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Asked by anon-253669 on 7 May 2020.
Question: did we actually go to the moon because why haven't we gone since ?
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James Smallcombe answered on 7 May 2020:
Yes we made multiple trips to the moon. They were very expensive trips and partly motivated by politics. Competition from researchers in different areas for what is the “most important science” is very tough. There isnt enough money to do everything, we don’t always agree, and politics can be involved.
Since the moon landings other space exploration like Mars has been prioritised, though there have been discussions of returning to the moon in the not to distant future.
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Adam Baskerville answered on 7 May 2020:
Humanity has been to the moon multiple times. Here is a list of the Apollo missions and dates:
Apollo 11- 1969, Apollo 12 – 1969, Apollo 13 – 1970, Apollo 14 – 1971, Apollo 15 – 1971, Apollo 16 – 1972, Apollo 17 – 1972.
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Ry Cutter answered on 7 May 2020:
James’ answer is brilliant, there is a whole bunch of history behind visiting the moon. It was called the space race, and was kind of an unspoken, very loud competition between America and Russia! Highly recommend the Space race by Deborah Cadbury and Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski
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Susan Cartwright answered on 7 May 2020: last edited 7 May 2020 11:41 am
Yes, we did really go (I am old enough to remember staying up late to watch the landing). The Apollo programme included 6 landings plus one aborted attempt (Apollo 13). The reason that we have not gone back since is simply that fnding for space exploration is limited, and manned missions are very expensive. The science return per dollar is much higher for unmanned missions, and unmanned missions do not have the potential to kill people if they go wrong (we were very lucky to get the Apollo 13 crew back safe).
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Paula Koelemeijer answered on 7 May 2020:
We did go, multiple times! And we hope to return in the not too distant future! The Moon is very interesting to explore for us in more detail. However, funding remains an issue, and without political will, it is hard to go back. But as scientists we would love to go back!
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Giorgio Bindoni answered on 7 May 2020:
I am with Susan on this.
I was 19 when the first landing occurred and I remember it vividly -
John Bridges answered on 7 May 2020: last edited 7 May 2020 12:14 pm
I vividly remember seeing Apollo 17 landing and astronauts on tv in 1972!
However, in addition to landing astronauts on the Moon, The Apollo missions brought back hundreds of kg of lunar rocks to study. For instance we have recently been studying some of those grains with electron microscopes and the Diamond synchrotron (a big X-ray microscope in Harwell, Oxfordshire). We see signs of what we call ‘space weathering’ – the solar wind impacting the Moon’s surface without an atmosphere to protect it – having changed the uppermost surface.
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Marios Kalomenopoulos answered on 7 May 2020:
Just to add some points why it would be very difficult to fake a moon landing:
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1- There were many many many people involved, so it would be extremely difficult to keep it secret after all those years.
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2- There are actually many material (from hardware engines, technical blueprints etc) that would have to be faked.
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3- The technology to make a “realistic” moon landing in a studio, didn’t exist in the late 60s, so it was also practically impossible to fake the shots.
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So at the very end, it was just simpler to go to the moon and land there, than try to lie about it! 😉 -
Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 7 May 2020:
To follow up on what others have said:
1)100,000 people worked over nearly 10 years to send spaceships to the moon. Maybe with modern technology you could do it with only 50,000 people over 10 years, or 100,000 people over 5 years – it’s still a huge project. It cost $153 billion dollars in 2018 money – even if you could do it for $100 billion, that’s still a lot of money. You also need governments to agree that it’s a good idea and for different politicians to continue funding after they win elections.2)A lot of what you needed humans for, you can do now with robots – there have been many rovers on the Moon and Mars.
3)Related to 2), it’s still dangerous to send people into space, but we can send people to the International Space Station for months at a time. But going out as far as the moon is much riskier.
4) As a sanity check on whether we went there the first time: the USSR (Russia) was watching all the American launches. They would certainly have been able to see if the USA was lying – why wouldn’t they tell the world?
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anon answered on 7 May 2020:
To add to the great answers above, we even have photos of the Apollo landing sites 🙂
NASA has a whole library here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/revisited/index.html
taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraftFun fact: A colleague of mine used these and other images to reconstruct a 3D environment of the landing sites so that it can be seen in VR! Buzz Aldrin even visited them and tried it out, they say it was instant flashback for him.
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Liza Sazonova answered on 7 May 2020: last edited 7 May 2020 2:15 pm
Lots of people already said that we are 100% sure that we did actually go to the moon, and it’s an interesting question why haven’t we gone since!
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For one, it’s very, very expensive. Imagine the cost of building a spaceship, shooting it all the way into space, landing it carefully on the moon, and making sure it can return back to Earth (no one wants to get stuck on the Moon). It’s a lot of money!
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Secondly, there’s really not that much to do on the Moon!
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In the end, it’s just a big space rock. We studied it pretty well with rovers, we have good images of the Moon, and honestly we know a lot about it. Robots are much better at studying the Moon’s surface because they don’t need air and they don’t get tired.
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During the space race, it was cool to say that we flew to the Moon – so we did it. But other than brag about it, humans don’t really have much else to do there right now…
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It’ll be different in another few years, when science and technology become good enough to build Moon bases, or maybe mines! Then people might start flying to the Moon again. For example, there is talk of building a Moon telescope in a crater, and people will definitely need to fly there to get it set up. -
John Davies answered on 22 May 2020:
I agree with all the other comments, the landings (which I also remember as a child) were far to difficult to fake and keep secret. Today it will be very expensive to go back, but NASA is being told to do in the next few years. I hope they make it.
Just to follow up the item about LRO images of the landing sites. I and Jason Cowan made some posters of the landing sites linked to the location of images taken on the surface. You can see them here https://www.roe.ac.uk/~jkd/moon.html
Comments
anon-253669 commented on :
thx for answering