What Were the Real Reasons Why We Stopped Going to the Moon?

Next year, 2019, will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11

moon

landing, since then only 12 men have walked on the lunar surface in six missions spanning a period of less than three years. The Apollo project at its peak employed more than 400,000 people in some 20,000 companies and universities with a total cost adjusted to 2018 figures of around $145 billion, so after all the money invested in work, why did our interest in him fell like a stone into the void? and

what

were the

real

reasons

why we

stopped

going

to the

moon

. Today Apollo is seen as a revolutionary episode in our scientific understanding and technological capabilities; in just over 60 years we have gone from the first powered flight of the Wright brothers to Neil Armstrong's step on the lunar surface.

Apollo was not only the culmination of the space race, it was also the last great manned adventure in a century in which we climbed the highest mountains, went to the deepest parts of the oceans, and explored the farthest reaches of the earth. . As time goes by, the approval rating for the Apollo missions has gradually increased: in 1979, 41% of people in an NBC poll said Apollo was worth it; In 1999, twenty years later, it was 55%. In an increasingly uncertain world, the mystique of Apollo and our nostalgic look at this period in history when anything seemed possible has only increased with the recent loss of some of those original pioneers, such as Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and Gene Cernan, the Last Man on the Moon, but it wasn't always like that.

In fact, at the time President Kennedy defended Apollo, many scientists opposed it, saying it would divert money from other projects. Senior military officials were opposed because it would remove many of the best scientists from working in aerospace and missile technology, and community leaders opposed because they believed the huge amount of money would be better spent on education, poverty, and healthcare. There are many

reasons

we

stopped

going

to the Moon: the growing involvement in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 and the budget cuts that followed, the gradual thawing of the Cold War, and the growing belief that money could be better spent here in the Moon.

Land. than in space, but there are two reasons that surpassed all the others and to know

what

they were you have to go back to Kennedy's speech before Congress in May 1961 and the circumstances in which he delivered it. In November 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States at a time when the Soviets were achieving impressive milestones in space. They had taken the lead with Sputnik in 1957, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. They had orbited the Moon and photographed its far side with Luna 3 in 1959 and then, on April 12, 1961, to top it all off, they put the first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin.

All of this was a huge propaganda success for the Soviets and to many of the American and Western public it

real

ly seemed like the United States was losing the space race and, by default, the battle of ideologies, even though Alan Shepard became the first American in space just three weeks later. Kennedy had to do something, so on April 20, 1961 he sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson asking him to see what space programs he could allow the United States. to catch up and overtake the Soviets after meeting with NASA. He returned a week later with three suggestions, all based on the use of the first Apollo program.

Apollo had been conceived in 1960 by Eisenhower as a continuation of Project Mercury, but it would carry three astronauts instead of one Mercury and would have much larger rocket stages that would later become the Saturn V, with a range that would extend to the Moon, but at that time I still did not have well-defined objectives. The first of the proposals was to build an orbital space station, but NASA believed that Soviet-led heavy rockets would mean they could achieve this in the not-too-distant future. The second was a manned orbit around the Moon, again believed to be a goal the Soviets could also achieve.

They had already orbited the moon with their unmanned Luna 3 probe, so it wouldn't be a big leap for them to carry out a manned mission. The third option was a manned mission to land on the moon. This was something that NASA thought the Soviets would find difficult and had shown no signs of wanting to do. It's also quite far in the future, but the United States can likely get there first. Initially, Kennedy was skeptical about a manned moon landing due to the enormous price tag that was estimated at nine billion dollars for the next five years until 1966, in 2018 he was betting around $70 billion, but it was the only option he It would have the prestige and impact that Kennedy was looking for, it was big and bold and it would send a signal to the world that the United States was the preeminent leader in space and technology.

Although many believe that Kennedy was a great supporter of space and that this was the reason for the Apollo initiative, in a transcript of a meeting between him and NASA Administrator James Webb in April 1962 and published in 2001, he states Clearly, he's not really that interested in space, he's only doing it because of the progress of the Soviets and Yuri Gagarin's flight just a few weeks earlier. It has also been suggested, but it was to help offset the humiliation of the disastrous US-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which also occurred under his administration. And so it was that when he gave his speech to Congress on May 25, 1961, he said the following: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before the end of this decade of landing a man on the moon and returning him healthy." and saved the Earth." It literally referred to a man.

The mission would be to get a single astronaut to land on the moon, plant the American flag, and then return home. For Kennedy, Apollo was a political decision to achieve a political goal: to demonstrate to the rest of the world and to those developing nations that were still struggling with their future political paths that the technological and organizational power of the United States, and therefore the democratic capitalism. It was superior to Soviet-style communism. Although it was an all-out race to beat the Soviets, Kennedy attempted to back out of his commitment by offering to share the lunar mission with the Soviets twice, once in a private meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961 and again in the United States.

