Why Haven't There Been More Trips to the Moon Since the 1970's?

First, you cannot draw a parallel between today's $1000 laptop that is more powerful than the multimillion dollar computer that took up the whole room in the 1960s and rocket propulsion. Today's space launch vehicles are basically the same as they were in the 1960s. The Curiosity Mars Rove was launched by an Atlas booster that traces its heritage to the rocket that launched John Glenn on his first orbital flight and even earlier Atlas ICBMs of the 1950s. You still need a big, expensive rocket to go the moon. Even today, getting to and from the low Earth orbit may seem routine, but it's still hard and dangerous. Witness the two Space Shuttles accidents.

Second, and most important, you have to think of the moon landings in the context of 1960s space race between the Soviet Union and the US. John F. Kennedy challenged the country to land on men on the moon "before this decade is out." It's a tribute to JFK's charisma that the project survived through the upheavals, wars, and social unrest of the 1960s.

Most of the effort back then centered on getting the astronauts to the moon and back. Comparatively little thought went into what they will actually do when they got there, other than taking pictures and collecting samples. All of the astronauts who went to the Moon, except for Harrison Schmitt were test pilots; and even Schmitt was bumped up from Apollo 18 when that mission was canceled.

To establish manned outposts on the moon required technology that didn't exists in the late 1960s. To live in space or on the moon for weeks or months you need large habitable structures. In 1969 we didn't have any experience with the large habitable space structures. The Soviet Salyut and Mir and American Skylab space stations were still years in the future.

To land the habitat on the Moon you would need a whole new Lunar Landing Module. The one the astronauts used for the lunar landings had barely enough power for the task. To save weight the designers omitted the seats for the crew, so the astronauts stood all the way down to the moon, and back up to the orbit. The walls were made of several layers of Mylar. On the later missions, NASA even reduced the number of Band-aids in the First Aid kit to save a few grams of up-mass from the moon.

For every kilo of mass you get to the moon the mass of your launch vehicle goes up by several hundred or even thousands kilos. While Saturn V was the most powerful booster the US built up to that time, it stills wasn't big enough to launch the Lunar habitat modules. Another round of R&D would have been needed to develop all these technologies.

I think that maybe if the it wasn't a race to the Moon, but a slow, steady progress, we would have gotten to the Moon, in the 1985-1990 time frame, but with enough technology to establish outposts there. Initially these would have been missions like those of Apollo, then around 1997 a Lunar outpost would have been established, initially it would have been manned by visiting crews, but by now we could have had a permanently manned station much like we have the International Space Station.

This was actually the idea when NASA proposed the development of the Space Shuttle in the early 1970s as a quick and inexpensive way to get astronauts and payloads to low Earth orbit as the first step of their journey further out into space. While a remarkable flying machine, the Space Shuttle was subject to political meddling, its development was never adequately funded, took too much time to develop, cost too much to operate, and consumed too much of NASA's resources so that NASA couldn't develop the rest of the infrastructure needed to establish the permanent Lunar base.

Sorry for the long answer, but this questions touches a number of interconnected issues, and cannot be answered with the simplistic "There was no money." There was plenty of money to build the Space Shuttles and the Space Station, to bail out Chrysler and Savings and Loans in the 1980s and then again in 2008, and for George W. Bush's tax cuts of 2000s. Money could have been found to return to the Moon. The only thing that was missing was the political will.

The Apollo project and the Moon landings ended because the program was expensive and the U.S. was also involved with Viet Nam war at the time. The decision had to be made as to whether or not to order another batch of Saturn V rockets. The Nixon administration decided to end the program mainly because of the expense but also because Nixon himself believed that the lunar program and the landings would always be associated with Kennedy and Johnson.

The Apollo project was a proof of concept exercise and a race to beat the Russians to the task. They proved that it could be done. NASA wanted more landings and eventually a lunar base that would be permanently manned like the south pole bases that countries have been operating for decades. The cost was more than the Nixon administration was willing to commit to and the whole program ended.

