Why haven't we ever gone back to the moon?

I know I’m not the first person to ask this, as other human beings have thought of this before, but why haven’t we ever gone back to the moon since the early 70s?

I mean, there’s plenty of rich people and corporations who could make a lot of money by televising or live streaming a moon landing in the modern world, and such an act would inspire countless amounts of nationalistic pride and human zeal for science and space travel.

If we could afford to go there seven times in the late sixties and early seventies, don’t tell me that nobody nowadays with the superior technology and knowledge we have now would be willing to pay to send anyone to the Moon.

I’m posting this here because I feel it’s sort of an opinion thing rather than a factual question, but I also feel that it’s not really a debate per se it’s just something to be casually discussed even though it’s such an important topic.

The short answer is there’s nothing there that currently makes it worth the effort and expense of going.

The “currently” is the important bit. As technology evolves, the calculus will change.

For example, if we ever crack the fusion-power puzzle, the moon could potentially be part of a resource loop for propulsion and power generation in space:

But with fusion reactors forever past a thirty year horizon, this remains merely theoretical.

Ditto the development of a space elevator. If it were significantly easier and cheaper to get back and forth from orbit, the transit to and from the moon becomes more realistic to consider as a somewhat routine operation. But until someone figures out how to weave carbon nanotubes at industrial scale, that, also, remains a future dream.

We will go back some day. But there has to be a compelling reason beyond “it will be neat for people to watch.”

That 3He is a good fuel for nuclear fusion is a misnomer perpetuated by people desperately scrambling for rationale for having permanent human presence on the Moon. In fact, even if we could achieve sustained fusion conditions with deuterium and tritium (D-T fusion), D-3He fusion has requirements that are approximately two orders of magnitude more difficult with a corresponding inverse in power density, and prohibitive parasitic (Bremsstrahlung) losses at the minimum plasma confinement conditions for fusion. The supposed benefit of D-3He fusion is that it is aneutronic—that is, that it does not produce neutrons the way D-D and D-T fusion does—and provides charged particles from which momentum is readily converted into electrical power, but the problem with that is that at the necessary conditions for D-3He fusion, a significant amount of D-D fusion will occurs, which is is a low yielding reaction that does produce energetic ‘fast’ neutrons about 50% of reactions.

The sum total is that D-3He reactions for sustained nuclear fusion power generation is not really viable—certainly not by any methods currently being developed—and even if it were, it would be vastly more cost effective to breed 3He on Earth by producing tritium and letting it decay rather than sifting through hundreds of tons or Lunar regolith per gram of 3He that is hypothetically recoverable. We might as well go to Venus to collect carbon dioxide, or Titan for some hydrocarbon snow.

As for the question of the o.p.:

The reason that “rich people and corporations” having gone back to the Moon is because there is not, in fact, a lot of money to be made from live streaming or anything else. The entire reason the United States went to the Moon was in the desperate zeal to demonstrate superior technical prowess vice the ideological opponent in the “Space Race” that the US was vastly behind in by the time we even realized there was a competition. That was a decision, hastily made by John Kennedy and announced at Rice University in September 1962 and that Kennedy immediately regretted when he was informed of the scope and cost of the effort and risk of failing to meet his goal. To achieve that goal the US spent an extraordinary amount of money: US$25.8B between 1960 and 1973 (parts of what became Apollo were actually started before Kennedy made it a national commitment), which adjusted for inflation is about US$257B in FY2020 dollars (The Planetary Society estimate).

Although the Apollo program and associated Ranger and Surveyor uncrewed program yielded a wealth of scientific information about the formation of the Earth/Moon system and inspired a lot of people, it was never particularly popular with the US public which never offered more than 50% approval for the program. The later J-class extended missions were being curtailed even before the Apollo 11 landing, and even the extended program utilizing surplus hardware didn’t go beyond three Skylab missions and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The missions after Apollo 13 weren’t even televised live except for a few minutes of specific activities due to a combination of public disinterest and concerns about another significant failure occurring during live airing, which is probably a good thing because some of the astronaut-to-ground-control conversations became pretty spicy (and actually make for interesting reading).

