Yes, they lost the technology. The last Apollo mission was over 50 years ago, the people who achieved it are retired or dead, and engineering drawings alone are not enough to build a new Saturn V (or the landers, suits, etc). Not to mention all of that is outdated technology by now.
NASA is now building the SLS, a modern(ish) heavy lift rocket meant for moon missions, among other things. But for a couple decades in between there was this obsession with the Space Shuttle as the primary launch platform, and the Space Shuttle wasn't of much use beyond low earth orbit. And with the Soviets focusing on space stations after the Apollo landings there wasn't any competitive aspect to going further either.
There were obviously lots of unmanned missions to the moon and other places in the solar system, but manned activity was limited to low-earth orbit for the last 50 years, so the capability to go further withered.
It's more like we've lost the engineering. The technology is all still there but now greatly improved. From welding techniques to computer components the whole exercise in in manufacturing would be a huge undertaking to rebuild because we aren't manufacturing any of those old technologies anymore so that would be a problem. Or you have the problem of re-engineering the whole rocket with modern components and manufacturing techniques.
We can build medieval castles all day long with concrete and steel, but if you want an actual stone medieval castle, we don't know how to do it.
The Saturn V rockets were very risky, NASA got extremely lucky with them the first time but no longer have the same tolerance for risk. Even if they still had Saturn V rockets ready to fly today in their inventory, it would not be an acceptable option today.
I don't even think we've lost the engineering. We've lost the risk tolerance. Apollo was a risky program, people dying was considered acceptable. The US just doesn't work like that any more.
No, we don’t. Let me introduce you to OSHA and their buddy worker’s comp insurance.
I ran an industrial facility that had been in operation since the 40’s, safety used to not even be a concern. If it operated in 2000 the way it did in 1950’s, or even in the early 80’s, they’d be out of business.
According to that article the astronauts would go to orbit in an SLS then get into the Starship lander in orbit. Is that just for political reasons so there's some point to the SLS?
Yes, on Falcon 9/Dragon. That differs from Starship w.r.t. human-rating in a few ways:
- Dragon can do an emergency abort, by (a) accelerating away from the booster and (b) parachuting down to a soft-landing. Starship's upper stage is so massive that such acceleration and soft-landing seem out of reach (ideally an emergency-fallback-everything-has-gone-wrong mode shouldn't rely on tricky maneuvers like their landing flip!). There may be ways around that, e.g. using an ejectable module, but it would all need designing, building, testing, validating, etc.
- Falcon 9 needed to prove its reliability by performing many successful uncrewed missions. Starship will need to take the same approach, but hasn't managed any yet ;)
- SpaceX had to stop making changes/improvements to Falcon 9, since NASA would reset the successful-mission-count back to zero after major changes. SpaceX was willing to do that, since they had another rocket to focus on (Starship). Also, it helped that Falcon 9 had already exceeded their expectations by the "Block 5" design (which is why Falcon Heavy hasn't seen much use; Falcon 9 is very capable on its own!). Even when Starship is reliably launching, it will likely undergo design changes for a while.
- Getting Starship to the Moon will need in-orbit refuelling. That's untested, and more dangerous than docking and crew transfer (which is now routine), so it makes sense to launch the crew separately and transfer them to an already-refuelled Starship. This doesn't add much complexity, since refuelling requires multiple launches, orbital rendezvous and docking anyway. The choice of crew launcher is then arbitrary: SLS, Falcon 9, Soyuz, Starship, etc.
(Earth) launch and landing will be the hardest parts to get crew-rated, if they ever are. Perhaps the only human-rated approaches will be smaller, safer systems like Soyuz (or some modern replacement on that scale), with immediate transfer to a Starship or space station once orbital. Given its cargo lifting capacity, and station-sized living space, that would still be a great improvement over today (although maybe not enough to pay back SpaceX's costs)
And spacesuits, NASA has been impressively ineffective at getting any kind of new spacesuit designs going, they're still just cycling between the leftovers from the shuttle.