NASA's future was not assured at that time. There was the real possibility that NASA would cease to exist and manned space travel by the U.S. would not longer happen at all. Nixon gave the agency the choice of building a reusable spacecraft along with the Air Force or possibly cease to exist. The public would have not approved of ending manned space travel. NASA took up the challenge but the budget was ridiculously low for such a leap in technology.

The Air Force planned to launch their own shuttles from California and they needed a large cargo bay for their spy satellites causing the spacecraft to grow in size and sprout wings because of cross landing requirements. Some spy satellites were launched into polar orbits. A spacecraft launched into a polar orbit cannot orbit once and then land where it started because the Earth is rotating under it. The craft had to have the ability to fly back to the launch site.

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The situation that resulted in the lunar landing was a very unique one. The United States and Soviet Union were extremely powerful, and possessed the capability to destroy civilization many times over. Both nations were too scared of the consequences of each other's power to act directly on the other with violence. As a result, the United States and Soviet Union projected their power in other ways. They competed to see who could build the better weapons. They competed to see who could build the better sphere of influence. They competed to see who could build the better spacecraft.

In the 1960's, there was a lot of support all around for sending Americans to the Moon. Within a decade, things changed enormously. The Vietnam War changed Americans' perception of the government, and the attitude towards the space program changed. America also felt that money would be better spent defending itself from the Soviet Union. By the 1970's, when the goals of the Apollo program had been completed, and the spacecraft used in it were outdated; there was support for what became the Space Shuttle. That became NASA's new way to get into space. The only issue with the Space Shuttle was that it could only go into orbit (a few hundred miles above the Earth). With NASA spending money on the Space Shuttle program, there were no funds for a vehicle that could get to the Moon.

Money.

It didn't stagnate, but what money was left after the 1960s budgets were slashed went mostly into robotic exploration. There have been remarkable achievements and some really fantastic explorations. Just not with humans. For instance, the Voyagers, now out beyond the solar system, a bunch of missions to the moon (one of which photographed the Apollo landing sites) and a bunch more to Mars, including the one that just landed.

Several reasons.

1. The Apollo missions were intended to put an American on the moon. They achieved that.

2. The American people were getting bored with the lunar missions. There were more pressing issues at home (Vietnam for example) and they didn't support the missions anymore.

3. The funds were diverted to Skylab, considered more important to US security at the time.

4. The space program is not stagnant, the moon is just not a priority.

People make the mistake of comparing a modern laptop costingf $1,000 to a million dollar mainframe that had far less computing power and filled a room in 1969 and say that proves technology has advanced enough to make it easier to go to the Moon today.

What they should do is compare a $20,000 car today that gets the same MPG and has the same top speed as a car costing $3,000 in 1969 and then realize that only computers (and all electronics technology) has enjoyed amazing advances while cars (and all transportation technologies including rockets) have not. So it is just as expensive and difficult today as it was in 1969 and still not worth to cost to keep doing it.

You cannot just assume all kinds of different technologies all advance at the same rate.

one thing you might want to consider is that propulsion technology has not really advanced very much at all. we still use chemical rockets almost exactly the same way as they did in the apollo program. they still cost a heck of a lot of money. the fact that our computer and communications technologies are better just means that we're more likely to send robotic probes for exploration missions, because you don't need to spend so much on giant rockets that way.

Basically it's way too expensive even with the space station technology we now have. In real terms we can do it for about 10-20% of the cost of the first landings but thats still hundreds of billions.

A manned space starion is seen as more value for money.

The Apollo program was a political endeavor. When the propoganda value

of space spectaculars evaporated, so did the funding for space travel.

It was and is still too much expensive, now days scientist are working on a technology using anti-gravity stuff that is much faster and less expensive. If they succeed, then we would be able to take a vocation trip to moon.

for more details follow the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPPBkhjp1fY

I hope this post helps some one.

Thank You..