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.
Mission accomplished boys, let's pretend that Moon doesn't exist for 50+ years. /s
For the record, I do want Artemis to succeed.
More plausable explanation, however, is that it simply did not exist at all and they faked everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?