If we went to the Moon already, why can’t we go back so easily? What technology have we lost? What are we trying to do differently? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO GENERATED)

If we could get to the moon in the 19 sixties, why does it seem so hard to do it now in the 21st century? Like, we've all seen or remember the 19 sixties. We had giant computers that could now fit inside of a a little calculator, let alone the computing capacity of your smartphone. We had technology that is laughably out of date by today's standards, and we just did it. And yet now it seems almost impossible.

Like, we've been trying to recapitulate it for almost 2 decades now. Like, we've been hearing for decades, oh, we're going back to the moon. NASA's back to we're headed back to the moon. More people on the moon. It's taking forever.

Our current plans are bloated, horribly late, over budget, and it seems like it's getting worse. What's going on? Well, to set things up, let me paint the picture of the difference between the 19 sixties and seventies Apollo missions and our current strategy with the Artemis project. So let's start with Apollo. On July 16, 1969, we made history.

At 9:30 in the morning, the Saturn 5 Rocket, the largest, most powerful rocket ever built, ignited. Capable of over 34,500,000 Newtons of thrust at launch, the Saturn 5 hoisted 48 tons of fuel, equipment, landers, life support, systems, communications gear, a command module, a descent module, an s an ascent module, and 3 human beings into space. It was a 3 stage rocket with the first two stages igniting, burning, and detaching before lofting the remaining spacecraft into a stable parking orbit around the Earth. After a couple of orbits, the 3rd stage ignited its own smaller rockets, boosting the spacecraft towards the moon. While in transit, the spacecraft separated into 2 components, a command and service module and a lunar module.

That lunar module spun around and reconnected. It was a better configuration for the relatively easy transit through empty space after the rigors of launch. 3 days later, the spacecraft passed within 110 kilometers of the lunar surface. 2 more burns put it in a stable orbit around the moon. The lunar module detached and arrived on the surface where 2 astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, spent 21 hours and 36 minutes on the moon.

They reentered the lunar module and an ascent stage detached, rocketing them back up to the waiting command module. They rendezvoused, discarded the lunar lander which crashed back on the moon's surface, and returned to earth several days later, splashing down 920 miles southwest of Honolulu in the Pacific Ocean. That feat would be successfully repeated 5 more times before the Apollo missions came to a close in the early 19 seventies. That was over 50 years ago. Today, NASA has plans to return to the Moon, dubbed the Artemis project, and the first crewed mission profile, which is currently slated for no earlier than 2026, looks something like this.

First, a launch will send the lunar lander craft into Earth orbit. A private company, either SpaceX or Blue Origin, will provide this craft. To get the lander to the moon, it will need to be refueled, which will take somewhere in the ballpark of 10 to 20 additional launches. Each one of these launches will just carry extra fuel. They will rendezvous in orbit, and they will, refuel this lunar spacecraft.

Alternatively, there might be a tanker in orbit that is already prefilled, but the basic structure is the same. The lander itself will then burn and get itself over into lunar orbit and wait. Additional lunar landers may be sent to deliver supplies to the lunar surface for later use. Then NASA's newest rocket, the Space Launch System or SLS, will send the Orion spacecraft into orbit. The Orion spacecraft will then carry 4 astronauts into a lunar orbit taking 2 to 3 days to reach the moon.

The Orion spacecraft will dock with the lunar lander. 2 astronauts will descend on the lunar lander and spend roughly a week at or near the lunar south pole. Then the astronauts will get back in the lunar lander, launch up and rendezvous with Orion, ditch the lander, and return to Earth splashing down in some handy large body of water. Like I said, what's going on? With Apollo, we had a single launch of a single vehicle that contained all the stuff needed for a lunar mission.

It was like heading out on a backpacking trip with all the supplies you need well, on your backpack. On your back. In a single bag. The Artemis mission concept is more like sending a few of your buddies out ahead of time to set up your campsite, and then you setting off with barely enough supplies, and then on the last leg of your trip, you get into your best friend's Range Rover to take you to the actual campsite, and leaving the Range Rover there when you're done. What's going on?

As we've come to learn on this show, simple questions don't always have easy answers. And we've also come to learn on this show that it might be easy or tempting to point our fingers at one specific cause, but that we should resist that temptation because often the universe is nuanced and complex, which is good for us because it means we get to keep doing this show together without running out of things to talk about. And all of this goes double for literally anything involving humans and especially politics. Because I can tell you this, quantum mechanics is easier than people, and general relativity is easier than politics. People act like physicists are so smart, but really we pick the easy problems to work on.