Apparently, they can't do their lunar spacesuits until they do their lander
> What's more, delays to Starship have knock-on effects because the spacesuit contractor needs to know how the suits will interface with the spacecraft, and simulators need to be built for astronauts to learn its systems.
Ironically, Starship has the same problem Shuttle has, basically limiting it on its own to LEO. The payload stage is too big and heavy.
The solution to get Starship and Shuttle beyond LEO is the same: either use up the fuel required for landing and expending the vehicle or orbital refueling.
The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
There is another thing sets apart Starship from other launch systems: relatively wide availability/manufacturability of its fuel outside of Earth. You won't find kerosene or hypergols on Mars or Ganymedes, but methane can be produced fairly straightforwardly there.
Not easier to handle, though. Keeping methane in a tank or moving it across some distance is fairly straightforward, as the problems regarding natural gas storage and transportation were solved a long time ago.
Hydrogen is notoriously tricky to even keep in one place, much less pipe across some distance.
> The difference is that Starship is so cheap it makes both of those options feasible. Shuttle's reusability was supposed to make it cheap, but it ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight.
But that's exactly what people believed about the space shuttle before it launched as well. Let's wait to see Starship actually work before predicting it will be enormously cheap. As it stands, that cheapness is entirely predicated on a completely unrealistic level of reusability (multiple launches per day with the same rocket, when even Falcon 9 requires weeks or months between launches of the same rocket).
You don't have to take Elon's word to know that it'll be cheap. It's being built in the open air under dozens of cameras streaming 24/7 on Youtube. Calculating the time & materials cost for Starship is straightforward.
The problem is not the same...Shuttle's main engines were dead in orbit after jettisoning the main tank. Only OMS thrusters were working and it landed unpowered, gliding to the surface (more like a controlled crash). It would never make it to orbit with the main tank attached. There was no possible way to fuel it, no engines and OMS was not usable beyond LEO.
You have full powered engines in orbit on Starship, "just" need to fuel them :)
> If it used a more advanced technology, it should have been able to at least fly to the Moon
That's erroneous reasoning. More advanced technology does not imply more advanced capabilities in every respect. The shuttle was not designed to go to the Moon, it was designed for other purposes. It doesn't have the delta-v to reach the Moon, nor would it have any way of landing on it, nor any way of returning even if it could land.
Think of it this way; much of the technology on a modern container ship is more advanced than that on a dreadnaught battleship. That doesn't mean a container ship is any good at blasting other ships out of the water; they aren't built for that.
Why even would they want to send the Shuttle to the Moon? That sort of mission is just a political stunt, the scientific research done there isn't worth the expense.
If the country with the most reasons to call "FAKE!" during the Cold War didn't accuse NASA of faking the launch... why are you? The government lies all the time but this is a ridiculous hill to die on.
The descent phase wasn't very long, and the astronauts were kind of busy during that time. That left just automated cameras, which tended to be lower quality (NTSC or worse). So, yeah, we have few photos of the descent, just video of lousy quality, and it's perfectly understandable why.
The fact that they're 50 years old? It's really hard to keep stuff maintained, and manufacturing methods have completely changed. The last people who could build that particular lander are retired or dead.
And they haven't made a new one.
So no, NASA hasn't had a human rated lunar lander for a very long time.
> You don't see 50 years old weapon systems stop working.
You mean simple firearms, that were carefully cleaned, prep'ed, and packed for long-term storage? Or something at least vaguely comparable to a moon rocket in size and complexity, like a B-52?
Talk to an old Air Force guy, who knows the maintenance routines for the older warbirds, and how many issues they have with "manufacturer went out of business" spare parts, etc.
If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
It's not like NASA is missing fuel, or that hull is damaged, or that engine is not working. At least, these things shouldn't happen if they put half effort into maintaining it.
