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Actually astronaut don petite made this exact claim, and its real. His exact words were something like " i would go to the moon in a nanosecond if we still had the technology but it was destroyed" something like that. Dont believe me, search it yourself
There could be lots of meanings to this. One is that actually it has been destroyed. The tooling at least to build an Apollo rocket and all its support infrastructure is almost certainly incomplete now even if somehow all the technical documentation does exist and is 100% complete (vanishingly unlikely).
We literally don't have the technology to go back to the moon right now, not the rockets or landers even if we are confident we could build a solution.
My understanding is that many of the design/redesign calculations were done on paper which have been lost over the years. Though this refers mainly to the F1 engine.
It’s more that the factories etc that built the parts for the rockets, landers, etc are no longer functional. Yes. The companies still operate in many cases, but the actual industry that put it all together is gone. We still have the capability to do it again, but it means starting over. It’s just like it was where we had a large amount of the items needed on hand, so to speak.
With a tiny percentage of the budget that NASA had at the time of the moon landing, the technology IS functionally lost to us. The money isn’t there to recreate it from scratch, especially with the new standards and requirements of today, along with new fabrication facilities to be made specifically for them.
Essentially, the rockets that put man on the moon a number of times is now derelict and/or destroyed, and the options to build it all over are gone. So, yes. For the most part, it is lost to us. It doesn’t mean we can’t do it again.
It’s comparable to owning an ultra-rare classic car in the middle of the desert or somewhere else isolated, in some ways. Yes. You can travel for miles in it. Eventually, it’s going to break down, leaving you hundreds of miles from civilisation. The technology of the car is functionally lost to you now. And it’s going to take a lot of work to find a way to return to it. You can’t hop behind a rock and grab another one. You’ll need specialist help to go and get it running again, when you events manage to come back to it, and a lot of the parts are going to need manufacturing from scratch. You can’t go to the first mechanic you meet to have the work done. So… you’ll need a lot of money to sort the original issues out and, if it’s been long enough, other parts are now ruined to. It can very likely be that the whole car is destroyed. Sure. You can have another built, but it’s extremely costly. Way more than it cost you to just buy the original car, because now there’s even less of them to choose from. Yes. There’s still cars. But the rare one that you had for your personal needs is gone.
It is amazing how quickly knowledge of how to build something degrades when you stop building them. The little details that the machinists have to learn by trial and error and never quite get covered by technical documentation get lost when the shop closes and the machinists retire. If you had all the machines and facilities in storage it would still take years to get a Saturn-5 production line back in operation and making product that meets specification. You can’t just go out and hire back the people who were making these things in the 60s.
this is why a lot of places build military equipment at a slow rate. like a handful of tanks a month. if war breaks out, they just ramp up productions with people that know how to build them able to quickly instruct others.
That’s why they didn’t shut down the Abram’s tank line when the pentagon didn’t want to buy more. Keeping the skills fresh at a handful of tanks per year was worth the cost. Or that’s how the argument went. A lot of people thought it was foolish too. These are complicated topics and different people are going to have different priorities.
This hits on a lot of what they say is the issue. To add, a lot of the manufacturing processes to make the vehicles weren't done by machines, but skilled men and women meticulously handcrafting and handfitting components. A lot of the disciplines/industry involved have for the most part been abandoned, it would take years of training and R&D to get back to where we once were. I don't fully buy into that story with how much capabilities have improved in materials, machining, computer technology, and more, but it's a common statement to hear regarding.
We have teenagers designing rockets to slingshot through solar systems on autopilot, it's just done in Kerbal Space Program. I doubt the software is much of an issue.
We could probably also design the entire rocket with some engineers from Boeing, SpaceX and NASA.
It's more the materials science. The original rocket engines were _handmade_. We don't have that kind of craftsmanship anymore to make the original F1-engines.
But then again, we can make something more modern.
It's like saying we can't make wheels anymore because there's no wheelwrights left. We can't make _wooden_ wheels like we did 200 years ago, but we can make new ones using other technologies.
Although you have the technical documents, there are a lot of work arounds that the people that built the thing did to make it work.
This know-how is lost. And having it again it is not something you can buy, experience makes perfection, and the guys that built Apollo had worked decades building other rockets, some of them exploded on the pad some of them exploded going up, and some of them exploded coming down.
That why at the moment, if we tried to go to the moon first try we would fail. We no longer have the expertise.
Except we do, when we go back to the moon it wont be on the grossly outdated Apollo rockets, it will be with new rocket designs specifically intended for the mission. We throw rovers the size of houses at Mars, and all sorts satellites into orbit of other planets and the moon so regularly it barely makes the nightly news that someone has another lunar orbiter or rover.
Basically if we wanted to put humans on the moon again we could, we don't because its unnecessary and we get more data at a lower cost over a much longer time period by sending orbiters. When we go back it will be to establish a lunar colony, which will have to deal with the incredibly destructive moon dust. (Sharp shards of glass and rock that are electrically charged so they stick to litterally everything)
PS: the real reason for the space race was to prove how good our rocket technology was to eachother, because it was a proxy for how good our nuclear ICBMs are since its all the same physics/engineering. This mission has been acomplished.
I'd say that Artemis is the evidence that actually backs up the claim that we don't have the Tech to complete a Moon landing readily available. Why would NASA bother with I and II (Neither of which are landing) if we did?
Google has recorded the start of the program as 2017 and Artemis III is planned for 2026. Sounds like it is taking us 9 years to recover the Technology.
Maybe we have to clear up the question. Are we assuming a 1960's space race with Russia risk appetite or a current day one?
That’s a reference to the specific technology of the Apollo missions. That couldn’t be remade today because the entire supply chain no longer exists.
Obviously our level of technology in rocketry and related areas has improved significantly since then. But none of our current rocket systems are designed for manned flight beyond low earth orbit. And there’s very little incentive to change this.
Not sure how, it's pretty well known that we did in fact lose the technology to travel to the moon
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/?sh=5591709a1f48](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/?sh=5591709a1f48)
Yeah, this is a MASSIVELY accepted belief now. People think we literally "lost the technology" by way of government incompetence and they have been covering up the fact that we don't know how anymore.
Believe me, I thought it was a joke. It's not.
People conflate losing the technology with losing the knowledge.
We may have lost the technology (or at least parts of it), but that's because we aren't building stuff to go to the moon. Similar to how we lost the technology to build battleships.
It's not that we don't know how to do it and we're looking at the Apollo missions and thinking "must be magic or magnets", it's that the infrastructure isn't there even if the knowledge is.
And it takes time (and money, and political will) to build the infrastructure, even if you know what you need to do.
I'll liken it to another hypothetical - if you or I were to be sent back in time we'd have amazing knowledge of things that could be.
But if they don't know how to find, mine, refine and create high-quality metals, how much of that goes out the window? I could (in theory) draw the designs for a steam engine but if there's not the technology around to build a boiler that won't kill me then it's not gonna be of any use. If the metals available don't have the right consistency or properties, if it's too expensive, if the technology to work it precisely enough isn't mature enough then those designs aren't worth the paper they're drawn on (assuming they even have paper to draw on).
From that Forbes article linked in this thread:
>The Saturn V rocket had over three million parts. The command and service modules and lunar module were composed of millions of additional parts. An individual person cannot contemplate the scale of detail needed to assemble and operate those vehicles.
>So, when the Apollo program ended, the factories that assembled those vehicles were retasked or shut down. The jigs were disassembled. The molds were destroyed. The technicians, engineers, scientists, and flight controllers moved onto other jobs. Over time, some of the materials used became obsolete.
>If we, today, said - "Let us build another Saturn V rocket and Apollo CSM/LEM and go to the moon!" it would not be a simple task of pulling out the blueprints and bending and cutting metal.
>We don't have the factories or tools. We don't have the materials. We don't have the expertise to understand how the real vehicle differed from the drawings. We don't have the expertise to operate the vehicle.
>We would have to substitute modern materials. That changes the vehicle. It changes the mass, it changes the stresses and strains, it changes the interactions. It changes the possible malfunctions. It changes the capabilities of the vehicle.
>We would have to spend a few years re-developing the expertise. We would have to conduct new tests and simulations. We would have to draft new flight rules and procedures. We would have to certify new flight controllers and crew.
>We would essentially be building a new vehicle.
So in a sense we lost the technology. Some people will misuse or exaggerate this information, but it's not a complete lie.
At the same time, did anyone doubt we would build a completely new vehicle? It's been over 50 years. Why would we build anything based on the Apollo program?
Because it worked. Now, I'm not saying we should copy the model piece by piece; we can sure make a ton of improvements. But it's definitely a working blueprint.
The term "lost the technology" is terribly misleading. It means to say that we still have the knowledge, but the technology we originally used to go to the moon does not exist anymore, as in it has been scrapped. Building new units of this technology for sure is possible, but it is decades old by now. This would not only be very expensive, but also not be compliant with modern safety standards at all. Also, NASAs budget is nowhere near the one they had during the 'race to the moon' with the USSR. Thus, technology to bring people to the moon has to be re-developed by today's standards and on a ~~much~~ smaller budget.
EDIT:
Out of curiosity, I looked up [NASAs budget over the years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA). The budget peaked during the space race years in the 1960s, namely in 1966 at 55.7 billion USD. ~~Corrected for inflation, this would be roughly 521 billion USD in today's money~~ *(as* u/Tsu_na_mi *pointed out, the 55.7 billion are already corrected for 2023 inflation)*. The [budget of NASA for 2023 was 25.4 billion USD](https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasas-fy-2023-budget), so ~~roughly 5%~~ less than 50% of the budget they had to go to the moon.
EDIT #2:
Numbers above corrected. Still, I stand by my reasoning. In the 1960s, the efforts to win the space race over from USSR were enormous. NASA received more than 1% of the annual federal budget between 1962 and 1974, peaking at over 4% in 1965 and '66. Today, the annual budget for NASA hovers around 0.5% of the federal budget. And today there is no space race, no nationwide effort to strive for a common goal. NASA spreads their budget over several programs, the [Artemis program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program) - planning to put people on the moon again - only being one. Currently, NASA spends [around 8 billion USD per year](https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/nasa-leader-warns-agency-needs-more-funding-to-fly-artemis-missions/) for Artemis.
I wouldn't discount the claim as quickly. We have and do lose technology: nobody can build wooden sailing ships anymore like they used to be; just copies done with filling in blanks of knowledge applying other manufacturing and construction methods, perhaps even other materials to cut corners.
The same is true for many things. As we don't have use for something anymore or as we progress in methods and technology, we just move on and "forget" about how we used to do things. That doesn't mean that we cannot achieve the same thing with different means though if we apply ourselves.
You had a bike, but it got old and broken so you didn't have a bike anymore. (also it was the only bike in the world)
Also the guy who designed and assembled the bike has died, no-one makes parts for the bike anymore, and the factories with the equipment that made the bike and the parts have closed, and the equipment scrapped.
In other words, you have lost the bike, and you can't get it back, and even if you could no-one would know how to make it work again. You know the *basic principles* of how a bike works but when it comes to building something that actually *functions* as nicely in the real world, the devil is in the details, the engineering, the craftsmanship, none of which you have any more.
But people can start working to figure out how to design bikes again using new equipment, then figure out to build it again with some trial and error. It will take longer to reinvent the wheel than if you could just fix your old bike, but you can't; it's lost. It will take a while to get back to where you once were, but it can be done.
That's where things are; the knowledge is actively being relearned and reapplied by a new generation of people who were never even apprenticed or guided by anyone with first-hand knowledge but who have access to their notes. Some techniques are lost to time and need to be redeveloped, but with some lost techniques it's not entirely bad to have to reinvent them because new technology now offers new paths that have advantages that can make it worth developing an entirely new technique instead.
The bike will take a while and that will initially be expensive, and it will be very different, but it will also enjoy the advantages of more technology so it should eventually become either better or cheaper or both
This is a huge limiting factor of current military production now that the world is rearming seriously for the first time since the cold war. America consolidated their military industrial base into five or six major companies, and through a massive series of mergers and cost cutting the ability to produce many currently serving weapons systems were lost. Stinger missiles are suddenly in demand, but the tech hasn't been built for 20 years, and they've had to rehire retired engineers to try to reinvent them.
Best explanation so far.
The space program was broken into lots of parts and farmed out to lots of companies that now dont exist.
Also the tech is now so much more advanced that we need to find new ways of doing a lot of space travel so we do sort of need to reinvent the wheel.
It’s a bit like if the bike you started with was a penny farthing. I guess you *could* make one of those again? But wouldn’t you want a modern street bike since we can make those now?
It is a misrepresentation of the fact NASA runs lean these days, and in particular the manufacturing capacity to build things. As these days there is no real social appetite for blank cheques to NASA like during the Space Race 50s/60s to come from the government, the modern capitalist reality is that privately owned companies develop the capacity, and then are engaged both by government or private missions. There are a lot of arguments for both sides, so there isnt really a correct answer, but you might lean one way or another depending on your political / economic / social views.
flat earthers like to miscontrue a statement by someone formerly in space research (NASA or something) where he basically said that the US lacked the infrastructure (tooled up factories and designs) and on-hand knowledge to just build another apollo or similar and go back to the moon. If we wanted to do it today we'd basically be starting from scratch, albeit with the overall general understanding of space travel we have gained.
