Why is it so hard to go back to the moon?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-it-so-much-harder-for-nasa-to-send-people-to-the-moon-now-than-it-was-during-the-apollo-era/

by ajd2201 • 2 years ago

101 141 2 years ago

scientificamerican.com

vasco• 2 years ago

We've gone back to the moon many times, just not carrying useless people.

On another note it annoys me a bit that people in power are "fine" with thousands of dead people for wars that aren't needed, but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Can we carry the not-useless people instead?

Juliate• 2 years ago

I guess the parent meant that it was comparatively way cheaper and easier to send probes, rather than people. And that we did send probes, even way further than the Moon.

throwaway48540• 2 years ago

As soon as we get some. Main metrics of usefulness would be survival rate in hard vacuum, cosmic radiation and absolutely minimal or extreme temperatures - divided by volume, weight, price and energy requirements - and further by the useful work it can do per unit of time.

In conclusion, not any time soon. Humans will return to the Moon only when we accept that our presence there is purely symbolic/for the cool factor, and decide to eat the enormous price tag.

avmich6• 2 years ago

Whenever a roboticist is asked if robots are better than humans for, say, Moon exploration, he pauses. Red Whittaker from Astrobotic was admitting that robots are not nearly as capable as humans, at the time of Google Lunar X Prize competition. Robots have improved since then, but costs to send humans have also lowered. I'd like to have a conversation on this topic before asserting the answer one way or another.

motohagiography• 2 years ago

either we develop a death row space program or yield future civilization in our lifetimes to the country who does.

AI driven androids (or more likely cephalopoids) might be able to bootstrap some initial habitat, but the prisoner/android conflict in spacefaring is going to be very real, imo.

pjc50• 2 years ago

Even the Soviet space programme, in the decades after losing something like twenty million lives in a war that everyone would rather have avoided, was not reckless with the lives of its astronauts. Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.

There's probably a lot to be written about the precise moral boundary, but Western culture is very against missions which are definitely suicidal while OK with those that merely have a very high chance of getting you killed.

potato3732842• 2 years ago

Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.

Magellan, Hudson, Cook and a litany of others were certainly not cheap cannon fodder. Yet they were allowed to take on immense personal risk and risk to their crews, above and beyond the standards of the time because it was deemed worth it.

There is a fine line between reckless and acceptable risk. The cost of such endeavors absolutely pales in comparison to the long term potential for wealth creation for the rest of humanity by making the resources of other planets reachable. I think that we as a society should be slightly more willing to let people take upon serious risk of death in the pursuit of societal progress.

BonoboIO• 2 years ago

Vladimir Komarov would argue against your theory

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

I hope that when (if?) SpaceX's Starship becomes fully operational we'll get the sort of bold explorers going on their own missions at their own risk. If some wealthy young guys want to go on a mission to Mars in the same spirit as Shackleton or Darwin or Edmund Hillary I think they should be able to. Those explorers and scientists knew the great risks they were taking but chose to do it anyways because they valued furthering human achievement more than they valued their own safety. When an exploration mission's acceptable risk of death is 10% instead of 0.01% we'll see great things being accomplished.

PaulDavisThe1st5• 2 years ago

They went to places that, without human exploration, we couldn't know anything about.

That's just not generally true anymore. We know things about other planets in the solar system, and planets and stars elsewhere in the galaxy, and in other galaxies, without any human ever having to go to those places.

The combination of sophisticated probes and more much sensitive sensing technology has really changed the justification for human exploration, possibly so much that the justification is mostly gone.

clintfred2• 2 years ago

I love this perspective! Exploration has probably never "made sense", has it?

wiseowise• 2 years ago

but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.

Given what happened to first dog sent to the space - they might not know what they’re signing up for.

47282847• 2 years ago

It’s a crucial element for control over your population. You need to instill a high worth of their lives, otherwise the danger of rebellion and refusal is too high.

close04• 2 years ago

The political justification to spend so much money and more importantly to take as many risks as in the '60s just isn't there anymore.