Your "can maintain" for those old submarines amounts to "can maintain something which was originally designed to last for several decades, with a high-trained full-time crew, regular major maintenance, and a supply chain for spare parts...and all the billions of dollars which those non-trivial details cost".
Vs. those old rockets were designed to be one-shot expendable stuff. Plenty of them are on public display at museums - you could ask the museum staff about how many $$$/year they have available in their budgets, to keep the rockets in operational condition. (Hint: $0.)
Or, you might want to check out the YouTube channel for the USS New Jersey (historic WWII battleship, now a museum) -
- where their curator often talks in gritty detail about vast differences between "operational warship" and "keep afloat and open as a museum". Note that the something-million dollars which they are currently trying to fundraise - for some bare-minimum drydock maintenance - is small potatoes compared to the cost of a single new F-35 fighter.
You realize that submarine was only meant to last 20 years and instead they spent 3 years rebuilding it to serve a different role? It is also closer to 40 years than 50 and is decades younger than the rockets in question. I'd also hazard that the lifetime maintenance costs of that submarine far dwarf it's initial construction costs.
Part of the reason why the SLS took so long and cost so much is because they DID try to re-use all the old resources and technology rather than building from scratch.
> If people can maintain underwater nuclear-powered coffins armed with nukes for 50 years, why can't they maintain a (then) functional space rocket?
Can? Sure you can. Absolutely.
Did they? No. There was no mandate, no requirement, no project, no budget.
Put that Ohio submarine into a dry dock, send everyone home. Tell them to find something new to do because the project has ended. Do you think you will be able to re-launch submarine in a year later if you changed your mind? How about ten years later? How about 51 years later? I wouldn't hold my breath.
The best way to maintain a capability is by regularly exercising it. The Ohio did that every year constantly, the Apollo program did not.
NASA would have to pull out the Saturn V blueprints and rebuild the manufacturing process from scratch. They would have to start hiring from 0 and reacquire all the institutional knowledge they lost over the past 50 years. They would have a real problem with supply chains: those are all gone, the tooling scrapped, the workers retired, and the business sectors offshored. They would have to redo all the testing so the process could reliably produce a working rocket from the designs. And the designs themselves are based on obsolete techniques, materials, and components.
Even if it was possible, there would be no point: the blueprints weren't the hard part, and the world has changed since they were drawn up.
The USA has lost the technology for putting people on the moon.
Records were not kept, knowledge died with the engineers who built it. Materials are no longer available, some of the technology has not been built in 50 years. In the end, redeveloping the stack is much cheaper than using the old rockets. Which is exactly what they are doing - and with every new development comes the risk you are chasing the wrong rabbit and won't, in the end, end up at your target.
Sorry, but it is hard for me to accept that explanation. You don't simply "lose" such technology or don't make a plan B in case it fails to work for some strange reason.
More plausable explanation, however, is that it simply did not exist at all and they faked everything.
Ofcourse we could make it in theory, but practically that's not the case. You don't just build a Saturn rocket and moonlander in your own factory (inhouse) one day. There is a massive supply chain. The development cost percentage points of US GDP. There were thousands of people involved. There also wasn't the internet. x factory responsibile for making component y, would call their supplier and buy an off the shelf component. Those suppliers no longer manufacture those components, why? No demand, probably obsolete etc. It's like trying to go buy a vacuum tube now when you could simply use a transistor. Imagine the cost of setting up a factory just to manufacturer vacuum tubes that have no other use. There's plenty suppliers that wouldn't have documented their manufacturing processes either, with the knowledge being handed down to whoever is doing the job.
Orchestrating a plan to keep millions in the dark and ensuring thousands, upon thousands of people keep a secret to their deathbeds is a lot less plausible.
"You don't just build a Saturn rocket and moonlander in your own factory (inhouse) one day. There is a massive supply chain"
You miss the point. They used those rockets multiple times to go to the Moon, it's not like it was "do once and forget" situation.