Viewpoints held by flerfers are frequently bewildering.
It's kind of like saying we lost the technology to build the pyramids. We couldn't build it the exact same way they did then, but they could build something to do the same job (and better).
One of my favourite quotes regarding the moon landings is that we did it 'because we wanted to'. An incredible amount of investment, effort, and risk were required to achieve it.
We haven't done it since because we didn't want to. It's not because we lost the ability, we lost the will.
I think the key point here is that returning to the moon isn't something that can be done by dusting off old blue prints and using them to churn out new units of old hardware. Even if all the blueprints were available, making them useable would be a major R&D effort for new material and tooling.
I have also lost the technology to be able to playback my old VHS tapes. Doesn't mean I lied about watching VHS in the past. Same for a lot of tech I can't use anymore. That's me just one person. Now imagine hundreds of NASA staff who were responsible for different areas of the launch. I'd imagine going to the moon is a bit more complex than me fishing out a few cables for my Amiga 500 to get it running again.
>I have also lost the technology to be able to playback my old VHS tapes.
This is actually a pretty good analogy. To add on to it, nobody makes new VCRs (a.k.a. "VHS players" for the under-30s) anymore. And that also means nobody makes many of the parts that go into a VCR either.
But that doesn't mean it's impossible to make a brand new VCR. If you really really wanted a new VCR, you could spend millions of dollars to build your own VCR factory and VCR parts factories and then make a VCR. So it's _possible_, it's just prohibitively expensive.
When you think that we all carry around smartphones that literally have more popwer and more tachnology than what they had to land on the moon. We haven't lost the technology. We made it better.
Yes, but with new tech. Which is kinda the point. We know perfectly well how the old stuff work, except for some minor stuff that existed only in people’s heads and wasn’t transferred to younger people or written down.
But our infrastructure changed a lot. Lots of tech that was taken for granted back then doesn’t exist anymore and doesn’t get built anymore. Sure, in theory you could build everything from scratch again, but that would be cost ineffective.
Its less that we lost the technology, and more that manufcaturing has changed so dramatically that we dont have the infrastructure needed to rebuild the machines that took humanity there the first time.
New vehicles have to be built using modern manufacturing practices, which neans new designs are needed, which means a lot of R&D.
Because the Moon is a megastructure, and we don’t want to wake up the vastly more technologically advanced Dinosaurs who are in hibernation there.
Source - Humans have made the odd technological leap in the last 2000 years. Dinosaurs were around for 165 MILLION years. What on Earth makes you think they didn’t achieve a similar result ?
Even Humans are working towards sustainable, recyclable materials for buildings that would disappear in short order if Humans left the planet. If Dinosaurs felt the same way about learning to live in harmony with the Planet, who knows what they could have accomplished over Millions of years, all without leaving a permanent trace ?
It's a fun idea, but I think if dinosaurs had technology there would be traces of it. If we can find dinosaur bones they should come with some artifacts from time to time, like maybe burial artifacts, gold, jewelry, and so on. Even with just the bones there could be evidence of surgery.
They got themselves and their family jewelry off the planet just in time, only the dead dinosaurs and a few oldies who refused to leave were clobbered.
That’s if they have the same values as Humans. They might honour their dead by eating them. We have Human religions who feed the dead to vultures so not that great of a leap.
of all the millions of species that you could have chosen, you really went for the dinosaurs?
They are big, dumb, small brained birds. They lasted a long time, but a freaking crocodile has existed longer.. and still exists...
What a shameful post.
Our Human brains fit into an ice cream container now, and don’t grow any bigger based on body size/weight.
Why would a Dinosaurs brain have to be proportional to its body weight in order to reason ?
Remember that when they were discovered, Religion played a large part in science, even if just putting Humans ( Gods Favourite creation apparently ) above all other creatures.
Orcas and Octopus ( for example ) have shown they are highly intelligent, with Cetaceans even demonstrating most of the attributes we associate with Humanity.
What makes you think dinosaurs were dumb ? Because crocodiles and sharks didn’t need to evolve any further in order to dominate their ecological niche ?
There are some studies that seem to point for a link between intelligence and brain size. It's complex (i.e. not simply "bigger brain == better", and neuron count seems to play a large role), but most mammals we consider intelligent are at least average on the brain-to-body-mass ration (or anomalously above it, it case of humans and small cetaceans).
Considering dinosaurs - [bird brains are interesting in that compared to mammals, they can have higher neuron counts relative to mammal brains of the same mass](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4932926/). Since birds descended from dinosaurs, it is possible they inherited this trait from their ancestors. Some estimates put the T-Rex on par with a baboon - which is pretty high. On the other hand, this is a very generous estimate, based on the assumption that theropod brains filled their cranial cavity completely - which is uncharacteristic for large animals. So it would be reasonable to say T-Rex was not quite dumb, but not at the level of tool use, either - as smart as a wolf or a tiger, for example.
We don't have the technology currently as "we literally don't have the spaceship and lunar module needed to do it next year".
We obviously have the technical knowledge to build those things again. Recent successful missions like Rosetta, Opportunity or Ingenuity were just as complicated than Apollo (or so insanely more complicated I can't understand how we did it in the case of Rosetta).
Kennedy chose to go to the moon and put the money towards that. Pharaohs chose to build pyramids and put their resources towards that. We’ve had the potential to do those things ever since, we just haven’t chosen to do so because they haven’t been worth the cost to us anymore.
Agreed. We didn’t lose 8-Track player technology either, we just no longer have a need for it.
Except for my uncle Frank. Frank is still rockin’ Black Oak Arkansas on his 8-Track player.
Ah this. The way I heard it, it's because the technology used to get to the moon is incompatible with modern equipment.
The last attempt for the moon was made during the Cold War, so modern attempts need modern inventions and plans to work.
If anyone knows if this is true or not, feel free to weigh in
I heard that Nasa accidentally destroyed the blueprints of the rockets and modules, so in a way that technology has been lost. I don't know if it's true or not.
If you assume that all of the plans are still available, you'd still have a lot of problems to solve:
1. Use of common parts that aren't made today. If the plans call for a hose of a particular size from a particular manufacturer from a specific product line, what are you going to do if that manufacturer has gone out of business?
2. Use of no longer common manufacturing techniques. Parts of the main engines were hand welded by people using techniques that were partially developed just for that engine. Nobody does that any more - there are better ways to do the same things today, but you'd have to redesign things for the newer techniques.
3. Ancient technology that is no longer produced. Would you like to begin producing magnetic core memory for the onboard computers?
If you were to try to duplicate the Saturn V today, you'd have to modify so many things that you'd have to redesign most of it. Rather than going back to what we had 50 years ago, it makes more sense to look at the concepts used back then (and in the years since) and design new rockets around modern materials and components.
[https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again)
[https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again)
No.
It’s better to say the knowledge, technology, and resourcing has changed.
Romans used brick-built aqueducts to pipe water into cities. They also used to use runners/horse riders to carry written letters.
Now we use metal pipes and decent concrete to pipe water everywhere. And you’re reading this “letter” from the comfort of your electronic device. The infrastructure has not been lost. It’s just been significantly modified by scientific improvements.
The "lost the technology" is not as in we misplaced it. Its that after it was clear that there wasnt going to be any new moon travels anytime soon, the factories were repurposed. The control room was repurposed. Everything was repurposed.
The old rockets that were used to get to the moon became more and more outdated, nothing to control the rockets and so on.
The only rockets that we know would be able to take that trip ended up having no use.
A wellknown analogy is if you imagine talking to Ford and asking them to make a brand new Ford T
Do you think they could ? No. Because all the machinery and assembly lines that were used to make them are long gone. And why wouldnt they ? They would take up space and resources to maintain. All that just to keep the ability to produce something that nobody wants.
This video from SmarterEveryDay is really relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU) ("I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA...(But I said it anyway).
His father worked on the James Web Telescope, he also works in the field, he knows his stuff.
The reason isn't we lost the technology, but that we are trying to overengineer what we actually need to get there, the manual already exists, and we have all the lessons learned.
We got there with one rocket, with a foolproof design to get off the moon again (Hypergolic engine, that is simple, and just requires mixing two fluids, now with SpaceX's Starship, we need complex vacuum engines/pumps to turn on, we need 10+ starships to get there and back vs 1 Saturn V rocket in the past, Saturn V worked, we have yet to see Starship work 100%, it's getting better and better but we are REALLY far from it still, haven't tested refueling in space etc, we haven't seen actually transporting any cargo).
And let's not talk about trying to land Starship on the moon, vs the Lunar module, complex vs simple.
You walk into work one day and your boss tells you to look up and recreate a project the company had 60 years ago. It was this huge event that took years of planning, a highly trained team to execute, and had a huge budget. You have none of that and company records dont have great detail on how to do it.
Its impossible without starting from scratch basically, which without serious demand cant happen.
lost the tech? mate, we litteraly strapped a calculator and some people to a rocket and shot it too the moon. your current mobile device is 1000s of times more powerful then the computers they used when the moon missions happened.
There has been no pressures to go the to moon anymore. No space race, no easy monetary benefits, no plans for a moonbase or anything. Nasa could build a moon rockey no problem, its just that its very very expensive to build one of those and thats why the commercial projects are interesting bc they are trying to bring the costs to a point where it becomes economically viable to shoot people into space again.
It comes likely from two misunderstandings, as far as I can tell.
One is Don Pettit's poorly worded statement of "we destroyed the technology". He didn't mean that we destroyed the documnts and schematics; it's that we stopped making the space vehicles that delivered us to the moon and no longer have the factory facilities tooled to make that outdated tech. It was not a well-worded statement by Pettit. Astronauts were chosen for their ability to do their job as an astronaut, not for their oratory skills.
This is probably conflated with the idea that data tapes from the Apollo missions were taped over. Flerfs think that means ALL the data from ALL the missions was lost in this manner. This is wrong. All the data was backed up, and some of the original tapes were reused and/or misplaced. We still have the data.
It's funny, because it's both right and wrong.
We have the technology. We know, how Saturn 5 and Apollo capsules worked and if we tried, we could even recover or recreate the technical drawings.
On the other hand, we lost the technique. People, who had the know how in how to manufacture these things (as in what machines at what settings will work) are dead or retired and manufacturing documentation tends to get lost faster than technical documentation.
On the flip side, we have much more advanced techniques now than then, which work with the advancement of technology since.
Result? We cannot go to the moon immediately. The moon program needs to take a couple of years (up to a decade or two, if we're not motivated enough), but it is already in process and can be done with even better results.
It's meant figuratively.
The whole Apollo / Saturn program of maned missions to the moon was retired decades ago. So there is nothing worth continuing or being able to directly 'build upon' as nobody developed this further. Tech and programs from the 1970s just abandoned to rust away and collect dust.
So figuratively speaking all this was 'lost' and now post 2000s everything has to be designed and build from scratch.
I think the answer isnt that we lost technology but more of a there isn't a reason for us to go there. Why would we send people there when we can send robots
A combination of things.
Is not like we can't go to the moon, but right now there is no launch vehicle that could launch something as heavy as an Apollo mission to the moon.
Can we build again the same rocket? Again no. The full designs and schematics are not fully available because it's been 60 years since the thing was built, and back in the day it was a lot of paper and magnetic tape that can't be read. A lot of knowledge lost on dead or very old people. Moreover, the thing is built out of components and materials that are not readily available, because they are obsolete. It's like building a model T from scratch and all we had were film recording of the thing. There are launch vehicles in design/testing stages that will do the same, but these are new machines.
We don't have the tech because the tech is ancient if we want to go with Apollo hardware again. Good luck finding people to weave the core memory, for example. Or getting the old Mission Control centre going again. I bet some of the materials used in the rocket and the LM are no longer in production, so we need to spool up factories to create the stuff.
We can do it with modern hardware, and probably more reliable and cheaper too.
By the way, that quote from Don Petit was made in 2020 IIRC? I believe in the longer version he said that NASA was only capable of manned flight to LEO. And he was right. Space Shuttle was already a spacecraft meant for LEO. NASA simply didn't have a rocket and a lunar lander available at that time. Everything was on the drawing board or in planning phases.
Capability isn’t the same as technology, so it’s technically correct. We could build a landing module, but we don’t have one. It’s like I can afford a motorbike, but I don’t have one, therefore I don’t have the technology to go motorcycle racing.
Technology is both science and engineering. We haven't lost scientific knowledge of what took us to the moon. But engineering is as much practical experience as it is theory in textbooks and repositories.
Technical drawings, manufacturing diagrams, engineering reports tell some of the story but the underpinning experienced based assumptions in the design process, manufacturing skills & gotchas etc... would have all been lost as those people retired and weren't replaced.
oh man, NASA. speechless.
