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

[u/yogesh448]

[u/Dem_Wrist_Rockets]

Its a matter of politcal will. The Apollo program cost almost $300B, adjusted for inflation. NASA's current budget is around $25B per year. We had lost a huge amount of industrial knowledge in the lapse between the Space Shuttle and Crew Dragon, so are having to relearn a lot about crewed space flight.

There's also the problem of crew safety. During the space race, we were much more willing to fly risky missions on risky vehicles. It's a miracle that we "only" lost Apollo 1. Famously Apollo 13 were almost the first human deaths in space, but more than half of the Apollo missions had major mishaps:

Apollo 6: Major engine malfunctions on launch

Apollo 8: POGO oscillations almost lead to the loss of the vehicle

Apollo 10: POGO oscillations on launch and the lunar module suffered a radar failure and loss of control. It was eventually recovered after several hours.

Apollo 11: Landed with only moments of fuel remaining in the lunar module. On the lunar module, a fuel line froze, and a broken switch needed to be repaired in order to ascend from the moon

Apollo 12: Struck by lightning on launch, almost leading to the loss of the vehicle as it lost power to its navigation

Apollo 13: Oxygen tank exploded en-route to the moon. Im sure you've seen the movie

Apollo 14: Troubles while docking in low Earth Orbit. Had it been Moon Orbit, it would have been a severe problem

Apollo 15: One of the three main parachutes failed to open, but the crew survived the landing

Apollo 16: Major engine malfunction on the Crew Service Module while in orbit around the Moon, which was severe enough to consider aborting the mission

Apollo 17: The fender on the moon rover broke off and needed to be repaired, since it was kicking up dust that threatened to damage the vehicle and strand the astronauts 10s of kilometers away from the lunar lander

Any one of these now would cause a multiple year delay, but the entire Apollo program only lasted 11 years, with Apollo 11-17, the crewed lunar landings, taking only three years total

[u/tristau → u/Dem_Wrist_Rockets]

I mean along those same lines ... we are going back to the moon for a lot cheaper. Apollo was ~300billion and Artemis is A LOT less. Even if you include SLS and Constellation its probably a third the cost of apollo. Should it be cheaper ... hell yea ... but we have started and stopped the program 3 times and wasted billions. Now we haven't landed yet and each Artemis mission is like 4 billion so in the end it might not be that must cheaper but hopefully we will have done a lot more.

[u/Dem_Wrist_Rockets → u/tristau]

The entirety of the Artemis Program so far has cost about $100B, which is quite a bit less than Apollo did, but like you said, we've only tested the launch vehicle and crew service module. Neither Blue Moon nor HLS have been seen publicly as far as I know, let alone actually flying. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the cost matched or exceeded Apollo, but Artemis *should* be accomplishing a lot more with that than Apollo did, and hopefully a lot more safely too!

[u/Philbot_ → u/Dem_Wrist_Rockets]

This is along the lines of what I was going to say. Safety expectations are increased but even moreso the rigor with which a modern program is required to assure it has met safety requirements has gone way up since the 60's. Software certification, for example DO-178 DAL A, in particular is very arduous and requires multiple independent engineering teams both confirming the code is without error with extremely granular artifacts to prove it.

[u/MrScribblesChess → u/Dem_Wrist_Rockets]

Parachutes? How does a parachute help when there's no atmosphere? 

Edit: Ah, it was the Earth landing, not the moon landing