Now, maybe a 100 years from now, a future historian will be able to summarize everything better about why Artemis is so much harder than Apollo, so much more complex, taking so much longer. You know, we're in the thick of everything now, so it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what's going on, but this is my best guess. As usual, it comes down to numerous factors that are sometimes related and sometimes independent, but I think we can boil it down to 3 p's, price, politics, and Patreon. That's patreon.com/pmsutter, and you knew that was coming. This is how you can support the show.

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No. Actually, the 3 p's are price, politics, and priorities. So let's look at the first p, the price. Yes. The Apollo missions were impressive.

And yes. The Saturn 5 Rocket was the most awesomest rocket ever built. And everything was also hideously expensive. The entire Apollo program cost roughly 26,000,000,000 Space bucks, by by which I mean dollars, but that was in the 19 sixties seventies. Once you account for inflation, the entire Apollo program cost nearly $260,000,000,000.

Yes. That's a Sagan 1,000,000,000 with a b. If we include project Gemini in the robotic lunar program, which were necessary precursors to get Apollo off the ground, literally, that goes up to over $280,000,000,000 on the moon landings. At its peak, NASA was consuming something like 5% of the entire federal budget, and the Apollo missions were more than half of NASA's budget. That was simply unsustainable.

We don't have that kind of appetite now. We don't have that kind of money for space programs now. No one is going to approve spending 5% of the federal budget on space exploration human launches. It's just not gonna work. I'll get into that in the in the politics.

But that's a raw fact. The Apollo missions had more money than the Artemis project does. Simple numbers. Today, total, in the roughly 10 to 20 years, depending on how you count, of the Artemis project, it has spent around $90,000,000,000, and NASA itself only commands less than 0.5% of the federal budget. So if anyone ever asks why do we spend all this money on space, tell them it is a rounding error in the federal budget.

You could eliminate all of NASA and our overall federal budget outlook, growth, GDP, all that would be largely unaffected. That's $90,000,000,000 over the entire lifetime. We are trying to return to the moon for a fraction of what it cost 50 years ago. That's just fact. We can't get around that.

We're spending less money on the moon return than we were on the first trip out. And so, yeah, things are going to be different this time. Things might take longer. Things might look different because we're spending a different amount of money. Now it's not always true that the more money you spend on a thing, the faster it happens or the better it is.

I get that. But, also, spending less on a thing is probably going to get you worse results. And I know some of you asked, many people asked, I even wondered this, why don't we just reuse the Saturn 5? Why are we building any 1,000,000,000 why are we spending any 1,000,000,000 of dollars to build an entirely new rocket, the Space launch system, when we already had the Saturn 5 that was more than capable of delivering people to the moon? Why do we need to do it again?

Well, the truth is because we're spending less money, we have to be careful with our budgets, and it's actually cheaper to build with new designs than it is to try to reuse Saturn 5 tech. Because, one, Saturn 5 tech was developed in the fifties sixties with 19 fifties, sixties, and seventies understanding of rocketry and machining and computer aided design and flight management and all that. We don't wanna do that again. We actually have better tools available. We are able to make better composites, better materials, better understanding of fuel and flight characteristics.

It would be more expensive to take 19 sixties technology and try to fit it into a 21st century mission than to just build a brand new rocket. And, yeah, there are blueprints, there are books, there are schematics, there are designs, But most of the knowledge of building something, especially like a rocket, which is among the most complex machine ever invented by humanity, most of that knowledge is in people's brains. It's in their heads. The tiny little fixes. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. You gotta turn the valve this way or or, you know, we the the the thing says we need to go to this tolerance, but actually we need to go a little bit over here to make it fit. Like, there's just so much built in human knowledge that only exists in people's brains that that never makes it into a document or a piece of paper or a schematic. There's so much know how when you have thousands of human beings working together on a project. Each one of those people, individuals, brings their own set of knowledge.

They they gain their own knowledge. They gain experience, and they apply it, and it never gets written down. And so we can't just look at the blueprints of a Saturn 5 and do it again because most of the tiny, tiny little details in anyone who has ever worked on a a large project knows exactly what I'm talking about. We would have to relearn all of that again. We would have to teach ourselves how to build a Saturn 5 again.

The blueprints and the documents and the designs simply aren't enough. And when you look at it, that kind of a daunting task, you say, well, let's just build a new rocket anyway. It's going to be cheaper. The second reason is politics. Closely aligned with the price, the Apollo missions were a point of national pride and competition against the Soviets.

That's what fueled the national appetite. It's really hard to get a country full of people, especially a large country with 100 of millions of people, to spend 5% of all their money combined on a single thing. There are very, very few things in our in any nation that meet that kind of bar. And for a brief period of time, NASA did because, man, we wanna stick it to the commies. Right?

