Why is it so difficult to return to the moon if we have done it
before?
The last time a human was on the Moon was in 1972.
Since then, technology has taken giant steps, and more and more countries have developed their space
program, but despite this, human beings have not returned to visit the Moon. What are the reasons?
Let's find out! The main motivation
To find the reasons that led to the trip to the Moon, we have to go back to the end of the
decade of, the 60s. After World War II, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union
engaged in the Space Race, a stubborn struggle between the two powers whose ultimate goal was
to place a citizen of the nation on the surface of the Moon. From this struggle, in which both
nations intended to demonstrate their military and technological superiority over the adversary,
the United States would emerge as the winner. The trip to the Moon, more than an end in itself,
was a way to show the world who would set the pace of the international political agenda for the
remainder of the century. Reaching the Moon had more of a political purpose than a scientific one.
In a different historical context, out of simple scientific concern, would we have reached the Moon
in '69? Everything seems to indicate that it does not. As we have said, the motivation for
the Americans to send a human-crewed mission to our satellite was the tension generated by the
political situation. Without this rivalry with the USSR, it would have been hard to imagine
that the American government would mobilize the nearly 400,000 people who participated in
the Apollo program and dedicated to it during the 14 years that it lasted, the equivalent
today of about 120,000 million dollars. Today it is unimaginable that the U.S.
government would again fund a trip of this nature at such high costs to the nation.
The high cost of stepping on the moon again Reaching the moon was not an easy feat
to achieve because, in addition to the technological challenges we will discuss later,
there were also many economic challenges. A law signed in March 2017 by President
Donald Trump gives NASA an annual budget of around $19.5 billion and stands at nearly $20
billion today. But although this sounds like an astronomical figure, in reality,
it is not if you consider that the total is divided between all the divisions of the agency
and all the ambitious projects like the James Webb Space Telescope, the giant rocket project called
the Space Launch System and remote missions to the Sun, Jupiter, Mars, the asteroid belt,
the Kuiper belt and the edge of the solar system. In addition, NASA's budget is somewhat small
relative to its past. Since 1960 the economic allocation dedicated to the American space
program skyrocketed, reaching the record figure of 5.3% of the national budget in 1965. But five
years later, in the early 70s and resolved the Space Race in favor of the Americans,
NASA suffered a significant budget cut for various reasons, including the loss
of political interest in the Moon and the accident the Apollo 13 mission suffered.
These events would lead to the cancellation of the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions,
making Apollo 17 the last human-crewed mission to the Moon. As a result, for the last 40 years,
NASA's budget has remained below 1%, and for the last 15 years, it has been
heading toward 0.4% of the federal budget. In other words, if today we have not returned
to the moon, it is, on the one hand, a lack of interest on the part of governments and, secondly,
a lack of economic resources. What happened to technology?
Today NASA has the new rocket SLS ("Space Launch System"),
which will be the successor of the Atlas V that was responsible for taking astronauts to the Moon;
this rocket made its debut with the launch of the Artemis 1 Mission, which was a success,
managing to take the Orion capsule to the orbit of the Moon, which will be the new spacecraft
that will transport humans to the lunar surface. Something that caught the attention of many is
that before the launch of the Artemis1 mission, it was canceled two times due to failures in the
rocket's fuel chambers of the rocket, and therefore it was necessary to perform more
tests before the ship could be launched. But why was it so difficult to launch
the SLS? Isn't NASA supposed to have years of experience already?
The reality is that the launches of the Apollo missions were not easy either;
as you will remember, the mission that managed to land successfully was the 11th; that is to say,
before the 11, ten missions did not get it for various reasons,
most of them had several cancellations either due to weather problems or technical problems.
Some Apollo missions didn't even get off the ground, but it's hardly talked about.
It is also worth remembering that during the space shuttles, NASA had many problems getting make them
taken off even though they already had the experience of the Apollo spacecraft.
The most common problems during shuttle launches were almost always in fueling
systems since this was not the same as that of Saturn V rockets and Apollo spacecraft.
