If they get it working the USA might beat China to putting a woman on the Moon.
I thought NASA already had those rockets. What's preventing them from sending astronauts and cargo now?
And they haven't made a new one.
So no, NASA hasn't had a human rated lunar lander for a very long time.
You don't see 50 years old weapon systems stop working.
You mean simple firearms, that were carefully cleaned, prep'ed, and packed for long-term storage? Or something at least vaguely comparable to a moon rocket in size and complexity, like a B-52?
Talk to an old Air Force guy, who knows the maintenance routines for the older warbirds, and how many issues they have with "manufacturer went out of business" spare parts, etc.
If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
It's not like NASA is missing fuel, or that hull is damaged, or that engine is not working. At least, these things shouldn't happen if they put half effort into maintaining it.
Part of the reason why the SLS took so long and cost so much is because they DID try to re-use all the old resources and technology rather than building from scratch.
Vs. those old rockets were designed to be one-shot expendable stuff. Plenty of them are on public display at museums - you could ask the museum staff about how many $$$/year they have available in their budgets, to keep the rockets in operational condition. (Hint: $0.)
Or, you might want to check out the YouTube channel for the USS New Jersey (historic WWII battleship, now a museum) -
https://www.youtube.com/battleshipnewjersey
- where their curator often talks in gritty detail about vast differences between "operational warship" and "keep afloat and open as a museum". Note that the something-million dollars which they are currently trying to fundraise - for some bare-minimum drydock maintenance - is small potatoes compared to the cost of a single new F-35 fighter.
I'm sure if the political will had been there to maintain the Saturn V/Apollo capability, they could have.
Can? Sure you can. Absolutely.
Did they? No. There was no mandate, no requirement, no project, no budget.
Put that Ohio submarine into a dry dock, send everyone home. Tell them to find something new to do because the project has ended. Do you think you will be able to re-launch submarine in a year later if you changed your mind? How about ten years later? How about 51 years later? I wouldn't hold my breath.
The best way to maintain a capability is by regularly exercising it. The Ohio did that every year constantly, the Apollo program did not.
Even if it was possible, there would be no point: the blueprints weren't the hard part, and the world has changed since they were drawn up.
Records were not kept, knowledge died with the engineers who built it. Materials are no longer available, some of the technology has not been built in 50 years. In the end, redeveloping the stack is much cheaper than using the old rockets. Which is exactly what they are doing - and with every new development comes the risk you are chasing the wrong rabbit and won't, in the end, end up at your target.
More plausable explanation, however, is that it simply did not exist at all and they faked everything.
NASA a radically changed it's focus an functions since the space race. Suppliers have changed too.
They could do it again with enough funds and time, but it will take many years.
Orchestrating a plan to keep millions in the dark and ensuring thousands, upon thousands of people keep a secret to their deathbeds is a lot less plausible.
You miss the point. They used those rockets multiple times to go to the Moon, it's not like it was "do once and forget" situation.
How could they simply forget things after doing it for so many times? You need extreme reliability and know-how to do those things consistantly over the span of a decade.
There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering. If not, then the whole thing is not really believable. Sorry.
Interestingly enough, the leftover Saturn V hardware was put to good use by launching Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, both of which turned out to be valuable steps in the US space program. So as much as it pains me to say, it may have been a good thing that the last three moon missions were canceled.
You've never heard of the situation where no one knows how a business critical piece of software works? "Bob wrote it 20 years ago but he died last year". This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. If no one is paying for that knowledge and supply chain to be maintained it will atrophy and dissapear. That's why the US army is still buying tanks even though they have thousands in storage, they need a company to maintain the supply chain and institutional knowledge to build tanks. Are you imagining generations of engineers being tasked with knowing how to build a rocket with 1960's technology with parts from suppliers that no longer exist despite no one having any intention to ever buy such a rocket again and no one paying for the maintenance of that ability?
NASA didn't have the budget to continue to operate Saturn V and also build Shuttle.
The president and NASA leadership wanted Shuttle. So the last Saturn V were put into storage.
To claim they don't exist is stupid, you can go see them:
https://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?max_w=800&id=NASM-A19...
Yes, lots of those design top documents still exist. But not every supplier and sub-sub-sub supplier did the same thing. Most of those companies don't exist anymore or were bought and bought again.
NASA never wanted to build a Saturn V again. So they archived all the plans.
You seem to believe that they put some kind of plan in place to keep the Saturn V so they could bust them out again. This is simply not the case. As far as they were concern Saturn V was over and Shuttle was the future. Archiving everything was the only thing they did.
Of course we could do a huge effort and recreate the Saturn V program. And the lots of documentation that exist would help. But anybody who has recreated old things, knows that plans are not perfect. Doing something like that would simply not be worth.
I can't really say how we now have a better rocket that can send people to the Moon.
