Why is it so hard to pull off a lunar landing?
nature.com
nature.com
And they managed to live broadcast from the moon! Storage was in it's infancy, so even storing a video from the moon was impossible (they would need many reels of film that just wouldn't fit.
Digital cameras weren't invented, you only had analogue cameras. Most of them required film - and can't be developed on the spot, it requires special equipment. So to get video from the moon, the used cathode ray tube cameras - and even the cathode ray tubes of TV news were huge at the time, you can look at pictures, these things used to take a whole truck to carry. But they managed to get a very small cathode ray tube camera there, and to film long videos of hours of missions on the moon.
And get managed to broadcast it all with analogue RF all the way from the moon to earth. With no digital signal processing, because that wasn't fast enough back then for any real time use. And with surprisingly low noise for an analogue transmission. They made a whole network of receivers on earth to be able to do it.
Today all of that would be cheap, but back then it must've been quite the achievement.
They also had pretty minimal computational power available compared to newer attempts. But maybe putting a human in control is enough.
Google's moon challenge is pretty cool. They actually wanted to give a bonus for taking pictures of the original moon landing site. That could've been really nice.
But sadly, NASA was afraid that the site would be disturbed and declared no fight zone over it.
It built on lessons learned from the many failures of the Ranger program before it. And the Russians lost 12 landers before their first success.
It should also be noted that Luna 9 was a relatively hard landing, not suitable for a crewed spacecraft. Surveyor 1 was the first soft landing, and a prototype for the missions that would follow.
In fact we dont even know of the Apollo 11 LM is still in orbit of the moon or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHbLV7xEhc
Scott Manley's video also has some links in its description for some of the tools NASA uses for more precise gravitational estimations and whatnot. Its pretty cool.
This is true on earth as well, though proportionately less so we don’t notice it as much. But for example the level of the sea is different at different places (I believe the general sea level of the pacific is 2 m higher than that of the Atlantic).
Whats more is that basically all things in the solar system exert influence on one another. For some things its not a huge influence but even if you are orbiting the Moon, Mercury or Jupiter have an influence on that orbit.
Overall its mind blowing to me that at some point, not too long ago, we had people able to figure out things like the mass of some body they could barely see and deduce how it affects other bodies in the system.
even today with something like Planet Nine/Persephone[1]. We cant see it, its 10x the mass of earth, but based on the mass and trajectories of what we CAN see and how they are being influenced, we know something(s) more are still out there.
This is something even KSP doesnt do well. And its one of those deeply humbling facts for me that I am not that smart. No way i could ever figure out things like the mass of a celestial body, even with the tools I have right now in front of me 2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine#History
[2] https://earthsky.org/space/how-do-astronomers-know-the-mass-...
I mean, it's mostly math. Before we had an excess of computer power, it was basically plug-n-chug with a room full of grad students. It's not something that any one impressive human just eyeballs and know's "ah, that planet floats in a bathtub" at first glance.
Which isn't to say there weren't scarily capable people! If you want an example of one of the people that for me inspires the type pf awe you're talking about. Bob Farquhar
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Farquhar
That man, had to have had either one of the most beautiful mental processes, or horrifying, in that actually running the kind of math he did was preferable to anything else.
Seems like a reasonable precaution for a industry that brought us “move fast and break things” and normalized endless bugs as an unavoidable natural law.
Remember that apollo program (just like soviet one) was an offshoot of military wanting to erase a nation on the other side of the world with efficiency.
The Mercury and Gemini programs, sure - both of them used ICBM as their boosters. So did the Vostok, Vokshod, and Soyuz programs.
Apollo was very different. The Saturn booster is so much larger and more complicated than any reasonable ICBM would be, it would be gloriously inefficient at that role.
The Apollo program was a cold war thing. But it wasn't a military thing, it was a different kind of competition.
If you take a look at the vintage Rockets of the World poster (https://venngage-wordpress-gallery.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/...) you can see how much bigger the N1 and Saturn V (spanning the last two rows), compared to the earlier boosters on the third and fourth rows.
The internet is a communication to survive nuclear war. Forklifts and pallets were to simplify military logistics. The highway system is to provide point to point connections without risking losing a railway. Cell phones are kinda private, but a lot of the components came from special hardware for the military.
