The apollo program ran from 1961-1972, 11 years.[1]
The total budget was ~260B in todays dollars.[1]
That's ~24B per year in todays dollars. NASA's current budget is 22B[2], less than .5% of the federal budget. We sent 4 times that amount to Ukraine for the war by an emergency vote. Computing power has increased effectively infinitely, manufacturing automation & precision has increased incredibly. We are vastly richer than we were in 1972: our GDP has increased roughly 25X since then.
The reason we have not gone back to the moon is because we have chosen not to do so. It is not hard, nor particularly expensive.
In my opinion, simple inflation adjustment is not that accurate. In particular, notice that certain costs, like higher education, have increased significantly faster than inflation since the 60s. And since rocket science requires a highly educated workforce, you end up with higher salaries relative to the median. I'd actually like to see an analysis of the number of people working on the program. I bet Apollo had 2x or 3x more people working on it than Artemis.
But I haven't done the math/research, so I could be very wrong.
It's not just your opinion. It's widely known in economics. It's so widely known in fact that statistics agencies state exactly how they come up with inflation figures, which basket of goods they base it on and adjustments.
It's not just that we have $25/y now and had ~$24B/y then, to suggest it is practical. Costs are also vastly reduced over those benchmarks. Starship HLS cost the government under $3B. For that same price you could buy 30 Falcon Heavy flights at wholesale rates. New Glenn looks to launch soon and we don't know its price but it should be competitive, and it's a plenty capable ship.
Of course, depending on these as Artemis does now would only improve prices, not timelines, but it's not like commercial options are all a year old. Marginal launch has been approximately free in Artemis terms for a good while now, possibly even back in the pre-SpaceX dark ages when US launch was a monopoly flying on Russian engines with a billion dollar a year protection racket tax.
Ultimately it comes down to most of the money NASA spends on Artemis being spent on rent seeking by large old space companies that know job losses would look politically disastrous, captured in cost-plus contracts with hiring mandates, tech reuse mandates, and financial incentives not to execute. NASA is spending about as much on a mobile launch tower going overbudget on a cost plus contract as they have on Starship HLS. Guess which one had Congresspeople giving empassioned speeches about NASA's unreasonable spending habits!
not sending a man to the moon means people will LIVE actually, I can't imagine what kind of hell that would bring if Boeing tried to make another moonrocket
The reason we went to the moon was to prove that capitalism could do it better than communism. We've got nothing like that to prove now. Folks are working on making money doing things in space, and that's coming along nicely.
NASA's scientific mission isn't particularly strongly served by having humans in a place. Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
>Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically. 50 years ago the Boeing capsule would have been given the go ahead to detach without a second thought for instance.
Basically going from 2 9s to 11 9s (or whatever NASA targets internally these days) is comically expensive.
And I'd have to see a paper justifying human presence (besides trying to future proof society) as actually bringing more scientific value than robotic experiments.
This is the worst argument and I'm sick of hearing it. Do you seriously, honestly, think that there is nothing left for us to learn on the moon? Or that seeing humans doing things on the moon does not in any way inspire others to push forward in scientific endeavor? Such arguments demonstrate only a lack of curiosity and imagination.
But is there any scientific value? We ran enough missions that we're still looking at everything we brought back last time, what science would we be doing that we either haven't already done, or can do here on earth just fine without going to the moon for it?
- We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs
- The project is designed and built by international committee
It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.
Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey.
Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.
Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?
For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.
It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there.
Now, that science is done.
Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.
Because when we do science on earth we go to a place once take only a few samples and that's it. And then maybe every 10-20 years we might take another sample or something.
We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.
yeah. you can still buy a lot of ttl chips new (actually i think the agc used rtl, but ttl would be fine), there's new old stock of the others, and if that's not enough, teenagers can fabricate 10-micron chips in their garages nowadays
And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined.
Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.
High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.
The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.
The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.
When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.
And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.
If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.
Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.
Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums.
This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.
It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale.
If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.
So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.
I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust.
So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code.
The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out.
Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".
We've gone back to the moon many times, just not carrying useless people.
On another note it annoys me a bit that people in power are "fine" with thousands of dead people for wars that aren't needed, but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.
Even the Soviet space programme, in the decades after losing something like twenty million lives in a war that everyone would rather have avoided, was not reckless with the lives of its astronauts. Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.
There's probably a lot to be written about the precise moral boundary, but Western culture is very against missions which are definitely suicidal while OK with those that merely have a very high chance of getting you killed.
>Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.
Magellan, Hudson, Cook and a litany of others were certainly not cheap cannon fodder. Yet they were allowed to take on immense personal risk and risk to their crews, above and beyond the standards of the time because it was deemed worth it.
There is a fine line between reckless and acceptable risk.