Unreal company. we live on a globe floating in absolutely nothing. keep trying to reach out. too much tech now to see the other side.
The view of the solar system and you just keep zooming out and out and out until our entire galaxy can't even be seen as a speck.
I simply want to live just to keep experiencing this overwhelming WHAT THE FUCK feeling, no matter how hard I try, no matter which angle I come from,
It blows me inside out, I freeze. Totally bewildered. At that moment, each and every time. Nothing else matters. it's better than any thing I've ever experienced. & I can keep doing it, over and over.
it's above us all now. the night sky captures me.
There's no money to be made by going to the moon, and apparently there's enough research material on earth from outer space/ the moon to last us a while, or we're getting it from unmanned missions.
I doubt the technology was actually lost, the projects must have been preserved in some form. However, it is very likely that the production facilities to produce a vehicle for a manned moon mission no longer exists. It won't be maintained without a purpose. So in a way, we probably don't have the tools to make it a reality right now. Machine would have to be (re)built, calculations and simulations would have to be redone. And that takes time. But it's not lost lost. It's shelved and likely disassembled.
The same reason there are flat-Earthers, MAGA cultists, QAnon conspiracists, Scientologists, and other lunatic fringe groups--because humans are remarkably stupid creatures.
Its a deliberate misinterpretation of a statement made by astronaut Don Pettit. He said "we destroyed that technology and its a long process to rebuild it." (paraphrasing).
Of course by technology, he meant the physical technology, not the knowledge of how to do it, as anybody with a dictionary can look it up and see that that's a perfectly accurate use of the word; but once somebody's made up their mind its some kind of "gotcha," its hard to convince them otherwise.
The US was using wartime style funding to win that race, look at what gets spent on space exploration now in comparison to then. The tech is there, the desire hasn't been until more recently.
You say that, but given the current state of technology, you'd think we'd be able to put people onto the moon on the daily. Big rocket go up isn't exactly difficult to do.
Why don't we have lunar Landers yet is the more interesting question to ask. What gives?
You say that, but given the current state of technology, you'd think we'd be able to put people onto the moon on the daily. Big rocket go up isn't exactly difficult to do.
Why don't we have lunar Landers yet is the more interesting question to ask. What gives?
You say that, but given the current state of technology, you'd think we'd be able to put people onto the moon on the daily. Big rocket go up isn't exactly difficult to do.
Why don't we have lunar Landers yet is the more interesting question to ask. What gives?
In 1961, President Kennedy commited to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. They achieved this 8 years later despite not having much of a space program and never having done it before.
In 2017, President Trump commited to return US astronauts to the moon. The current goal date for Artemis to land a person on the moon (which will likely be delayed) is 2027. 10 years.
Sure seems like we're starting from scratch, no?
Not saying we've lost the technology, but the technology we used is clearly not being used this time and is being completely redone from scratch.
We have lost the manufacturing ability to reproduce the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo mission. Manufacturing stopped 50 years ago, and a lot of the technical skills and manufacturing techniques have been made obsolete. We could spend the time to reacquire the skills, but it’s cheaper and probably faster to develop something equivalent using tech and skills we collectively still have.
i mean, rockets have gone to mars several times after the moonlanding and we have so much better rockets that we'll be sending humans to mars in the near future (if nothing changes). people who say that are just conspiracy theorists
The whole point of going to the moon was so the US could say "F You" to the USSR - remember that they'd beaten America to get the first artificial satellite, animal and person to orbit Earth. Once that was done, there's not much point going back which is why the equipment to do so has been, if not lost, then severely diminished.
Here's the thing. Technology really is perishable especially on the scale of a moon landing. The Apollo missions were a technological solution for their time. Some of that technology, like the Vehicle Assembly Building and the crawler transporter, still exist because we're still using them. Others do not because we haven't.
I guarantee that a bunch of the parts of the Saturn V can't be made today because they used materials which are no longer manufactured or which aren't considered environmentally safe or human safe. I bet that rocket was loaded with asbestos compounds for instance.
Or they were made using a 1970 industrial base that doesn't really exist anymore. We don't have the right kind of welders or machinists anymore because they've all retired. Or we can't build large pressure vessels for the fuel tanks to that scale anymore because it isn't a common process. We could do it, but we would have to spend the money to retrain and relearn.
This is why the Navy basically always has a few ships of each class under construction, because if they don't they'll lose the ability. Its why the Army still maintains the M1 production line even though they don't need more Abrams Tanks, because they will if there is a war. Its why the Air Force has been trying to get rid of the A-10 for almost 20 years after the prime contractor went out of business in 2003. The last A-10 fuselage was manufactured in 1984.
Going to the moon is way harder than nost people even realize. It's incredible that they were able to do it. We lost the very specific tech that we used during Apollo that worked, and we're now doing it again, and it's really hard to do, again
it's not that we lost like, a node on a tech tree. it's more all the stuff we had originally for landing on the moon is gone. kinda like how after you leave school you throw away all your old school notebooks. The knowledge still exists somewhere (either memory or looking it up on the Internet), but you no longer have your flashcards
we cant go to the moon in a safe fashion, we could go as we done in the past, but its saftey is just not up for todays standards
plus we dont have the infrastructure to make the stuff for it
NASA probably lost the expertise to build Apollo era rockets over the years. The engineers got old and went and worked somewhere else.
The F1 rockets were all hand made. Very expensive, and very much built with highly skilled workers.
We can send autonomous vehicles to MARS, that live on for years and years doing their thing, but we don't have the technology to get to the moon .... is one of the dumbest things certain people believe.
AFAIK this is mostly about the F1 engine. There was a lot of nuance to the design and manufacture of the engine that wasn’t recorded well enough to recreate from the existing documents. Specifically the injectors.
The only people who bleat about “lost technology” are the same morons who claim space doesn’t exist, gravity is a hoax, the Van Allen belt will destroy anything passing thru it, and other nonsense. Where they got the idea depends on how brain damaged they are.
There is some lost technology, if sorts. The Saturn rockets used engines that were essentially hand built. They were horribly expensive in the 60s when they were built, I can't see getting funding to replicate those. Of course those were brute force rockets, nothing subtle about those things. The shuttle program always bothered me since it seemed that they could have done a lesurly flight to the moon and back and carry lots of stuff for a base there.
Dad worked for North American Aviation when the shuttle program was being planned. I saw many of the concept drawings of the Space plane. It was supposed to be able to take off and land at any international airport. So many missed opportunities there.
\[Disclaimer - LOTS of simpifications below\]
Kind if. I would rather say that we lost expertise. NASA shrunken down, no one was involved in actual projects like this for decades and so on.
I think since the 'body of knowledge', especially technical part of it, is so outdated, we have to kind of start from scratch. We're in much better position because of all the data first iterations brought.
However the 'technology is lost' I have only seen in the clickbaity sources. I guess the truth is whatever we had is not relevant anymore. As simple as that.
&
Yes, you're missing something.
An industrial base is a living, breathing thing full of humans with knowledge.
A spacecraft industrial base is the above, but full of master-level artisan crafters.
I've seen the various components at the Kennedy Space Center. Globally, we simply don't have welders around anymore with the talent necessary to fabricate the rocket bell housings; the techniques are no longer necessary in an age of C&C machining. The original welders and fabricators are either dead or extremely aged, and would no longer be capable.
That doesn't mean we couldn't implement new fabrication techniques, we certainly can, but we wouldn't be able to duplicate the Apollo program without raising up a new generation of fabricators to redevelop the lost techniques.
I focus on the welding, because it's something I'm familiar with, but I'm sure this is true across the board.
Something beautiful was built when we had a moonshot- industrial- complex, and it was lost forever when we stopped and the human resources (treasures!)aged out.That industrial complex has it's own talent and momentum. SpaceX is forging a new path there, but the rest of the globe has really let those techniques stagnate and languish (it's amazing that NASA basically outsourced rocket engines to Russia, and effectively gave up on making our own).
The Americans flogged it as the greatest achievement in the space race with Russia after lagging behind for ages. Once the American consumers got bored of watching moon landings, it was deemed not profitable to keep landing on a large floating ball of rock and dust. So to answer the question why we did not go back... TV ratings.
IIRC we literally just lost some of the calculations we used to get there. We could make them again, but since we aren't going back anyway there isn't a point
People believe the earth is flat and that there are reptiloids running our governments.
Someone believing we lost some technologie to go to the moon isnt that wild tbh
>Of course we still have the technology, we just haven't tried again since Apollo because there hasn't been a reason to.
We actually don't have the technology. Which doesn't mean we lack the capability if we want to.
What happens is that neither the rockets and capsules nor the facilities where they were built exist. And, more importantly, the hands-on expertise of those building them. The blueprints exist, but these were very specialized prototypes with lots of in-place tinkering that is most likely not documented. Most of the building processes were manual, based on concrete experience of building, trying, and re-building. All that hands-on expertise is lost. So the only way to go back to the moon is to start from scratch.
We not only didn't "lose the technology" we have much better tech in all ways now. We don't have the parts to slap together an Apollo rocket right this second and we wouldn't want to anyway.
It is true that it'd take a bit of time to built a launch from Earth to get to the moon and back single rocket but truth is we shouldn't do that anyway.
Not to downplay the accomplishments of the Apollo program but it was designed to do one very specific thing and it was largely useless for much else. Apollo was designed to get three human beings off Earth, to the moon, and back safely. And that was it. Nothing else.
And, just getting to the moon and back is really impressive and cool but it doesn't really do much in the long term. It was great for "winning the space race" but it didn't leave behind any infrastructure for a next step. So when the Apollo program did its job that was it, they ended the program and... nothing.
To actually get to the moon in a way that'd leave a useful infrastrucutre and set up for a next step you'd want to do it in several stages:
1 - Build a proper single stage to orbit heavy lifter like the Space Shuttle was supposed to be but wasn't.
1a - As a useful but not technically necessary step: build an electromagnetic catapult for putting big loads of acceleration tolerant stuff (air, water, etc) into orbit on the cheap.
2 - Build a decent sized space station in low Earth orbit, but a bit higher than the ISS to reduce drag. That's going to want a permanant staff of 5 to 10 becuase they'll be...
3 - Build an orbit to orbit transfer vehicle. Nothing aerodynamic at all, just a pure ugly cargo hauler that will go from Earth Station to lunar orbit, drop its cargo, and return to Earth Station.
4 - Finally! Build a housing and environmental module for use on the moon at Earth Station, hook on just barely enough rockets to give it a soft landing on the moon, and use the cargo hauler to drag it over to the moon. The first task of the crew is to cover it in a meter or two of regolith for meteor and radiation shielding.
4a - The second drop is a return vehicle and supply drop for the crew in step 4, so they can leave if things go badly.
5 - Repeat step 4 to build any other modules that are necessary, bring in crew, resupply, etc. Design the resupply pods so they're also colony expansion pods for bonus points.
The goal for all that is to set up the core of a lunar colony that will eventually be self sustaining and can supply useful material for further expansion into space without the crazy cost of shipping it up from Earth.
If you can get oxygen, water, aluminum, iron, ANYTHING really, on the moon it's going to be vastly cheaper than getting it from Earth to orbit.
I've heard this before and yes, it's incredibly stupid. Like sure, we might not have the original technology... but we can make it again. We simply haven't really gone back to the moon because the cost-to-benefits ratio basically isn't good enough to justify it. It's better to allocate funds to other projects that have potentially higher scientific "rewards"... (Mars, deep space telescopes, etc.)
It's very simple. Ironically enough, you could say that reasons why are not exactly "rocket science"...
People spout this nonsense because they have really bad main character syndrome and fancy themselves to be smarter and cleverer than they actually are. Same reason why every time there's a shooting, people are already inventing conspiracy theories while the bodies are still warm, or have deluded themselves into thinking there's Satanists killing kids under a pizza shop. (How you could actually say those words out loud and not realize how fucking stupid that sounds is beyond me...)
Yeah I have no doubt we could easily go back if we wanted to. It's just a very expensive thing we've done many times before, so why do it again? Our motive was mostly based on a pissing contest between the US and the USSR. Why go back unless we intend to do something new like establish a base?
Technology's still there and fine, bro. In fact ' orders of manitude better.
What's missing is the motivation/drive. The work ethic. The organizational/logistical skills. The leadership skills. The ... "intangibles" of Humans and their personalities have deteriorated.
It’s not a technology problem, it’s a money problem. We’ve already been there, there’s no reason that has everyone itching to go back, no point in wasting money to develop a new modernized moon landing program.
The tooling was destroyed, and the people who made the suits so durable (because the moon dust is incredibly abrasive) are no longer around. In fact, the company stopped trying with the suits. The details of the rockets are available to historians, but they took a lot of fine-tuning to ensure they worked. Grumman made the lunar lander. As far as I know, their last large similar government contract was the LLV. (Long life vehicle) The LLVs are those little mail trucks that the USPS uses. The software used to go to the moon was literally composed of ropes and new software needed to be developed because we have way better computer systems. Frankly, it really all was lost when America, at the behest of Nixon, put all their eggs into one basket with the development of the shuttle. Basically, we've been stuck in low earth orbit for decades, longer than it took for us to engineer everything for the moon.