How could they simply forget things after doing it for so many times? You need extreme reliability and know-how to do those things consistantly over the span of a decade.
There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering. If not, then the whole thing is not really believable. Sorry.
>There must have been a knowledge transfer for such an important feet of engineering.
You've never heard of the situation where no one knows how a business critical piece of software works? "Bob wrote it 20 years ago but he died last year".
This kind of stuff happens all the time in the real world. If no one is paying for that knowledge and supply chain to be maintained it will atrophy and dissapear. That's why the US army is still buying tanks even though they have thousands in storage, they need a company to maintain the supply chain and institutional knowledge to build tanks.
Are you imagining generations of engineers being tasked with knowing how to build a rocket with 1960's technology with parts from suppliers that no longer exist despite no one having any intention to ever buy such a rocket again and no one paying for the maintenance of that ability?
Yes, lots of those design top documents still exist. But not every supplier and sub-sub-sub supplier did the same thing. Most of those companies don't exist anymore or were bought and bought again.
NASA never wanted to build a Saturn V again. So they archived all the plans.
You seem to believe that they put some kind of plan in place to keep the Saturn V so they could bust them out again. This is simply not the case. As far as they were concern Saturn V was over and Shuttle was the future. Archiving everything was the only thing they did.
Of course we could do a huge effort and recreate the Saturn V program. And the lots of documentation that exist would help. But anybody who has recreated old things, knows that plans are not perfect. Doing something like that would simply not be worth.
I'm sure that NASA has all the blueprints filed away somewhere, but the reason we don't have a Saturn V factory running today is not because NASA forgot how to make them. Instead, it's because of cost. Between the Apollo 13 disaster, the Vietnam War, and maybe some other factors, public interest and approval of continued Moon exploration wanted, and Congress revoked the planned funding for Apollo 18 through 20, opting instead to focus on programs like the Space Shuttle.
Interestingly enough, the leftover Saturn V hardware was put to good use by launching Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, both of which turned out to be valuable steps in the US space program. So as much as it pains me to say, it may have been a good thing that the last three moon missions were canceled.
The last moon landing was 1972. That's 51 years ago. They were all part of the same Saturn programme, production actually ceased 4 years earlier in 1968. At the time it was the most complex machine ever built.
It's a completely acceptable explanation. Much more so than "it didn't exist at all" which requires enemies with thousands of nukes pointed at each other to conspire for 50+ years.
The issues are pretty straightforward, when the SaturnV and lunar lander were being built, almost all of the design was done by hand, all of the parts were made by hand and the engineers made all sorts of little undocumented adjustments to the designs in the process.
On top of that, the flight computers of the era were extremely primitive, large and heavy, and the design was done with this in mind.
Finally, NASA's safety standards were much more lax at the time. Saturn V would be considered way too dangerous to fly crew on nowadays.
Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship.
"Modern engineering methods are just too different to just recreate a Saturn V without effectively redesigning it from scratch, at which point it might as well be a much more capable vehicle like Starship."
I'm all for it, and root for SpaceX and Musk to make it happen.
What I'm saying all this time on this thread is following:
"Man never went to the Moon before. Artemis will hopefully be the first. If man has been to the Moon multiple times using the same aging technology over 50 years ago, then it shouldn't be an issue to go there now. In fact, it should be much easier and cheaper, as the computers are 1000x more powerful nowadays, and we still have fuel/energy sources that were used then."
Astronomers today measure the distance between Earth and the Moon by shining a laser beam towards it and measuring the time it takes to come back.
Now, guess why the beam actually comes back instead of getting absorbed by the lunar surface? Because Apollo 11 left a mirror there half a century ago, it still works
There are people alive, today, that can prove to you that we went to the moon just by shooting a laser beam in the sky, so yes, we did go to the moon.
