Why Hasnt Any Country Gone to the Moon Again
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To this solar day, people wonder: If nosotros went to the moon in the 1960s, why is it taking so long to go dorsum?
Before this year, at a meeting of the National Infinite Council, Vice President Mike Pence said information technology was "not good enough" 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 it," is the short answer, said Casey Dreier, senior infinite-policy adviser, chief advocate, and biggest space fan at the Planetary Lodge, a nonprofit that promotes space science and exploration.
"Information technology's also really of import to recall why Apollo happened in the first place wasn't considering of some idealistic, soaring vision of exploration," Dreier added.
President John F. Kennedy did not spend $v.4 billion in 1960s money — what amounts to more than than $45 billion today — because he cared about space.
"The just reason he committed the resources to Apollo that he did was that he saw Apollo as a front in the Cold State of war," Dreier said.
The big spending boost NASA got went abroad non long subsequently Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts returned to Globe. President Richard Nixon welcomed Armstrong and the Apollo 11 coiffure back in 1969 , and there were half dozen more Apollo missions. Merely by the very next year, in 1970, Nixon cutting NASA's budget by hundreds of millions of dollars and said it was no longer a special program. Similar whatsoever other part of government, human space flight would have to compete for resource.
That's why Poppy Northcutt, who worked at Mission Command during the Apollo plan, called information technology a pleasant retentivity, simply besides sad and bloodshot. NASA already had plans for more than ambitious missions to the moon and Mars, she said, and she wishes they could have done those too.
"In Congress' heed, and perhaps in the public mind also, they viewed it every bit a race, a race with the Russians, and once the race with the Russians was won … there was not anything more than to do," Northcutt said.
NASA'southward upkeep remained low for decades. The agency'southward crewed space missions stayed in depression earth orbit e'er since, about one-thousandth of the style to the moon — like going a few blocks rather than traveling across the country.
Then in 2003, the space shuttle Columbia bankrupt apart above the earth'south atmosphere, killing the seven crew members. Dreier said the disaster made the White House and Congress reflect: Why do we send humans into space? Why are they risking their lives?
After that massive setback, President George W. Bush-league came up with a bold new mission for NASA, perhaps with the idea that if lives are going to be put at risk with space exploration, we might also shoot for the moon. The goal: render to the moon by 2020, live and work on the lunar surface, then become to Mars and other planets. NASA chosen the program Constellation.
So-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin called information technology " 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 i would stay a full week.
In 2008, Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon , visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA was already in the concluding stage of the blueprint process for the lunar lander. Kathy Laurini, project manager, remembers Cernan telling her team to add something that would make beingness in space a petty more pleasant for the astronauts:
"When you lot're on these missions, yous're far away from earth, and you lot're roughing it up, yous don't have a keen identify to slumber, it'due south hard to go to the bathroom … what would really have been nice is to be able to wake up in the forenoon and have a nice hot loving cup of coffee," Laurini said.
And so information technology came as a total daze when the Obama administration canceled Constellation in 2010. Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator at the time , described information technology every bit "a death in the family."
Some space analysts, to this day, say Obama "ruined space exploration" and "expressed an antipathy to American exceptionalism." But Dreier noted that Obama inherited the plan from George West. Bush, who promised an Apollo-sized program but could non pair it with Apollo-sized funding.
"The political support for that initiative never actually materialized. And past the time the Obama administration 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 look out of that and win."
After Constellation, Dreier said NASA got smart and decided to build something that would work, more than or less, no matter where the adjacent president wanted to go: a big rocket and a crew sheathing that could stay in space.
"You can send it to the moon, y'all can probably send it to an asteroid, perchance through some modifications, you can send things to Mars, but you don't need to start over every four years," he said.
There's also something NASA doesn't like to talk about because it removes the romance of infinite travel: the space program is a giant job-cosmos program.
NASA shouldn't be shy about information technology, Dreier said — information technology'due south part of the big picture, and it's how space exploration gets paid for.
"NASA is one of the purest expressions of human being curiosity that we see in the entire world," Dreier said. "What other government agency has fans similar this? You don't see the Department of Agriculture having people call themselves agronomics fanatics."
People buy NASA T-shirts, pins and hats because space exploration is cool. That's why we make flick after moving picture about the astronauts, the gripping homo drama, life and decease stakes, just nosotros don't picket movies near the politics of paying for it.
Source: https://whyy.org/segments/why-havent-we-gone-back-to-the-moon/
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