Why haven't humans gone back to the Moon?

One of humanities greatest ever achievements was pointing humans on the moon ... so why has it never been repeated?

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#moon #moonlandings #apollo

[ThecrackpotdadPlus]

My favourite line was “a rover won’t complain about being in a small box with no air…”

My thought, well neither will a human… I’ll see myself out.

[travisihs]

If you look closely, to the right of the dog, there's a guy talking to us on the camera.

[MJameson]

Thank you for addressing the people who straw man the issue as “NASA claims we don’t have the technology anymore.” It’s like claiming cassette tapes are fake because my car stereo doesn’t have a tape deck.

[itinerantpatriot]

I was a child of Apollo and it was a great adventure, especially for us kids. NASA went all out in selling space to us, including having shows like The Jetsons and Star Trek on prime-time. Even I Dream of Jeannie was space-based. My brother and I were on NASA's kids mailing list and we had a telescope and star charts so we knew knew where to look for stuff. When Apollo 11 touched down everyone, and I mean everyone, watched. I had my little carboard LEM next to me and the whole block cheered out loud when Armstrong announced: "The Eagle has landed!" What a day! I figured by 2000 there would be flying cars, colonies on Mars, and...then the show was over. He's right. If Apollo 13 hadn't drawn people back in 14 just may have been the final trip.

At its scientific heart, NASA was never really down with the manned space program. It got them a boatload of money so they pumped it up but the science guys always outnumbered the exploration guys. James Webb was on record as saying the Apollo program wasn't worth it as far as ROI was concerned but Kennedy made it clear to him that outside of going to the Moon he really wasn't that interested in space. There is some evidence Kennedy was ready to ditch the program if he couldn't talk the Soviets into a joint effort. Johnson was more of a space guy than Kennedy.

And that's why we don't go back. The explorers lost the internal battle. Nixon threw em a bone with the Shuttle but it really didn't have much of a mission and cost a lot of money. NASA only started talking up Mars again when Elon Musk was making noise about it but I think Elon and NASA are going to realize it's a whole tougher and way more expensive than they think and people these days just aren't into it. Plus, there's no bad guy to race against. If the US had managed to get Alan Sheppard into space first Apollo may never have been a thing. But those damn Soviets, who couldn't build a washing machine or a car worth a damn kept beating us in space. The Bay of Pigs also helped give birth to Apollo. Kennedy needed a win as well as a good distraction and he got both with his Moon shot.

Alas, I won't live to see that Martian colony and now that I'm older I thank God flying cars never came about. But I feel for the kids today. We don't dream big dreams anymore and as we have become more interconnected we have lost those competitive juices. Too bad. Live long and prosper gang, just get used to doing it right here on the good Earth.

[Skip]

Another thing is safety. The Apollo missions safety factors were lower than NASA’s current standards for human-rated flying

[aadithyanjr]

Another often overlooked aspect of the Apollo program was that the space-race was more or less considered a war time expense. The USSR and the USA were basically doing a technological battle to showcase supremacy. That's why at those times there were so many interesting aircrafts entering the stage like the X-15, SR71, XB-70 etc

[Darkwolfe]

The immense negative public sentiment when lives are lost is a _huge_ part of why we don't send people anymore, and is not mentioned in the video. I can remember being a kid and all the media attention on Christa McAuliffe being on board the Space Shuttle. I can also remember the horror and after-effects of that explosion being shown all over the nation, live, including in the classrooms of every school that had a TV, in 1986, only to be followed, in 2003, by another shuttle disaster. It shaped people's minds just as surely as 9/11 did, not in the magnitude of how many lives were lost, but in the sheer waste of it for no really good purpose. Not once, but twice.

[aeromoe]

I really enjoy your content and delivery style. And your furry lap critter too 😂. Thanks for your entertaining and educational vids...keep 'em coming please.

[Astronomy_Live]

It's also worth noting that the "Trial by Fire" video was released just before the launch of EFT-1 on the Delta IV Heavy. The Delta IV Heavy was not nearly as powerful as SLS and could not send EFT-1 all the way out to the moon. As a result, the elliptical orbit for EFT-1 had a much lower apogee, and this was used in part to test how Orion would handle lingering in the Van Allen belts for much longer than a normal Artemis mission. Whereas an Artemis mission sends Orion through the belts quickly, Orion lingered in that region of space during its final, elliptical orbit on EFT-1, and it went through some of the most intense parts of the belts.

