Why has there not been a second moon landing?

Debbie got it spot-on, decent amount of info there too. I'd just like to add that, due to advances in technology, we don't really need to send people to the moon to gather rock/sand samples and do whatever else they do up there, because now they can just use robots. They can go places humans can't, they can perform all the same tasks and then some, and they don't have families, so everybody just curses at them and farts in their general direction when they die.

Second Moon Landing

Ahem... you are aware of Apollo 12?

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a12/a12.html

There had been in total six landings on the moon during the Apollo program. Not just one.

Also, the real simple reason why is money. No bucks, no buck rogers. The NASA budget had been reduced from 5.5% in 1966 to 0.55% in 2009. With less than 18 billion USD p.a. you couldn't even keep an existing moon landing program running, let alone develop a new one. You need much more people for planning, monitoring and commanding such a mission. You need to build much larger rockets, which cost much more. You need different training and new training methods as for the Space shuttle or the ISS.

Also, what you should never forget: While being on the moon is a major achievement, in terms of technology and achievements, it is absolutely dwarfed by the Space Shuttle program. The Space Shuttle did never land on the moon, but was a true workhorse for NASA, achieving almost anything that is possible in low earth orbit. Apollo had not even 20 flights, the Space Shuttle already way over 100.

Very likely, you will never see something like the Space Shuttle again in the next decades. It is still ahead of its time.

Apollo 11 landed 20 July 1969 Apollo 12 landed 19 November 1969 Apollo 14 landed 5 February 1971 Apollo 15 landed 30 July 1971 Apollo 16 landed 20 April 1972 Apollo 17 landed 11 December 1972 Nothin' much going on there. Big chunk of gray dusty rock. We may go back for deuterium someday pretty soon though.

Not enough money, honey.

When President Nixon was elected in 1968, one of the first things he did was to cut the NASA budget. This left them enough money for seven of the planned 12 missions. Then people lost interest in seeing men in bulky white suits on a rock. Each mission started to look the same as the last and maybe a lot of people started to wonder what was the point of it after a lot of Moon rocks had been brought back and many other experiments done. More could have been done but they had achieved most of what they set out to do.

Since then NASA has not had enough money to run Moon missions, the space shuttle, interplanetary probes and the Hubble telescope. All of those are cheap compared to Moon missions.

Our technology is not all that much better, not in relevant areas anyway. Sure there might be some improvements in rockets due to better design but it might amount to a 10% improvement. Rockets are mechanical devices. They are not affected much by advances in communications, computing, pharmaceuticals or biology, which is where almost all the big advances since 1969 have been.

What else? Radio and television? They were more than adequate for what was needed and so by the way were computers then. You do not need ultra fast processors or huge memories to do navigational calculations. You do need them for moving big files and pictures around, which is most of what is done with computers now. But you can do complex calculations on a pocket calculator and good ones came on the market back about then.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

We were in a major "space race" with the Soviet Union and needed a symbolic victory, after losing so many times (they had the first satellite, first animal in space, first man, first woman). It is still hugely expensive to put men in an air-tight, meteor-resistant, sun-proof box on top of a giant bomb and shoot it thousands of miles/hour. It's just not high on the govt's priorities now.

Six landings so far:

Apollo 11 July 20, 1969, Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins.

Apollo 12 November 14-24, 1969

Charles Conrad, Jr. Commander

Richard F. Gordon Command Module Pilot

Alan L. Bean Lunar Module Pilot

(Apollo 13 had a mishap and only orbited the moon, per the movie)

Apollo 14 Jan 31 - Feb 9, 1971

Alan B. Shepard, Jr. Commander

Stuart A. Roosa Command Module Pilot

Edgar D. Mitchel Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 15 July 26-Aug 7, 1971

David R. Scott Commander

Alfred M. Worden Command Module Pilot

James B. Irwin Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 16 April 16-27, 1972

John W. Young Commander

Thomas K. Mattingly Command Module Pilot

Charles M. Duke, Jr. Lunar Module Pilot

Apollo 17 December 7-19, 1972

Eugene A. Cernan Commander

Ronald E. Evans Command Module Pilot

Harrison H. Schmitt Lunar Module Pilot

One possible reason there was no second round of missions is that the astronauts in the early phases did not report the flashes seen only in their eyes. Although this did not happen all the time it was found out later that these were subatomic particles passing through their bodies and sometimes their eyes. Along with cosmic radiation it is the reason why our kind does not venture into space, it is hazardous. For successful voyagers into space our spacecraft will have to create a magnetic field to protect travellers from these conditions. The international space station is largely protected from these effects because it is close to the Earth which generates it's own field. Short answer, space is deadly because there is nothing out there to support life if things go wrong.

It's very simple. The Apollo moon landings were an expensive and dangerous political stunt, once they had been achieved there was no reason to go back. Especially with the technology of the day. The very same thing happened with the South Pole. The first humans reached the South Pole in 1912, but no one returned until 1957, over forty years later.

NASA has returned to the moon, not using men but with LRO and LCROSS robot devices. This is both much cheaper and much safer than sending men there. Water has now been detected on the surface of the moon, it was not found on the surface by the Apollo missions. Cassini also detected the presence of water/hydroxyl molecules there back in 1999 during a flyby. NASA built the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) for Chandrayaan-1, India's first moon probe.

The truth that we can't handle, we didn't go there in the first place.

Ok Mr. Spectros. I will believe what I want. Yes i saw the landing in 1969. Yes i wanted to be an astronaut. Yes i had a telescope when i was twelve. I was a member of an astronomy group for ten years, have a certificate in forensic science and spent some time carefully watching DVD's frame by frame.

All due respect to the Astronauts.