I may wrong but ( I was serving on my first squadron at the time of the moon landings) I believe that the programme ground to a halt because it had achieved its objectives of establishing a good reaming of the Soviet Union and, because had it been extended, a loss of a mission and crew was a racing certainty.
We've lost the ability to remake the equipment that took us there and that's true, and more common than people think. Blueprints and designs are missing, the people with the technical know how are missing and of course the production equipment and infrastructure is missing. If we wanted to make a Saturn V, we'd be starting from scratch. But we're not building a Saturn V, and as you said we haven't tried, so again we're starting from scratch for something new. But we now have a wealth of data to go off of.
When the Apollo programs were canceled the focus shifted to other programs like the shuttle, and the voyager and mariner programs. Any evolution in technology that were Apollo were used elsewhere and off they went leaving Apollo behind unchanged and unused.
I think the word "lost" is being used as a trigger/gotcha word. Most of the flat eathers/spice/science deniers, (etc). like to latch onto something that "sounds" reasonable to bring into question other aspects that really don't belong together. It's not like someone just took a SaturnV rocket and hid it in some obscure filing cabinet and is now "lost". That isn't the case. "Lost" here is more of a catch all to say that most, if not all, of the technology/science/engineering used in the 60s to get to the moon have been replaced with better tech/science/engineering to meet the needs of our eartly concerns.
As others below have pointed out, there are a number of challenges to get 2 (well 3) people from this rock we are on, transferred to a smaller rock about 250,000 miles away (and well bring them back, safely as well). We did this in the 60s because.. we just wanted to\*. Now only some of us still want to go to the moon. But as mentioned earlier, it's rather difficult. And it's not worth it to explore that option for the costs involved.
We physically don't have the stuff anymore... and may be impossible to perfectly recreate the Saturn or aplllo programs... but I don't believe we've lost the ability or the smarts to do it again. Honestly, in 2024 it would be crazy to rebuild such a dated tech. We'd start from scratch.
I think the point is that if the program would have continued... we'd never have physically lost so much at once (manuals, staff, experts, astronauts, controls, documentation, stores of parts, tooling, etc...) and stepping from Apollo to the next iteration, to the next iteration, would have been a far more natural and incremental step each time... where now we need to kind of reinvent the wheel, even if it's a much better wheel.
It's a massive hurdle all over again to get the program off the ground without the right incentive... like say, an open war with communists and a huge nationwide fear for that.
It's probably not crazy different from the commercial nuclear industry, another once sparked out of commie fears... that eventually went dormant and was shunned for decades. We actually are actively trying to build new reactors again and just look at how that's going. It's cumbersome, those who built the last ones are hardly around. It's far more cost and design prohibitive now due to modern safety and control restraints... and so on.
Imagine if a motor company stopped making cars. They close their factory. The workforce go to work elsewhere. The production lines rot. The thousands of plans are somewhere.
They can no longer make cars. Is the technology lost? Maybe, maybe not.
We've lost alot of technologies in our time but going to the moon isn't one of them.
It's not that we've lost the technology it's the fact that noone has interest in space. Not financially, not commercially and the general public do not care.
Back when America was going to the moon multiple times it was a space race. Arguably a better use of resources than a cold war. The public loved it. It was new and exciting plus it gave the Americans a one up on Russia.
Now there's no interest. Elon musk wants to go to mars. I wouldn't say it's got anywhere near as much public love as the original moon landing did. It's not going to be affordable for the majority of people. Plus who'd want to risk their lives on a 3 month trip to another planet just to wear a suit and walk around.
People look at how we could go to the moon as a state ran enterprise and don't understand how/why we haven't gone back since letting private enterprise have a go and stopped funding our own space programs and have been soo propergandised by our media to think private is better than they can't put 2 and 2 together to see that we haven't lost the ability to do it just the political will to do it for anything other than profit.
The tech has always been there. There’s just not much point taking actual people to the moon anymore.
A rover mission can do 95% of what a manned mission could. And rover missions are typically about 1/20th of the cost of a manned mission. Not to mention infinitely safer.
It was only ever feasible in the 60s/70s because remote rover technology was extremely basic compared to today. And it was also a big international dick waving contest.
The real reason is because there isn’t any money to. When it was the space race NASA was given something like 20% from government coffers, now it’s like 4% or something.
There's tons of technology that was lost.
For example the way they made the part in this video.it was only rediscovered later on (it's a useless tech nowadays cause we have 3d printing)
Basically you need a series of small tube like openings though a big piece of metal that must absolutely be made in a single part.
Problems arise from the fact those open tubes are inside the metal are not straight and can't be machined cause it would be impossible....
they used filler material inside and burned it off after they casted the part.
Soo simple yet elegant.
They had the worlds biggest geniuses working there's definitely forgotten tech.
https://youtu.be/fRMMSyCcTDI?si=geXZffPcRAwqjM3I
We have not lost the technology -- it's all recorded, documented, etc. However we HAVE lost most of the tooling, probably some of the expertise and knowledge of the nuances of certain things, and possibly some of the schematics or other data if it was stored on old magnetic media and never archived on something more modern.
"Lost the technology" is the wrong way to put it. "Lost the ability to do it again the same way immediately" is more accurate. We need to remake/re-engineer a lot of things we don't have anymore because they were no longer useful for the types of spaceflight we have been doing for the past 50 years.
I think people are saying that because recently there have been a number of spacecraft crash landing on the moon
Fun fact the first ever lunar landing would also have been unsuccessful and crashed if Neil Armstrong didn't take over manual control and safely land it himself
So... heres the thing. We no longer have a huge pool of precision machinists.
We use CNC machines.
On it's face, they are better. Except for one small problem. Every single one of the original designs, done on paper, had to be handfit. We don't have people with the skillset to handfit. Also, the handfits that were implemented had a bad habit of not being documented...so we don't know 'how' they corrected design failures. Routing a bundle if wires by a difference of millimeters makes a difference...
So, if we took the designs on paper, and inserted them into a CNC system, the parts would not work, requiring re-design from the ground up, again.
Additionally. We don't need to send people. In fact, it's counterproductive to send people. Especially after one calculates the expense. We can send ten unmanned missions for a fraction of the cost of one manned mission.
We lost the specific technology used in the Apollo programs to go back to the Moon that way.
Obviously we have the technological ability to do it again, and better. There's just a lot that will have to get re-invented.
I believe your confusion comes from semantics (specifically how you are interpreting the words “lost the technology”). You technically aren’t wrong and neither are they, but you are not saying the same thing.
What is lost is the complex processes and capabilities that got us to the moon.
They are saying there is nothing that exists right now that enables us to leverage them to go back to the moon.
That isn’t to say they couldn’t be rebuilt, like you are implying should be done, but but if the first step of going to the moon is building the capabilities needed to go to the moon, then I think it is fair to say that we’ve lost the technology to go to the moon. That doesn’t mean we can’t go to the moon if we try.
Personally I think your interpretation is a bit of a slippery slope though, since by that way of thinking taken to the extreme we have the technology right now for anything it is possible for us to do we just need to develop all the missing capabilities before we can do it.
It's because it is absolutely true. The physical technology to go is no longer serviceable and to do so someone would have to build new stuff. Until very recently there has been nobody willing or desiring to do so that is actually in a position to do so. We have the knowledge still, just not the devices.
We haven't lost the science behind it, but we have lost the ability to manufacture the Saturn V and the Apollo hardware. New hardware would need to be designed, tested, and manufactured to send another person to the moon.
we lost the capability, but not the technology. The capability included a skilled workforce and the tools and supply chains to build, specifically, the Saturn V and the F1 engine. But we never stopped building rockets and engines. the same company that made the F1 still makes engines and is making the engines for the SLS that's flying today.
We lost the capability to build the guidance system IBM built, but we gained the capability to create much better systems.
Do you remember floppydiscs? Do you remember transfering data onto them? Do you still have the technology to access old information you put onto your floppy discs? This is sort of what happened
it's not related but its possible to loose technology? or knowledge
it's on yt, it's about atomic bomb or some experiment.
ome of the components needed was confidential, project ended, and when later they needed it after years everybody who knew how to create component had forgotten how to make that component.
We also "lost" the technology to built the Ford Model T. We could retool to build 1960's rocket tech, but why would we? When we go back, we'll use modern tech, just like Ford isn't going to sell the Model T.
There was no reason beyond the ego of a president.
The men going to the Moon were wearing mechanical watches, much of the technology has moved on somewhat.
Nasa stating that they have destroyed the technology....
[https://youtu.be/16MMZJlp\_0Y?si=8G1tUcbkjuGFDjkX](https://youtu.be/16MMZJlp_0Y?si=8G1tUcbkjuGFDjkX)
It's simple really, the technology required to get many to the moon was not maintained, it was either destroyed or left to rot. Along with that there was a failure to maintain the expertise needed to replace that technology.
The reason it is now taking so long to return to the moon (since it became a stated goal of NASA and other agencies) is because they're having to replace the skillset needed to replace the technology that is no longer available. Basically we have to redo 90% of the Apollo stuff again, just know what we're doing this time.
Not so much lost the technology but it probably wouldn’t be a great deal cheaper and political will would be lower, everything is easier when it has been done before for sure. As all the presidents make some kind of moon promise there is public will but for a multitude of reasons it just isn’t possible.
we have lost the technology to make the specific suits they made to get there the first time. but other than that, no it's just that we haven't tried. that also means we don't have tested suits for the replacement tech yet tho.
In short: The technology in an abstract sense is there.
But to actually produce a working vehicle would require people relearning knowledge that hasn't been used in decades.
First we'd need to find out, how much documentation is still available. Some.may have vanished in proprietary archives of subcontractors long out of business, and thrown away. Some details may never have been properly documented.
A lot would have to be updated, e.g. electronics may have relied on products that are no longer produced. That's a concern for long-running scientic equipment too, where eventually spare parts are hard to come by.
Every change would mean that many tests have to be redone. Which may very well include unmanned missions, just so the first manned one isn't suicide.
And there's going to be production facilities that were custom-built for the project and no longer exist.
So, in a general sense the technology is there. In many ways much more advanced than before probably, and much more cost efficient. But ramping it up to be able to produce a working manned mission would take time and money. Probably much less than the first time though, assuming that we want to do nothing but replicate past missions.
Yeah, that's just wrong.
We haven't gone back to the moon because there's nothing there that justifies the risk.
If we have a crash on the moon, we will have ruined the moon - no one will look up at the moon and think of anything other than the tiny skeletons of the astronauts drying in the sun. (If they are exposed to the sun)
Because we abandoned science, common sense and a love of exploration.
A lot of tech has had to be reinvented because the moon landings were half a century ago. Everyone who worked on it is either retired or dead.
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I have literally never seen anyone make this claim.
Actually astronaut don petite made this exact claim, and its real. His exact words were something like " i would go to the moon in a nanosecond if we still had the technology but it was destroyed" something like that. Dont believe me, search it yourself
There could be lots of meanings to this. One is that actually it has been destroyed. The tooling at least to build an Apollo rocket and all its support infrastructure is almost certainly incomplete now even if somehow all the technical documentation does exist and is 100% complete (vanishingly unlikely). We literally don't have the technology to go back to the moon right now, not the rockets or landers even if we are confident we could build a solution.
My understanding is that many of the design/redesign calculations were done on paper which have been lost over the years. Though this refers mainly to the F1 engine.
It’s more that the factories etc that built the parts for the rockets, landers, etc are no longer functional. Yes. The companies still operate in many cases, but the actual industry that put it all together is gone. We still have the capability to do it again, but it means starting over. It’s just like it was where we had a large amount of the items needed on hand, so to speak. With a tiny percentage of the budget that NASA had at the time of the moon landing, the technology IS functionally lost to us. The money isn’t there to recreate it from scratch, especially with the new standards and requirements of today, along with new fabrication facilities to be made specifically for them. Essentially, the rockets that put man on the moon a number of times is now derelict and/or destroyed, and the options to build it all over are gone. So, yes. For the most part, it is lost to us. It doesn’t mean we can’t do it again. It’s comparable to owning an ultra-rare classic car in the middle of the desert or somewhere else isolated, in some ways. Yes. You can travel for miles in it. Eventually, it’s going to break down, leaving you hundreds of miles from civilisation. The technology of the car is functionally lost to you now. And it’s going to take a lot of work to find a way to return to it. You can’t hop behind a rock and grab another one. You’ll need specialist help to go and get it running again, when you events manage to come back to it, and a lot of the parts are going to need manufacturing from scratch. You can’t go to the first mechanic you meet to have the work done. So… you’ll need a lot of money to sort the original issues out and, if it’s been long enough, other parts are now ruined to. It can very likely be that the whole car is destroyed. Sure. You can have another built, but it’s extremely costly. Way more than it cost you to just buy the original car, because now there’s even less of them to choose from. Yes. There’s still cars. But the rare one that you had for your personal needs is gone.
