On July 20, 1969, one of the most momentous events in human history occurred:
people walked on the Moon. Eventually the United States completed six Moon landings…
and then we suddenly stopped. This is the real reason we haven't been back to the moon.
One of the key drivers of the USA's quest to land humans on the Moon was a sense of
competition with the Soviet Union. The Soviet government poured money and expertise into their
space program in the 1950s, and achieved several amazing firsts in the process.
Sputnik was the first artificial satellite orbiting Earth in 1957, and in 1961 Soviet
pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the Earth. By the early 1960s,
it seemed obvious that the Soviets were going to be the first nation to land someone on the Moon.
The Cold War was in high gear, and the potential technological and strategic advantages such a feat
would give the Russians was a concern. As noted by former NASA Chief Historian Roger Launius,
the Space Race was really a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Instead of deploying tanks and troops on Earth, the two countries deployed scientists
and engineers in an effort to claim the Moon as their own—if only symbolically. Those Cold
War conditions no longer exist, and so far, no countries have risen to the same rivalry that
the USA and the Soviet Union had, removing a key reason we went to the Moon in the first place.
It took more than a decade to get us to the Moon the first time. It also
took an incredible amount of money and effort,
both mental and physical. And it could have gone wrong at any time—technology could have failed,
astronauts could have died, or a new president could have simply canceled the project.
The political risks were so high it's actually miraculous the project succeeded even one time.
And those political risks have only gotten worse in the decades since our last visit to the Moon.
Presidents have frequently suggested a return to the Moon, and NASA has come up
with several plans to do so—but once the price tag shoots up and the challenges become clear,
these plans are usually shifted to goals perceived as more practical.
That's the other problem: The benefits of going back to the Moon are largely theoretical.
Scientific research is a key reason to go back—but there's no clear profit margin.
A Moon base could be used as a refueling depot, but until there's a more practical
reason to go to and from the Moon—or to use the Moon as a layover on our way somewhere else—the
risks associated with such a project are frightening. Put simply, no politician
wants to have their name associated with an expensive boondoggle, or a tragic disaster.
It's absolutely true that President John F. Kennedy was the man who pushed for going to
the Moon, citing the need to fight the Russians' efforts to dominate space.
But the truth is a little less inspiring. Because part of the reason President Kennedy
pushed so hard for the Space Program was his need for some good publicity after
a series of political disasters had his administration reeling.
"And this generation does not intend
to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it."
Kennedy began his presidency convinced that a Moon landing would be far too
expensive to seriously consider. Then he had a very bad, no good year in 1961.
The Soviet Union made the USA look bad when they put Yuri Gagarin in orbit around the Earth,
and made the argument that we couldn't afford to go to the Moon look kind of silly.
Then Kennedy green-lit the Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. This was a disaster for Kennedy.
It was so poorly organized and incompetently executed, it made Kennedy look foolish and weak.
It changed his attitude towards his military leaders and advisers, and it forced him to look
for a way to change the conversation. Announcing a bold "Moonshot" mission was ideal. It made
him look like a visionary leader and it made the USA look like a technological superpower.
So if you want us to go back to the Moon, we might need to find a new political disaster.
Landing on and strutting around the Moon in 1969 was an incredible feat.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
Sure, it cost a tremendous amount of money and effort, but you'd be forgiven
for assuming that once we've achieved a goal like this, it must get easier to do.
Unfortunately, that assumption would be wrong — which is one big reason we haven't been back since
the end of the original Apollo Program in 1972. As noted by the MIT Technology Review, because the
original Moon landing project was positioned as a "race" against the Soviets, the project wasn't
designed for efficiency. Shortcuts were used wherever possible, and no one thought to build
sustainable supply chains. The end result is a system where the equivalent of two or three jumbo
jets' worth of technology and engineering is just burned up or thrown away, never to be used again.
In other words, the whole system of getting people to the Moon was never designed for repetition.
It's actually amazing we ran 17 Apollo missions and got to the Moon six times using it. If we want
to get serious about going back, we'll need to find a sustainable, efficient system for doing so.
Don't hold your breath, though; in 2007 Google announced the X Prize, offering $20 million
to the first non-governmental organization to complete a lunar landing. Since then only two
crafts have successfully landed on the Moon — and both were robots sent by the Chinese government.
Put simply, getting to the Moon and back is incredibly dangerous,
and the danger is exacerbated by the fact that Apollo craft design has never
really been the safest way to travel off the planet.
The frantic race to put men on the Moon in the 1960s led to a lot of corner-cutting in terms of
the technology and engineering used. After the success of the Apollo 11 Moon landing,
the sense of urgency that drove the project evaporated.