By my calculations using SPENVIS, in a single orbit, EFT-1's final orbit trajectory should have resulted in a hypothetical crew on board receiving roughly half the total dose that would be accumulated over the entire course of the Artemis I mission (which lasted for weeks). And whereas the vast majority of the dose received during an Artemis mission comes from solar radiation beyond the VABs, nearly the whole dose of radiation for EFT-1 came from the VABs because of how its trajectory traveled through them so much slower than on Artemis I.

[robertschwalb]

Another fun fact about concord, lots of people complained about the extremely loud sound. Setting off car alarms and shaking windows near the air port, and just being extremely loud for the duration of the flight for anyone on ground in the flight path.

[minnesotajack]

Right…because if our government is known for nothing else, it’s fiscal discipline

[JFrazer]

There are a lot of issues with this.
First, put the supposedly huge budget-busting cost into perspective. $250 billion sounds like a lot if you say it quickly and don't blink or think about it.
During the same time frame, Americans spent as much on cosmetics, and large States spent more on liquor. Don't mention the cost on the Vietnam war in the same breath. Don't think of comparing Apollo to the war, or your head will explode.
Today our *_annual_* DoD budget is comfortably greater than the entire historic running grand total NASA cost. Including Apollo, the Shuttle, the ISS, and everything else NASA does. Not counting "black" military spending and ongoing military operational expense, which aren't in that voted DoD budget and are more.
We give the DoD $680 billion a year. The Pentagon has catastrophically failed its audits and can't account for over half of its assets. Half of what we give them every year (more than the total Apollo cost) just goes away and nobody asks why or where. We've spent $14 trillion + on the military since 2003.

Second, the often repeated claim that Congress cut Apollo because the public had lost interest. They say that the most amazing thing that NASA ever did was to make going to the Moon seem boring.
We have a memo from the White House in '66 to the State Department pushing forward the Outer Space Treaty. It specifically said that they wanted to leave in the parts which are hostile to private interest in space, so that they could cause a loss of interest so that they could cut the budget. Of course it said they wanted to allocate the money to other parts of the budget, but it specifically mentioned "... and to mitigate the Political Strain of the war in Vietnam." (Memo retrieved via FOIA in '98 by 2 members of the National Space Society, first published in print by Dr Robert Zubrin in his '99 book "Entering Space")
Government didn't cut the space budget because people lost interest, that's the exact opposite of what happened. It's also a lie that cutting the Apollo budget was saving money to go to the war. Apollo and NASA as a whole has never been more than very small drop in a very big bucket of the Military spending.
It was also pointed out that when the "Pathfinder" little rover landed on Mars, even if you take half of the number of hits on the NASA website for the mission as repeats, that's still more people than those who vote in this country. More than there are either actively for or against any supposedly "hot button" issue that we or our media spend so much time on. People have always been very interested in anything meaningful going on, even if it was just flags and footprints to beat the Soviets, or a little rover.

The real hoax and scam of the Space Age is that so many including people knowledgeable about space, have been convinced that going to the Moon or doing other large things in space is a very great budget-busting expense, and that there isn't and wasn't then known very good beneficial reasons to be doing big things in space.

Gerard O'Neill started looking into space industries and habitats in '69 and through the early '70s, culminating in the '75 NASA Ames / Stanford space settlement studies.
There are (were) no new inventions needed to start, mining asteroids and moons and to build for virtually Earth-like conditions anywhere in space where there are or to which we bring materials.
The early first generation "Stanford Torus" habitat was to be for the ≈10k workers in the space manufacturing facility. The first hab and all the ground, launch, and in-space infrastructure to reproduce it would have been done by 2005. the cost over the time period would have been ≈3 or 4 times the Apollo program cost, variously around $900 billion today. Like many large infrastructure or industrial developments down here. Like the Interstate Highway System or a large dam. Like 3 or 4 of our CVNs and their air wings and escorts and the logistics infrastructure to deploy them.
Vastly less than a small oil war or the bailouts we've seen.
Any who disagree with any of that are invited to show their professional qualifications in mining, construction and astronautical engineering and where they've published under peer-review showing that those studies were wrong.

