I think I’ve answered this exact question several times already.
In a nutshell:
1. It’s expensive. Apollo wound up costing over US $170 bn in 2005 dollars, which is a lot for any single program. We weren’t running the kinds of deficits in 1960 that we are now, and people were screaming about the cost back then. Any modern lunar program would wind up costing at least US $200 bn, partly because of pork-barrel politics, but mostly because…
2. It’s hard. It doesn’t matter how advanced your electronics and computers are, it still takes 9 – 10 km/s delta-V to reach Earth orbit (although if you make it to LEO, you’re halfway to just about anywhere in the inner solar system). Liquid-fueled rocket engines haven’t advanced that much beyond Apollo days, mainly because they were about as advanced as they could get already. Any gains have been incremental (a few more seconds Isp, a few more N of thrust, etc.). A manned lunar mission means a super-heavy lifter, which means a new launcher built from scratch (what the Ares V would have been before it was cancelled). Current heavy lifters such as the Delta-IV Heavy can’t do the job; they can’t lift enough mass to orbit. And they’re not man-rated. Building spacecraft to keep people alive between here and there hasn’t gotten any easier, either; it still takes so much mass, it still takes so much engineering. Again, any improvements over Apollo-era systems would be incremental.
3. National priorities have changed since 1960. We’re not in the middle of a dick-waving exercise with the Soviet Union; there’s no Soviet Union left to compete with. There’s no reason to send people to the Moon except to do basic exploration, and technology has advanced to the point where we don’t need to send people to do basic exploration anymore.
There are plenty of people who would love to build on the Apollo legacy, but they’re outnumbered by the people who aren’t willing to pay for it.
More Comments by jfb
His name was Ed Fendell, a controller in Houston in charge the remotely-controlled camera on the LRV.
Yes, he had to take the signal delay into account – he had to anticipate the liftoff and rate of ascent. …
It doesn’t have to be pretty to work.
The foil acted as a thermal blanket, reflecting as much of the sunlight as possible to keep the base of the LM from overheating. The foil was only about 125 microns thick, …
Apollo Moon Landing Hoax – Scientific Evidence
The blueprints *weren’t* destroyed; they’re on file at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. Not that it matters; we couldn’t build the Saturn V today if we wanted to, because most of the technology it used is …
Apollo Moon Landing Hoax – More Photographic Proof
Did you know that many of the people involved in the moon landing died from a car crash?
Upwards of 90 people die *every day* in car crashes in the US; it’s not at all surprising that a lot people “involved …
Apollo Moon Landing Hoax – Camera Problems
It’s not a C, it’s an O.
And it *looks* like some kind of inclusion (a pebble embedded in a slightly softer matrix rock). It looks like the surrounding matrix has eroded a bit, leaving a small channel around the …
More Comments on Apollo Moon Landing Hoax – Why Fake a Moon Landing? by jfb
Apollo Moon Landing Hoax – Why Fake a Moon Landing?
Water is *rare* on the Moon; in fact, it’s pretty limited to craters at the poles that are constantly in shadow. There are elements on Earth that are rare enough that if you aren’t sampling in the exact right …
Apollo Moon Landing Hoax – Why Fake a Moon Landing?
The third reason is that it’s still really *hard*. It’s not trivial to engineer manned spacecraft and man-rated launchers, even with the last 40 years of experience, and getting out of Earth’s gravity well is no easier now than …
Apollo Moon Landing Hoax – Why Fake a Moon Landing?
@Ozzy Moron:
Sorry, no, that’s not how it works. NASA has made its claim (we sent people to the Moon), and has backed it up with physical evidence (samples, science data from instruments left on the Moon), documentary evidence (film, …