We do have rocketry that is a lot more advanced than the Saturn V ever was - but it simply cannot, and does not do what the Saturn V did.
I could argue details - but notice that, after battleships were no longer so important, it remained a critical priority for the U.S. Navy to be the "Reigning Superpower" on the world's oceans:
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading...
Vs. how interested was the U.S. Gov't in retaining "can go to the moon" capabilities after Apollo 17 (in Dec'72)? Can you name any post-Apollo, pre-2000 manned-moon-mission NASA programs which received serious funding?
The issues are pretty straightforward, when the SaturnV and lunar lander were being built, almost all of the design was done by hand, all of the parts were made by hand and the engineers made all sorts of little undocumented adjustments to the designs in the process.
On top of that, the flight computers of the era were extremely primitive, large and heavy, and the design was done with this in mind.
Finally, NASA's safety standards were much more lax at the time. Saturn V would be considered way too dangerous to fly crew on nowadays.
Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship.
I'm all for it, and root for SpaceX and Musk to make it happen.
What I'm saying all this time on this thread is following:
"Man never went to the Moon before. Artemis will hopefully be the first. If man has been to the Moon multiple times using the same aging technology over 50 years ago, then it shouldn't be an issue to go there now. In fact, it should be much easier and cheaper, as the computers are 1000x more powerful nowadays, and we still have fuel/energy sources that were used then."
Thank you for the discussion.
Now, guess why the beam actually comes back instead of getting absorbed by the lunar surface? Because Apollo 11 left a mirror there half a century ago, it still works
There are people alive, today, that can prove to you that we went to the moon just by shooting a laser beam in the sky, so yes, we did go to the moon.
The reason why this isn't a problem is that the device wasn't 'just' a mirror, but rather a retroreflector. This reflects any light back at its source, regardless of which direction the light came from.
If you were really lost in deep space, perhaps you could flash a very bright light (not a laser) momentarily, then look for the return flash from the retroreflector moments later - or at least, hopefully that soon, otherwise you are very far away indeed! A few strategically-placed retroreflectors around the solar system could make an effective triangulation-based location tracker. I wonder if this already exists in some form.
It works this way with any conspiracy. It is you mental model, it is your decision, but it is little sad to watch people choosing ignorance over knowledge.
As for cost and 'easier', the Artemis lander programs are cheaper than what Apollo cost, and they have far higher requirements than just being the bare minimum to keep 3 carefully selected specimens of humanity alive for a few days. Hell, Starship is supposed to have an entire infirmary. That is to say that it would indeed be a lot easier if we were just aiming to land a few people in a can for a few days and were completely willing to risk their potential inability to return. We've made the requirements much harder, so the project is appropriately harder.
Do you think we could built an exact replica of the Model T and its manufacturing line? We could build something kind of like it, but it would require a lot of engineering.
The type of plastic and cloth used is likely not manufactured anymore. The processes used and tools used don't exist anymore in the exact same way they did then. And the people trained to build those tools and operate them don't exist anymore.
The idea that all technology once built can just be recreated without any issue is just complete nonsense.
Do you not know anything about how technology works?
Mission accomplished boys, let's pretend that Moon doesn't exist for 50+ years. /s
For the record, I do want Artemis to succeed.
NASA is now building the SLS, a modern(ish) heavy lift rocket meant for moon missions, among other things. But for a couple decades in between there was this obsession with the Space Shuttle as the primary launch platform, and the Space Shuttle wasn't of much use beyond low earth orbit. And with the Soviets focusing on space stations after the Apollo landings there wasn't any competitive aspect to going further either.
There were obviously lots of unmanned missions to the moon and other places in the solar system, but manned activity was limited to low-earth orbit for the last 50 years, so the capability to go further withered.
> What's more, delays to Starship have knock-on effects because the spacesuit contractor needs to know how the suits will interface with the spacecraft, and simulators need to be built for astronauts to learn its systems.
From https://web.archive.org/web/20230809230628/https://www.chann...
- Dragon can do an emergency abort, by (a) accelerating away from the booster and (b) parachuting down to a soft-landing. Starship's upper stage is so massive that such acceleration and soft-landing seem out of reach (ideally an emergency-fallback-everything-has-gone-wrong mode shouldn't rely on tricky maneuvers like their landing flip!). There may be ways around that, e.g. using an ejectable module, but it would all need designing, building, testing, validating, etc.
- Falcon 9 needed to prove its reliability by performing many successful uncrewed missions. Starship will need to take the same approach, but hasn't managed any yet ;)
- SpaceX had to stop making changes/improvements to Falcon 9, since NASA would reset the successful-mission-count back to zero after major changes. SpaceX was willing to do that, since they had another rocket to focus on (Starship). Also, it helped that Falcon 9 had already exceeded their expectations by the "Block 5" design (which is why Falcon Heavy hasn't seen much use; Falcon 9 is very capable on its own!). Even when Starship is reliably launching, it will likely undergo design changes for a while.