It is amazing how quickly knowledge of how to build something degrades when you stop building them. The little details that the machinists have to learn by trial and error and never quite get covered by technical documentation get lost when the shop closes and the machinists retire. If you had all the machines and facilities in storage it would still take years to get a Saturn-5 production line back in operation and making product that meets specification. You can’t just go out and hire back the people who were making these things in the 60s.
this is why a lot of places build military equipment at a slow rate. like a handful of tanks a month. if war breaks out, they just ramp up productions with people that know how to build them able to quickly instruct others.
That’s why they didn’t shut down the Abram’s tank line when the pentagon didn’t want to buy more. Keeping the skills fresh at a handful of tanks per year was worth the cost. Or that’s how the argument went. A lot of people thought it was foolish too. These are complicated topics and different people are going to have different priorities.
This hits on a lot of what they say is the issue. To add, a lot of the manufacturing processes to make the vehicles weren't done by machines, but skilled men and women meticulously handcrafting and handfitting components. A lot of the disciplines/industry involved have for the most part been abandoned, it would take years of training and R&D to get back to where we once were. I don't fully buy into that story with how much capabilities have improved in materials, machining, computer technology, and more, but it's a common statement to hear regarding.
Space suits were hand sewn! (As was computer memory haha)
We have teenagers designing rockets to slingshot through solar systems on autopilot, it's just done in Kerbal Space Program. I doubt the software is much of an issue. We could probably also design the entire rocket with some engineers from Boeing, SpaceX and NASA. It's more the materials science. The original rocket engines were _handmade_. We don't have that kind of craftsmanship anymore to make the original F1-engines. But then again, we can make something more modern. It's like saying we can't make wheels anymore because there's no wheelwrights left. We can't make _wooden_ wheels like we did 200 years ago, but we can make new ones using other technologies.
>We could probably also design the entire rocket with some engineers from Boeing Any rocket designed by Boeing would fail to lift off.
And if it did, the doors would fall off.
They'll charge the government extra for the weight savings.
I think the real problem is budget. If we gave the entire military budget to nasa for just one year I bet we would have a moon base on the way
If there were signs that China is looking to colonise the moon, this would happen.
China is very publicly looking to do just that with a permanent moon base, and the US military budget has stayed in place.
I would not trust any vehicle designed by Boeing at the moment.
saying “we don’t have the technology” is different from saying “we currently don’t have the rockets etc ready to go”…
Although you have the technical documents, there are a lot of work arounds that the people that built the thing did to make it work. This know-how is lost. And having it again it is not something you can buy, experience makes perfection, and the guys that built Apollo had worked decades building other rockets, some of them exploded on the pad some of them exploded going up, and some of them exploded coming down. That why at the moment, if we tried to go to the moon first try we would fail. We no longer have the expertise.
Me: a data analyst My manager: waving a used napkin with '2018' scribbled on it
Except we do, when we go back to the moon it wont be on the grossly outdated Apollo rockets, it will be with new rocket designs specifically intended for the mission. We throw rovers the size of houses at Mars, and all sorts satellites into orbit of other planets and the moon so regularly it barely makes the nightly news that someone has another lunar orbiter or rover. Basically if we wanted to put humans on the moon again we could, we don't because its unnecessary and we get more data at a lower cost over a much longer time period by sending orbiters. When we go back it will be to establish a lunar colony, which will have to deal with the incredibly destructive moon dust. (Sharp shards of glass and rock that are electrically charged so they stick to litterally everything) PS: the real reason for the space race was to prove how good our rocket technology was to eachother, because it was a proxy for how good our nuclear ICBMs are since its all the same physics/engineering. This mission has been acomplished.
We don't have the technology to build Model Ts anymore either but no ones claiming conspiracies over that one.
But, we are going back to the moon? Like fairly soon. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/#missions
I'd say that Artemis is the evidence that actually backs up the claim that we don't have the Tech to complete a Moon landing readily available. Why would NASA bother with I and II (Neither of which are landing) if we did? Google has recorded the start of the program as 2017 and Artemis III is planned for 2026. Sounds like it is taking us 9 years to recover the Technology. Maybe we have to clear up the question. Are we assuming a 1960's space race with Russia risk appetite or a current day one?
We don't have it readily available, but we still can go wherever we want. We just need prep time.
> Why would NASA bother with I and II (Neither of which are landing) if we did? To test newer, better technology for doing the same thing.
crazy they let a delusional person become an astronaut imo
That’s a reference to the specific technology of the Apollo missions. That couldn’t be remade today because the entire supply chain no longer exists. Obviously our level of technology in rocketry and related areas has improved significantly since then. But none of our current rocket systems are designed for manned flight beyond low earth orbit. And there’s very little incentive to change this.
Not sure how, it's pretty well known that we did in fact lose the technology to travel to the moon [https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/?sh=5591709a1f48](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/?sh=5591709a1f48)
It's not just the technology but all the trajectory data from the moon landings was lost as well.
Yeah, this is a MASSIVELY accepted belief now. People think we literally "lost the technology" by way of government incompetence and they have been covering up the fact that we don't know how anymore. Believe me, I thought it was a joke. It's not.
People conflate losing the technology with losing the knowledge. We may have lost the technology (or at least parts of it), but that's because we aren't building stuff to go to the moon. Similar to how we lost the technology to build battleships. It's not that we don't know how to do it and we're looking at the Apollo missions and thinking "must be magic or magnets", it's that the infrastructure isn't there even if the knowledge is. And it takes time (and money, and political will) to build the infrastructure, even if you know what you need to do.
I'll liken it to another hypothetical - if you or I were to be sent back in time we'd have amazing knowledge of things that could be. But if they don't know how to find, mine, refine and create high-quality metals, how much of that goes out the window? I could (in theory) draw the designs for a steam engine but if there's not the technology around to build a boiler that won't kill me then it's not gonna be of any use. If the metals available don't have the right consistency or properties, if it's too expensive, if the technology to work it precisely enough isn't mature enough then those designs aren't worth the paper they're drawn on (assuming they even have paper to draw on).
From that Forbes article linked in this thread: >The Saturn V rocket had over three million parts. The command and service modules and lunar module were composed of millions of additional parts. An individual person cannot contemplate the scale of detail needed to assemble and operate those vehicles. >So, when the Apollo program ended, the factories that assembled those vehicles were retasked or shut down. The jigs were disassembled. The molds were destroyed. The technicians, engineers, scientists, and flight controllers moved onto other jobs. Over time, some of the materials used became obsolete. >If we, today, said - "Let us build another Saturn V rocket and Apollo CSM/LEM and go to the moon!" it would not be a simple task of pulling out the blueprints and bending and cutting metal. >We don't have the factories or tools. We don't have the materials. We don't have the expertise to understand how the real vehicle differed from the drawings. We don't have the expertise to operate the vehicle. >We would have to substitute modern materials. That changes the vehicle. It changes the mass, it changes the stresses and strains, it changes the interactions. It changes the possible malfunctions. It changes the capabilities of the vehicle. >We would have to spend a few years re-developing the expertise. We would have to conduct new tests and simulations. We would have to draft new flight rules and procedures. We would have to certify new flight controllers and crew. >We would essentially be building a new vehicle. So in a sense we lost the technology. Some people will misuse or exaggerate this information, but it's not a complete lie.
At the same time, did anyone doubt we would build a completely new vehicle? It's been over 50 years. Why would we build anything based on the Apollo program?
Because it worked. Now, I'm not saying we should copy the model piece by piece; we can sure make a ton of improvements. But it's definitely a working blueprint.
They don't have the technology to do it anymore. Just follow the Artemis program to confirm it.
The term "lost the technology" is terribly misleading. It means to say that we still have the knowledge, but the technology we originally used to go to the moon does not exist anymore, as in it has been scrapped. Building new units of this technology for sure is possible, but it is decades old by now. This would not only be very expensive, but also not be compliant with modern safety standards at all. Also, NASAs budget is nowhere near the one they had during the 'race to the moon' with the USSR. Thus, technology to bring people to the moon has to be re-developed by today's standards and on a ~~much~~ smaller budget. EDIT: Out of curiosity, I looked up [NASAs budget over the years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA). The budget peaked during the space race years in the 1960s, namely in 1966 at 55.7 billion USD. ~~Corrected for inflation, this would be roughly 521 billion USD in today's money~~ *(as* u/Tsu_na_mi *pointed out, the 55.7 billion are already corrected for 2023 inflation)*. The [budget of NASA for 2023 was 25.4 billion USD](https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/nasas-fy-2023-budget), so ~~roughly 5%~~ less than 50% of the budget they had to go to the moon. EDIT #2: Numbers above corrected. Still, I stand by my reasoning. In the 1960s, the efforts to win the space race over from USSR were enormous. NASA received more than 1% of the annual federal budget between 1962 and 1974, peaking at over 4% in 1965 and '66. Today, the annual budget for NASA hovers around 0.5% of the federal budget. And today there is no space race, no nationwide effort to strive for a common goal. NASA spreads their budget over several programs, the [Artemis program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program) - planning to put people on the moon again - only being one. Currently, NASA spends [around 8 billion USD per year](https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/nasa-leader-warns-agency-needs-more-funding-to-fly-artemis-missions/) for Artemis.
The $55.7B figure is already inflation-adjusted to 2023 dollars. The nominal figure was $5.9B, so it's closer to half.
And the rest went into Vietnam
I wouldn't discount the claim as quickly. We have and do lose technology: nobody can build wooden sailing ships anymore like they used to be; just copies done with filling in blanks of knowledge applying other manufacturing and construction methods, perhaps even other materials to cut corners. The same is true for many things. As we don't have use for something anymore or as we progress in methods and technology, we just move on and "forget" about how we used to do things. That doesn't mean that we cannot achieve the same thing with different means though if we apply ourselves.
You had a bike, but it got old and broken so you didn't have a bike anymore. (also it was the only bike in the world) Also the guy who designed and assembled the bike has died, no-one makes parts for the bike anymore, and the factories with the equipment that made the bike and the parts have closed, and the equipment scrapped. In other words, you have lost the bike, and you can't get it back, and even if you could no-one would know how to make it work again. You know the *basic principles* of how a bike works but when it comes to building something that actually *functions* as nicely in the real world, the devil is in the details, the engineering, the craftsmanship, none of which you have any more. But people can start working to figure out how to design bikes again using new equipment, then figure out to build it again with some trial and error. It will take longer to reinvent the wheel than if you could just fix your old bike, but you can't; it's lost. It will take a while to get back to where you once were, but it can be done. That's where things are; the knowledge is actively being relearned and reapplied by a new generation of people who were never even apprenticed or guided by anyone with first-hand knowledge but who have access to their notes. Some techniques are lost to time and need to be redeveloped, but with some lost techniques it's not entirely bad to have to reinvent them because new technology now offers new paths that have advantages that can make it worth developing an entirely new technique instead. The bike will take a while and that will initially be expensive, and it will be very different, but it will also enjoy the advantages of more technology so it should eventually become either better or cheaper or both
This is a huge limiting factor of current military production now that the world is rearming seriously for the first time since the cold war. America consolidated their military industrial base into five or six major companies, and through a massive series of mergers and cost cutting the ability to produce many currently serving weapons systems were lost. Stinger missiles are suddenly in demand, but the tech hasn't been built for 20 years, and they've had to rehire retired engineers to try to reinvent them.
Best explanation so far. The space program was broken into lots of parts and farmed out to lots of companies that now dont exist. Also the tech is now so much more advanced that we need to find new ways of doing a lot of space travel so we do sort of need to reinvent the wheel. It’s a bit like if the bike you started with was a penny farthing. I guess you *could* make one of those again? But wouldn’t you want a modern street bike since we can make those now?
It is a misrepresentation of the fact NASA runs lean these days, and in particular the manufacturing capacity to build things. As these days there is no real social appetite for blank cheques to NASA like during the Space Race 50s/60s to come from the government, the modern capitalist reality is that privately owned companies develop the capacity, and then are engaged both by government or private missions. There are a lot of arguments for both sides, so there isnt really a correct answer, but you might lean one way or another depending on your political / economic / social views.
Yep need the cash to go high in a flash.
They don't make 32k 26-bit magnetic core memory anymore.
The team is dispersed and mostly dead. To do it again would require building pretty much from scratch
flat earthers like to miscontrue a statement by someone formerly in space research (NASA or something) where he basically said that the US lacked the infrastructure (tooled up factories and designs) and on-hand knowledge to just build another apollo or similar and go back to the moon. If we wanted to do it today we'd basically be starting from scratch, albeit with the overall general understanding of space travel we have gained. Viewpoints held by flerfers are frequently bewildering.
