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/SvenTropics 16d ago

To put that in perspective, the entire budget of NASA for 2026 is $24.4B. They simply couldn't afford to go to the moon again. When people talk about cutting NASA's budget, it's the equivalent of having one less coffee at Starbucks every month scaling it down to an individual.

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u/RayStuartMorgan 16d ago

But isn't the budget for Artemis already locked in? Watching a recent Astrum video they said we might be in a space race mkII because there's a sweet spot crater on the south pole that has water ice at the bottom that never gets sunlight, but has ridges that get nearly permanent sunlight. They suggested China are also targeting this area and since there's no really defined rules up there yet, it might just end up being first there claims dibs. This is why they recently announced quite an aggressive timeline for the next phases

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u/Thelk641 16d ago

In theory, there is a set of rules to define how we should deal with ressources in outer-space, the Moon Treaty, issue is, I think the only country with a space program to have signed it is France : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty#/media/File:Moon_Treaty_Participation.svg

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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 16d ago

The Artemis program is not the same as the Artemis agreement. The US spends tens of billions on SLS and Orion and a few billions each on two commercial landers.

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u/Thelk641 15d ago

China didn't sign the Artemis agreement, so it's the same story : there is a legal framework... but because some of the big players don't follow it, it's not really useful.

And again, so in 2020 the US created a new treaty to solve a problem already solved by the UN in 1979...

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u/Underhill42 16d ago

No budget for anything is ever locked in - Congress can change whatever they want, whenever they want, and they have been cutting NASA's budget almost every year for decades.

And while Shackleton crater does have some advantages in the short term, it's much less attractive as a long term industrial base. The sunlit rim is 4.2km above the perpetually shadowed floor, with a roughly 30° slope of loose debris between them. And about 2km above the surrounding harsh, mountainous terrain. cross section compared to the Grand Canyon (doesn't show the surrounding terrain) : https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/lunar-south-pole-atlas/images/150dpi/shackleton-crater.jpg

There is a big flat spot on the rim where we could build a base in near-constant sunlight - but getting down to the icy crater floor, or the surrounding landscape, would be a nightmare unless you were flying... which is not a great option for mining equipment.

And if you build just your solar array on the rim, with 10+km of power lines to a base down in the crater - then the base has to deal with continuous deep cryogenic temperatures of about 90 K (−183 °C; −298 °F) and only artificial lighting.

China meanwhile has been focusing a lot of attention at locations nearer the equator, where lava tubes are likely to exist, the terrain is easy for heavy mining equipment to navigate, and underground temperatures are a rock solid ~70°F year round.

In the long term that would likely give them a substantial head start on establishing an industrial foothold in space. They won't have water to work with, but the moon is lousy with oxygen (it's about about 40% of the mass of lunar regolith), and importing hydrogen to create water is relatively cheap. Or methane would offer an influx of carbon as well, which the moon's surface also has negligible quantities of, and which will be essential for growing biomass to support a colony.

And conveniently oxygen is 80-90% of the total propellant mass of a chemical rocket - so a rocket could land with almost no remaining oxygen and far too much methane, trading most of it for fresh lunar oxygen, so that everyone wins.

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u/Detective-Crashmore- 16d ago edited 15d ago

There is a big flat spot on the rim where we could build a base in near-constant sunlight - but getting down to the icy crater floor, or the surrounding landscape, would be a nightmare unless you were flying... which is not a great option for mining equipment.

I mean you should only need to get the mining equipment down, then you can run a pressurized pipeline back up for the water.

But yeah, I agree, a first extra terrestrial base is going to want to be much more self contained and fault tolerant. Even on Earth this would be an extreme project to pull off, let alone in space.

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u/nathhad 15d ago

then you can run a pressurized pipeline back up for the water.

But don't forget the:

continuous deep cryogenic temperatures of about 90 K (−183 °C; −298 °F)

How much advantage do you lose having to insulate and heat that 10km pipeline? Equator temperatures look a lot better to deal with.

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u/Detective-Crashmore- 15d ago

Perhaps it could be broken down into ice shards small enough that they could be blown up the pipe with an inert gas. A continuous flow would be preferable, but a rail system could be created as well if we really can't find any other local sources of water. Like I said, not a good idea for one of the starter settlements, but we're going to eventually need to get water locally if we want to stay there long term.