We wanna show them who's boss, who's more technologically superior, which way of doing things is better. We wanna get to the moon first. It became a nationwide priority, and we put our money where our mouth was. We spent a lot of money on it nowadays. Returning to the moon is not a point of national pride or competition, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Like I said, spending 5% of the federal budget on Apollo missions, well, well, great, was unsustainable. We were never going to do that for the long haul. And we can see what happens. Once we got to the moon, public interest in the Apollo missions collapsed in a matter of years because it was unsustainable. Once we showed that we could do it, they're like, okay.

Yeah. Whatever. Another moon landing. Who cares? It's not necessarily a bad thing that this is not a point of focused national attention and pride and competition because those are fickle and temporary.

And when the spotlight moves off of you, you run the risk of losing everything. So it's smarter to have different reasons to go to the moon. To be slower and cautious about it. To get different angles of public support involved in this. So it's not a single focused let's go moment, but a longer more sustained let's do this thing kind of trajectory because we don't want that collapse to happen again.

So we want to be smart, and we want it to be sustainable. Relatedly to that, to keeping things sustainable, we have to keep a lot of people very, very happy, and we have to do things old school. There's a lot of talk about new space and the private space companies, and they're doing amazing things. I would love to devote an entire episode of what the future of private space flight looks like from my perspective. So feel free to ask.

But NASA is a government organization. It is part of the government bureaucracy. And if you want to play the political game, which means surviving as a political agency, as a bureaucracy, as a government outfit, you have to play by certain rules, and you have to keep lots of different people happy. This is part of it. Because there isn't this focused national attention of let's beat the Soviets, Instead, you have to be smarter about it.

You have to be more diplomatic about it. You have to get people on board in different ways. And the number one way to get people on board with a big government project is to ensure that they get a cut. Make sure that someone's writing a check with their name on it. And that's why NASA has tentacles in almost every state.

That's why there's launch facilities in Florida, rocket manufacturing plants in Georgia, why they're in Alabama, why there's command facilities in Houston, why the oh, there's some extra launch pads out in California, why one little essential doohickey on the rocket can only be made in Oregon. There's a reason for that. Yes. It's inefficient. Yes.

It's slow. Yes. It can lead to corruption, but also it's the only way to do it. Some community in Oregon, if they don't care, if we're not beating the Soviets, if if there's not this focused national attention spotlight on it, the only reason they're really going to care is if they have a stake in it, if they have a role to play, if they have a part of the grander story. NASA has to play those politics.

These weren't necessarily considerations. They they were part of the consideration, don't get me wrong, back in the sixties seventies. But also, the government was just writing blank checks to NASA to get the job done. Now we have to do things differently that is going to change how we approach returning to the moon. We have to do it old school.

And, yes, private space companies can do things differently, and great, and they need to, and that's worth celebrating and pouring resources in. NASA can't because NASA has to play the political game. As an example of this, the Space Launch System is less powerful than the Saturn 5. It's true. It simply can't get as much stuff into orbit or to the moon as the Saturn 5 did.

Why in the heck are we designing a new moon mission based on a less capable rocket? Well, because of politics. Because we're kinda stuck with it. You know, I just talked a little bit ago about how wasteful it would be to try to rebuild, just just brush off the drawings of the Saturn 5 and let's build it again. We're kinda, sorta doing that with the shuttle engine.

So the space shuttle wound down. That program wound down, and we didn't really know, we as in NASA and engineering folks, didn't know what to do with all that infrastructure, the shuttle program involved, manufacturers, suppliers, key components from so many different states, communities, representative districts, like, the like, the whole deal. It was this massive tentacle spreading across the country. And then when you're not building shuttles anymore and you're not doing that anymore, what do you do with all of that space industry infrastructure? You know, all the all the plants, all the engineers, all the technicians, you know, all the all the the whole fraction of our economy that was devoted to building and maintaining the space shuttles, what do you do with them?

And so NASA cooked up these new lunar and Mars missions, the Artemis project, as a way to reuse the old shuttle engines. One, because there were a bunch of shuttle engines just sitting in warehouses unused. And then 2, you know, if we've recently been building shuttle engines, it's not like 50 years ago, the Saturn 5. We it was just a few years ago that we built our last shuttle engine. Maybe we can just keep doing that.

And so NASA designed the rocket, the actual entire assembly of of this mission around the engines, around the shuttle engines. So at the bottom of the space launch system, you're looking at old shuttle engines. And when there are new versions of the space launch system, there are going to be new versions of the old shuttle engines because they were playing politics. Because they had to, because that is how you survive in the political game, by keeping a lot of people happy. And the number one way to keep people happy is to keep giving them money to do things.