I'm sure there's lots of neat tech we use everyday that isn't rooted in military funding, I just can't think of any at the moment.
You're trying to make a distinction where there is none - it's the same bag of money. Which also why the money quickly dried up when rocket guidance, indeed, became a solved problem. Before Apollo was finished.
Once you've figured out how to efficiently kill most people on the planet, you can decrease investment in the endeavor and just keep a finger hovered over the button.
> Kennedy as president had little direct interest in the U.S. space program. He was not a visionary enraptured with the romantic image of the last American frontier in space and consumed by the adventure of exploring the unknown. He was, on the other hand, a Cold Warrior with a keen sense of Realpolitik in foreign affairs, and worked hard to maintain balance of power and spheres of influence in American/Soviet relations. The Soviet Union's non-military accomplishments in space, therefore, forced Kennedy to respond and to serve notice that the U.S. was every bit as capable in the space arena as the Soviets. Of course, to prove this fact, Kennedy had to be willing to commit national resources to NASA and the civil space program. The Cold War realities of the time, therefore, served as the primary vehicle for an expansion of NASA's activities and for the definition of Project Apollo as the premier civil space effort of the nation. Even more significant, from Kennedy's perspective the Cold War necessitated the expansion of the military space program, especially the development of ICBMs and satellite reconnaissance systems.2
Source: Project Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis
And rockets that can navigate precisely are a nice side-effect of that.
It's unfortunate that aboard the commercial craft there was stuff from national space programs, but this was not comparable to NASA's mission. It's just like SpaceX exploding a ton of rockets to further their research instead of obsessing over getting everything perfect on first try. Unfortunately they should have done more mock missions, but there wouldn't have been enough funding I fear
Making one of something where the cost is no object is almost always possible. Making millions at a commercially-viable cost is much more challenging.
The entire Apollo program had a budget of $165.5 billion (in 2021 dollars), over a 10 year program. $16.5 billion per year. It's a big number, but it's absolutely dwarfed by things like a $600bn military.
Apollo was actually pretty close to the same GDP share (2.5% of GDP annually) as the modern defense budget (3.1% of GDP).
Inflation-adjusted numbers ignore that we have more people and more value produced per capita now than in the 1960s.
I don't have the numbers though.
Yes, the spending on the Apollo program is pretty close (as share of GDP) to the current military budget, not to the contemporary (1960s) military budget, which ranged from a 7.6-9.4% of GDP.
When you're sending a probe to Mars, the trial runs are very expensive. They spend a lot of time making sure that the mission will be successful. I'm skeptical that anywhere near the same level of care is going into the private missions, but I the reason is cost, not that they can't bootstrap themselves up with Earth-environment experimentation.
Yes, I'm aware at least one of the Mars probe missions totally failed. I don't think that detracts from the overall point. They weren't screwing up a bunch of missions before they got one right.
There are other technologies and other ways to do things. Almost every achievement in human history has been accomplished without these technologies.
Moon landing deniers would eat that one up.
It seems to be an article of faith for some though. We could have a space tourism industry with a package to visit the Apollo landing site museum on the Moon and a ton of people still would not believe.
If you deny X, and then you carefully deny anything that could prove X... what do you replace it with?
F.ex., I get how someone could disbelieve the current physics of motion. But then how do things move? It can't all just be dice rolls and unexplained magic.
If you toss out the way we understand things work... there still has to be a way things work!
If science doesn't work then what the fuck is this thing?
The alternate explanation would be a hoax so elaborate it involved robotic missions to leave props on the moon on top of a giant disposable rocket launch, satellites to fake the signals, and a huge cutting edge filming effort to fake the broadcasts. At some point it starts to get as hard as just going to the damn moon.
However, as you suggest, even if that evidence were faked to such an elaborate degree could be an even higher technical feat that would be worthy of even greater recognition.
Convincing fakes usually have misdirection as a big component, because faking something under close expert scrutiny is orders of magnitude more difficult.
I don't.
You don't have to fly straight over it of course.
By the way what authority does NASA have over the moon? I thought the outer space treaty declares that no country can own things in space.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
I'm all for preserving it but I do wonder how they can declare this.