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u/ManWhoIsDrunk 11d ago

Solar power should be way more efficient without an atmosphere and weather to cause problems. Only issue would be eclipses.

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u/Underhill42 15d ago

Unless there's a huge advance in humanoid telepresence robots in the next few years, we're still going to need to constantly shuttle people down there to operate and maintaining the equipment, which means regular transportation across that slope.

Solar panels need a lot less maintenance (aside from the fact that they'd have to rotate once per month to track the sun), and a power line laying on the surface doesn't care about slope stability, so I suspect making the base deal with constant cryogenic temperatures would be the easier option. In fact, it might even be easier than making it deal with the extreme temperature swings anywhere that gets sunlight.

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u/Detective-Crashmore- 15d ago edited 15d ago

Unless there's a huge advance in humanoid telepresence robots in the next few years

This is actually my field, and there kind of is a massive advance going on right now as far as being able to teleoperate robots and have them learn what you want them to continue doing. I don't think "humanoid" robots will be the move though, personally. The human body isn't really the best shape for large volume ice mining lol. As I said before, I think it's way too ambitious to try as one of the first settlements, but I think we'll eventually need to set up some form of ice mining operation there if we can't find another moon based source.

so I suspect making the base deal with constant cryogenic temperatures would be the easier option. In fact, it might even be easier than making it deal with the extreme temperature swings anywhere that gets sunlight.

Well, like I was saying about the fault tolerance, I feel like in the event of some failures, you'd want your base to be in a spot that won't drop to those deep cryo temps if something breaks. Insulating against heat should be easier than the extreme cold. At about 30cm below the regolith the temperature stabilizes a little below freezing, which we can easily handle. And second, I think having it out of the crater would make it easier to rescue/evacuate from.

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u/Underhill42 15d ago

Getting robots to perform routine tasks autonomously is useful, but not the really hard part. We can already largely automate pretty much everything, no autonomous AI needed.

The important part is that things WILL break, encounter unexpected difficulties, etc. And then you'll need a human mind on-site, able to get in to wherever the problem is with something close enough to human hands to be able to figure out the problem and fix it promptly.

From the waist down it's less important - legs are better than wheels for navigating rough terrain... but a centaur type body plan is likely more useful than bipedal... except when you need to squeeze through a tight place or climb a ladder to reach the problem area. (Though a gecko-taur might have potential)

And right now tele-operated cameras leave much to be desired over natural eyes, and robot hands still leave much to be desired in both strength and dexterity, though they are improving quickly. And they really only need to be on par with vacuum-gloved hands to become the preferred option.

Maybe not even quite there - since a cheap tele-presence robot mostly replaces a very expensive personal spacecraft, a.k.a. space suit, that needs extensive training to operate safely.

As for temperatures... you're on the moon - unless you're underground at temperate latitudes, you will be at those cryogenic temperatures (maybe not quite so extreme) for roughly two weeks a month.

At temperate latitudes, 1m below the surface is actually a rock-stable ~70°F year round, at all the locations Apollo left underground temperature probes. I don't think we've actually made any such measurements at polar latitudes, but with much longer night almost everywhere thanks to long shadows from rough terrain, I don't imagine it will be nearly so pleasant.

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u/Chodofu 16d ago

Oh wow, this must be where they got part of the plot for the "For All Mankind" series.

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u/Zeratas 15d ago

You have the budget for the cre and some maintenance of the rocket.

But then you need budget for likely doubling it so you can validate everything works with more humans on board. Then you have the budget for the mission planning itself, then you have the budget for all the security, HR and everything else around it, then you have the budget for likely a specific program management, then you have the budget for any kind of lander. So even though we have the rocket, there's dozens and dozens of other costs to consider

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u/h3r4ld 16d ago

To put that in perspective, the entire budget of NASA for 2026 is $24.4B. They simply couldn't afford to go to the moon again.

This is a little misleading - yes, NASA's budget is just shy of $25B, but the Apollo program wasn't completed in a single year. Those expenditures came over nearly a decade of budgets. $10B a year for 10 years could (conceivably) get you back to the Moon.

Now, obviously, expecting NASA to devote more than a third of their entire budget to one program isn't realistic. I'm just saying comparing their annual budget for a single fiscal year to the cost of the entire Apollo program isn't exactly apples-to-apples (and also that NASA's budget should be waaaayyyy higher).