At the same time NASA probably has many other interesting missions to run today, and to operate from the past, with lower total budget than 5 decades ago.

thedigitalone• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/EF6Sj

sktrdie• 2 years ago

Isn’t it simple economics? There’s no incentives

Perhaps entertainment might fund it? Like a reality show on the moon? Still doubt it will finance billions

saghm2• 2 years ago

Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time". With Apollo, it was something we had never done before, and I imagine a lot of people genuinely didn't know if it could be done, making it a huge achievement for humanity. Nowadays, people grow up learning that we already have done it, and "do the same thing we did in the 1960s in the 2020s" isn't an exciting enough achievement to get the public at large interested (and would make any failures even more embarrassing).

jlarocco• 2 years ago

I feel like that's a big part of it.

I love the idea of spending tax money on R&D, but what would we accomplish on the moon at this point? Seems better to spend on telescopes and space stations until we have firm plans for what to do on the moon.

anigbrowl2• 2 years ago

Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time".

All the people asking 'why can't we go to the moon' would definitely get excited. Plenty of people get excited every time SpaceX has a successful launch or achieve some innovation, but somehow you've convinced yourself that 'people on the moon' is fundamentally boring and nobody is interested.

panick21_7• 2 years ago

NASA has plenty of budget and is not driven by demand.

travisb2• 2 years ago

From the article in no particular order:

- We don't spend enough money

- We have a low tolerance for risk

- We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs

- The project is designed and built by international committee

It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.

yodsanklai• 2 years ago

but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic

I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...

kragen3• 2 years ago

yeah. you can still buy a lot of ttl chips new (actually i think the agc used rtl, but ttl would be fine), there's new old stock of the others, and if that's not enough, teenagers can fabricate 10-micron chips in their garages nowadays

this is not the problem

jwells89• 2 years ago

Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums.

This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.

bee_rider6• 2 years ago

It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there.

Now, that science is done.

Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.

clintfred2• 2 years ago

I'm interested in learning more about your perspective that there's no science left to be done on the moon.

Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

I went for a brief swim in the ocean once and having not seen any fish I concluded that the ocean must be devoid of life.

panick21_7• 2 years ago

Because when we do science on earth we go to a place once take only a few samples and that's it. And then maybe every 10-20 years we might take another sample or something.

We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.

cachvico• 2 years ago

It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale.

If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.

So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.

travisb2• 2 years ago

This really proves my point.

I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust.

So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code.

The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out.

Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".

panick21_7• 2 years ago

And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined.

Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.

High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.

The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.

The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.

When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.

And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.

If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.

Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.

happiness_idx• 2 years ago

You said a whole lot of nothing and no conclusion... What is your point?

cruffle_duffle2• 2 years ago

Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey.

Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.

Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?

For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.

recursivedoubts2• 2 years ago

The apollo program ran from 1961-1972, 11 years.[1]

The total budget was ~260B in todays dollars.[1]

That's ~24B per year in todays dollars. NASA's current budget is 22B[2], less than .5% of the federal budget. We sent 4 times that amount to Ukraine for the war by an emergency vote. Computing power has increased effectively infinitely, manufacturing automation & precision has increased incredibly. We are vastly richer than we were in 1972: our GDP has increased roughly 25X since then.

The reason we have not gone back to the moon is because we have chosen not to do so. It is not hard, nor particularly expensive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

colechristensen2• 2 years ago

The reason we went to the moon was to prove that capitalism could do it better than communism. We've got nothing like that to prove now. Folks are working on making money doing things in space, and that's coming along nicely.

NASA's scientific mission isn't particularly strongly served by having humans in a place. Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.

ApolloFortyNine2• 2 years ago

Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.

And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically. 50 years ago the Boeing capsule would have been given the go ahead to detach without a second thought for instance.

Basically going from 2 9s to 11 9s (or whatever NASA targets internally these days) is comically expensive.

And I'd have to see a paper justifying human presence (besides trying to future proof society) as actually bringing more scientific value than robotic experiments.