The shuttles were extremely complex craft that mixed a rocket's power with an airplane's
aerodynamics and had engines that used solid and liquid fuel. This complexity was what caused
technical failures in all launch attempts. In fact, according to the registry of launch
cancellations, shuttle launches are the ones that suffered the most cancellations;
some were canceled up to 5 times before taking off successfully.
The problem of fuel supply Before successfully taking off,
the Artemis 1 mission was canceled two times due to technical failures in the fuel system;
these failures are the same ones that caused the cancellation of the Apollo missions and
the same ones suffered by the shuttles. Fuel leaks are the most common failure
in rockets and one of the main reasons for takeoff cancellation for more than 50 years,
but why does this problem still exist today? The fault lies with the fuel used by the rockets,
HYDROGEN. This is the simplest and lightest element of all; on earth, it exists in abundance,
but it is mixed with other elements, and molecular separation processes such as electrolysis must
be used to obtain pure hydrogen. Hydrogen is a highly light element,
so much so that putting together a single gram of material requires billions of hydrogen
atoms. Hydrogen is so light that it can sneak through any opening, however tiny it may be;
in a typical environment and average temperatures, this is not usually a problem,
but leaks are much easier to occur in a cold environment and high pressures. It is precisely
these environments in which space rockets operate. For a rocket's fuel tanks to remain full of fuel,
they must be permanently connected to terrestrial cooling systems by cables
and hoses until the moment of launch. At the time of takeoff, some connections
separate from the bridge; it is right here where leaks usually occur since
these connections cannot be screwed tightly, and it is tough to avoid leaks when they are
at high pressures and shallow temperatures. In short, it's hard for rockets to take off
because hydrogen is used as fuel. But... if this is the problem,
why not use another fuel? Reusing rockets
The reason why NASA continues to use hydrogen fuel is its high efficiency
since it is the element that provides greater thrust and less weight. Still,
another important reason is the law; we are not talking about physical laws but political ones.
In 2010 the U.S. Congress ordered that NASA would have to continue using the rockets that
were used in the shuttles as part of the SLS rocket program; in fact, you may not know it,
but the SLS engines are the same as those used by the space shuttles at the time.
As the budget was cut, Congress suggested that to optimize resources, NASA would have
to use the contracts, investments, budget, workforce, industrial base,
and existing infrastructure in the U.S. that were used for the space shuttle in the new SLS program.
Likewise, would also be reused the Orion 1, and the existing propulsion systems,
such as the liquid fuel engines that cause so many leaks, the external storage tank,
and the solid fuel engines, would also be reused. All this was reused and conditioned to the new
Artemis 1 project. In other words, the Artemis project, which seeks to
take new astronauts to the Moon, uses the same technology, rockets, engines, and launch base
that space shuttles used more than a decade ago. That's why getting back to the Moon is so tricky;
beyond touch screens, the technology of the Artemis 1 program is not so
different from what we had 50 years ago. Moreover, perhaps the most potent reason
we haven't returned to the Moon is the simplest of all: there hasn't been a need to go back. The
missions of the Apollo program were so prolific that apart from the countless experiments carried
out on the Moon, so many samples of lunar material were collected that even today,
many of them remain unstudied by scientists. To all this, we must add that in the coming years,
NASA's interests will focus on objectives such as Skylab, the laboratory in Earth orbit, or sending
probes and satellites to many other corners of the solar system. And perhaps the question is: Why
should we return to the Moon when there is so much still to be explored on the rest of the planets?
In light of recent scientific advances, there is nothing to criticize NASA for. Today we
explore Mars with robots, discover new solar systems almost daily, and detect phenomena such
as gravitational waves that until very recently were only part of the theory.
As we have seen, there are several reasons why we have not been to the Moon since 1972,
and yet none has to do, for example, with the strange conspiracy theories circulating for
several years on social networks. Just because we haven't come back doesn't mean we won't.
The horizon of the next human-crewed mission to our satellite will be marked by NASA's Artemis
project that aims to put a man back on the Moon. And it may also be that on this occasion imitating
Neil Armstrong in 1969, is a woman who takes a new step on the surface of our natural satellite.