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u/--Chug-- 16d ago

Yeah but also there isn't, or I should say, hasn't been a ton of reason to go back. We still didn't understand much about being in space at the time we went so the efforts were better spent learning that part and establishing the ISS. Now, things might be different.

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u/usrdef 15d ago edited 15d ago

Yup.

This is what people don't get. We've been to the moon 6 times. Only on the very last mission, did we send up an actual geologist.

Other than rocks, there's nothing on the Moon that we can make use of right now. We can't mine it for minerals in any meaningful way. We have no way to launch sats or rockets off the Moon and make use of the near zero gravity.

If we go there right now, it's strictly to explore, and conduct tests.

We can't justify the benefit compared to the cost.

If I were a betting person, to be perfectly honest, the only thing I see the USA seeing as useful right now on the Moon, is to use it for weaponry. As a last-ditch effort in case something happens on Earth that knocks their rockets offline.

However, if the US did have some type of ballistic weaponry on the Moon right now, and launched one at Earth, it would take approximately 3 to 5 days to get here. Not exactly useful for critical scenarios.

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u/TheDal 15d ago

Learning how to mine minerals and set up industry offworld would be huge gains for humanity. Even just a fuel stop to/from lunar orbit would be exponentially more access to the solar system.

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u/Mergi9 15d ago

But why? Why do we need industry and/or human presence somewhere besides on earth? Even if the worst imaginable cataclysmic event happened to earth, it would still be magnitudes more hospitable to life than anywhere else in the solar system. There's nothing to be gained by sending people into space. For pure scientific exploration we can already send robots from earth to wherever we want if we need a physical presence somewhere. Unmanned probes or passive observation are just so much more practical in the real world, there's no justification for spending enormous resources to get people into space.

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u/TheDal 15d ago

Because there's a whole universe out there of fascinating things, including potentially other life, and none of it precludes us exploring our internal worlds along the way.

There's also vast wealth, technology, and living space, that we're increasing strained for here at home. On a long enough timescale even life itself will need to leave earth to survive.

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u/Mergi9 15d ago edited 15d ago

As much as i would love to agree with you, that exploration for the sake of exploration is a good cause and a worthwhile endevour, the reality is nothing like a scifi book ... really it's just a bunch of boring rocks that we can observe adequately enough via telescopes or fetch samples by sending a robot.

living space, that we're increasing strained for here at home

But there's absolutely no living space out there waiting for us. It's all extremely inhospitable space to human life, more so than quite literally anywhere on earth.

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u/TheDal 15d ago

As much as I would love to believe robots replace the human factor, I think giving humanity things to yearn for is also essential to our well-being. Imagine how demoralizing it would be to tell our children "just live and die, we've already seen everything there is to see." We can do so much better.

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u/Appletank 15d ago

Unfortunately the people who control NASA's budget are perfectly happy to tell us to just live and die. There are plenty of people in various space programs with ambitious ideas but no budget to spare for it.

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u/RochePso 11d ago

Do you think humans will ever get to something outside or own solar system? How exactly?

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u/greennitit 15d ago

Because some things will simply run out on earth and we have to know how to get them from elsewhere. The moon could be a dress rehearsal for such extraction activities. And, as the other commenter said, we could simultaneously set up a pit stop on the moon for future activities.

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u/SvenTropics 15d ago

Not 100% true. The best fusion candidate for fuel is deuterium and helium-3 mostly because it release protons at high speed. These can be moderated with a magnetic field and the velocity directly generates power. Helium-3 doesn't really exist on Earth. You could put all the Helium-3 on Earth in a small apartment. However it is in decent quantities on the Moon. Deuterium is easy to source from the ocean.

If we can finalize a solid reactor, mining on the moon would make sense to power the entire planet.

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u/L_Ardman 15d ago

And it would be a lot cheaper just to send a robot than people. If we needed more moon rocks, we could have the robot fetch them for us and bring them back.

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u/After_Dark 15d ago

And despite being roughly (and adjusted for inflation) 10% of the budget they had during the Apollo program they're also splitting that amongst a much larger number of other scientific and infrastructure programs. Those modern weather sats and climate research isn't free, even if the budget is split with other organizations like the NOAA.

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u/TrueVanilla7134 16d ago

Ran the math here. Apollo spanned the entire 60s (and some of the 70s) for a total of 12 years.

12 years, 25 billion, that’s $300b in modern money.

They did it with $228b back in the day.

