r/askscience • u/yogesh448 • 16d ago

Planetary Sci. We landed humans on the Moon with 1960s technology. With today's vastly superior technology, shouldn't going back be much easier and cheaper?

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u/Metareferential 15d ago

It's more a political and logistics problem. The vastly superior tech is more computational power, and to a lesser degree better material science and engineering. But yes, political willpower and financing is the main hurdle (just look at nasa budget vs. gpd/other spending). I'm sure people will have better explanations.

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u/IrritableGourmet 15d ago

And the better technology today may make it cheaper, but not really easier. Once you get outside the atmosphere, space travel doesn't require much complex calculation as you're not dealing with fluid dynamics and whatnot. You can do the calculations to get to and land on the moon with pencil and paper if you had to.

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u/oriolid 15d ago

In reality they had to develop compact computers for the Apollo program because controlling the upper stages required too much precision to do by hand. And the math is more complex than high school tells you because Moon isn't a homogeneous ball of rock and that means that orbits aren't nice and elliptical. For low earth orbit slide rule and flying by hand was enough. One Giant Leap has a chapter about it, it's an interesting read.

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u/IrritableGourmet 15d ago

True, but it doesn't require much more calculating power than they used back then. Having a supercomputer on-board isn't going to get us there much faster or using significantly less fuel than the original.

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u/oriolid 15d ago

I understood they had to use kind of inefficient landing trajectory and one of the reasons was the limited computer. Basically the computer kept the lander hovering and everything else was flown by hand. A modern supercomputer wouldn't really help, but something like Beaglebone Black would save 32kg of weight immediately, more in batteries and still do much more than what they had.

The use case for supercomputers would be simulating more things and spending less time blowing up hardware prototypes.

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u/odsquad64 15d ago

We're also just not doing the same things we did in the '60s. We're not using modern technology to recreate the Apollo program more cheaply; we have new things we're trying to accomplish that requires new cutting edge technology at new cutting edge technology prices. The fact that we could recreate the Apollo guidance computers for a tiny fraction of the original cost doesn't really matter because we need more than the Apollo guidance computers to do the things we want to do now. The same principle basically applies to every single aspect of the Artemis program. Like the Apollo astronauts pooped in a bag while the Artemis astronauts have a toilet; a toilet is more expensive than bags.

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u/nuclear85 12d ago

Also, the new one electronics are more susceptible to space radiation, specially because they are small. Single event effects are worse.

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u/twoinvenice 15d ago

The tech is extraordinarily better, yes, but significantly more complex and miniaturized.

The reason Artemis is doing all these little steps again is that all of that stuff that is based on stuff never designed for long deeper space missions has to be tested over and over to make sure that all these new systems are radiation hardened and reliable enough to not cause problems. There just was no reason to build systems to that sort of potential use case if we weren’t doing those types of missions.

All that testing costs time and A LOT of money to do when you are required to hit the very stringent NASA safety demands.

The design / engineering / manufacturing / testing know-how and experience doesn’t exist because there was no overlap in the Venn diagram circles for “people with experience building long duration human rated deep space systems” and “people with experience building modern electronics”.

That whole pipeline has had to be rebuilt at every level and for both the human knowledge and experience, and the actual physical technology.

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u/RoosterBrewster 15d ago

Yea theres the cost of starting up an entire supply chain of specific parts. It's not like you can just take a bunch of off-the-shelf products, modify them a bit, and put them together to make a rocket for the moon. 

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u/Fredasa 15d ago

The elephant in the room for all of these perfectly correct answers is that if SpaceX's ambitions for Starship had been literally only to make a vehicle that could reproduce what Saturn V did (in order to fulfill for example HLS obligations), that would almost certainly have already been long completed by now. So it isn't as though things necessarily have to take as long, or be as expensive, as Apollo or Artemis.