In July 1969, history was made when the United States became the first country to put a man
on the moon. Then, in December 1972, history was made again when the US became the last
country to put a man on the moon, as the Apollo program was canceled early following Apollo 17.
But what’s the reason we abandoned the moon in the 70s, never to return?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question:
what’s the real reason why we have not returned to the moon?
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The most immediate and understandable reason we’ve not gone back to the moon since the early 70s
is that the United States government slashed NASA’s federal budget rendering the agency
unable to carry out expensive, dangerous space missions. The Apollo program alone
cost, at the time, $25.8 billion; when adjusted for inflation, that’s almost $260 billion. After
the US won the Space Race, the Soviet Union more or less stopped trying to compete - despite an
early lead putting the first satellite in space, the first man in space, and sending probes to the
far side of the moon and even Venus. By the late 60s the Soviet space program’s visionary engineer
Sergei Korolev had died. Without Korolev to push for the space program, the Soviet government also
cut funding, and without the motivator of Cold War competition, the US didn’t see the point in
continuing to go to the moon. After all, at the time there was no way to get any return
investment from it – in a lot of ways, the journey to the moon was seen as a money pit,
despite the public support for space exploration. But in 2017, the US announced its intention to
return to the moon. This time, the aim will be to put the first woman up there. However,
that doesn’t guarantee that the program will necessarily make its proposed lunar flights in the
mid-2020s. After all, there already was a lunar return project in the 2000s called Constellation.
It was canceled by Obama in 2010 for being too expensive. If it hadn’t been canceled,
we might have already sent people back to the moon since it was eyeing a 2020 landing date.
But if we already have the technology to go to the moon because we already did it
multiple times in the 1960s and 70s, why is it taking so many years and costing so much money
to plan programs like Constellation and Artemis? The Apollo program was only launched in 1961,
just eight years before the moon landing. Well, the simple truth is that we seem to
have lost a lot of the technology and knowledge we used to go to the moon in the twentieth century.
While it’s baffling to imagine that this could be the case, NASA in the wake of the 1972 budget
cut was a different place, and it just wasn’t able to preserve everything from the program.
NASA’s already come under fire before for not preserving vital things, specifically, the raw
footage of the moon landing, which was taped over! Of course, we do still have lots of footage of the
moon landing because we have what was broadcast on live TV at the time. But the footage that was lost
is the unprocessed, low-framerate feed that wasn’t suitable for broadcast. It’s not just those tapes,
though; everything that came together to make the moon landing happen doesn’t really
exist anymore. We might have blueprints and schematics for lunar modules and rockets,
but we don’t have the experts who made those blueprints into a physical spacecraft capable
of landing people on our nearest celestial neighbor. Hundreds of thousands of people
worked on the program, all of them exceptional engineers, designers, and physicists. Without
those very same people, we’re not able to get to the moon in the same way we did in the 60s.
In fact, we don’t even have access to the same building materials because, after the budget cut,
factories making unique components for space missions shut down. So we don’t have that
knowledge, either. We’ve lost the technology we used because it was so monumentally complex,
and that’s despite how much information about lunar technology is available in books and
online – and has been for decades. Though you can try to write down as much as possible,
there are always going to be things that go unwritten, small modifications or calculations
that were vital to the success of the mission but which have just been lost to time. That’s
why we can’t just rebuild all the lunar modules and the Saturn V rocket exactly as they existed
in 1969 and set off to the moon again. Interestingly though, people have attempted
to reconstruct that equipment, specifically the enormous F-1 engine present inside the Saturn V
rocket. Over 360 feet tall, it’s remained the largest and most powerful rocket ever used.
In the 2010s, there were efforts to rebuild an F-1 engine, which hadn’t been used since 1973, so that
they could rediscover the technology and hopefully use it in the development of future launch
systems. A group of young NASA engineers worked tirelessly to recreate the engine using materials
and information they could scrounge from archives and museums. Rediscovering this technology could
help NASA save money in the future of space exploration, as the F-1 engine – despite being
absolutely huge – is a simple enough design. But it was still an extremely difficult task
to pull off, even with a component belonging to the Saturn V, one of the most famous launch
vehicles in the world and possibly the one most integral to human space exploration.
There are yet other reasons not only why we can’t use technology recycled from Apollo, but why it’s
probably better that we don’t. In the twenty-first century, there’s a huge focus on sustainability
and the environment; giant, single-use rockets are bad for both of these things,
hence the recent push towards reusable vehicles. Where reusable vehicles are concerned,
SpaceX has the lead with the Falcon 9, and other private companies including Virgin and Blue Origin
are working on various modules and components that will be good for multiple uses. NASA is doing the
exact same thing and wants reusable components for Artemis. We also have better technology now
than we used to and have done significantly more research into space even without going into the
moon; simply put, with enough time, we can do everything the Apollo program did but better.
Artemis is already budgeted to be far cheaper than Apollo, with a $35 billion price tag. Artemis will
also have the support of other leading space agencies, like the European Space Agency and
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, as well as using equipment from SpaceX. So it has the backing
of a tremendous amount of research and money. Even if we did still have access to Apollo’s technology
right now, it just wouldn’t be fit for purpose anymore because we’ve come such a long way.
Upsetting as it might be to think that the machines and people that got us to the moon
aren’t here anymore, no knowledge is truly immortal. Everything is at risk of being
lost in some way, either because it gets destroyed or because it’s something deemed to be so simple
at the time that it was never written down. A prime example of this is Roman concrete,
which is extremely sturdy and enduring. But for years, we didn’t understand why the concrete was
so good or why we’d failed at recreating it; it was finally discovered that the secret to
the concrete is simple seawater and volcanic ash. Another long-lost mystery is how Damascus steel,
which contains carbon nanotubes, was forged in the Middle East hundreds of years ago.
Some researchers believe they have solved this mystery, but to many, it’s still up for debate.
There’s one final piece of the puzzle for why we don’t just go back to the moon: it’s hard.
Sending humans to the moon and bringing them back is perhaps the most difficult and ambitious
scientific endeavor ever undertaken. Of the many space agencies that now exist, NASA remains the
only one to have sent people to walk on the moon. Even the China National Space Administration,
the agency with the second-largest budget, isn’t any closer to accomplishing the feat.
Though 12 men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, we no longer have the complete knowledge
of how that happened, which is why we’re developing newer, better ways to go back to
the lunar surface in the 2020s. And that’s the real reason we haven’t returned to the moon.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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