So we are reusing some old shuttle technology, the the engines. It's actually costing us way more money than if we had just designed engines from the ground up. It is affecting the entire mission profile because we have weaker engines. We have a weaker rocket than we did with Saturn 5, and that limits what we can do. We simply can't get the whole package up in a single launch, like we did with Saturn V.

We can't do an entire lunar mission based on the Space Launch System because it doesn't have enough oomph, it can't get enough stuff over to the moon to make it happen. So we need a more complex mission with more components, and we need other partners. Yes. It's inefficient. Yes.

We're spending more money. This is proof right here. If you wanna know, like, why can't we just go back to Saturn 5, imagine this times 10. But it's keeping NASA alive. They're playing the game.

Yes. It's inefficient, but that's better than 0 efficiency and simply getting wiped away from the federal budget, which is threatens to happen every few years or so. And this is another line of thinking. One could argue that it's a great thing that we kept all that shuttle infrastructure in place, all the engineers, all the technicians, all the know how in place. We kept those people employed for years even though the space launch system is is kind of a beast and an albatross and weird Frankenstein's monster of of old and new technology.

We kept those people employed. We kept those companies around, and that was exactly the technical base that we needed to have our modern renaissance and private space flight companies, but that's a different episode. Folks, I need to pause to take a quick little break and mention that this show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I didn't realize how much physics stressed me out, especially as a student, until I started teaching it again. And I'm facing 50 incredibly smart and bright, but oh, so nervous and anxious and stressed out students.

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That's better help, he l p, dot com slash spaceman. We've done price, we've done politics, and the last reason why Artemis looks a lot more different than Apollo is priorities. And this this takes several different shades. One is in risk tolerance. I'm gonna be brutally honest with you.

The Apollo missions were dangerous. They were straight up dangerous. Don't believe me? Look at Apollo 1. A pure oxygen environment during a test caught fire.

3 astronauts died. Apollo 6, engine number 2 partially failed, nearly killed the crew, nearly blew up the whole thing. Apollo 13, a little sturdy thing in a tank broke and nearly killed the crew. That's 3 of the Apollos. 1 was lethal and 2, near disasters.

Like, a breath away from complete catastrophe. We were testing these rockets and complex machines as they were flying. The public and political desire for risk, the tolerance for risk is way, way lower than it was in the 19 sixties. NASA simply, especially after the 2 space shuttle disasters, NASA can't have dead astronauts. They are hanging on to public goodwill by a thread.

And if they screw up, we're done. And also, as a public, in this sixties seventies, we were smoking, we were drinking, and we were lighting rockets on fire and going to the moon. And if a few people died in the process, well, it's worth it. There was a different attitude towards risk, an attitude that the public simply doesn't have anymore. And so, of course, things are going to move slower.

They're going to be more complex. There are going to be a 1000000 tests on the ground to ensure that every flight is much much safer than any flight of the Apollo missions because we just can't stomach the thought of corpses on the lunar surface. Another angle of the priorities are the different mission parameters. Apollo missions could be counted in hours. Yeah.

All that might, all that work, all that money to spend a day ish poking around. A few hours actually outside of the vehicle and actually walking on the surface. The new Artemis missions are designed to last for days, maybe over a week on the lunar surface. That means you need more stuff. You need more water, more air, more food, more fuel, more extendable arm grabby things, more pouches, wrenches, tricorders, doodads, gizmos.

If you wanna spend a week on a moon, you gotta pack more stuff. And hauling that stuff to the moon ain't easy. The more stuff you have, the bigger the rocket you need, which means you need more fuel, which means you have a bigger rocket, which means you need more fuel. This is called the tyranny of the rocket equation. The only way we can think of to get a decent sized mission, like, a week long mission to the moon is to have these multiple components where the lander is not inside of the initial rocket that leaves the Earth's surface, that leaves before.

The only way to get that large of a lander over to the moon, you can't do it in one launch. You need to refuel it. We have a different location. You know, the Apollo missions, you know, they're just just happy to land somewhere on the moon, somewhere easy. We're more interested now in the lunar south pole because there might be pockets of water ice there, and there might be a lot of water ice underneath the surface.

Landing there is kind of difficult. You need a very special kind of orbit, which is tricky to get into, which means the entire mission is more complex, more involved, trickier, has a lot more moving parts. Another priority is we have a different purpose. Don't get me wrong. The Apollo missions returned an enormous amount of scientific knowledge about the moon.

But remember that the science part was shoehorned in. There there were so much advocacy. It's a fascinating aspect of American history. The primary goal was getting humans on the moon and beating the Soviets. That was goal number 1.