Joined. United Nations speech in September 1963, but they rejected the offer, and after Kennedy's death, both sides abandoned the proposal. It would take the Soviets three more years before they got serious about their own lunar mission and by then they had fallen far behind and the technical challenges of the N1 rocket would delay and ultimately end their manned lunar ambitions. Over time, Apollo grew from a single manned landing to a series of ten, although after Kennedy's assassination it became almost a living monument to him. Even after the Apollo 1 disaster that killed all three crew members while performing a pre-flight test, there was a determination to continue and keep his vision alive.

This also highlighted the danger that the mission could fail in some way: they were literally flying into the unknown. Although most of its systems had been tested and previous missions had flown around the moon, the development of the lunar lander was taking much longer than expected and the landing of Apollo 11 and the ascent from the lunar surface was something that was not expected. could be simulated. precisely on Earth, if something went wrong at that time, there was the very real danger of the crew being stranded on the Moon. This made Apollo 11 the grand finale of the space race between the United States and the Soviets, with all the exciting moments until the end.

Although the Soviets attempted to upstage Apollo by landing a remote-controlled Lunakhod rover on the moon in February 1969, the rocket failed to launch, but this was kept secret for many years and it would be February 1970 before the replacement Lunakhod landed. officially. . But Apollo 11 did reach the moon and after the crew landed and planted the American satellite. flag on the lunar surface, they stayed a total of 21 hours and 36 minutes before leaving and returning home safely. And that was it, the race was won, the United States had done it, they beat the Soviets and took one man or in this case two to the moon and returned them safely home, just as Kennedy had declared before the Congress in 1961.

Although there were nine more Apollo missions in the works, Apollo 11 was the primary goal, all subsequent missions were effectively filling in the missing pieces to do science and making use of massive infrastructure and investment, but they had been done to achieve Apollo 11. to the lunar surface. However, because Apollo was a political project to show the power of the US and the free market system, there was no plan to continue the science and colonize the moon or make a permanent lunar outpost or even return to the moon. In fact, like so many other major events that have happened since there was no grand plan for what would happen after the initial Apollo missions.

This rather ill-defined conclusion from Apollo was noted at one point, but no one said that significant action was taken by the highest levels. After the initial adulation dies down, apathy sets in even though there are more missions planned, a sort of be there, see it, do it attitude becomes prevalent among the public. What was front-page news around the world is relegated to the back pages or not even reported in many countries, interest from both the public and government drops dramatically, and NASA is threatened as budget cuts become increasingly ever deeper. In January 1970 and after Apollo 12, NASA announced it would cut 50,000 more jobs from its workforce of 190,000 and that was less than half of its 1960 peak of 400,000.

Apollo 20 would be canceled and its Saturn 5 would be used to launch Skylab itself made from the upper stages of a Saturn 5 rocket. Of all the following missions, only Apollo 13 really stands out, but for the wrong reasons because it brought back to the drama of whether they will make it or not. There were calls to end the program after Apollo 13, but NASA did not want to fail, so it was announced that they would eliminate missions 18 and 19 and condense their most important goals into Apollo 17, which would become the last. one. With this ending NASA was left in a strange place, Skylab was a provisional measure to make a space station but using leftover parts from Saturn 5 and the shuttle was all that remained of a space transportation system that would have taken man back to the moon and Mars.

Now it would only be for missions in low Earth orbit, basically it will be a space truck that will transport men and equipment to and from orbit, but neither Skylab nor the shuttle had that surprise factor of the Apollo 11 mission. The long-awaited giant leap for the Humanity will be limited to a few hundred kilometers above the Earth and as such we will no longer need giant rockets capable of returning the entire infrastructure to build and launch them to the Moon. The Moon became a footnote in space history for the next 50 years, as robotic probes took on the job of exploring the solar system.

Only in recent years have we seen anything resembling those ambitious goals of the 1960s, but they are still on a much smaller scale than before, so it is ironic that The Economist noted that Apollo was the program. chosen to confront the Soviets was to demonstrate that America's free market system was better than the centralized government control of the Soviets, and yet it took an enormous amount of American public resources, money, and centralized government organization to achieve it. So were we right to leave a moon after Apollo or should we have perhaps continued Soviet and foreign cooperation as we have done with the International Space Station?

Let me know in the comments and also, why don't you check out some of our other videos? Do you have time. So now I just want to say thanks for watching and please subscribe, like and share.