Why have no nations gone to the moon since?

If it was difficult enough from 1969-1972 to go to the moon than why has nobody gone back?

We have the ISS currently. Why not build something on the moon? Why was it not built on the moon?

There are several aspects to this, I suspect.

First, there is the reason that Apollo misions 18 – 20 were cancelled in the first place – cost. Well, not so much cost per se (because the bulk of the cost was in developing the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo LM, CM and SM), but conspicuous consumption. A bloody great big rocket like the Saturn V is a very conspicuous expense. Remember that Shuttle always promised to make access to “space” cheaper (and they had to brush the distinction between LEO and deep space under the carpet because Shuttle was not capable of sending anything higher than the orbit of Hubble). And, because the Apollo programme had been sold to the public by the media as a race to beat the Commies to the moon, once NASA had achieved its target, the public mostly lost interest.

Second, there is the minimal prestige in being second. The USSR gave up their manned lunar programme around the time that the success of Apollo 11 was apparent (because their politicians were only interested in showing up the Americans). No other nation at the time had the combination of the wherewithal and the inclination to take part in a race for second place.

Third, in the intervening time, any nation wishing to send people to the moon has had to do all of the launch vehicle development from scratch (and remember that the USA and the USSR were – kind-of – working on rocket programmes since the end of the Second World War).

Fourth, there is the set of hazards inherent in sending humans into space.

Fifth, there is the need to assemble or develop a group of people with the technical know-how to make it happen (not just the launch vehicle and systems needed to protect people in the harsh environment, but also the knowledge of orbital mechanics required to rendezvous and the ability to navigate reliably to the moon). It is only recently that any nations other than the USA or the USSR has even sent unmanned probes to the moon. It really is rocket science.

Anyhow, that’s my guess.

If it was difficult enough from 1969-1972 to go to the moon than why has nobody gone back?

We have the ISS currently. Why not build something on the moon? Why was it not built on the moon?

God, I feel dumb asking this. (I believe the answer is it costs to much money and its not economically viable and we don’t know how to mine in space and its really just to difficult and not practical and we are not well enough “endowed” metrically to have a long lasting presence there without unlimited money unlimited manpower and unlimited resources.)

And please don’t tell me there is nothing there to see?

But they say there is no dumb question. So going with the quote that made me laugh the most:

“So put up or shut up.”

Please, if you have a comment on “why” no one has gone back.

@ #49 Cletus: My apologies.

@ #57 David V: That’s what these comments ^ are about!

These pics are so cool!

John Glenn, OTOH, was a Democratic party Senator :

[url omitted]

whose Presidential run came in 1984. Wonder how different history would be if Glenn had been President rather than Reagun? There’s an alternative universe SF story begging to be written!

And sure to be full of win!

Could everyone just knock off the political BS for one freaking blog entry? PLEASE?! I don’t care WHO started it this time, I’m asking you ALL to finish it, take it to another blog, fire off emails to each other, whatever.

Oops.

Posted my responses to Vince before getting to this comment.

You folks seem like all you care about is a far left ideology and don’t care about truth. You even seem to be willing to sacrafice science to that ideology, which seems odd here.

Citations needed here. Seriously.

Either put up, or shut up.

The curious thing is, you may actually have a point. I have no idea what the voting record in Congress and Senate might be like with respect to manned space exploration, but you are really not making a good case.

Was it not a Republican who (despite his myriad other failures and missteps) tried to get space exploration back on track?

Er … no.

GWB’s “plan” to go to the moon and then Mars was never going to succeed without an immense boost to NASA’s funding. Perhaps he should have kept his plan to himself until he was suitably confident he could persuade Congress to give NASA the money they would need.

Was it not a Democrat president that took us entirely out of the manned space flight business and made sure there was no way to get back in for at least a generation?

Nope. George W Bush was a Republican.

@ tom – Ah, yes, you are right, personal attacks are the strongest form of arguement. The fact remains, that Nixon signed the bills that paid for it.

Irrelevant. He was the president who gutted Apollo, and if he had been in office in ’61 or ’62, Apollo would never have been started.

The fact remains (and unasailed by you) that few democrats have ever been anti-communist,

Irrespective of who assails this claim, you have done nothing to support it. Until you do, I (and, I suspect, others) will reserve judgement about whether or not it is rightly a “fact”.

However, your case is weak, considering the fact that any Democrat who openly expressed Communist sympathy would have received zero votes (or as good as) throughout the entirety of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Although I have to concede that (AFAICT) Kennedy is the only one who threatened to launch the USA’s entire nuclear arsenal at the USSR (but then, did any Republican do this?).

and the fact remains, (unasailed by you again) that the strongest detractor of the space program was a man often hailed as one of the great Democrats.

Again, this is irrelevant. Proxmire was one senator. You may have fact on your side on this point, but you have not shown that it has any bearing on the case you are trying to make.

I know you don’t like it, but the space program was a bipartisan effort from the beginning.