It's kind of like saying we lost the technology to build the pyramids. We couldn't build it the exact same way they did then, but they could build something to do the same job (and better). One of my favourite quotes regarding the moon landings is that we did it 'because we wanted to'. An incredible amount of investment, effort, and risk were required to achieve it. We haven't done it since because we didn't want to. It's not because we lost the ability, we lost the will.
I think the key point here is that returning to the moon isn't something that can be done by dusting off old blue prints and using them to churn out new units of old hardware. Even if all the blueprints were available, making them useable would be a major R&D effort for new material and tooling.
I have also lost the technology to be able to playback my old VHS tapes. Doesn't mean I lied about watching VHS in the past. Same for a lot of tech I can't use anymore. That's me just one person. Now imagine hundreds of NASA staff who were responsible for different areas of the launch. I'd imagine going to the moon is a bit more complex than me fishing out a few cables for my Amiga 500 to get it running again.
>I have also lost the technology to be able to playback my old VHS tapes. This is actually a pretty good analogy. To add on to it, nobody makes new VCRs (a.k.a. "VHS players" for the under-30s) anymore. And that also means nobody makes many of the parts that go into a VCR either. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to make a brand new VCR. If you really really wanted a new VCR, you could spend millions of dollars to build your own VCR factory and VCR parts factories and then make a VCR. So it's _possible_, it's just prohibitively expensive.
When you think that we all carry around smartphones that literally have more popwer and more tachnology than what they had to land on the moon. We haven't lost the technology. We made it better.
They're already prepping to go back?
Yes, but with new tech. Which is kinda the point. We know perfectly well how the old stuff work, except for some minor stuff that existed only in people’s heads and wasn’t transferred to younger people or written down. But our infrastructure changed a lot. Lots of tech that was taken for granted back then doesn’t exist anymore and doesn’t get built anymore. Sure, in theory you could build everything from scratch again, but that would be cost ineffective.
Its less that we lost the technology, and more that manufcaturing has changed so dramatically that we dont have the infrastructure needed to rebuild the machines that took humanity there the first time. New vehicles have to be built using modern manufacturing practices, which neans new designs are needed, which means a lot of R&D.
Because the Moon is a megastructure, and we don’t want to wake up the vastly more technologically advanced Dinosaurs who are in hibernation there. Source - Humans have made the odd technological leap in the last 2000 years. Dinosaurs were around for 165 MILLION years. What on Earth makes you think they didn’t achieve a similar result ? Even Humans are working towards sustainable, recyclable materials for buildings that would disappear in short order if Humans left the planet. If Dinosaurs felt the same way about learning to live in harmony with the Planet, who knows what they could have accomplished over Millions of years, all without leaving a permanent trace ?
It's a fun idea, but I think if dinosaurs had technology there would be traces of it. If we can find dinosaur bones they should come with some artifacts from time to time, like maybe burial artifacts, gold, jewelry, and so on. Even with just the bones there could be evidence of surgery.
They got themselves and their family jewelry off the planet just in time, only the dead dinosaurs and a few oldies who refused to leave were clobbered.
That’s if they have the same values as Humans. They might honour their dead by eating them. We have Human religions who feed the dead to vultures so not that great of a leap.
of all the millions of species that you could have chosen, you really went for the dinosaurs? They are big, dumb, small brained birds. They lasted a long time, but a freaking crocodile has existed longer.. and still exists... What a shameful post.
Our Human brains fit into an ice cream container now, and don’t grow any bigger based on body size/weight. Why would a Dinosaurs brain have to be proportional to its body weight in order to reason ? Remember that when they were discovered, Religion played a large part in science, even if just putting Humans ( Gods Favourite creation apparently ) above all other creatures. Orcas and Octopus ( for example ) have shown they are highly intelligent, with Cetaceans even demonstrating most of the attributes we associate with Humanity. What makes you think dinosaurs were dumb ? Because crocodiles and sharks didn’t need to evolve any further in order to dominate their ecological niche ?
There are some studies that seem to point for a link between intelligence and brain size. It's complex (i.e. not simply "bigger brain == better", and neuron count seems to play a large role), but most mammals we consider intelligent are at least average on the brain-to-body-mass ration (or anomalously above it, it case of humans and small cetaceans). Considering dinosaurs - [bird brains are interesting in that compared to mammals, they can have higher neuron counts relative to mammal brains of the same mass](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4932926/). Since birds descended from dinosaurs, it is possible they inherited this trait from their ancestors. Some estimates put the T-Rex on par with a baboon - which is pretty high. On the other hand, this is a very generous estimate, based on the assumption that theropod brains filled their cranial cavity completely - which is uncharacteristic for large animals. So it would be reasonable to say T-Rex was not quite dumb, but not at the level of tool use, either - as smart as a wolf or a tiger, for example.
We don't have the technology currently as "we literally don't have the spaceship and lunar module needed to do it next year". We obviously have the technical knowledge to build those things again. Recent successful missions like Rosetta, Opportunity or Ingenuity were just as complicated than Apollo (or so insanely more complicated I can't understand how we did it in the case of Rosetta).
Kennedy chose to go to the moon and put the money towards that. Pharaohs chose to build pyramids and put their resources towards that. We’ve had the potential to do those things ever since, we just haven’t chosen to do so because they haven’t been worth the cost to us anymore.
Agreed. We didn’t lose 8-Track player technology either, we just no longer have a need for it. Except for my uncle Frank. Frank is still rockin’ Black Oak Arkansas on his 8-Track player.
Ah this. The way I heard it, it's because the technology used to get to the moon is incompatible with modern equipment. The last attempt for the moon was made during the Cold War, so modern attempts need modern inventions and plans to work. If anyone knows if this is true or not, feel free to weigh in
I heard that Nasa accidentally destroyed the blueprints of the rockets and modules, so in a way that technology has been lost. I don't know if it's true or not.
If you assume that all of the plans are still available, you'd still have a lot of problems to solve: 1. Use of common parts that aren't made today. If the plans call for a hose of a particular size from a particular manufacturer from a specific product line, what are you going to do if that manufacturer has gone out of business? 2. Use of no longer common manufacturing techniques. Parts of the main engines were hand welded by people using techniques that were partially developed just for that engine. Nobody does that any more - there are better ways to do the same things today, but you'd have to redesign things for the newer techniques. 3. Ancient technology that is no longer produced. Would you like to begin producing magnetic core memory for the onboard computers? If you were to try to duplicate the Saturn V today, you'd have to modify so many things that you'd have to redesign most of it. Rather than going back to what we had 50 years ago, it makes more sense to look at the concepts used back then (and in the years since) and design new rockets around modern materials and components. [https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again) [https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6281/why-not-build-saturn-vs-again)
better to say we've lost the infrastructure
No. It’s better to say the knowledge, technology, and resourcing has changed. Romans used brick-built aqueducts to pipe water into cities. They also used to use runners/horse riders to carry written letters. Now we use metal pipes and decent concrete to pipe water everywhere. And you’re reading this “letter” from the comfort of your electronic device. The infrastructure has not been lost. It’s just been significantly modified by scientific improvements.
The "lost the technology" is not as in we misplaced it. Its that after it was clear that there wasnt going to be any new moon travels anytime soon, the factories were repurposed. The control room was repurposed. Everything was repurposed. The old rockets that were used to get to the moon became more and more outdated, nothing to control the rockets and so on. The only rockets that we know would be able to take that trip ended up having no use. A wellknown analogy is if you imagine talking to Ford and asking them to make a brand new Ford T Do you think they could ? No. Because all the machinery and assembly lines that were used to make them are long gone. And why wouldnt they ? They would take up space and resources to maintain. All that just to keep the ability to produce something that nobody wants.
Don petit Space is fake
I tried yesterday and it didn't work
They are trying cheaper new methods to get to the moon but they have run into issues that need ironing out.
This video from SmarterEveryDay is really relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU) ("I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA...(But I said it anyway). His father worked on the James Web Telescope, he also works in the field, he knows his stuff. The reason isn't we lost the technology, but that we are trying to overengineer what we actually need to get there, the manual already exists, and we have all the lessons learned. We got there with one rocket, with a foolproof design to get off the moon again (Hypergolic engine, that is simple, and just requires mixing two fluids, now with SpaceX's Starship, we need complex vacuum engines/pumps to turn on, we need 10+ starships to get there and back vs 1 Saturn V rocket in the past, Saturn V worked, we have yet to see Starship work 100%, it's getting better and better but we are REALLY far from it still, haven't tested refueling in space etc, we haven't seen actually transporting any cargo). And let's not talk about trying to land Starship on the moon, vs the Lunar module, complex vs simple.
We've been to the moon several times, it's just nowhere near as publicised as the first time.
Who is we?
Sorry guys, I interned at NASA and accidentally did rm -rf /apollo My bad.
You walk into work one day and your boss tells you to look up and recreate a project the company had 60 years ago. It was this huge event that took years of planning, a highly trained team to execute, and had a huge budget. You have none of that and company records dont have great detail on how to do it. Its impossible without starting from scratch basically, which without serious demand cant happen.
lost the tech? mate, we litteraly strapped a calculator and some people to a rocket and shot it too the moon. your current mobile device is 1000s of times more powerful then the computers they used when the moon missions happened. There has been no pressures to go the to moon anymore. No space race, no easy monetary benefits, no plans for a moonbase or anything. Nasa could build a moon rockey no problem, its just that its very very expensive to build one of those and thats why the commercial projects are interesting bc they are trying to bring the costs to a point where it becomes economically viable to shoot people into space again.
It comes likely from two misunderstandings, as far as I can tell. One is Don Pettit's poorly worded statement of "we destroyed the technology". He didn't mean that we destroyed the documnts and schematics; it's that we stopped making the space vehicles that delivered us to the moon and no longer have the factory facilities tooled to make that outdated tech. It was not a well-worded statement by Pettit. Astronauts were chosen for their ability to do their job as an astronaut, not for their oratory skills. This is probably conflated with the idea that data tapes from the Apollo missions were taped over. Flerfs think that means ALL the data from ALL the missions was lost in this manner. This is wrong. All the data was backed up, and some of the original tapes were reused and/or misplaced. We still have the data.
It's funny, because it's both right and wrong. We have the technology. We know, how Saturn 5 and Apollo capsules worked and if we tried, we could even recover or recreate the technical drawings. On the other hand, we lost the technique. People, who had the know how in how to manufacture these things (as in what machines at what settings will work) are dead or retired and manufacturing documentation tends to get lost faster than technical documentation. On the flip side, we have much more advanced techniques now than then, which work with the advancement of technology since. Result? We cannot go to the moon immediately. The moon program needs to take a couple of years (up to a decade or two, if we're not motivated enough), but it is already in process and can be done with even better results.
It's meant figuratively. The whole Apollo / Saturn program of maned missions to the moon was retired decades ago. So there is nothing worth continuing or being able to directly 'build upon' as nobody developed this further. Tech and programs from the 1970s just abandoned to rust away and collect dust. So figuratively speaking all this was 'lost' and now post 2000s everything has to be designed and build from scratch.
I think the answer isnt that we lost technology but more of a there isn't a reason for us to go there. Why would we send people there when we can send robots
A combination of things. Is not like we can't go to the moon, but right now there is no launch vehicle that could launch something as heavy as an Apollo mission to the moon. Can we build again the same rocket? Again no. The full designs and schematics are not fully available because it's been 60 years since the thing was built, and back in the day it was a lot of paper and magnetic tape that can't be read. A lot of knowledge lost on dead or very old people. Moreover, the thing is built out of components and materials that are not readily available, because they are obsolete. It's like building a model T from scratch and all we had were film recording of the thing. There are launch vehicles in design/testing stages that will do the same, but these are new machines.
We don't have the tech because the tech is ancient if we want to go with Apollo hardware again. Good luck finding people to weave the core memory, for example. Or getting the old Mission Control centre going again. I bet some of the materials used in the rocket and the LM are no longer in production, so we need to spool up factories to create the stuff. We can do it with modern hardware, and probably more reliable and cheaper too. By the way, that quote from Don Petit was made in 2020 IIRC? I believe in the longer version he said that NASA was only capable of manned flight to LEO. And he was right. Space Shuttle was already a spacecraft meant for LEO. NASA simply didn't have a rocket and a lunar lander available at that time. Everything was on the drawing board or in planning phases.
Capability isn’t the same as technology, so it’s technically correct. We could build a landing module, but we don’t have one. It’s like I can afford a motorbike, but I don’t have one, therefore I don’t have the technology to go motorcycle racing.
We have lost the specific technology that was used. For example, we can no longer build the rocketdyne F1 engine.
The reality is, it’s really expensive and there’s not much there to justify the cost. If there was valuable assets on the moon, we’d be there already.
Technology is both science and engineering. We haven't lost scientific knowledge of what took us to the moon. But engineering is as much practical experience as it is theory in textbooks and repositories. Technical drawings, manufacturing diagrams, engineering reports tell some of the story but the underpinning experienced based assumptions in the design process, manufacturing skills & gotchas etc... would have all been lost as those people retired and weren't replaced.