And then, oh, by the way, maybe if we teach them to pick up rocks, we might learn something. Tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the attention and focus and priority was doing science. The Artemis missions are science first. They're not only going to spend way longer on the lunar surface, they're going to be much better trained. The astronauts are going to be much better trained.

They will be carrying out a lot more experiments, which means they need to carry more scientific gear with them. With the Apollo missions, we are playing fast and loose with money and human lives to achieve a singular goal of beating the Soviets. Now, we are being cautious with money and lives to achieve a myriad of goals, mostly scientific. And scientific goals have a lot more stuff and work and planning and design and instruments associated with them than just putting boots on the ground and turning around and leaving. The Artemis project has an entirely different set of priorities than the Apollo missions did.

And this different set of priorities dictate a different mission profile, which makes the mission more complex because we are trying to do more stuff on the Moon. And we have a different purpose included in that priority. We're not just going to land and look around, take some selfies, and come back. We're planting the beginning of a lunar base. We're sowing the seeds of long term habitation with the Artemis project.

Once again, this requires so much more stuff. Not just to spend a week there, which is longer than any of the Apollo missions. Like a single Artemis mission could potentially spend more time on the moon than all of the Apollo missions combined. But we also expect our astronauts to start building stuff, habitats, walls and roofs and water filtration devices and and porta potties and and all this stuff, vending machines, because we want to lay the first step to long term habitation that requires more stuff, that requires a more complex mission. And then when you weave it together with the fact that we're spending less money on Artemis than we did on Apollo, that we live in a different political climate where there isn't a singular national focused will, where instead we have to be much more careful.

We have to make sure there are a lot of people on board with this in different ways. We had to reuse some of our shuttle technology just to keep those people on board so that NASA wasn't outright defunded that limited what we could do with our rocket, the Space Launch System, which is weaker than the Saturn 5, and so you need to involve a lot more components. Artemis is a lot more complex than Apollo, and that's not a bad thing. Yes. There are going to be delays, Setbacks, inefficiencies, bloated budgets, because we're doing things differently now.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a side goal here. A lot of the Artemis project hinges on the development of a fuel depot in orbit, like a big old tank that you can send rockets up to fill with extra fuel, and then those rockets return to Earth. That is more complex than necessary than we need for now for the initial Artemis missions. That's for sure.

But it's essential for the future exploration of the solar system. And if NASA and NASA's buddies nail this now, they will be 1 to 2 generations ahead of everyone else in terms of capabilities. Because if NASA has access to a orbiting fuel depot, where they can send anything up into orbit, refuel, and then rock it, that's how you don't just get to the moon. That's how you get to Mars, the asteroid belt. That's how you send missions quickly into the outer solar system.

If that's all we get out of the Artemis project, for this phase of the Artemis project, is the working out the details of an orbiting fuel depot and how to refuel in 0 g and freezing cold, which could be an entire episode of how do we actually do that, that's a game changer right there. And that's a hidden game changer that I don't think a lot of people talk about. Yes, it's frustrating to see delays and cost overruns and slightly less than impressive rockets. I get it. But that's not the reality we live in.

How we got here is a product of 100, if not 1,000 or 1,000,000 of individual decisions and considerations playing out over decades. Trying to make the most of a not so stellar situation where we don't have national focus and priority on beating the Soviets. So we're trying to be smart about it. In many different directions, we're trying to be smart engineering wise, money wise financially, and smart politically. Why?

It's so that we never have to retreat from the moon again. Thank you to Somer l on email for the question that led to today's episode. And thank you to all my Patreon supporters, especially the ones, who who contributed to earn a free copy of Rescuing Signs. We've got so many of you. Oh, I can't thank you.

Oh, man. This is amazing. We've got Justin g, Chris l, Lothian 53, Barbara k, Alberto m, Duncan m, Corey d, Stargazer, Robert b, Tom g, Nyla, bike Santa, Sam, r, John, s, Joshua, Scott, m, Rob, h, Lewis, m, John, w, Alexis, Gilbert, m, Rob, w, Valerie, h, Demetrius, j, Jules, r, Mike, g, Jim, l, Scott, j, David, s, Angelo, l, William w Scott, r, Dean c, Miguel, bbjj108, Barrel Wires, Heather, Mike s, Michelle r, Pete h, Steve s, Nathan, and what what bird. That's patreon.com/pmsutter. Again, I cannot thank you enough.

It is a distinct honor to be able to share all of these wonderful stories about the universe with you and to be supported in that. Please keep sending me questions. Drop a review on iTunes or Spotify. That really helps the show's visibility. In the meantime, send me more questions.

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