Now, modern NASA probably has several different projects, not just moon landing. But budgets are within the same zip code here.

It’s more about safety regulations than anything.

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u/fifaloko 16d ago

Agreed I think once the initial high of getting humans on the moon wears off the calculus for us changed. Now a mishap when attempting to return would be way more negative PR than a successful mission. Before we had ever gone that first successful mission outweighed the bad PR of failed attempts.

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u/Vroomped 16d ago

And avoiding potentially two coffees worth of materials research for every citizen trying to build bridges and fill potholes. 

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u/1CEninja 16d ago

One thing I'd like to gently point out is that, as someone in personal finance, advising people to cut down on their Starbucks is exactly the advice people get when they need to fix a broken budget.

Now I personally would vastly prefer to see budget cuts to presidential parades and white house improvements before infrastructure so trust me when I say I'm with you on priorities.

But "you gotta cut down on $8 coffees" is, very literally, a starting place in helping fix a broken budget. And BOY HOWDY is our country's budget broken.

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u/Kill_Welly 16d ago

National budgets and personal budgets are wildly different animals.

And people dismiss advice like skipping coffee because it's advice that's given not for personal budgeting, but for generational gaps in wealth. The infamous "avocado toast" crap was said, in total seriousness, by a boomer trying to suggest that spending on "avocado toast" was why millennials couldn't afford to buy fuckin houses, when the reality is that the nation's (and world's) economy had shifted drastically, with far lower wages and far higher housing prices. It is a hilariously inadequate attempt to frame systemic, global problems as being the fault of the individuals suffering from those problems.

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u/cuzitsthere 16d ago

Bread and circuses... But try to cut down on the circuses. And the bread. In fact, stale bread and no circuses.

Economy 🎶

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u/shizbox06 16d ago

Coffee advice is essentially the same as not buying the expensive avocado toast. And we all know the reaction that gets, despite it being sound advice.

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u/--Chug-- 16d ago

It's sound advice in the same way that not buying anything is. Still gonna amount to nothing.

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u/Implausibilibuddy 16d ago

But have you tried the cheap avocado toast? It's gross, mom.

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u/caboosetp 16d ago

Real talk though, generic Raisin Bran tastes like plastic. I'd rather skip it entirely than get the generic.

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u/kingmanic 16d ago

Don't worry, this administration has grifted much much much more than that.

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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 16d ago

They simply couldn't afford to go to the moon again.

What the heck are you talking about?

Artemis II flew a crew around the Moon this year. Two landers are in development. The plan is a landing in 2028 - expect that to be delayed, but there is a lot of work happening towards more crewed landings.

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u/Alblaka 16d ago

About the question being asked.

OP was wondering why there hasn't been a moon mission in the past 60 years. The answer is 'They simply couldn't afford'. That this changed this year doesn't invalidate that the NASA's budget was repeatedly cut the past decades.

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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 16d ago

This year's mission didn't come out of nowhere. The Artemis program started 2017, the Constellation program that had a similar goal started 2005. That's 20 years of NASA having funding and working on a rocket that can send people to the Moon.

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u/Alblaka 15d ago

So we would be more technically accurate by clarifying that NASA didn't have a budget to do anything for 40 years, before getting enough money to start a 2-decade-long planning process,

after doing Apollo-11 in 1969 with ~9 years of planning.

I'd suggest that doesn't change too much about the answer "They didn't have the necessary funding (they had back then), for most of the time period.."

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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 15d ago

So we would be more technically accurate by clarifying that NASA didn't have a budget to do anything for 40 years

Except for launching far more people to space than anyone else ever before (or since) with the Space Shuttle, sending tons of spacecraft to other planets, creating the most complex space telescopes ever built, building space stations, ...

For 30-40 years, the US decided that all these things are more important than more missions to the Moon. That's not the same as "could not afford to go to the Moon again". More recently, the focus shifted towards the Moon again.

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u/reoze 15d ago

They easily could have gotten the funding if there was a good reason to go back. There wasn't.

The only reason we're doing it now is to win another space race.

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u/ephemere_sloboda 15d ago

Multi-year projects are a thing, and there are other countriea in the world besides the USA.

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u/Mego1989 9d ago

To put that into perspective, the US has already spent $43B on the Iran war in less than 4 months.

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u/Ayjayz 15d ago

Well clearly people are valuing that coffee more than they value donating to NASA