I'm afraid this might actually keep fueling moon-landing denial conspiracy theories:
"Look how hard it is to get to the moon in 2022! How can we have possibly done it in 1969?"
FWIW the Atlas V that delivered the Mars rovers was also Kerosene (RP-1) fueled.
It is possible to make liquid hydrogen work reliably - the Ariane 5 ECA, which delivered the James Web telescope uses it, but it seems the SLS was congressionally mandated to reuse ancient Space Shuttle tech, which also used to suffer on average one launch scrub per mission ...
Mother: "Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems."
These theories make no sense in the context of intense surveillance both blocks were subjecting each other to and it's quite recent, after the advance in movie making and recorded television, that we think the US could have faked it all. I mean, we can ping the mirror on the moon, they came back with rocks and they went to walk on the moon several times, there s no doubt.
Just look at this graph, it says it all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3...
Its a total misunderstanding of the problem. Budget as % of federal spending is totally meaningless measure. And it causes far more confusion then it explains anything.
Agencies don't send % of federal budget when they buy some aluminum sheets, they pay in $s.
Of course the % of federal budget goes down when you have vietnam, great society and so on and so on.
So this graph is just used to make excuses for NASA performance. In effect NASA budget now is actually not that different from the Apollo area. And in the last 5 years, NASA budget has gone up.
But I don't see this as excusing NASA/Congress. It's spending that money with the benefit of 50 years of technological advancement, but reusing technology from the 1980s to make a completely disposable rocket that will cost $4 billion per launch.[3] Meanwhile, SpaceX is spending an amount estimated in single-digit billions to develop a rapidly and completely reusable rocket of similar size, aiming at a launch cost two to three orders of magnitude lower.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
[2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion
[3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reve...
SLS since 2011 cost $20 billion, add $20 billion for Orion. Add to that 5-10$ billion in infrastructure. These 50 billion $, didn't pay for the development of a single engine.
Given how much technology has advanced and how much more technology and knowlage is available, it should be much cheaper to do the same.
For example, https://www.edn.com/apollo-16-launches-after-month-long-dela...
Plus NASA was much more tolerant of failure back then. The first Apollo mission failed and the program continued. If this launch fails, it could set back this program by years or more.
NASA just on base level, now has to do far more things at the same time, only a small part of its budget is focused on the moon. So they have science sats, space station and lots of other things.
Second is budget, NASA of course had a larger % of the federal budget but that is bad analysis as that was before social spending exploded. But even in absolute terms, during peak spending, NASA had higher yearly spending then now. Even more important is that if you are working towards a mission many project, lander, rocket, crew capsule all hit peak cost at the same time, so you will need much more money at that moment (in that year). Current NASA can't do this, they have to make development sequential. That's why NASA switched to this concept called 'capability based planning'. So instead of saying we need to do X,Y and Z to do 'Mission A'. Its we have P, L and we could invest some development in O so we can attempt do 'Mission B'.
The thirds is just as important. In pure money terms, even with the reduced amount of flexibility and money because of the above, doing a moon landing is very possible. However, NASA does not have architecture freedom. Every single component of the moon landing architecture has to be separately battled for politically. NASA does not have the mandate of going to the moon and here are 5 billion a year to do it. That is how it worked during Apollo. The politicians didn't care what the architecture was. Now Congress tells NASA, you need to build a rocket like this, a capsule like this and so on.
To be more specific, its totally clear to everybody who really thinks threw this that SLS/Orion make very little sense. The US has a grown fleet of commercial rockets that can launch pretty large payloads to LEO. And soon NASA will have access to multiple providers for both human and cargo (pressurized and unpressurized) transportation to LEO.
So up to LEO NASA has everything it needs. What it really needs is some craft to go from LEO to LLO (Lower Moon Orbit) and then a Lander to go up and down to surface. Those could be the same craft.
NASA has to pay nothing of their yearly budget to have the ability to put stuff and humans into LEO. So really their 4-6 billion $ in budget should be 100% focused on how do get that cargo (including human) from LEO to the moon. Instead SLS/Orion cost 4-5 billion $ per year, and the result is only a tiny amount of cargo can go to the moon, and not even to LLO.
How to use those 4-6 billion $ to do that is up for debate. There are multiple answer that would work just fine. Depots and reusable tugs. Mega lander (like Starship). Assembly in moon orbit. All would be doable if you could spend 5 billion $ a year on it.
NASA is not the moon lander agency now. NASA is the do these 100 things and do it the way congress wants them agency.
Or they'll just continue to assert that it didn't happen with Apollo. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
There my be good reasons to have another moon mission, but demonstrating things to paranoiacs isn't on the list. Even if it would accomplish anything, I simply don't care what they think. They don't have anything to contribute, and can only distract.