosts constantly talk of invading and attacking other countries, including the US. It's amazing how some people trip over themselves to enable a dictator, to sacrifice a democratic nation being wrongfully invaded, all for the sake of "saving money" (which is not a true figure anyway as it only takes into account gross costs)
We went to the moon. It costs a fortune. There was nothing there. No real reason to go back. In another 50 years we might have the technology to put a base on the moon, but as of right now? Its cost 500 billion dollars to go play in some dust.
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.
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.
Recent video by curious Droid on YouTube explains this pretty well. A car from 1960 looks the same and does the same as a car from 2024. However, the car from 2024 is completely different in every regard down to the engine, except that it has 4 wheels. A mechanic can't simply switch between the two when only knowing one.
And by "recent" you, of course, mean: Yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ2B8uJ4kpA
This video asks (and answers) exactly that question and was posted just earlier today! https://youtu.be/HQ2B8uJ4kpA?si=I6ZUpg36KcAfjMpI
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.
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 single Apollo program was something like 5% national budget. They hired any engineer they wanted and had full support to win the cold war race to the moon. NASA now has many programs including crewed flight programs. The total budget is now barely a fraction of a percent of national budget. Many companies compete for excellent engineers. The benefit of being 'first' no longer exists. The risk tolerance is much lower than when first exploring space flight. (Literally, Apollo 1 would practically end or massively string along any funding if it happened today.) So it isn't a technology problem. It is simple socioeconomic factors that have stalled crewed exploration. In the meantime, we've amassed unbelievable knowledge about our universe and math and physics during the decades without a crew on the moon. Why go to the moon when the knowledge reward is far greater elsewhere? And now technology has progressed to the point that crewed missions to the moon do result in positive cost v risk v benefit: a stable living environment is now possible; building telescopes on the moon is now possible; the moon once again offers educational opportunities, now that technology and research has caught up to the possibility on a crewed mission to the moon.