Even aside from the evidence itself it fails the massive conspiracy with no leaks test. Conspiracies leak exponentially with the number of people in the know. SOE worked this all out running operations in occupied Europe. This is why top secret intelligence operations employ incredibly rigorous procedures. Let’s say you have a spy in a foreign country, you make sure only a tiny number of people know the details, preferably low single digits, you layer and compartmentalise everything, you run decoy operations. Even then it’s incredibly hard, the vast majority of operations eventually leak. Only very few of the best run operations with very few people in the know ever last.
With the moon landings many hundreds, more like thousands of people would have to know. All of the astronauts and their backups, the model and set makers, the film crews, the mission flight staff, the film and video technical production staff. There were six manned landings, they’d have had to do the whole faking thing over and over again for years.
It’s several orders of magnitude bigger than most spy operations, made up of people who aren’t even spies, they’d be mostly civilians with very specific technical skills so you can’t be picky about who you select for it. There is no way this wouldn’t have leaked. Somebody on the inside would have said something to a friend or lover, or got pissed off over something, or changed their political opinions, or got sloppy or just decided to get famous and talk. Especially by now with the Cold War well and truly over. Why wouldn’t they? But no, nothing, not even a hint after fifty years. Ask anybody who knows anything at all about Intelligence operations how plausible that is.
Mission Control had 30 people in the room at a time, and each console had its own engineering room with about a dozen staff, and there were several shifts. Then there were the teams at tracking and communications stations all over the world. That adds hundreds more people at least, possibly thousands. They would all have to know the crew never actually landed on the moon.
*Sorry, silly me, six rockets over a period of three and a half years.
The same government that exposed its soldiers to nuclear detonations? That did biological weapons testing on its own civilian population?
You're absolutely right, there's no way they would have risked late-life cancer or even a spaceflight explosion on a dozen people who signed waivers of informed consent.
Every single one of us is expendable to our government. If they thought it important, or even just really really wanted to, they'd have killed thousands in the attempt. Anyone who doesn't see that is estranged from reality.
Recommended.
As well as https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/laurelcanyon/ from that same site.
AFAIK there have only been two attempts by private companies.
SpaceIL's crash in 2019 seems to have been caused by a premature engine shutdown due to a faulty IMU [1].
iSpace's attempt seemed to go well until the very end, when contact with the lander was lost. Their status update from April 26 suggests that also their engine may have shut down prematurely: "engineers monitored the estimated remaining propellant reached at the lower threshold and shortly afterward the descent speed rapidly increased" [2].
If this turns out to be the case, the ultimate culprit may be faulty altimetry.
> These days we even have lasers to instantly detect distance to the ground that could be incorporated real-time to thruster output.
Yes, but lasers don't work well through dust clouds, and throttling rocket engines is hard. You can't smoothly reduce thrust all the way to 0; even with a sophisticated design, there is a cutoff at something like 20% [3]. So you need to plan ahead, shut down the engine before touchdown and hope that you don't end up hitting a stray boulder - which is all it might take to tip over and bury your antennas in regolith.
[1] https://spacenews.com/spaceil-says-chain-of-events-led-to-cr...
Most things require an iterative loop of testing, fixing and refinement.
The trouble with landing on another planet (with different gravity, atmospheric density, etc) is that there's no real way before you get there, therefore first attempts are extremely likely to fail.
Actually, I think that is the one of the biggest challenges. No atmosphere to slow you down means you have to rely entirely on rockets to slow down from orbital speeds to zero.
On a body with atmosphere you can essentially just drop a payload up to some maximum size with a proper heat shield and a parashute and it will end up (somewhere) on the surface in one piece.
On an atmosphere less body you essentially need to run precisely controlled flight all the way to touchdown.
Everything has tradeoffs. :-P
Engines are well understood. With enough propellant one can gently hover down at 1 cm/s from 1km. No atmosphere also means few surprises.
Given the Mars gravity I still wonder if no atmosphere would still make it worse vs the thin that it has.
A celestial body with no atmosphere: Extremely easy to take off from, but very hard to actually land.
This sounds as if the journalist tries to downplay the fact that NASA managed to do it a) first, and b) actually landed humans on the moon, not just unmanned vehicles. The only thing which makes it less impressive is the enormous budget of the Apollo program.
> On 3 February 1966, the Luna 9 spacecraft became the first spacecraft to achieve a survivable landing on a celestial body.
By the way, it got 7 upvotes despite being factually incorrect.
