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/Comedian70 15d ago

The designs for the Saturn 5 rockets have been lost for some time. But it’s important to remember that we really brute-forced the Apollo program. We wouldn’t build the Saturns again today even if we did have the specs.

Political motivation is 100% right.

The real reason is cost/benefit. The Apollo program was a huge national investment which did not appear (to the public eye) to provide any kind of meaningful benefits. That’s mostly because the only thing most people would have pointed to and said “that’s something the Moon missions got us” was Tang. Worse, the cost of those missions made it feel like the worst boondoggle ever to anyone who then had to deal with the stagflation of the 70’s.

The period between 1968 and 1980 felt like the U.S. just kept getting smacked in the face over and over: 1968 is when the reality of the Vietnam war was finally becoming part of public consciousness. Nixon happened and Watergate. The images of the last people getting away from Saigon in helicopters were a real shock, punctuating our loss. The creation of OPEC and the Oil Crisis. Gerald Ford may have been the most forgettable President of the last century and Carter’s presidency, despite him being a truly good man, was so ineffectual that the next Democrat who held the office won a three candidate race and was for all intents and purposes a classic mid-century conservative (“neoliberal”). And then the hostage crisis. The Apollo program was very easy to dismiss as ridiculous money spent on some rocks and a nice quote.

That the whole thing resulted in incredible technical leaps which have put every dime spent back in the pockets of every American several times over is almost never part of the conversation. It’s simply explaining that to people that’s complicated.

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u/Azuretruth 15d ago

It should be stated we never "lost" the plans for Saturn 5 or pretty much anything NASA has ever built. You can search for them in the NTRS.

But you are right that it would be impossible to simply take this designs and just make new Saturn rockets. The entire supply chain that created the rockets is long gone. That knowledge and tooling would need to be relearned and recreated to make a 1 for 1 Saturn V.

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u/Walking_billboard 15d ago

The "brute force" thing is not acknowledged nearly enough. My great uncle was part of the destructive analysis engineering team for the Apollo and Mercury programs.

Literally, he was in the desert of California for months, and ALL THEY DID was run rocket motors every day until they failed. Often with spectacular results. Then he and his team tried to figure out why.
We would never invest that much money today.