The cost of such endeavors absolutely pales in comparison to the long term potential for wealth creation for the rest of humanity by making the resources of other planets reachable. I think that we as a society should be slightly more willing to let people take upon serious risk of death in the pursuit of societal progress.
I hope that when (if?) SpaceX's Starship becomes fully operational we'll get the sort of bold explorers going on their own missions at their own risk. If some wealthy young guys want to go on a mission to Mars in the same spirit as Shackleton or Darwin or Edmund Hillary I think they should be able to. Those explorers and scientists knew the great risks they were taking but chose to do it anyways because they valued furthering human achievement more than they valued their own safety. When an exploration mission's acceptable risk of death is 10% instead of 0.01% we'll see great things being accomplished.
They went to places that, without human exploration, we couldn't know anything about.
That's just not generally true anymore. We know things about other planets in the solar system, and planets and stars elsewhere in the galaxy, and in other galaxies, without any human ever having to go to those places.
The combination of sophisticated probes and more much sensitive sensing technology has really changed the justification for human exploration, possibly so much that the justification is mostly gone.
As soon as we get some. Main metrics of usefulness would be survival rate in hard vacuum, cosmic radiation and absolutely minimal or extreme temperatures - divided by volume, weight, price and energy requirements - and further by the useful work it can do per unit of time.
In conclusion, not any time soon. Humans will return to the Moon only when we accept that our presence there is purely symbolic/for the cool factor, and decide to eat the enormous price tag.
Whenever a roboticist is asked if robots are better than humans for, say, Moon exploration, he pauses. Red Whittaker from Astrobotic was admitting that robots are not nearly as capable as humans, at the time of Google Lunar X Prize competition. Robots have improved since then, but costs to send humans have also lowered. I'd like to have a conversation on this topic before asserting the answer one way or another.
I guess the parent meant that it was comparatively way cheaper and easier to send probes, rather than people. And that we did send probes, even way further than the Moon.
It’s a crucial element for control over your population. You need to instill a high worth of their lives, otherwise the danger of rebellion and refusal is too high.
either we develop a death row space program or yield future civilization in our lifetimes to the country who does.
AI driven androids (or more likely cephalopoids) might be able to bootstrap some initial habitat, but the prisoner/android conflict in spacefaring is going to be very real, imo.
Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time". With Apollo, it was something we had never done before, and I imagine a lot of people genuinely didn't know if it could be done, making it a huge achievement for humanity. Nowadays, people grow up learning that we already have done it, and "do the same thing we did in the 1960s in the 2020s" isn't an exciting enough achievement to get the public at large interested (and would make any failures even more embarrassing).
Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time".
All the people asking 'why can't we go to the moon' would definitely get excited. Plenty of people get excited every time SpaceX has a successful launch or achieve some innovation, but somehow you've convinced yourself that 'people on the moon' is fundamentally boring and nobody is interested.
I love the idea of spending tax money on R&D, but what would we accomplish on the moon at this point? Seems better to spend on telescopes and space stations until we have firm plans for what to do on the moon.
The US will land astronauts on the moon, probably this decade but maybe early in the 2030s. That's my bet. Compared to previous human spaceflight efforts, Artemis has the support of both major parties and the NASA community (scientists, engineers, and administrators). That was not always the case, which is why the Constellation Program failed.
Moreover, the Artemis program, unlike the "flags and footprints" goal of Apollo, has a plausible path for a sustainable human presence on the moon and an evolutionary path to a human Mars landing. If they can pull that off, with a budget smaller than Apollo, then I think NASA will deserve all the praise they get.
Will China land humans on the moon before us? No, because we already did that in 1969. But they might land humans before Artemis does. In that case, I suspect we'll see a real-live version of "For All Mankind" and we'll dump extra funding on NASA. Maybe. Or maybe we'll do what the Soviets did when we beat them and shift to something else, like Mars.
I'd like for life on earth to go to the moon again. Why should I care if it's bearing a china flag or a usa flag? Nationalism and the "us" mentality is a disease.
In my experience, different people care about different things. There's probably a bunch of things that you care about passionately that completely bore me.
Because the goal as of now is not to get to the moon. It's a government jobs program. Nothing wrong with that IMO, but in the 1960s the goal was to get to the moon before the Soviets + pour money into ICBM-adjacent tech.
Now the motives are dubious. Gateway to Mars? Cold War 2 with China? I don't think anyone even knows what the goal is other than "spend money".
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The total budget was ~260B in todays dollars.[1]
That's ~24B per year in todays dollars. NASA's current budget is 22B[2], less than .5% of the federal budget. We sent 4 times that amount to Ukraine for the war by an emergency vote. Computing power has increased effectively infinitely, manufacturing automation & precision has increased incredibly. We are vastly richer than we were in 1972: our GDP has increased roughly 25X since then.
