Why Haven't There Been More Trips to the Moon Since the 1970's?
Since Neil Armstrong's death, I have been reading some articles regarding space travel and the competition that existed between the United States and Russia, that spurred on the Apollo Program. I guess I am surprised that with advancing technology, more trips were not made, and more exploration of the moon accomplished?
That is a 30 yr span, and in other fields of science, many strides have been made, while with the space program, it actually seems to have become stagnate. Why?
2012-08-27T16:46:22Z
No, lol, I am not a follower of Zuma. What is that? Please enlighten me.
Why is exploration of Mars more important or more advantageous than that of the Moon?
Also, wouldn't the cost of robotics and satellites be about equal to what they would spend anyway?
2012-08-29T20:36:32Z
@ bp: Yeah I had heard that, need to do more research on it.
Mr. Smartypants2012-08-27T16:39:31Z
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Manned space flight is just obscenely expensive. The moon shots cost, altogether, hundreds of billions of dollars. That would be trillions today. More manned moon shots today would cost more than the Iraq War (but wouldn't kill hundreds of thousands of people). Even the Space Shuttle, which was supposed to save trillions because it was re-useable, ended up costing way more than 'disposable' single-use rockets.
We can accomplish all our goals in space with robots. We can land them on the moon and get the same science done. We send them to Mars. We used them to launch satellites, etc. At a small fraction of the cost.
We sent men to the moon for propaganda purposes. So we could claim to have won the Space Race against the USSR. But there's really no question that we won it. Now we have the Russians and the Chinese working for us, helping launch satellites for communications or science, even cheaper than we could do it. Actual -exploration- of space is on the back burner.
Americans are strange about govt. spending. Everyone wants a big tax break, nobody wants to pay taxes, but nobody wants to give up any of the things govt. actually does! If you want to save money, you have to cut spending SOMEWHERE, and NASA is a good candidate, especially considering the huge amounts of money we were throwing at them in the 1960s, when we had the money.
Making a trip to the South Pole is very different to living there. And if you are only going just to say you were there then that story got stale very quickly.
Well as previously said, space missions are extremely expensive, and since we have already been there and done that, it would be best for the progress of science and discovery that we pursue new things.