TheRealPomax3• 2 years ago

But is there any scientific value? We ran enough missions that we're still looking at everything we brought back last time, what science would we be doing that we either haven't already done, or can do here on earth just fine without going to the moon for it?

anigbrowl2• 2 years ago

This is the worst argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Do you seriously, honestly, think that there is nothing left for us to learn on the moon? Or that seeing humans doing things on the moon does not in any way inspire others to push forward in scientific endeavor? Such arguments demonstrate only a lack of curiosity and imagination.

euroderf• 2 years ago

We've got nothing like that to prove now.

Just wait til China announces an effort to put humans on Mars.

GMoromisato5• 2 years ago

In my opinion, simple inflation adjustment is not that accurate. In particular, notice that certain costs, like higher education, have increased significantly faster than inflation since the 60s. And since rocket science requires a highly educated workforce, you end up with higher salaries relative to the median. I'd actually like to see an analysis of the number of people working on the program. I bet Apollo had 2x or 3x more people working on it than Artemis.

But I haven't done the math/research, so I could be very wrong.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

I think it's more like 10x. There were 400,000 working on Apollo and I doubt there's more than 40,000 working on Artemis.

MrDrMcCoy• 2 years ago

The quality of our education has fallen in addition to the rising costs.

killingtime742• 2 years ago

It's not just your opinion. It's widely known in economics. It's so widely known in fact that statistics agencies state exactly how they come up with inflation figures, which basket of goods they base it on and adjustments.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-...

There are other indices if you want to compare historical prices relevant to moon programs

credit_guy2• 2 years ago

We sent 4 times that amount to Ukraine for the war by an emergency vote.

Not sending money to Ukraine means people die. Not sending a man to the Moon? People would just wonder why.

mmooss3• 2 years ago

Not sending money to Ukraine means people die.

Yes, and lose their freedom, and it greatly increases the risk that many more will die and lose their freedom.

endejerv• 2 years ago

hardly, they would have folded and had a puppet government installed. many young men on both sides would be alive.

amy-petrik-214• 2 years ago

not sending a man to the moon means people will LIVE actually, I can't imagine what kind of hell that would bring if Boeing tried to make another moonrocket

snapcaster• 2 years ago

Doesn't sending weapons to a country at war ensure more death and destruction? isn't that the point?

lm28469• 2 years ago

How much would it cost to do it again in the same exact way though ?

It basically amounted to a trash can with an apple watch on top of a V2 rocket

recursivedoubts2• 2 years ago

i would bet money that an apple watch has more computing power than was available to all of NASA, and maybe the entire US government, at the time

Veedrac• 2 years ago

It's not just that we have $25/y now and had ~$24B/y then, to suggest it is practical. Costs are also vastly reduced over those benchmarks. Starship HLS cost the government under $3B. For that same price you could buy 30 Falcon Heavy flights at wholesale rates. New Glenn looks to launch soon and we don't know its price but it should be competitive, and it's a plenty capable ship.

Of course, depending on these as Artemis does now would only improve prices, not timelines, but it's not like commercial options are all a year old. Marginal launch has been approximately free in Artemis terms for a good while now, possibly even back in the pre-SpaceX dark ages when US launch was a monopoly flying on Russian engines with a billion dollar a year protection racket tax.

Ultimately it comes down to most of the money NASA spends on Artemis being spent on rent seeking by large old space companies that know job losses would look politically disastrous, captured in cost-plus contracts with hiring mandates, tech reuse mandates, and financial incentives not to execute. NASA is spending about as much on a mobile launch tower going overbudget on a cost plus contract as they have on Starship HLS. Guess which one had Congresspeople giving empassioned speeches about NASA's unreasonable spending habits!

wormlord• 2 years ago

Because the goal as of now is not to get to the moon. It's a government jobs program. Nothing wrong with that IMO, but in the 1960s the goal was to get to the moon before the Soviets + pour money into ICBM-adjacent tech.