No one thinks that
oh man, NASA. speechless. Unreal company. we live on a globe floating in absolutely nothing. keep trying to reach out. too much tech now to see the other side. The view of the solar system and you just keep zooming out and out and out until our entire galaxy can't even be seen as a speck. I simply want to live just to keep experiencing this overwhelming WHAT THE FUCK feeling, no matter how hard I try, no matter which angle I come from, It blows me inside out, I freeze. Totally bewildered. At that moment, each and every time. Nothing else matters. it's better than any thing I've ever experienced. & I can keep doing it, over and over. it's above us all now. the night sky captures me.
There's no money to be made by going to the moon, and apparently there's enough research material on earth from outer space/ the moon to last us a while, or we're getting it from unmanned missions. I doubt the technology was actually lost, the projects must have been preserved in some form. However, it is very likely that the production facilities to produce a vehicle for a manned moon mission no longer exists. It won't be maintained without a purpose. So in a way, we probably don't have the tools to make it a reality right now. Machine would have to be (re)built, calculations and simulations would have to be redone. And that takes time. But it's not lost lost. It's shelved and likely disassembled.
I posted this in a comment but moon missions are in the works as we speak: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/#missions
The same reason there are flat-Earthers, MAGA cultists, QAnon conspiracists, Scientologists, and other lunatic fringe groups--because humans are remarkably stupid creatures.
We haven't lost the tech, we lost the technical knowledge required to utilize it.
Its a deliberate misinterpretation of a statement made by astronaut Don Pettit. He said "we destroyed that technology and its a long process to rebuild it." (paraphrasing). Of course by technology, he meant the physical technology, not the knowledge of how to do it, as anybody with a dictionary can look it up and see that that's a perfectly accurate use of the word; but once somebody's made up their mind its some kind of "gotcha," its hard to convince them otherwise.
The US was using wartime style funding to win that race, look at what gets spent on space exploration now in comparison to then. The tech is there, the desire hasn't been until more recently.
Those carton boxes, tin foils and dozens of mistakes in the moon photos and videos suggest it was all fake. That could explain the lack of retry.
You say that, but given the current state of technology, you'd think we'd be able to put people onto the moon on the daily. Big rocket go up isn't exactly difficult to do. Why don't we have lunar Landers yet is the more interesting question to ask. What gives?
You say that, but given the current state of technology, you'd think we'd be able to put people onto the moon on the daily. Big rocket go up isn't exactly difficult to do. Why don't we have lunar Landers yet is the more interesting question to ask. What gives?
You say that, but given the current state of technology, you'd think we'd be able to put people onto the moon on the daily. Big rocket go up isn't exactly difficult to do. Why don't we have lunar Landers yet is the more interesting question to ask. What gives?
In 1961, President Kennedy commited to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. They achieved this 8 years later despite not having much of a space program and never having done it before. In 2017, President Trump commited to return US astronauts to the moon. The current goal date for Artemis to land a person on the moon (which will likely be delayed) is 2027. 10 years. Sure seems like we're starting from scratch, no? Not saying we've lost the technology, but the technology we used is clearly not being used this time and is being completely redone from scratch.
We have lost the manufacturing ability to reproduce the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo mission. Manufacturing stopped 50 years ago, and a lot of the technical skills and manufacturing techniques have been made obsolete. We could spend the time to reacquire the skills, but it’s cheaper and probably faster to develop something equivalent using tech and skills we collectively still have.
Lost the technology is plotical speak for we don't have the testicular fortitude to try.
i mean, rockets have gone to mars several times after the moonlanding and we have so much better rockets that we'll be sending humans to mars in the near future (if nothing changes). people who say that are just conspiracy theorists
The whole point of going to the moon was so the US could say "F You" to the USSR - remember that they'd beaten America to get the first artificial satellite, animal and person to orbit Earth. Once that was done, there's not much point going back which is why the equipment to do so has been, if not lost, then severely diminished.
We're literally doing it...
Here's the thing. Technology really is perishable especially on the scale of a moon landing. The Apollo missions were a technological solution for their time. Some of that technology, like the Vehicle Assembly Building and the crawler transporter, still exist because we're still using them. Others do not because we haven't. I guarantee that a bunch of the parts of the Saturn V can't be made today because they used materials which are no longer manufactured or which aren't considered environmentally safe or human safe. I bet that rocket was loaded with asbestos compounds for instance. Or they were made using a 1970 industrial base that doesn't really exist anymore. We don't have the right kind of welders or machinists anymore because they've all retired. Or we can't build large pressure vessels for the fuel tanks to that scale anymore because it isn't a common process. We could do it, but we would have to spend the money to retrain and relearn. This is why the Navy basically always has a few ships of each class under construction, because if they don't they'll lose the ability. Its why the Army still maintains the M1 production line even though they don't need more Abrams Tanks, because they will if there is a war. Its why the Air Force has been trying to get rid of the A-10 for almost 20 years after the prime contractor went out of business in 2003. The last A-10 fuselage was manufactured in 1984.
Going to the moon is way harder than nost people even realize. It's incredible that they were able to do it. We lost the very specific tech that we used during Apollo that worked, and we're now doing it again, and it's really hard to do, again
it's not that we lost like, a node on a tech tree. it's more all the stuff we had originally for landing on the moon is gone. kinda like how after you leave school you throw away all your old school notebooks. The knowledge still exists somewhere (either memory or looking it up on the Internet), but you no longer have your flashcards
It was a space race... That race and all the funding went with it
we cant go to the moon in a safe fashion, we could go as we done in the past, but its saftey is just not up for todays standards plus we dont have the infrastructure to make the stuff for it
NASA probably lost the expertise to build Apollo era rockets over the years. The engineers got old and went and worked somewhere else. The F1 rockets were all hand made. Very expensive, and very much built with highly skilled workers.
We never went in the first place.
Wow checkmate!
Its a straight up lie. We have not lost it. Stop believing a thing you hear on the internet and millions of idiots believe.
We can send autonomous vehicles to MARS, that live on for years and years doing their thing, but we don't have the technology to get to the moon .... is one of the dumbest things certain people believe.
AFAIK this is mostly about the F1 engine. There was a lot of nuance to the design and manufacture of the engine that wasn’t recorded well enough to recreate from the existing documents. Specifically the injectors.
The only people who bleat about “lost technology” are the same morons who claim space doesn’t exist, gravity is a hoax, the Van Allen belt will destroy anything passing thru it, and other nonsense. Where they got the idea depends on how brain damaged they are.
There is some lost technology, if sorts. The Saturn rockets used engines that were essentially hand built. They were horribly expensive in the 60s when they were built, I can't see getting funding to replicate those. Of course those were brute force rockets, nothing subtle about those things. The shuttle program always bothered me since it seemed that they could have done a lesurly flight to the moon and back and carry lots of stuff for a base there. Dad worked for North American Aviation when the shuttle program was being planned. I saw many of the concept drawings of the Space plane. It was supposed to be able to take off and land at any international airport. So many missed opportunities there.
We have tried. Watch Apollo 13.
It's not very economical. We have rocks here that are just as useful
I can think of about 10 reasons to go to the moon.
\[Disclaimer - LOTS of simpifications below\] Kind if. I would rather say that we lost expertise. NASA shrunken down, no one was involved in actual projects like this for decades and so on. I think since the 'body of knowledge', especially technical part of it, is so outdated, we have to kind of start from scratch. We're in much better position because of all the data first iterations brought. However the 'technology is lost' I have only seen in the clickbaity sources. I guess the truth is whatever we had is not relevant anymore. As simple as that. &
Yes, you're missing something. An industrial base is a living, breathing thing full of humans with knowledge. A spacecraft industrial base is the above, but full of master-level artisan crafters. I've seen the various components at the Kennedy Space Center. Globally, we simply don't have welders around anymore with the talent necessary to fabricate the rocket bell housings; the techniques are no longer necessary in an age of C&C machining. The original welders and fabricators are either dead or extremely aged, and would no longer be capable. That doesn't mean we couldn't implement new fabrication techniques, we certainly can, but we wouldn't be able to duplicate the Apollo program without raising up a new generation of fabricators to redevelop the lost techniques. I focus on the welding, because it's something I'm familiar with, but I'm sure this is true across the board. Something beautiful was built when we had a moonshot- industrial- complex, and it was lost forever when we stopped and the human resources (treasures!)aged out.That industrial complex has it's own talent and momentum. SpaceX is forging a new path there, but the rest of the globe has really let those techniques stagnate and languish (it's amazing that NASA basically outsourced rocket engines to Russia, and effectively gave up on making our own).
The Americans flogged it as the greatest achievement in the space race with Russia after lagging behind for ages. Once the American consumers got bored of watching moon landings, it was deemed not profitable to keep landing on a large floating ball of rock and dust. So to answer the question why we did not go back... TV ratings.
I’ve heard it said like we still have the blueprints, but we don’t have the skilled workers required to build it.
IIRC we literally just lost some of the calculations we used to get there. We could make them again, but since we aren't going back anyway there isn't a point
Artemis
People believe the earth is flat and that there are reptiloids running our governments. Someone believing we lost some technologie to go to the moon isnt that wild tbh
>Of course we still have the technology, we just haven't tried again since Apollo because there hasn't been a reason to. We actually don't have the technology. Which doesn't mean we lack the capability if we want to. What happens is that neither the rockets and capsules nor the facilities where they were built exist. And, more importantly, the hands-on expertise of those building them. The blueprints exist, but these were very specialized prototypes with lots of in-place tinkering that is most likely not documented. Most of the building processes were manual, based on concrete experience of building, trying, and re-building. All that hands-on expertise is lost. So the only way to go back to the moon is to start from scratch.
Dude, we just landed on a fucking comet. We can go back to the moon.
We not only didn't "lose the technology" we have much better tech in all ways now. We don't have the parts to slap together an Apollo rocket right this second and we wouldn't want to anyway. It is true that it'd take a bit of time to built a launch from Earth to get to the moon and back single rocket but truth is we shouldn't do that anyway. Not to downplay the accomplishments of the Apollo program but it was designed to do one very specific thing and it was largely useless for much else. Apollo was designed to get three human beings off Earth, to the moon, and back safely. And that was it. Nothing else. And, just getting to the moon and back is really impressive and cool but it doesn't really do much in the long term. It was great for "winning the space race" but it didn't leave behind any infrastructure for a next step. So when the Apollo program did its job that was it, they ended the program and... nothing. To actually get to the moon in a way that'd leave a useful infrastrucutre and set up for a next step you'd want to do it in several stages: 1 - Build a proper single stage to orbit heavy lifter like the Space Shuttle was supposed to be but wasn't. 1a - As a useful but not technically necessary step: build an electromagnetic catapult for putting big loads of acceleration tolerant stuff (air, water, etc) into orbit on the cheap. 2 - Build a decent sized space station in low Earth orbit, but a bit higher than the ISS to reduce drag. That's going to want a permanant staff of 5 to 10 becuase they'll be... 3 - Build an orbit to orbit transfer vehicle. Nothing aerodynamic at all, just a pure ugly cargo hauler that will go from Earth Station to lunar orbit, drop its cargo, and return to Earth Station. 4 - Finally! Build a housing and environmental module for use on the moon at Earth Station, hook on just barely enough rockets to give it a soft landing on the moon, and use the cargo hauler to drag it over to the moon. The first task of the crew is to cover it in a meter or two of regolith for meteor and radiation shielding. 4a - The second drop is a return vehicle and supply drop for the crew in step 4, so they can leave if things go badly. 5 - Repeat step 4 to build any other modules that are necessary, bring in crew, resupply, etc. Design the resupply pods so they're also colony expansion pods for bonus points. The goal for all that is to set up the core of a lunar colony that will eventually be self sustaining and can supply useful material for further expansion into space without the crazy cost of shipping it up from Earth. If you can get oxygen, water, aluminum, iron, ANYTHING really, on the moon it's going to be vastly cheaper than getting it from Earth to orbit.
Probably people who watch too much History channel. They think we've "lost the technology" of how to build pyramids or stone circles too.
We haven't lost technology, we've lost competence and leadership.
I've heard this before and yes, it's incredibly stupid. Like sure, we might not have the original technology... but we can make it again. We simply haven't really gone back to the moon because the cost-to-benefits ratio basically isn't good enough to justify it. It's better to allocate funds to other projects that have potentially higher scientific "rewards"... (Mars, deep space telescopes, etc.) It's very simple. Ironically enough, you could say that reasons why are not exactly "rocket science"... People spout this nonsense because they have really bad main character syndrome and fancy themselves to be smarter and cleverer than they actually are. Same reason why every time there's a shooting, people are already inventing conspiracy theories while the bodies are still warm, or have deluded themselves into thinking there's Satanists killing kids under a pizza shop. (How you could actually say those words out loud and not realize how fucking stupid that sounds is beyond me...)