You're the one downplaying actual history.
For an informal international pissing match, you're assuming some pretty formal rules. The point was nearly entirely to show off how much more impressive one country was over another. The USSR was winning until they weren't, sure, but then the USA started winning until the USSR literally died.
I had never even heard of unmanned, automated landers making it to the moon before humans! They had some computers and I happened to have picked up that they've sent things into orbit, but predetermined engine burns (with time to apply corrections from the ground) in a vacuum with nothing around you is quite a different level of achievement.
I don't care as much about the history so much as the science and future, but I am a space nerd so I'm actually rather surprised that I never knew this. The USA manages its public image about as carefully as China I feel like, the advantage being that they're often genuinely on the good side (no concentration camps for a minority group tends to help, for instance) but by no means selfless, impartial, or genuine. (The best example of public image management may be immigration desire stats. You'd be foolish to immigrate from a poor place to the USA when you can immigrate somewhere with higher social mobility as well as security, but the number of people in such a situation that wish to immigrate to a place like Denmark is tiny by comparison. The American dream, it's called, not the Danish dream. It's a huge, well-managed PR campaign to look to the USA as a leader, shoving competitors' achievements under the rug.)
My point is not who won and who lost, it's that the USA has basically erased the USSR's achievements through its PR campaign and framing it as a race to put people on the moon, instead of the USs effort to catch up to the way more advanced USSR.
You could argue that was moving the goalposts, since at that point the Soviets were (significantly?) ahead of the Americans, but the Soviets had just put Gagarin briefly in orbit. It seems hard to say that there had been that much of a "race" to that point?
Matter of fact is that the US was behind the USSR in terms of technology. Kennedy declared a symbolic goal that was extremely risky and served little scientific purpose, and then accomplished that. That's the moving of goalposts. It was never a race to put a man on the moon, it was a rapidly developing scientific field, and the USSR was ahead of the US until their country started falling apart.
And now, because of that symbolic goal and a successful PR campaign, people don't know the USSR's achievements. The commenter above didn't know the USSR was the first to land on the moon and just claimed it was the US. That's the part that irks me.
Saturn V had the same problems (dynamic instability) which nearly destroyed it. It just barely worked.
However, because of a decades long PR campaign, people think the US "won" and don't even realize all of the USSR's achievements. That's the rewriting of history that I'm referring to. I'm happy to acknowledge NASA's achievements, as long as it's not at the expense of others.
Most mention Korolev's failing health and death.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3riyh3/why_d...
Summary: Khrushchev wanted the moon for cheap, lunar rockets weren't useful for ICBM research, the transition to Brezhnev threw a wrench into the program.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22pled/why_d...
Summary: infighting, N1 had too many rockets and not enough quality control, exhaustion on the team, and Soviet electronics were way behind U.S. electronics.
Comments from the soviets themselves: https://web.archive.org/web/20121002063209/http://www.astron...
My interpretation of the history of the USSR space program is that they more often than not went the hard way and used remote controlled/preprogrammed vehicles not because it was easier but because it was hard (sorry). I fail to see how landing people on the moon is a bigger achievement than if it was done by remote control in a time with, well, hardly any computer power at all. In my opinion this is part of the rewrite of the history of the space race to an alternative version where the goal was actually landing a man on the moon and not a moving goal post that changed every time something new was achieved.
I also think there's a case to be made that, given their history of success and expertise, they could have also landed a man on the moon first if things had gone differently.
This is most definitely not the case in the late 60s. The Soviets very much wanted to land on the moon up until the Apollo landing.
The cuts to the Soviet space program came after.
Even if you disagree the history, why attribute it to someone else's intentions? What evidence do you have?
People will be competitive, and they will form groups and take sides and compare technological achievements.
The sentence did mention china has done it on the first attempt which is also factual and relevant to context. The article is about moon landings and associated failures.
As for the Apollo program everyone knows about it. There's no point in regurgitating obvious facts.
Landing on the first attempt is pretty impressive in itself, given the difficulty in landing at all is.
> I really hate these sinophiles' attempts to elevate China into some super-awesome, super-intelligent master race.
...I'm sorry, what the fuck are you talking about?