Now the motives are dubious. Gateway to Mars? Cold War 2 with China? I don't think anyone even knows what the goal is other than "spend money".

panick21_7• 2 years ago

Many people know what the goal is, congress is just not interested in any of them.

krapp• 2 years ago

Tell Americans that the Communist Chinese are planning to build a gender transition ray on the moon and just watch the money flow.

AStonesThrow• 2 years ago

Thank you! I've just doubled my order of Reynolds Wrap!

GMoromisato5• 2 years ago

The US will land astronauts on the moon, probably this decade but maybe early in the 2030s. That's my bet. Compared to previous human spaceflight efforts, Artemis has the support of both major parties and the NASA community (scientists, engineers, and administrators). That was not always the case, which is why the Constellation Program failed.

Moreover, the Artemis program, unlike the "flags and footprints" goal of Apollo, has a plausible path for a sustainable human presence on the moon and an evolutionary path to a human Mars landing. If they can pull that off, with a budget smaller than Apollo, then I think NASA will deserve all the praise they get.

Will China land humans on the moon before us? No, because we already did that in 1969. But they might land humans before Artemis does. In that case, I suspect we'll see a real-live version of "For All Mankind" and we'll dump extra funding on NASA. Maybe. Or maybe we'll do what the Soviets did when we beat them and shift to something else, like Mars.

ghssds• 2 years ago

I'd like for life on earth to go to the moon again. Why should I care if it's bearing a china flag or a usa flag? Nationalism and the "us" mentality is a disease.

GMoromisato5• 2 years ago

In my experience, different people care about different things. There's probably a bunch of things that you care about passionately that completely bore me.

I wouldn't worry about it. I definitely won't.

collyw• 2 years ago

Globalism is the disease and it's killing Western nations.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

A lack of competing forces

The US collectively felt that they needed to prove that capitalism was superior to communism. In this case, the contracting system was the competition between private sector entities to produce the parts and expertise, alongside NASA the state run enterprise handling requirements and coordination.

While the Soviet Union relied on more state run enterprises, aiming to prove collective coordination.

With the absence of resources up there, and lack of return, and inability to prove anything about capitalism vs communism to anyone that mattered, the programs atrophied in both unions.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

For our next project we decided to bring venus home.

kragen3• 2 years ago

it's not that hard

it's just that the usa can only do very easy things now, because the people there have forgotten how to work together

the article explains some of the forms this takes, but, for political reasons, frames it differently

see also: bullet trains, homelessness, mass incarceration, hvdc transmission, chip fabrication, the renewable energy transition, electric vehicle manufacturing. the usa is failing to get its act together in almost every conceivable way

DrNosferatu• 2 years ago

Yes, it is called "enshitification" - caused by the Financialization of the economy, and rent-seeking rather than innovating technologically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

kragen3• 2 years ago

that's part of it; marc andreessen's nimby posture in the atherton zoning discussion, for example, was pure rent-seeking: https://archive.fo/MjHa8

(i know that's from the 'david miscavige leads scientology to milestone year' atlantic, but i think in this case their reporting is authentic)

but i don't think that's all, or even a majority, of it. rent-seeking is at least beneficial to the rent-seeker, if successful. but most of the problem is people fighting with each other in ways that aren't profitable even to themselves. a lot of that takes the form of arguing about how to assign blame for problems instead of solving them ;)

mmooss3• 2 years ago

Thanks for the article. For a comprehensive review of Artemis, in much detail, and other NASA missions, see this paper (free online and PDF versions available at the link):

NASA at a Crossroads: Maintaining Workforce, Infrastructure, and Technology Preeminence in the Coming Decades (2024)

http://nap.nationalacademies.org/27519

It's the report of a National Academies committee of experts - organized by their Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board, Space Studies Board, and Division on Engineering and Physical Science - formed to "review the critical facilities, workforce, and technology needed to achieve NASA's long-term strategic goals and mission objectives".