It may well have been. But nonetheless, Nixon was against it.

However, you broke out the ad hominem, so clearly you win the arguement. All that hate is gonna eat you up dude. It’s just not healthy to hate like that.

Tom’s argument (29) is not an ad hominem, for two reasons.

First, his comments about your poor English are purely factual (but I leave others to comment on whether they are excessively petty or otherwise). You seem to have interpreted this as a personal attack, but he is simply highlighting an error that you made.

Second, even if Tom’s comment was a personal attack, it still isn’t an ad hominem. He has already addressed your arguments in his preceding paragraphs. His claim was not that your argument fails because of your poor grammar (which would have been an ad hom), but that your argument fails because it is a weak argument unsupported by pertinent facts.

Either way, your reaction to his comment seems excessively aggressive. Why do you have such a problem with his disagreement?

If you click on the smaller picture that BA provided, he has posted on his Flickr account a comparison picture with those numbers added.

@ 49 cletus:

My guess is that you have already explained that line: it is the shadow of the wall of a crater that is more defined in the Apollo picture due to the light coming from the lower right in that picture but is not easily seen due to the light coming from the lower left in the LRO picture. While not as extreme, you can see a similar crater “loss” by comparing the crater marked with 2 in the lower right corner.

Thank you

Jack Lousma, as a wiki-check shows now I know the name, was aboard Skylab & STS-3 Columbia – the third Space Shuttle mission & third skylab crew too – and became a Republican senator afterwards. Well, that’s something new I’ve learnt today. Cheers.

I don’t think any of these men would be considered particularly anti-science.

Agreed – although as you’ve noted Schmitt is a climate contrarian rejecting the 97% of climatologists that accept HIRGO is real.

Sadly, the same cannot be said about many of the present Republicans esp. their presidential candidates with the honourable exceptions being Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney. But that’s another story for another thread.

BTW. In other news the GRAIL has been lifted. Both spaceprobes are off successfully after a smooth launch and are now en route to the Moon.

5. THE WEBB TELESCOPE: LET’S NOT LOSE THE NEXT GENERATION.
In July a House panel voted to stop building NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the far more powerful replacement for the Hubble. Webb fell victim to budget overruns. Yesterday a report commissioned by NASA says that with 59 on board the agency faces a dire shortage of astronauts. What do astronauts do these days? Well, they train on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to deliver supplies to the International Space Station, which we don’t own. And what do we get from the ISS? The garbage and human waste accumulated since the last delivery.

Sen. John Glen (D) – Ohio
Jack Swigert (R) – Colorado – Elected but died before taking office.
Sen. Harrison Schmitt (R) – New Mexico
Sen. Jack Lousma (R) – Michigan
Sen. Edwin Garn (R) – Utah
Sen. Clarence Nelson (D) -Florida

I don’t think any of these men would be considered particularly anti-science. Oddly Schmitt seems to be a bit of a global warming denier, or at least minimalizer, though he is very pro space exploration and other science. I suppose some would call him anti-science for that.

Interestingly the Democrats seem to be the more religious of group, especially Sen. Glenn. So much for stereotypes.

A wiki-check has confrmed that noting : ” .. Garn was a Republican senator from Utah. He was the first sitting member of Congress in space.”

Garn flew on STS-51-D the 16th Space Shuttle flight and Discovery‘s 4th flight.

Nelson a Democratic party member flew on STS-61-C (Columbia) which as you observed was the last flight before the Challenger‘s loss in 1986. Looks, from what I can tell like, he’s still serving in office too.

So we have :

1) John Glenn – Democratic party
2) Jack Swigert – Republican
3) Harrison Schmitt – Republican
4) Jake Garn – Republican
5) Bill Nelson – Democrat
6) ??? ??? – ???

3 Republican astronaut-politicians and 2 Democratic party ones.

Who is the sixth one – anyone? VinceRN especially?

Which bright rock do you mean? What do you mean by “between 7 & 8″? Seven and eight what?

The odd thing I can’t resolve between them is the dark diagonal line in the Apollo pic which rises from the bright rock above the tracks halfway between 7 & 8. In the Apollo pic it’s a little ambiguous … could be read as another stem of the foot tracks or, more likely, the eastern wall of a large crater.

However in the LRO pic the dark line is absent altogether, and a slight depression appears in its place. The wall of that depression (it’s not as evident as a crater in the LRO pic as it is in the Apollo pic) appears to the east of a line drawn between the bright rock and the small crater to the northeast, whereas it’s clearly *on* that line in the Apollo pic.

Has to be a trick of the lighting, but I find it strange that I can map every other feature between the two images perfectly except that one.

If you think that scientists will fare well under a right-wing Tea Party dictatorship you’ve got another think coming. After teachers they are among the *first* to go because they represent a real threat. That is why VinceRN is here, because accurate information is a threat that must be eliminated.

What, you didn’t notice that he accused everyone here of being treasonous communist sympathizers? What do you think his preferred “solution” to the threat you represent would be?