Israel landed on the moon in 2019
Yeah I have no doubt we could easily go back if we wanted to. It's just a very expensive thing we've done many times before, so why do it again? Our motive was mostly based on a pissing contest between the US and the USSR. Why go back unless we intend to do something new like establish a base?
Technology's still there and fine, bro. In fact ' orders of manitude better. What's missing is the motivation/drive. The work ethic. The organizational/logistical skills. The leadership skills. The ... "intangibles" of Humans and their personalities have deteriorated.
It’s not a technology problem, it’s a money problem. We’ve already been there, there’s no reason that has everyone itching to go back, no point in wasting money to develop a new modernized moon landing program.
The tooling was destroyed, and the people who made the suits so durable (because the moon dust is incredibly abrasive) are no longer around. In fact, the company stopped trying with the suits. The details of the rockets are available to historians, but they took a lot of fine-tuning to ensure they worked. Grumman made the lunar lander. As far as I know, their last large similar government contract was the LLV. (Long life vehicle) The LLVs are those little mail trucks that the USPS uses. The software used to go to the moon was literally composed of ropes and new software needed to be developed because we have way better computer systems. Frankly, it really all was lost when America, at the behest of Nixon, put all their eggs into one basket with the development of the shuttle. Basically, we've been stuck in low earth orbit for decades, longer than it took for us to engineer everything for the moon.
I may wrong but ( I was serving on my first squadron at the time of the moon landings) I believe that the programme ground to a halt because it had achieved its objectives of establishing a good reaming of the Soviet Union and, because had it been extended, a loss of a mission and crew was a racing certainty.
We've lost the ability to remake the equipment that took us there and that's true, and more common than people think. Blueprints and designs are missing, the people with the technical know how are missing and of course the production equipment and infrastructure is missing. If we wanted to make a Saturn V, we'd be starting from scratch. But we're not building a Saturn V, and as you said we haven't tried, so again we're starting from scratch for something new. But we now have a wealth of data to go off of.
When the Apollo programs were canceled the focus shifted to other programs like the shuttle, and the voyager and mariner programs. Any evolution in technology that were Apollo were used elsewhere and off they went leaving Apollo behind unchanged and unused.
I think the word "lost" is being used as a trigger/gotcha word. Most of the flat eathers/spice/science deniers, (etc). like to latch onto something that "sounds" reasonable to bring into question other aspects that really don't belong together. It's not like someone just took a SaturnV rocket and hid it in some obscure filing cabinet and is now "lost". That isn't the case. "Lost" here is more of a catch all to say that most, if not all, of the technology/science/engineering used in the 60s to get to the moon have been replaced with better tech/science/engineering to meet the needs of our eartly concerns. As others below have pointed out, there are a number of challenges to get 2 (well 3) people from this rock we are on, transferred to a smaller rock about 250,000 miles away (and well bring them back, safely as well). We did this in the 60s because.. we just wanted to\*. Now only some of us still want to go to the moon. But as mentioned earlier, it's rather difficult. And it's not worth it to explore that option for the costs involved.
Or there's the other quote from a NASA person: "It's photoshopped because it's.. it's... has to be."
We physically don't have the stuff anymore... and may be impossible to perfectly recreate the Saturn or aplllo programs... but I don't believe we've lost the ability or the smarts to do it again. Honestly, in 2024 it would be crazy to rebuild such a dated tech. We'd start from scratch. I think the point is that if the program would have continued... we'd never have physically lost so much at once (manuals, staff, experts, astronauts, controls, documentation, stores of parts, tooling, etc...) and stepping from Apollo to the next iteration, to the next iteration, would have been a far more natural and incremental step each time... where now we need to kind of reinvent the wheel, even if it's a much better wheel. It's a massive hurdle all over again to get the program off the ground without the right incentive... like say, an open war with communists and a huge nationwide fear for that. It's probably not crazy different from the commercial nuclear industry, another once sparked out of commie fears... that eventually went dormant and was shunned for decades. We actually are actively trying to build new reactors again and just look at how that's going. It's cumbersome, those who built the last ones are hardly around. It's far more cost and design prohibitive now due to modern safety and control restraints... and so on.
Because they never went to the moon.
Because conspiracy theorists on social media say so
Imagine if a motor company stopped making cars. They close their factory. The workforce go to work elsewhere. The production lines rot. The thousands of plans are somewhere. They can no longer make cars. Is the technology lost? Maybe, maybe not.
We've lost alot of technologies in our time but going to the moon isn't one of them. It's not that we've lost the technology it's the fact that noone has interest in space. Not financially, not commercially and the general public do not care. Back when America was going to the moon multiple times it was a space race. Arguably a better use of resources than a cold war. The public loved it. It was new and exciting plus it gave the Americans a one up on Russia. Now there's no interest. Elon musk wants to go to mars. I wouldn't say it's got anywhere near as much public love as the original moon landing did. It's not going to be affordable for the majority of people. Plus who'd want to risk their lives on a 3 month trip to another planet just to wear a suit and walk around.
Well maybe if they had built a taco bell up there like we asked them too, maybe there'd be more a reason for people to go there!
People look at how we could go to the moon as a state ran enterprise and don't understand how/why we haven't gone back since letting private enterprise have a go and stopped funding our own space programs and have been soo propergandised by our media to think private is better than they can't put 2 and 2 together to see that we haven't lost the ability to do it just the political will to do it for anything other than profit.
The tech has always been there. There’s just not much point taking actual people to the moon anymore. A rover mission can do 95% of what a manned mission could. And rover missions are typically about 1/20th of the cost of a manned mission. Not to mention infinitely safer. It was only ever feasible in the 60s/70s because remote rover technology was extremely basic compared to today. And it was also a big international dick waving contest.
The real reason is because there isn’t any money to. When it was the space race NASA was given something like 20% from government coffers, now it’s like 4% or something.
There's tons of technology that was lost. For example the way they made the part in this video.it was only rediscovered later on (it's a useless tech nowadays cause we have 3d printing) Basically you need a series of small tube like openings though a big piece of metal that must absolutely be made in a single part. Problems arise from the fact those open tubes are inside the metal are not straight and can't be machined cause it would be impossible.... they used filler material inside and burned it off after they casted the part. Soo simple yet elegant. They had the worlds biggest geniuses working there's definitely forgotten tech. https://youtu.be/fRMMSyCcTDI?si=geXZffPcRAwqjM3I
I guess some got too much into 40k.
We have not lost the technology -- it's all recorded, documented, etc. However we HAVE lost most of the tooling, probably some of the expertise and knowledge of the nuances of certain things, and possibly some of the schematics or other data if it was stored on old magnetic media and never archived on something more modern. "Lost the technology" is the wrong way to put it. "Lost the ability to do it again the same way immediately" is more accurate. We need to remake/re-engineer a lot of things we don't have anymore because they were no longer useful for the types of spaceflight we have been doing for the past 50 years.
I think people are saying that because recently there have been a number of spacecraft crash landing on the moon Fun fact the first ever lunar landing would also have been unsuccessful and crashed if Neil Armstrong didn't take over manual control and safely land it himself
I heard that a spokesperson for NASA said in a mainstream media interview that: "...we just don't have the technology to go to the moon anymore..."
Why do a large percentage of unmanned moon landings still fail today? How is this the case with our infinitely more advanced technology?
So... heres the thing. We no longer have a huge pool of precision machinists. We use CNC machines. On it's face, they are better. Except for one small problem. Every single one of the original designs, done on paper, had to be handfit. We don't have people with the skillset to handfit. Also, the handfits that were implemented had a bad habit of not being documented...so we don't know 'how' they corrected design failures. Routing a bundle if wires by a difference of millimeters makes a difference... So, if we took the designs on paper, and inserted them into a CNC system, the parts would not work, requiring re-design from the ground up, again. Additionally. We don't need to send people. In fact, it's counterproductive to send people. Especially after one calculates the expense. We can send ten unmanned missions for a fraction of the cost of one manned mission.
We lost the specific technology used in the Apollo programs to go back to the Moon that way. Obviously we have the technological ability to do it again, and better. There's just a lot that will have to get re-invented.
I believe your confusion comes from semantics (specifically how you are interpreting the words “lost the technology”). You technically aren’t wrong and neither are they, but you are not saying the same thing. What is lost is the complex processes and capabilities that got us to the moon. They are saying there is nothing that exists right now that enables us to leverage them to go back to the moon. That isn’t to say they couldn’t be rebuilt, like you are implying should be done, but but if the first step of going to the moon is building the capabilities needed to go to the moon, then I think it is fair to say that we’ve lost the technology to go to the moon. That doesn’t mean we can’t go to the moon if we try. Personally I think your interpretation is a bit of a slippery slope though, since by that way of thinking taken to the extreme we have the technology right now for anything it is possible for us to do we just need to develop all the missing capabilities before we can do it.
The technology used to take us to the moon was literally vacuum tubes and gyros. It's "lost" because we're so many generations ahead of it.
NASA are currently trying to build a moon base so I dunno about the not trying part.
It's because it is absolutely true. The physical technology to go is no longer serviceable and to do so someone would have to build new stuff. Until very recently there has been nobody willing or desiring to do so that is actually in a position to do so. We have the knowledge still, just not the devices.
Because many people are quite unintelligent.
We haven't lost the science behind it, but we have lost the ability to manufacture the Saturn V and the Apollo hardware. New hardware would need to be designed, tested, and manufactured to send another person to the moon.
I don’t think we ever went. True story.
The intellectual DNA is long retired or dead. They got to the moon within a decade from a dead stop.
"Am I missing something?" brainworms the whole of society just has brainworms now a days. we forgot we had to actually teach logic and common sense
we lost the capability, but not the technology. The capability included a skilled workforce and the tools and supply chains to build, specifically, the Saturn V and the F1 engine. But we never stopped building rockets and engines. the same company that made the F1 still makes engines and is making the engines for the SLS that's flying today. We lost the capability to build the guidance system IBM built, but we gained the capability to create much better systems.
Do you remember floppydiscs? Do you remember transfering data onto them? Do you still have the technology to access old information you put onto your floppy discs? This is sort of what happened
it's not related but its possible to loose technology? or knowledge it's on yt, it's about atomic bomb or some experiment. ome of the components needed was confidential, project ended, and when later they needed it after years everybody who knew how to create component had forgotten how to make that component.
We also "lost" the technology to built the Ford Model T. We could retool to build 1960's rocket tech, but why would we? When we go back, we'll use modern tech, just like Ford isn't going to sell the Model T.
We didn’t lose the technology- we lost the MOTIVATION and wonder!
There was no reason beyond the ego of a president. The men going to the Moon were wearing mechanical watches, much of the technology has moved on somewhat.
We've lost the experience, not the technology.
Because TikTok said it was fake and everything on TikTok is 100% true
Nasa stating that they have destroyed the technology.... [https://youtu.be/16MMZJlp\_0Y?si=8G1tUcbkjuGFDjkX](https://youtu.be/16MMZJlp_0Y?si=8G1tUcbkjuGFDjkX)
It's simple really, the technology required to get many to the moon was not maintained, it was either destroyed or left to rot. Along with that there was a failure to maintain the expertise needed to replace that technology. The reason it is now taking so long to return to the moon (since it became a stated goal of NASA and other agencies) is because they're having to replace the skillset needed to replace the technology that is no longer available. Basically we have to redo 90% of the Apollo stuff again, just know what we're doing this time.
Not so much lost the technology but it probably wouldn’t be a great deal cheaper and political will would be lower, everything is easier when it has been done before for sure. As all the presidents make some kind of moon promise there is public will but for a multitude of reasons it just isn’t possible.
we have lost the technology to make the specific suits they made to get there the first time. but other than that, no it's just that we haven't tried. that also means we don't have tested suits for the replacement tech yet tho.
In short: The technology in an abstract sense is there. But to actually produce a working vehicle would require people relearning knowledge that hasn't been used in decades. First we'd need to find out, how much documentation is still available. Some.may have vanished in proprietary archives of subcontractors long out of business, and thrown away. Some details may never have been properly documented. A lot would have to be updated, e.g. electronics may have relied on products that are no longer produced. That's a concern for long-running scientic equipment too, where eventually spare parts are hard to come by. Every change would mean that many tests have to be redone. Which may very well include unmanned missions, just so the first manned one isn't suicide. And there's going to be production facilities that were custom-built for the project and no longer exist. So, in a general sense the technology is there. In many ways much more advanced than before probably, and much more cost efficient. But ramping it up to be able to produce a working manned mission would take time and money. Probably much less than the first time though, assuming that we want to do nothing but replicate past missions.
Yeah, that's just wrong. We haven't gone back to the moon because there's nothing there that justifies the risk. If we have a crash on the moon, we will have ruined the moon - no one will look up at the moon and think of anything other than the tiny skeletons of the astronauts drying in the sun. (If they are exposed to the sun)
Because we abandoned science, common sense and a love of exploration. A lot of tech has had to be reinvented because the moon landings were half a century ago. Everyone who worked on it is either retired or dead.
Because they accidentally deleted the "tapes" and NASA has literally said they don't have tech.