There is a lot of interesting material, both immediately topical and, being HN, of intellectual interest. See especially Appendix G, "NASA 20-Year Critical Missions", a list and overview of all the missions, and especially Appendix J "Technology Survey Papers", which goes into detail about critical technologies NASA needs to invent (many for Artemis) and their R&D.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

The secret of the Apollo program was that they weren't all that safety concious; even after Apollo 1. Beating the soviets was more important.

They were very lucky they only had 2 mission failures and 3 lives lost.

vfclists• 2 years ago

There are two simple reasons.

1. You never went in the first place.

2. The moon is occupied by Nazis, aliens or both who have warned you never to return.

Gravityloss• 2 years ago

Apollo is not entirely a good model of how it should be done now. We don't do computer services the same way SAGE or SABRE were done in the sixties either. We should try to use off the shelf solutions where appropriate. But at the same time recognize where we need bespoke solutions.

Apollo had to do so much new things because there was no commercial space sector yet. You have now. Apollo developed engines and rockets and entirely new ways of operation. It would be a mistake to expect to develop an entirely new launcher rocket engine for example just for landing people on the moon.

For example, one could use multiple SpaceX Falcon 9 launches to launch and fuel a low earth orbit vehicle that would fly to the moon and send a lander. Most of the mass in LEO would be liquid oxygen.

There were alternative plans to use LEO assembly already in Apollo but it was deemed too risky. They did end up using docking after the translunar injection (turning the CSM around) and then of course famously in lunar orbit.

So you wouldn't need any new launchers to go back to the moon if one started a project today with a short deadline.

panick21_7• 2 years ago

Because the NASA budget it horrible allocated and not geared towards actually achieving specific things. NASA budget is big enough, its just that it resources are horrible allocated.

I could write a lot about this topic here, I have done before, but anybody that looks at anything other then that fact first, misses the problem. Other things that people mention might play a role, but by far the biggest is politics of NASA and NASA internal politics.

chewz• 2 years ago

My friend and I we are fixing old bikes for fun. And often the only way to figure out how to do certain things is watching YouTube videos about fixing bikes. And bikes are rather simple devices.

I guess NASA had lost all YouTube videos about how to assemble Moon rocket.

polski-g• 2 years ago

Decline of state capacity after the 1978 abolishment of the Civil Service Commission. There were poor gatekeeping controls in place afterwards and employee quality gradually declined. Now anybody with any sort of intelligence, drive or ambition works in the private sector. Salary is one aspect, but so is the desire to avoid working with people who are dumb and never get fired.

lacker• 2 years ago

How does an article about costs in the space industry discuss Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Lockheed Martin, but never mention SpaceX?

lagniappe• 2 years ago

Because that group of companies runs/maintains the ULA

pfannkuchen2• 2 years ago

Is it just the nature of singleton entities such as government agencies?

When NASA was first spun up in the late 1950s, there were no career NASA people. The people were hired from private industry. Nobody had heard of it, and it had no track record, so people probably did not join it for the prestige.

These days I feel like there is a lot of prestige associated with working for NASA. Everyday people think you are a genius for working there.

There are likely a lot of clout chasing bureaucrat types gumming up the works these days. And there is no competitor currently with the potential for a government money hose.

US government should probably have at least two competing space agencies, preferably more.

Also the field of software engineering has brain drained physical sciences and engineering for the last several decades. If you glance at salaries before choosing a major you are probably not going to do many of the disciplines related to rocketry.

kochikame• 2 years ago

You’re suggesting adding competing agencies in the name of efficiency? When this has been tried it always results in duplication of efforts, territorial protection of resources, harmful politics etc.

Bad idea.

pfannkuchen2• 2 years ago

Unsatisfying dismissal. Duplication of efforts is WAI. Other two happen in government generally.

Can you name the examples you are thinking of where this happened to apparently an extreme degree?

Also not all government programs are equal. Space travel has the handy property of being easy to apply simple objective metrics (“did you land on the moon, y/n?”), unlike almost every other agency (“is our children learning?”).

Why is it so hard to go back to the moon?

Related Stories