It's not just with China; it happens in other areas, too, usually focused on eastern nations or private enterprise (e.g., classical/ancient period mathematicians from India, SpaceX, etc.). I don't know if it's overcompensation for westerners' historically casual and sometimes active diminishing/ignoring these accomplishments or what, but it comes off as a tasteless attempt to assert superiority where none exists. And I'm just kinda tired of seeing it.
Please don't do this. You are seeing things in the text that isn't there and you seem to do the same just the other way around. It reads anti-chinese / racist.
Edit: reference
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_de...
I am a huge proponent of sending robots first, to build safer landing and launch structures, possibly also bases or better places to situate bases.
[0] https://masten.aero/blog/mitigating-lunar-dust-masten-comple...
I practiced a lot with the Lunar Lander game in the 1970s. The trick is to let it fall until the last second, then hit the thrusters full blast to hit 0V as it hits the surface.
Burn too soon, and you run out of propellant and crash.
Given the constraints, it's surprising they don't lose more rockets during the landing phase.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket does have throttle control, but at minimum thrust the thrust-to-weight ratio is still greater than 1, which means they have to hit 0m/s at exactly 0 feet of altitude or they start going up again. I’d imagine they time their ‘hoverslam’ to take 2x minimum thrust (or some other multiplier) and then adjust up or down through the manoeuvre.
> The official said that predicting orbits below 50 km is very tricky and usually they are estimated with an accuracy of plus/minus 1 km. If the lander`s predicted height was at 30 km, the actual orbit height may remain anywhere between 29 to 31 km.
> Similar will be the error in horizontal direction. Such errors occur as local gravity varies widely due to large variation of density of mountains and plains.
Newton's gravity equations deal with bodies like the Moon as having uniform mass. That's not he case and it matters.
Fun fact: China's Three Gorges Dam slowed down the Earth's rotation by 0.06 microseconds per day [2]. That's actually not a big deal because the rotation has variance all of its own from tides, weather, etc.
So even if you had a density map of the Moon you'd still have to account for variance added by rotational variation.
[1]: https://www.zeebiz.com/india/news-on-indias-vikram-lander-di...
[2]: https://www.kinetica.co.uk/2014/03/27/chinese-dam-slows-down...
Let’s not make a joke of ourselves. Newton’s gravity equations deal perfectly well with non uniform masses. You just need to integrate properly.
But all of this is beside the point. Obviously you are not going to land open loop. You need sensors which tell you where you are and how fast you are going.
I'm confused, how is the mean changing less impactful due to relatively high variance? If the was no variance at all, would .06us be a disaster?
Like most things in rocketry, it would be straightforward if you had plenty of fuel. It would be comparable to landing a helicopter, although you'd need more stabilization. Fuel-limited, you have to come in too fast, decelerate too hard, pick a landing site too quickly, and can't go around and try again. When the Apollo landers touched down, they had fifteen to thirty seconds of fuel left.
Space-X boosters returning to the takeoff site have even worse constraints.
This was true for Apollo 11 but not later missions. And it was that close to the safety margin, not an absolute limit.
>What makes landing on the Moon so difficult is the number of variables to consider
Compared to Earth, surely it's easier. Less terrain difference, lower gravity. It's getting there and the remoteness is what makes it hard.
Not quite. You can compensate with a landing gear that can survive your terminal speed going to zero very quickly and absorb the extra energy.
The math is much simpler on the Moon because there is no atmosphere.
What happens when you over-compensate with the thruster?
Sometimes you can recover from that, sometimes not.
Managing delta-v is half of what makes a Moon landing require precision. An atmosphere can let you ignore this half to a degree (depending on specifics of vehicle/mission).
Anyway, the easiest way to get a feel for these things is to play some Kerbal Space Program. Try doing some moon flights. You'll quickly realize that the part of the mission that feels easiest on the home planet (landing) also feels the hardest on atmosphere-less bodies, and vice versa (e.g. taking off, or slowing for landing).
Mars is probably the worst of both worlds, you have a thin atmosphere that is a nuisance but not very good for braking.
mission launch land days since last
successful landing
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Apollo 11 July 16, 1969 July 20, 1969 -
Apollo 12 November 14, 1969 November 24, 1969 126
Apollo 14 January 31, 1971 February 9, 1971 431
Apollo 15 July 26, 1971 August 7, 1971 272
Apollo 16 April 16, 1972 April 27, 1972 347
Apollo 17 December 7, 1972 December 19, 1972 316I'm not trying to discount Apollo here, I myself can barely comprehend their achievement at their time. But the magnitude of the effort was much much larger than this one mission.
