The Real Reason Why We Haven't Returned To The Moon | Unveiled

This is the Real Reason Why We Have Not Returned to the Moon

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?

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.