I used to think that if it were only slightly off, the return beam might end up intersecting the Earth at somewhere inconvenient, or even missing it entirely. Even more impressively, it took only five minutes to deploy, which is faster than most bathroom mirrors are installed :)
The reason why this isn't a problem is that the device wasn't 'just' a mirror, but rather a retroreflector. This reflects any light back at its source, regardless of which direction the light came from.
If you were really lost in deep space, perhaps you could flash a very bright light (not a laser) momentarily, then look for the return flash from the retroreflector moments later - or at least, hopefully that soon, otherwise you are very far away indeed! A few strategically-placed retroreflectors around the solar system could make an effective triangulation-based location tracker. I wonder if this already exists in some form.
Resorting to a conspiracy to explain facts you miss the opportunity to construct more precise mental model of engineering. And of economy of these big achievements.
It works this way with any conspiracy. It is you mental model, it is your decision, but it is little sad to watch people choosing ignorance over knowledge.
Again, you've glossed over the fact that if the US had never gone to the Moon, the Soviets would've been making it very clear. They obviously had good reason to closely monitor the landings so they could catch the US in any lies and embarrass them. The landings being faked requires a conspiracy to have lasted all this time, without ever being written down, between countries that were one serious misunderstanding away from ending human civilization.
As for cost and 'easier', the Artemis lander programs are cheaper than what Apollo cost, and they have far higher requirements than just being the bare minimum to keep 3 carefully selected specimens of humanity alive for a few days. Hell, Starship is supposed to have an entire infirmary. That is to say that it would indeed be a lot easier if we were just aiming to land a few people in a can for a few days and were completely willing to risk their potential inability to return. We've made the requirements much harder, so the project is appropriately harder.
You lose people, expertise and organizational structure. Those are more important than the "plans of the rocket". Not to mention, would nowadays engineers be able to work from the methods of back then? A lot of stuff would be faster to redesign from scratch (all the software and electronics for sure).
NASA a radically changed it's focus an functions since the space race. Suppliers have changed too.
They could do it again with enough funds and time, but it will take many years.
Kinda like America's WWII battleships didn't really exist - it was all faked - because the U.S. no longer has the industrial capacity to actually build battleships?
Neither destroyers, frigates or aircraft carriers do what a battleship did - delivering projectiles the size of a human some 15 kilometres away in a ballistic arch with some precision.
We do have rocketry that is a lot more advanced than the Saturn V ever was - but it simply cannot, and does not do what the Saturn V did.
I could argue details - but notice that, after battleships were no longer so important, it remained a critical priority for the U.S. Navy to be the "Reigning Superpower" on the world's oceans:
Vs. how interested was the U.S. Gov't in retaining "can go to the moon" capabilities after Apollo 17 (in Dec'72)? Can you name any post-Apollo, pre-2000 manned-moon-mission NASA programs which received serious funding?
Do you think we could built an exact replica of the Model T and its manufacturing line? We could build something kind of like it, but it would require a lot of engineering.
The type of plastic and cloth used is likely not manufactured anymore. The processes used and tools used don't exist anymore in the exact same way they did then. And the people trained to build those tools and operate them don't exist anymore.
The idea that all technology once built can just be recreated without any issue is just complete nonsense.
Do you not know anything about how technology works?
technology and knowledge quickly deteriorate if they aren't actively kept alive. Remember, that this knowledge must be in human minds, and be in the forefront of those minds continually, for the technology to be up to speed enough for it to be collaborated on and to progress or to be employed.
no group of people today, outside of a few enthusiast amateurs (very few), know much about how the Apollo program worked in enough detail to resurrect that technology and infrastructure.
We can't return to the moon today. That's why we're building up a new moon program. We can't just pick up where we left off.
NASA still can make those rockets, but I believe those were pretty inefficient. While it was “justified” during the Space Race, nowadays they would be deemed too costly IMO.
I thought NASA already had those rockets. What's preventing them from sending astronauts and cargo now?