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Looking Back At Apollo 17, and Why We Stopped Going To the Moon (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: The 43rd anniversary of the mission of Apollo 17, the last time men walked on the moon, has elicited a strange kind of nostalgia, and no little melancholia in some parts of the media. These qualities are captured in a story in IO9 that purports to tell us why no one has been back to the moon in over four decades and why we might soon return at last. Deadline Hollywood informs us that "The Last Man on the Moon," a documentary on Apollo moonwalker Gene Cernan, is set for a release to both theaters and video on demand in February, having been shown at film festivals for the past year or so,
We stopped going to the moon because we beat the Soviet Union and they eventually collapsed. The space race was a dick waving contest with the possibility of learning how to put weapons in orbit.
The only reason the U.S. goes back to the moon will be because China wants to try doing it. Otherwise a moon landing is in the hands of the rich entrepreneurs who are holding their own private dick waving contests.
Unfortunately, the Vietnam war and its aftermath bled the USA until there was nothing left.
The Vietnam War didn't bleed the USA. It drove the wrong group into power: The feel-good, anti-science hippies got their representatives to cut back on everything that didn't produce immediate self-satisfaction. That meant no nuclear power, no space program, little basic science. Only when scientists managed to convince the military that something could be a good weapon did anything get done: ARPANET, GPS, etc.
Did you see the Apollo 13 film (1995)? Part of the setup was that the moon missions were already old hat to Americans, who had mostly stopped paying attention after Apollo 11 had achieved the big goal.
I'm confident that the screenwriters had pretty good access to institutional memory at NASA re events that occurred 25 years earlier, there would've been a lot of old hands still around.
Kennedy sent us to the moon for prestige. "Look at America, aren't we wonderful!"
Where's the incentive now. It's a huge expense for little reward. Any mistakes cost billions, lives and ... prestige. Compare the costs and benefits and there is no logical reason to go. Some country more desperate for prestige will go next.
...omphaloskepsis often...
It is depressing to me just how few people admit haw mind bendingly awful it is that we have not been back for what used to be a lifetime.
As to why, I can think of several reasons that nobody from earth has been back in this time...
1. Lack of political leadership globally.
2. There are easier ways to fill pork barrels.
3. The press in the developed world is in the hands of an ever smaller bunch of sociopaths who take pride in being unscientific.
4. The world is too comfortable for the 1%
5. There is a myth that if we don't spend it on progress, the money will be used to feed/house the poor and hungry.
6. Fear by the powerful that once people are off earth, they will become "global citizens", not just good Americans, Russians, Brits or whatever.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
In addition, the very first Apollo mission resulted in loss of life, and they still pushed on - albeit with a delay. Hardly ruinous.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Primary objective was to beat the Reds to the stars, back then it was them or us. When Apollo program started, USSR scored a number of firsts in the Space Race that demonstrated the superiority of Communism (not really but there's extensive discussions on all that). Whatever, Hugh Dryden suggested putting a man on the moon and there was already the Saturn rocket and F1 engine in development. Kennedy used his great oral skills, Johnson used his huge political power, James Webb used his knowledge on how to work the system to maintain budgets over a multi-year period.
Once we achieved a manned landing the race was over. What's even interesting is Bob Gilruth suggested no more Apollo flights as each one had so many opportunities for things to go wrong and lose a crew (and almost did with 13). Apollo 18, 19, 20 were cancelled to save money (wouldn't have saved much as hardware ready to go, crews pretty much fully trained).
There is the "What If" Gargarin never made the first space flight? Would we have worked on economic development of space like we are trying to do now? Dennis Wingo has some articles including past studies from those years after Sputnik but before Gargarin's flight. https://denniswingo.wordpress....
mfwright@batnet.com
I've never seen any evidence that the same left wing groups who opposed nuclear power opposed landing people on the moon. Those two issues seem very unrelated to me in fact.
Meanwhile, fiscal conservatism has always been the reason for NASA budget cuts in my experience. With a shrinking budget should NASA have kept landing people on the moon or invested its limited resources in other less understood aspects of our universe?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
That's fine. But if you want the American public to fund it, you need to justify it. Do you have skin in the game? Are you willing to do without in order to fund a trip to Mars? Or do you just want everyone else to pay for it?