- Getting Starship to the Moon will need in-orbit refuelling. That's untested, and more dangerous than docking and crew transfer (which is now routine), so it makes sense to launch the crew separately and transfer them to an already-refuelled Starship. This doesn't add much complexity, since refuelling requires multiple launches, orbital rendezvous and docking anyway. The choice of crew launcher is then arbitrary: SLS, Falcon 9, Soyuz, Starship, etc.
(Earth) launch and landing will be the hardest parts to get crew-rated, if they ever are. Perhaps the only human-rated approaches will be smaller, safer systems like Soyuz (or some modern replacement on that scale), with immediate transfer to a Starship or space station once orbital. Given its cargo lifting capacity, and station-sized living space, that would still be a great improvement over today (although maybe not enough to pay back SpaceX's costs)
The solution to get Starship and Shuttle beyond LEO is the same: either use up the fuel required for landing and expending the vehicle or orbital refueling.
The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/rocket-scientist-say...
There is another thing sets apart Starship from other launch systems: relatively wide availability/manufacturability of its fuel outside of Earth. You won't find kerosene or hypergols on Mars or Ganymedes, but methane can be produced fairly straightforwardly there.
Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to even keep in one place, much less pipe across some distance.
But that's exactly what people believed about the space shuttle before it launched as well. Let's wait to see Starship actually work before predicting it will be enormously cheap. As it stands, that cheapness is entirely predicated on a completely unrealistic level of reusability (multiple launches per day with the same rocket, when even Falcon 9 requires weeks or months between launches of the same rocket).
You have full powered engines in orbit on Starship, "just" need to fuel them :)
We can build medieval castles all day long with concrete and steel, but if you want an actual stone medieval castle, we don't know how to do it.
Oh yes we do.
I ran an industrial facility that had been in operation since the 40’s, safety used to not even be a concern. If it operated in 2000 the way it did in 1950’s, or even in the early 80’s, they’d be out of business.
let me introduce you to the US military and the lack of mental health care we provide them after their service.
let me introduce you to prisons. farms. a dozen others.
let me introduce you to daily mass shootings.
Americans do not care about the lives of other Americans until and unless it is required by law.
no group of people today, outside of a few enthusiast amateurs (very few), know much about how the Apollo program worked in enough detail to resurrect that technology and infrastructure.
We can't return to the moon today. That's why we're building up a new moon program. We can't just pick up where we left off.
China in general want to go to the moon.
And the Chinese would get to beat the Americans at the American's own stated goal. America's programme is called the Artemis Program - Artemis being Apollo's sister - and the programme's first goal is to put a female and a person of colour on the Moon ASAP.
It would be a clear-cut victory for China over the USA, all the while being perfectly in keeping with China's socialist beliefs and past activities.
And China has several competent female astronauts (Wang Yaping and Liu Yang are experienced).
So, am I missing something?
Sending a woman (or a person of color for that matter) to the moon has no scientific benefits unless the mission is framed as building a long-term colony there (where both men and women could participate) for example.
You enumerated several political reasons but no scientific ones as I understand. Hence my question.
Therefore, the logic goes, each side needed to frequently show off their advanced technology whilst avoiding showing any secrets: ostensibly civilian space exploration serves that purpose rather well.
I've read a similar argument for spying - that countries begrudgingly want a certain amount of espionage to take place in peacetime. This is because it's better for everyone to know the extent of each other's military capabilities than to accidentally start an arms race out of a misplaced belief that their rivals are suddenly increasing development of weapons.
I was born in the post-USSR world, and am also British rather than American, so perhaps take my perception of the Cold War with a pinch of salt. :)
China putting a woman on the moon would be a little embarrassing to the US, but people would forget about it in a week or two. It wouldn't prove China's technological superiority, just some vague sense of moral superiority. And there are a lot cheaper ways to send that message.
What significant difference does it make if we put a woman (or woman of color) on the moon first vs putting another white man on the moon. [with modern technology].
I could think of a few positive reasons to do this, but it shouldn't be the main driving force of competition.
If the goal is “but X can do Y too” then there are already women astronauts so goal achieved I guess.
70% of the US is either female, POC, or both. Enticing that mind bogglingly huge demographic into STEM has massive utility for this country. Evidence shows that people aspire more easily to be like people they resemble, and the moonshot that inspired "Whitey On The Moon" didn't do that job well.
What would you pay to add 10 million more engineers and scientists to the trajectory of this nation over the next couple decades?
The US is I guess 51% women, maybe 20–30% Hispanic, maybe 15% African-American, and so on. Then you just need to put one of every identity on the Moon in the next decade.
Because surely you didn’t think that the average person of a sociological minority identify themselves as “not a white [straight] male”.