We'd beaten the Soviet Union to the Moon, after all, and every subsequent Apollo mission seemed
to underscore how little we got back out of these expensive and stress-inducing missions.
It all came to a head in 1970 when the Apollo 13 mission went horribly wrong. An explosion
jettisoned the crew's oxygen supply and damaged the module, leading to a tense, frightening trip
home in a crippled ship. While the astronauts returned safely, the incident underscored the
fact that the Apollo spacecraft was, in the words of historian John Logsdon, being pushed "right up
to the edge of its safe performance." Not long afterwards, President Nixon cut funding for the
Moon landings and shifted NASA's focus to cheaper, safer projects like Skylab and the Space Shuttle.
The computers on the Apollo lunar modules were incredibly basic compared to today's hardware.
In fact, as Real Clear Science notes, the smartphone in your pocket is probably one
hundred thousand times more powerful than the computers in the Apollo spacecraft. Heck,
even some calculators released in the 1980s were more powerful.
But computers are just part of the technology required to get people to and from the Moon—and
their limited capabilities were by design, as they needed to be extremely efficient in
order to use very little electricity. The lack of serious advances can be seen in
how similar today's Space X launches are to the launches in the 1960s—not
much has changed. And that's one huge barrier to going back to the Moon.
Legacy is always on politicians' minds. John F. Kennedy was the man who launched the U.S.
Moonshot, but he didn't live to see the mission succeed. Even if he hadn't been assassinated in
1963, by the time we got to the Moon in 1969 Kennedy would have been out of office anyway,
leaving another president to revel in the glory of the Apollo 11 landing.
That kind of timing makes presidents hesitate. Since it can take a decade—or more—to fund,
design, build, and test something as complex as a Moon landing, any president that pushes
for such a project is almost guaranteed to be out of office by the time it reaches fruition.
In today's political climate where presidents are never not campaigning, that's too long to
wait. And incoming administrations—especially if they're of the opposing party—have a habit of
canceling big projects put into motion by their predecessors so they can deny them the credit.
In fact, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon,
has argued pretty plainly that the only way we're getting back to the Moon
is if both political parties in this country put aside their differences.
The Space Shuttle program might have been a step back from the incredible achievement of putting
people on the Moon, but it kept humans in space and served an incredibly important purpose both in
preserving the USA's position as a leader in space exploration and people's excitement about it.
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded moments after takeoff in 1986,
it was a horrifying moment that chilled the entire nation. That event led to changes
in how NASA worked and how the Space Shuttle program was used. It was scaled back, and some
of the missions the Shuttle was performing were shifted back to older, more reliable technologies.
Then, in 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated when returning to Earth.
As PBS reports, this second disaster had a much
broader effect on the space program. President Bush and his administration questioned whether
it was worth putting human lives in danger by putting them routinely into space.
This new, more cautious attitude seriously slowed down our chances of returning to the Moon.
"Been there, done that" doesn't seem like it would be a viable political or scientific attitude,
but it sums up the basic attitude of many when it comes to the Moon. In fact, many people in the
government and in space-related agencies think we should be focusing on Mars as a priority.
As Scientific American reports, the House of Representatives' Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology introduced a bill in 2020
to make exploration of the red planet NASA's official stretch goal.
Not only is Mars a much more valuable destination in terms of scientific research and expanding our
understanding of the universe, it's also a goal that has captured the public's imagination.
That doesn't mean going back to the Moon is completely off the table, however.
As The Atlantic reports, most experts agree that the only way we're going to get human beings to
Mars reasonably safely is if we build a relay station of sorts on the Moon. Astronauts would
travel from the Earth to the Moon, refuel and make other preparations, and then launch from the Moon
to Mars, simplifying the logistics of the trip. But that means that we're still not going back
to the Moon until someone puts some serious money, talent, and other resources behind a trip to Mars.
When NASA announced plans to get American astronauts back on the Moon by 2024, many thought
it was overly optimistic. But even if the schedule slipped, it was an exciting development, and it
led to serious work on creating a next-generation rocket called the Space Launch System,
along with a new crew module called the Orion. The program has hit some bumps—it's already $2
billion over budget—but it was scheduled to be tested for the first time in 2020.
But just like every other industry, the aerospace world has been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
NASA recently announced it would be forced to shut down two important facilities:
The Michoud Assembly Facility and the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
The closures were necessary because employees there tested positive for the coronavirus,
and they've already had a big impact: NASA had to officially suspend the Space Launch System
program for the time being, dealing a serious blow to any chances of a return to the Moon.
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