Why Has No One Landed on the Moon Again
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To this day, people wonder: If we went to the moon in the 1960s, why is it taking so long to go back?
Earlier this year, at a meeting of the National Space Quango, Vice President Mike Pence said it was "not good plenty" that NASA told him it would have till 2028 to return to the moon.
"We don't have the political will that provides the money to do information technology," is the curt respond, said Casey Dreier, senior space-policy adviser, primary advocate, and biggest space fan at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space scientific discipline and exploration.
"Information technology'due south also actually important to remember why Apollo happened in the get-go identify wasn't because of some idealistic, soaring vision of exploration," Dreier added.
President John F. Kennedy did not spend $five.4 billion in 1960s money — what amounts to more than $45 billion today — because he cared nigh space.
"The simply reason he committed the resources to Apollo that he did was that he saw Apollo as a front end in the Cold War," Dreier said.
The big spending boost NASA got went away not long after Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts returned to World. President Richard Nixon welcomed Armstrong and the Apollo 11 coiffure back in 1969 , and at that place were six more Apollo missions. But by the very adjacent year, in 1970, Nixon cut NASA's budget by hundreds of millions of dollars and said it was no longer a special program. Like any other part of government, human space flight would have to compete for resources.
That'southward why Poppy Northcutt, who worked at Mission Control during the Apollo program, called it a pleasant memory, simply also distressing and bloodshot. NASA already had plans for more ambitious missions to the moon and Mars, she said, and she wishes they could have done those too.
"In Congress' mind, and perhaps in the public mind also, they viewed it as a race, a race with the Russians, and once the race with the Russians was won … there was not anything more to exercise," Northcutt said.
NASA'due south upkeep remained low for decades. The agency's crewed space missions stayed in depression earth orbit ever since, about one-thousandth of the way to the moon — similar going a few blocks rather than traveling across the country.
So in 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke autonomously above the earth's temper, killing the seven crew members. Dreier said the disaster fabricated the White Business firm and Congress reflect: Why do we send humans into space? Why are they risking their lives?
After that massive setback, President George W. Bush came up with a bold new mission for NASA, perhaps with the thought that if lives are going to be put at adventure with infinite exploration, we might too shoot for the moon. The goal: return to the moon by 2020, live and work on the lunar surface, and so go to Mars and other planets. NASA called the program Constellation.
Then-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin called it " Apollo on steroids. "
NASA got to work on a bigger rocket, a lunar lander three times larger than the one for the Apollo missions. The Eagle was on the moon for a few hours. This one would stay a full calendar week.
In 2008, Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon , visited the Johnson Space Centre in Houston. NASA was already in the concluding stage of the blueprint process for the lunar lander. Kathy Laurini, projection manager, remembers Cernan telling her team to add something that would make being in infinite a fiddling more pleasant for the astronauts:
"When you're on these missions, you're far abroad from earth, and y'all're roughing it up, you don't accept a great place to sleep, information technology's difficult to go to the bathroom … what would really have been nice is to be able to wake up in the morning and accept a nice hot cup of coffee," Laurini said.
So it came every bit a full shock when the Obama administration canceled Constellation in 2010. Charles Bolden, the NASA ambassador at the time , described it as "a death in the family."
Some space analysts, to this day, say Obama "ruined space exploration" and "expressed an antipathy to American exceptionalism." Only Dreier noted that Obama inherited the programme from George W. Bush-league, who promised an Apollo-sized program but could not pair it with Apollo-sized funding.
"The political support for that initiative never really materialized. And by the fourth dimension the Obama assistants came in, they were looking at a program that was billions of dollars over budget, years behind schedule, and it was unclear what level of success they could wait out of that and win."
Afterward Constellation, Dreier said NASA got smart and decided to build something that would work, more than or less, no affair where the next president wanted to become: a big rocket and a crew sheathing that could stay in space.
"You lot can send information technology to the moon, y'all can probably transport it to an asteroid, peradventure through some modifications, you lot can send things to Mars, but you don't demand to start over every 4 years," he said.
In that location's also something NASA doesn't like to talk most considering it removes the romance of space travel: the infinite program is a giant job-creation program.
NASA shouldn't be shy nigh it, Dreier said — it'southward part of the large picture show, and information technology's how space exploration gets paid for.
"NASA is one of the purest expressions of homo curiosity that we meet in the entire world," Dreier said. "What other government agency has fans similar this? You lot don't see the Department of Agriculture having people phone call themselves agriculture fanatics."
People buy NASA T-shirts, pins and hats because space exploration is cool. That'southward why nosotros brand movie afterwards motion picture about the astronauts, the gripping human drama, life and expiry stakes, but we don't scout movies about the politics of paying for it.
Source: https://whyy.org/segments/why-havent-we-gone-back-to-the-moon/
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