And let's not forget Grissom, White and Chaffee. NASA was _not_ on a successful path pre Apollo 1, as shown by the post-disaster analysis reports. Speculating here, but most likely we would not have gone to the Moon had Apollo 1 not happened.
Space is _incredibly_ hard.
Oh and it wasn't all success. Apollo 13 was a near miss. Apollo 1 had fatalities. Several other apollo missions has near misses. It was a very high risk operation.
In that case though, I think Apollo 10 should at least be mentioned in some capacity, as it was a dress rehearsal that came within 16km of the lunar surface, and tested much of the lander's systems. Not listed as a failure or success, just mentioned, as it's a very relevant test.
this would easily put the conspiracy theories to bed
Yes, e.g. LRO launched in 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter)
> this would easily put the conspiracy theories to bed
no, you are dealing with people who nit pick data, rejecting anything that does not support their position as falsified.
Attempts at reasoning are in my experience often met with emotion and ad hominem responses (e.g. the classic comparison to species of Ovis). Logic does not apply here.
It clearly didn't put the conspiracy theories to bed.
"Therefore either all retroreflectors have degraded such that their return signals fit to the scattered return from the lunar soil or the measurements were indeed taken to the lunar surface only."
https://www.youtube.com/live/CpR1UUnix3g?feature=share&t=428...
Scrub to 1:11:20
And at 1:35:33 the folks in the background look like they're holding back tears.
Roger.
>Today, by contrast, private companies are expected to repeat these successes, without government resources and without lessons gleaned from many failed and successful missions
Misplaced expectations.
They're going to need more crashes.
>the folks in the background look like they're holding back tears.
This was not in the background when NASA astronauts were tragically lost before they got to the moon the first time.
I expect anyone to repeat these failures until they have enough lessons learned themselves.
>why is it so hard to pull off a lunar landing?
Mother Nature is a bitch.
And when nature is working against you . . .
I don’t follow. Are you suggesting NASA mission control didn’t mourn the loss of Chaffee, Grissom, and White?
The whole world was heartbroken as awareness was universally raised about remaining risks even after such extensive and successful efforts had intentionally and brilliantly greatly reduced the possibilities.
Lurking risks still exist and unforseen failure modes remain as defined.
Space Shuttles were not fatality-free either.
> Even if a lander makes it to the vicinity of the Moon, it still has to navigate its way down to the surface with no global-positioning satellites for guidance
Was/is such a constellation ever planned? If not, why - due to the difficulty orbiting the moon?
National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy
https://web.archive.org/web/20221119151907/https://www.white...
The Artemis program's infrastructure is expected (per some plans, at least) to be the foundation of permanent communication and PNT. The US Space Force is also working on 'Space Situtional Awareness'.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronom...
But no weather. Weather is an enormous risk factor for Earth landings.
- Second Avenue Subway at a projected total cost across all phases of $17B vs. the GDP of NYC at $1T = 1.7%
- Berlin Brandenburg Airport at a final cost of €7B vs. the GDP of the city of Berlin and the federal state of Brandenburg combined at €228B = 3%
- California High Speed Rail at a current estimate of $128B for the full LA-SF system vs. the GDP of California at $3.6T = 3.5%
And all of these examples understate the problem, since the GDP was lower when the projects began, the costs may continue to rise as the projects progress, and outside (national-level) funding assistance is also used. So there is at least some merit to the idea that we just can't build as well as we used to.
We could, there is nothing preventing the US or Europe to return to 1970s taxation for companies and the filthy rich. The reason why we can't build like back then is to a very large part the erosion of the tax base to pay for it.
The Transcontinental Railroad was built in the 1860s and the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, both when government expenditure as well as taxation at all levels were a single-digit percent of GDP. I suppose by your logic we would be a galaxy-faring species if only we were able to tax the likes of Bezos and Musk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle
Note how willing they were to risk life and limb in training exercises, and Armstrong's comments on how important the skills gained there were to their actual mission success.
https://www.space.com/26593-apollo-11-moon-landing-scariest-...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190617-apollo-in-50-num...