Why is it so hard to go back to the moon?
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
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.
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.
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.
The thing with probes is that you should send more than one every 5-10 years, if you do that, you'll learn something from the failures before everyone working on the project dies of old age. It's the moon, you don't need to wait for a once-a-decade transfer window to line up.
>All the software in the world isn't as good as a trained pilot in a novel scenario
You can likely launch 5 (or more) autonomous missions rather than send humans. And that's assuming good spending, if you go by the $93 billion Artemis Program, likely 20 or more.
Yes, recall that Apollo 1 incinerated the capsule crew, that would have canceled the entire program today, back then it was "press on..."
We did continue with the Space Shuttle after its accidents, but that was decades ago now, and I'm sure that played into any discussions there might have been about extending the program.
The US government just delayed the next Starship launch by 2 months because of incorrectly filed paperwork.
It's not that SpaceX didn't file the paperwork... they just used the wrong form.
This is why our feet are firmly nailed to the ground.
If anyone actually cared to go to the Moon or Mars, then obstructionist bureaucrats like that wouldn't be in their jobs for very long.
If you look at the first flight test of Starliner, everyone talks about the timing problem that caused them to fail to achieve the proper orbit. What is more rarely discussed is that after this happened, they did a top to bottom code review while the Starliner was in orbit, and found a bug in the crew/service module undocking procedure that would have caused the service module to strike the crew module after undocking, most likely damage the heat shield, and cause the capsule to burn up on reentry. They applied a hot fix in orbit for this.
Had the timer problem not happened, the code review wouldn't have happened and this wouldn't have been caught.
With the number of gremlins that have come up on every Starliner flight, there are certainly many more lower probability defects that will eventually lead to a loss of crew.
My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright. These days that talent generally doesn't go to those places. IMO the main reason SpaceX has been so successful is that a lot of those people really wanted to work on rockets but didn't want to work for NASA/Boeing.
>My general feeling is that the true reason NASA/Boeing is much less successful than in the 60s is because the NASA of that time attracted the very top talent that was young, energetic, and bright.
Are they much less successful? Less things are being paid for and things are happening at a slower pace because money.
We're still doing science on the planet Earth, because there's still plenty to learn, and we actually live here with billions of people.
We've only sent a handful of folks to the Moon so far. We've literally barely scratched the surface, and only a few tiny patches of it as that.
Exploring new places has always lead to all sorts of interesting new discoveries. No reason to think a whole new world mightn't hold a few interesting (and/or potentially lucrative) surprises.
Sure: if we had the ability to actually send a proper mission that can drive around the entire thing, with a pop up lab (arctic research style) on the moon itself, that's a different matter, but we are nowhere near that level of proficient at space science yet, and going to the moon a few more times won't make a difference to that aspect.
There's a number of reservations wrt the practicality of SpaceX Starship of course. That said, it allows us to say there's at least one company projecting a 100 metric ton payload spacecraft in the near future (with prototypes already being tested).
If/when they get it working, remember that SpaceX tends to mass produce their spacecraft, so it wouldn't be just a one off single landing by a one off single lander.
So quick computation: 5 trips is 2 and a half years, and then shipping supplies and then people another year or so. At 100-150 tons per year you can supply (back of envelope[1]) 10-20 'overwinterers'[2] with a fairly comfortable margin for a year, as well as equipment and parts.
There's also no technical reason not to reserve a landing pad for an escape craft that you can rotate every 6-12 months.
So it seems like the technical capability will be there at least. Then it becomes the question of whether that's financially viable already.
Can you elucidate further logistical challenges?
(ps. this post will likely date quickly, since NASA seems to be planning an actual Artemis Base Camp [3])
[1] Back of envelope suggests something like 3 tons of essential supplies needed per person, assuming the modest oxygen and water recycling as available on ISS, and use of nuclear power.
[2] By analogy with the arctic base: 10-20 permanent crew for year-round maintenance, with occasional surges 'on season', bringing their own supplies and equipment.
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasas-artemis-base-camp...
We built the first railways on earth 200 years ago. We could build railways on the moon this century. Think about this. The time between the beginning of industrialization and a space civilization could be just 300 years.
Your grand kids would experience the space age, but only if you start working on it today.
After a decade or two, and the loss of any real competition, the US lost the political will to keep pushing boundaries. The primary reason we don't still have the immediate capability to put people onto the moon isn't technical, it's political. We are only now reigniting that desire, and again, it's because of another great power starting to push things in space.
It was CCCP pushing us then, it's the CCP now.
Just wait til China announces an effort to put humans on Mars.
But I haven't done the math/research, so I could be very wrong.
Maybe as an average because more people are being educated, but I find it hard to believe that our top students now are any less educated than the top students in the past.
Both perspectives reveal more about the speaker than the reality.
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
Could you please expand or give a few pointers on those indices? Or where could I learn more about this.
Could be more but the biggest cost is probably labour and there are 2 indexes for that:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm
https://www.bls.gov/productivity/
Wages can be drilled down to the employee groups that would be predominant, such as machinists or engineers.
Productivity can approximate how much more efficient people are now due to technology.
Then major component costs can be compared from other current rockets vs historical costs.
Not sending money to Ukraine means people die. Not sending a man to the Moon? People would just wonder why.
Yes, and lose their freedom, and it greatly increases the risk that many more will die and lose their freedom.
In which way?
2. Make nation with nuclear weapons more desperate
3. Make nation with nuclear weapons more angry
If the point is to prevent nuclear war you must either prevent nukes or prevent war. This accomplishes neither.
