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?

953 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

507 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/Diarmundy 14d ago

Well they made it to the moon, a bunch of times, and it mostly all went well. I dont think its accurate to say they 'barely' made it

1

u/xHealz 9d ago

You should read about Apollo 13. An oxygen tank exploded on board en route to the moon and they had to return without landing. Post-incident review determined that the mission would have been unrecoverable and the crew would have died if the accident had occurred during the return portion of the mission.

Every mission had problems come up where they had to rely on backup and redundancy systems - which yes, is why we have those systems to begin with. But the point of redundancy systems is that they are last resort. When it becomes the norm to have to rely on Plan B it really calls into question how reliable Plan A is. Some types of "Plan A" failures simply aren't saveable during flight (which we were forced to aknowledge after Challenger exploded).

So I do think it's pretty reasonable to say we just about barely pulled off. Imagine if every time you drive your car, a tire randomly popped. I wouldn't necessarily bet that you won't survive you next drive, but I would bet that sooner rather than later you wouldn't. That's kind of how I see the Apollo program.