The reason we have not gone back to the moon is because we have chosen not to do so. It is not hard, nor particularly expensive.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
But I haven't done the math/research, so I could be very wrong.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-...
There are other indices if you want to compare historical prices relevant to moon programs
Deleted Comment
Of course, depending on these as Artemis does now would only improve prices, not timelines, but it's not like commercial options are all a year old. Marginal launch has been approximately free in Artemis terms for a good while now, possibly even back in the pre-SpaceX dark ages when US launch was a monopoly flying on Russian engines with a billion dollar a year protection racket tax.
Ultimately it comes down to most of the money NASA spends on Artemis being spent on rent seeking by large old space companies that know job losses would look politically disastrous, captured in cost-plus contracts with hiring mandates, tech reuse mandates, and financial incentives not to execute. NASA is spending about as much on a mobile launch tower going overbudget on a cost plus contract as they have on Starship HLS. Guess which one had Congresspeople giving empassioned speeches about NASA's unreasonable spending habits!
Not sending money to Ukraine means people die. Not sending a man to the Moon? People would just wonder why.
Yes, and lose their freedom, and it greatly increases the risk that many more will die and lose their freedom.
NASA's scientific mission isn't particularly strongly served by having humans in a place. Not that there's no scientific value it's just much more expensive than robots and much riskier.
And our ability to accept risk has decreased dramatically. 50 years ago the Boeing capsule would have been given the go ahead to detach without a second thought for instance.
Basically going from 2 9s to 11 9s (or whatever NASA targets internally these days) is comically expensive.
And I'd have to see a paper justifying human presence (besides trying to future proof society) as actually bringing more scientific value than robotic experiments.
Just wait til China announces an effort to put humans on Mars.
It basically amounted to a trash can with an apple watch on top of a V2 rocket
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
- We don't spend enough money
- We have a low tolerance for risk
- We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs
- The project is designed and built by international committee
It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.
Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.
Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?
For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.
Now, that science is done.
Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.
Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?
We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.
I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...
this is not the problem
Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.
High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.
The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.
The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.
When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.
And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.
If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.
Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.
This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.
If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.
So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.
I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust.
So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code.
The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out.
Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".
On another note it annoys me a bit that people in power are "fine" with thousands of dead people for wars that aren't needed, but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.
There's probably a lot to be written about the precise moral boundary, but Western culture is very against missions which are definitely suicidal while OK with those that merely have a very high chance of getting you killed.
Magellan, Hudson, Cook and a litany of others were certainly not cheap cannon fodder. Yet they were allowed to take on immense personal risk and risk to their crews, above and beyond the standards of the time because it was deemed worth it.
There is a fine line between reckless and acceptable risk. The cost of such endeavors absolutely pales in comparison to the long term potential for wealth creation for the rest of humanity by making the resources of other planets reachable. I think that we as a society should be slightly more willing to let people take upon serious risk of death in the pursuit of societal progress.
That's just not generally true anymore. We know things about other planets in the solar system, and planets and stars elsewhere in the galaxy, and in other galaxies, without any human ever having to go to those places.
The combination of sophisticated probes and more much sensitive sensing technology has really changed the justification for human exploration, possibly so much that the justification is mostly gone.
In conclusion, not any time soon. Humans will return to the Moon only when we accept that our presence there is purely symbolic/for the cool factor, and decide to eat the enormous price tag.
Given what happened to first dog sent to the space - they might not know what they’re signing up for.
AI driven androids (or more likely cephalopoids) might be able to bootstrap some initial habitat, but the prisoner/android conflict in spacefaring is going to be very real, imo.
Perhaps entertainment might fund it? Like a reality show on the moon? Still doubt it will finance billions
All the people asking 'why can't we go to the moon' would definitely get excited. Plenty of people get excited every time SpaceX has a successful launch or achieve some innovation, but somehow you've convinced yourself that 'people on the moon' is fundamentally boring and nobody is interested.
I love the idea of spending tax money on R&D, but what would we accomplish on the moon at this point? Seems better to spend on telescopes and space stations until we have firm plans for what to do on the moon.
Moreover, the Artemis program, unlike the "flags and footprints" goal of Apollo, has a plausible path for a sustainable human presence on the moon and an evolutionary path to a human Mars landing. If they can pull that off, with a budget smaller than Apollo, then I think NASA will deserve all the praise they get.
Will China land humans on the moon before us? No, because we already did that in 1969. But they might land humans before Artemis does. In that case, I suspect we'll see a real-live version of "For All Mankind" and we'll dump extra funding on NASA. Maybe. Or maybe we'll do what the Soviets did when we beat them and shift to something else, like Mars.
I wouldn't worry about it. I definitely won't.
They were very lucky they only had 2 mission failures and 3 lives lost.
Now the motives are dubious. Gateway to Mars? Cold War 2 with China? I don't think anyone even knows what the goal is other than "spend money".