Note that before the fist hab is done, we've been mining NEAs and already building Solar power satellites, thus ending scarcity of energy and raw materials and room for growth, showing the way to removing from within the biosphere all our worst heavily polluting primary acquisitive industries. Ending oil wars and budget crunches, forever.
Yes, we hear that asteroid mining and building Solar power sats is 25 years away from producing any real returns. It's been 25 years away since the '70s. Yes, we hear that anybody who mines NEAs and brings back significant amounts of previously rare or "monetary" metals, undercuts the value of such things and thus their own business case. Yes, but for that moment, they own more "wealth" as such is measured, than all the mercantile interests & mega-corporations and old-money empires & nation-Sates, combined.
And yes, I love it when people try to tell me that I'm over-stating any of that.

The reason we haven't been back to the moon continuously and on to Mars and other big things in space, is that doing so means having at least one or more likely several operating production lines of SHLV boosters like the Saturn-V and bigger, and substantial experience doing things in space.
If we'd kept on going to the Moon and other large things in space, then by now somebody would be mining NEAs and building Solar power satellites and the value of all the gold in all the vaults and all the oil underground would drop down through the cellar, and the political power built on them would evaporate. Who pays and owns congress? (the people? Don't make me laugh.)

[Top-Code]

Reverse question: why haven’t flerfs gone to the “ice wall”

[tk]

I remember reading that 'Moon Dust' was found to be far finer and extremely abrasive, the Moon Dust was even able to penetrate airtight seals. The moon dust got into everywhere & everything, and it was just pure luck that dust didn't course a mission to be scrapped or a life lost.

[ledrid]

seeing explanations of orbital navigational terms always tickles my fancy after playing a lot of kerbal space program, i'm basically sitting here going "oh I know that one!" there was another one in a different video that mentions orbits high and low points. With a lot of games you could just brute force progression, but (at least without mods) it's extremely difficult to do a lot in ksp without actually taking the time to learn all the terms, maneuvers, and whatnot so you can use the tools the game provides you to get your desired results.

[heckanice]

If a Pokémon card can be worth 5million, a tablespoon of moon dust would be worth 5 billion, sell that table spoon and go back for more

[JohnM]

They always cherry pick what the NASA engineer said about going through the Van Allen belts. He was specifically talking about testing the new technology for the Orion spacecraft.
He is in no way implying that NASA doesn't know the risks of sending humans through the radiation. The Apollo Astronauts were monitored for the amount of radiation exposure.
The amount was about the same for a CT scan. They went through the weaker parts of the belts and didn't spend enough time to be exposed to lethal amounts.
There were risks to their lives in every mission including the Mercury and Gemini programs. These Astronauts were willing to take these risks.

[andysmith]

9:40 While this is mostly true, one of the Apollo missions did go through the centre of the belts – Apollo 14. The skin radiation dose received was 1.14 rads, compared to 0.18 for Apollo 11. See "Apollo Experience Report – Protection against Radiation" (Nasa Technical Note TN D-7080).

Edit: In the same document, it notes that the maximum allowable skin dose was set at 400 rads and that this was at the time an x-ray equivalent. It also states "Radiation doses to Apollo crewmen have been significantly lower than the yearly average of 5 rem set by the US Atomic Energy Commission for workers who use radioactive materials in factories and institutions across the United States."

[veramae]

A favorite story: "Buzz" Aldrin finally punched a guy, 1 blow, who was practically spitting in his face and accusing him of being a coward for not admitting the moon landings were faked. Guy had been pestering him for years.
In the vid, you can see Mrs. Aldrin rolling her eyes and stepping out of the way. As she said later, "You don't call experimental fighter jet pilots 'cowards' and expect nothing."
The YT "journalist" expected a lot of sympathy when he posted the vid, but the Internet community crushed him.

[doggonemess]

3:00 And... now I want to play Kerbal Space Program.