Oh, lord, you’re not a moon landing denier, are you?
By “potential”, I think you mean “imaginary”. There is no existing technology that is expected to provide “exponential” improvement in orbital launchers any time soon.
For the moment we’re limited to chemical power sources; nuclear power is unlikely to be allowed for atmospheric use. So you’re stuck with having to carry fuel from the ground. There may be some improvement from using air-breathing engines for initial boost, so you don’t have to carry all your oxidizer. But beyond that it’s just incremental improvements in material science (making the spacecraft lighter, and making engines that can withstand higher temperatures), design methods, etc.
I’m just a guy asking questions. Also, I said prohibitive not impossible. I try not to submit to the temptation of using pigeonholing buzz words like “denier” either. It only serves to inflame others, while choking out any potential for a meaningful discourse or expansion of ideas that might further our collective understanding of the world. Why? What sort of things do “moon landing deniers” have to say?
The simple answer to the original question is, of course, because the Branson/Rutan spaceplane was never intended to go to the Moon and was not built for that, and Dick and Burt have no reason to even bother with that.
We definitely have every capability in materials and systems to head back to the moon with greater relative efficiency than Apollo if we so wished BUT we would have make the investment to spool up the heavy industrial infrastructure for it almost from ground up because we did not maintain effort once the point was made that Capitalist Democratic America was more greatly endowed in the virile regions than the Soviet Communists.
Think of it this way: In the same time period as the Moon landings, commercial aviation had the the debut of the Boeing 747 double-deck airliner and the Concorde supersonic transport.
Today the big wow new airliner is… a double-decker jumbo (Airbus 380), and we’ve given up on the SST. How come no SST Jumbo, no suborbital hyperplane, why are we barely up to anticipating the 787 rather than the 1777? Because there was no return-on-investment justifiable to the stockholders in developing a jumbo SST or a suborbital hyperliner or a brand new, 100% different Boeing every 4 years.
The idea that somehow the absence of a continued aggressive push for interplanetary manned spaceflight post-1972 doesn’t jibe with the existence of an aggressive lunar exploration effort 1961-72, is a fallacy. There just was no longer the political will to continue making it a budgetary priority so the effort was abandoned and the manufacturing base was repurposed.
Dreams provide inspiration, but economics (and quite a bit of politics) determines what material objects will be paid for to get built – and moon rockets are material objects. (Zero-point energy and cold fusion are chimerical thought exercises that solve nothing, until someone actually comes up with it.)
Perhaps “immaginary” is a better word. I try to keep an open mind and sometimes my immagination gets the better of me. It’s just that the seeming logic, scientific “know-how” and holier than thou attitude of today’s academics is intellectually confining almost to the point of suffocation. The controlled, biased, affronting litterbox of partial truths and factoids that emerge does little to further our collective understanding of things.
I’d be willing to discount technolgical progress altogether. Why don’t we simply replicate Apollo using 1960’s technology and see what happens? It would be an interesting experiment don’t you think? This would also overcome the cost constraints associated with our current cutting edge advancements considering we’d be using 50 year old outdated materials, expertise and technology.
The Apollo technology isn’t that dated.
Compare a jetliner from 1960 to a jetliner today. That’s a 50-year gap but except for the electronics, the two planes won’t be that different. They’re both big aluminum tubes. The modern engines will be a little more efficient, but they’re basically just an optimized version of what was powering planes 50 years ago.
But if you compare a plane from 1960 to a plane from 1910 the difference is tremendous. The gap is the same – 50 years – but in 1910 airplanes were little more than glorified kites.
Sometimes technology takes a big leap forward. The first 50 years of aviation were a revolutionary period where change was fast and furious. But as the technology matured, the rate of innovation slowed. Right now we’re in a period where computing technology is changing as fast as aviation technology did in the first part of the 20th century. But eventually computers will become a mature technology too.
Rocketry is an outgrowth of aviation. The Apollo program was right at the edge of what that mature technology was capable of. We could build a new rocket like the Saturn V today, and it would probably be a few percent faster or more efficient, but the Saturn V was already pretty close to the limits of what you can do with normal rocketry.
Thanks for the informative and well thought out answer(s). That said, I find it curious that “political will” and “bugetary priority” continue to plague what should be an unrelenting, collective affinity toward even loftier interstellar aspirations - forty plus years after the fact. It just seems so spurious and regressive to think we’ve lost the stones necessary to push the limits of space travel due to a lack of funds and political grit.
Likely because, as has already been stated, there’s no impetus to do so.
There’s no longer a cold war or space race with the Soviets, justifying the expense.
Just because it’s 50-year-old technology, doesn’t mean it’s inexpensive. It’d still cost many billions of dollars to send astronauts to the Moon and bring them home.
And, to what end? The basic science which the Apollo missions conducted has been done. I’m sure that scientists could (and probably already have) come up with reasons to go back to the Moon, but in an economic environment like we’re in now, with strong political pressure to cut government spending, there’s going to be very little support for that level of spending for such a mission, with no compelling reason for being (“loftier interstellar aspirations” probably won’t cut it in an era where the federal debt is suffocatingly large).
Well right now we’re in a bit of a pickle just keeping the lights on. So while you may feel manned space expolration
I for one do not share your viewpoint and in fact I object to it quite a bit.
We could obviously build another Apollo-type multistage rocket. But it would cost a couple hundred billion dollars. That’s a lot more than Richard Branson has to spend (he has about four billion dollars).
But there IS still a space race, just not to the moon. Upon deeper anyalysis we see that the moon was just the first step (pun intended) towards even greater potential supra orbital achievements. If the U.S. sticks a flag in the moon, why doesn’t the Soviet Union endeavor to stick a flag in Mars? Then China a flag on Venus? etc.
(I assume you mean Russia; the Soviet Union ceased to place flags anywhere around 1991…)
As I noted upthread, the Chinese are aggressively expanding their space program, and have announced plans for a manned lunar mission by 2025, setting the stage for an eventual Mars mission.
AFAIK, Russia’s space program hasn’t done anything revolutionary since Mir. Today, their manned program exists almost entirely to service the International Space Station (and is extensively underwritten by the U.S.), and continues to use the same basic flight technology which they’ve been using since the 1960s. The Soviets’ manned lunar program, as well as their Shuttle program, were both abandoned before completion, and haven’t been revisited.
You need to keep in mind the big difference between the US/Soviet space race of the 1950s and the 1960s, and any rivalry with China today: the U.S. spent about 40 years in a cold war with the Soviets. The U.S. government and military did not want to cede any advantage to the Soviets, and were willing to spend to make sure that didn’t happen. While the Chinese are certainly not a warm ally of the U.S. today, they aren’t viewed in anywhere near the same sort of light as the Soviets were, back then. The U.S.'s primary military focus today is on rogue states (Iran, North Korea, etc.), and terrorist cells.
While there were undoubtedly dreamers and visionaries who drove the ideas behind programs like Apollo, without the military and strategic imperative of the Cold War, it seems unlikely to me that such programs would have gotten funding.
The point was only that the money can be had if the country decides to do it.
However, you’re right, I ought really have used the tab for the more optional* Iraq war at $787,000,000,000, in which case the US could have gone what; 3-4 times?
(*No WMD, no links to Bin Laden, no attacks on the US, no casus belli)
Well lets just imagine you are a congress critter, and next week someone from the treasury announces that they made a huge blunder in the numbers, and there is 200 billion spare over the next five years. What do you think will happen to the money? Who is prepared to bet that the US congress will cheerfully vote to spend it on a manned mission to the moon? If you are not, you have answered the question.