How? The nation with nuclear weapons probably understands that it will suffer a lot in a nuclear war, or will likely get hit with nuclear weapons itself, right?
> 2. Make nation with nuclear weapons more desperate
So what? It may be desperate, but can't use nuclear weapons because - see pt. 1. - it may think it will hit itself with nuclear weapons. Ok, maybe not even nuclear weapons - but that nation may also understand that it won't stand long against focused non-nuclear attack.
> 3. Make nation with nuclear weapons more angry
Nations, really, aren't people, saying they are angry is complicated. Maybe leaders will become more angry, but what could they do? Ok, even if everybody will get more angry, so what?
> If the point is to prevent nuclear war you must either prevent nukes or prevent war. This accomplishes neither.
You can't prevent nukes - they exist in the world - and can't even guarantee you can prevent war, but you should carefully estimate what bad and good consequences your actions will have. Is it better to try to stop an aggressor? What may happen if you do? What may happen if you don't?
Everyone is now worse off because the land is filled with mines and thousands have been killed. China and Russia
I don't see the relevance. Should we have Paris back to Germany? Manchuria, the Philippines, etc. to Japan?
> Everyone is now worse off because the land is filled with mines and thousands have been killed.
War is a horrible outcome, but the alternative - indefinite generations of subjegation, and risk of war and subjegation in additional countries - seems much worse.
Simple leave the land. It's crazy to see the left so anti-property when it comes to domestic matters but then in this case they are more than willing to give up untold human life for some now worthless land-mind filled dirt. Why are Ukranian property rights worth the death of so many?
We can manufacture land if we want to, and we used to do just that. Much of Florida and SF.
Well, if you send weapons, instead of killing people you have the aggressor's army just pumping cheeks and pretending to look fierce. No death, no destruction, just maybe threats. No?
It basically amounted to a trash can with an apple watch on top of a V2 rocket
In 1966, the mainframe to use was the CDC 6600, able to do ~3 million instructions per second (MIPS), with kilobytes, possibly a megabyte of RAM. The US government had a good number of mainframes, of a wide variety, but they wouldn't be able to reach the Apple Watch's computing power.
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!
- 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.
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...
this is not the problem
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.
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.
Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?
> Now, that science is done.
That said, building a base on the moon is pretty pointless, and I think we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to become a spacefaring species, we’re going to have to learn how to live in space. The conditions on each planet, moon, whatever, are all pretty different, so we’ll probably need different bespoke solutions on each one.
We should perfect the art of building self-sustaining orbital habitats, because those aren’t redesigned from scratch every time. Let’s iterate on the space-station.
Energetically going downwell is a big cost. The only reason to go onto a planet is to get resources that aren’t already present in less energetically disadvantageous locations.
In order to get to a planet in the first place, you’ll have to have a ship that can fly through space without the occupants getting irradiated. The biggest problem will be convincing them to get off the ship I think.
* Humans evolved to live on Earth
* In many cases there were people to trade with or steal already tended land from
We could look at Arctic expeditions I guess. They mostly didn’t colonize for some reason (despite the region being wildly more hospitable than anywhere off Earth).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570028
Colonizing the moon makes as much sense as swimming out to a rock a bunch of times, to prepare for piloting a cargo ship.
We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.
We know, and they knew at the time, that the achievement of getting to the Moon was just a cherry on top of the technological development required to do it.
Should not redo that work. The current strategy of using higher-tech components and less brute force is more scientifically interesting.
I also think going back to the moon is stupid, but I elaborated on that a bunch the other branch, so I’m not going to bother doing it again. But if we have to go back again, we should follow their spirit rather than their actions and use the most advanced systems available. Not a bunch of TTLs. The value is in testing our ability to manufacture complex devices to work in a hostile environment.
There's no need to spend billions on spending three or four people there to get scientific returns.
Getting humans to have long term sustainability and mobility on the moon and having tools and robotic support is long term.
The same architecture can then be reused for Mars.
On earth, most caves are explored with humans. Most science is not done by robotics only.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't there the same situation with Soyuz-1, when they thought the man onboard would help correct flight problems?
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.
The explorers that will go out into the solar system, like Jared Isaacman, will go for glory, fame, and/or profit, none of which can be gained by probes, no matter how sophisticated.
The explorers' dreams are of less importance than their benefactors' expectations.
Sending someone to Mars without them dying (and maybe bringing them back) will be a huge step. There's so much we can do on and around Mars, however, without anyone being out there, and some of them are also likely to be huge advancements.
Similarly for the asteroid belt. Yes, it will probably need humans out there eventually, but there's a massive, massive task of mapping and exploring it that can and almost certainly will be done without launching humans into space.
Note, I'm not saying that this would be easy or safe or cheap. But I am suggesting that the science achieved by getting some real scientists on Mars would be qualitatively and quantitatively greater than robotic missions.
So the cost with actual human scientists is never going to be below a probe and will realistically be significantly higher.
That means that the actual human scientists need to bring significant value to the endeavour for it to make sense.
At the same time we don't have the ability to reach other solar systems at all, nor projected in the next few decades. So we know relatively little about them in fact. Only as much as can be obtained by remote sensing over light years. (Which is to say: not very much.)
Given what happened to first dog sent to the space - they might not know what they’re signing up for.
Perhaps entertainment might fund it? Like a reality show on the moon? Still doubt it will finance billions
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't worry about it. I definitely won't.
They were very lucky they only had 2 mission failures and 3 lives lost.
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".
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
(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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
Bad idea.
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?”).
I guess NASA had lost all YouTube videos about how to assemble Moon rocket.
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.
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.
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.
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.