Although there are certainly mineral resources on the surface of the Moon, and ice water deposits in permanently shaded craters at the poles, there is nothing that is worth the extraordinary cost of sending people and equipment to the Moon, much less the difficulty of extracting it and somehow returning it intact to Earth. Gerald K. O’Neill postulated having lunar mining colonies to extract structural materials and consumables that would be delivered via mass driver to construct large permanent habitats at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points of neutral gravitational stability or to orbiting solar power satellites that would collect sunlight and beam power down to antennas on Earth through the microwave-frequency “atmospheric windows” but even a cursory analysis shows that this would be unfavorable compared to just collecting solar energy at Earth’s surface even with the spectral losses.

There is also the issue of habitability; aside from the difficulty of constructing habitats (which would have to be dug into the regolith or located in the large lava tubes found at various locations) there is the fine electrostatically-charged Lunar dust that sticks to everything and would pose both a health and tribological hazard to anything transiting outside (it was tracked into to the Lunar Modules by astronauts despite all attempts to vacuum it out and nearly made at least one Lunar Roving Vehicle inoperable in just a few hours of use), the radiation environment on the unprotected surface, the fact that the surface of the Moon is in shadow for two weeks out of four (making solar power problematic), and the fractional lunar gravity that would almost certainly have detrimental physiological effects on long term inhabitants.

Of course, other nations have gone to the Moon; the Soviet Union sent probes and even a sample return mission despite having ‘lost’ the race to put humans on the Lunar surface. India has since attempted a probe (crashed) and China a sample return mission (success), both sensibly using uncrewed missions rather than the extraordinary expense of sending delicate human beings and trying to keep them alive in conditions far more hostile than the worst on Earth outside of an active volcano. This is not to say that there is not some role of humans in space exploration, but the more sensible route would be to first establish an infrastructure for essential materials and consumables, and the ability to build terrestrial-like habitats in orbital space via autonomous systems first, and then send people to live in space for extended durations later rather than hauling every single consumable and construction material up from the surface of the Earth at prohibitive cost. Despite advances in some areas of technology, chemical rocket propulsion technology has only seen very marginal advances and has fundamental limitations that are not likely to be exceeded by further development in the foreseeable future.

As for the Moon (or Mars) there is really little reason to send people there, and certainly not for profit or “nationalistic pride”. Nor do they really make suitable ‘backup worlds’ as some people advocate or are ever likely to sustain self-supporting colonies. A permanent human habitation in space would almost certainly be in solar-orbiting habitats constructed of space-based resources (water, silicates, materials derived from carbonaceous chondrites, iron and nickel, et cetera), capable of producing terrestrial-like conditions via centrifugal rotation, and powered and kept in thermodynamic equilibrium by constant sunlight and controlled solar shading. The worthwhile science to be done on the Moon (and again, Mars and other planetary-like bodies) is best done mostly or exclusively by probes and landers controlled by human scientists and technicians without having to cope with bulky, constraining, and obstructive pressure and environment suits that provide very restricted vision and mobility with essentially no tactile sense.

Stranger

There were 5 and a half sequels to Apollo 11 and all of them garnered less interest than the previous one (except maybe part 2-1/2, Apollo 13). Put that in Hollywood terms and ask yourself: Why would anyone invest hundreds of billions of dollars to revive a franchise with that kind of record for pay-for-view streaming?

Is the vacuum of space more hostile (to humans) than the bottom of the Marianas Trench? I know that it’s easier to get there, but if we could somehow teleport humans to each location wouldn’t it be quite a lot easier to keep a human alive on the moon than 7 miles deep? At least in terms of the complexity and durability of the required equipment?

I know it’s probably a distinction without a difference. Both locations are in “die an immediate and painful death” territory.

None of that is meant to argue against your broader point, of course.

Is that from something? because it’s really funny.

That’s sorta the premise of Apollo 18, but don’t go out of your way; it’s not very good.

I’m surprised no-one has faked any moon landings since the 70s.
It’d be a lot easier these days, what with the advances in computer power
and CGI and stuff.

Going to the moon would cost several orders of magnitude more money than could be recouped by televising the landing. It’s just really really expensive to design and test and build in small quantities the intricate systems required to keep humans alive in space and then send them a long distance via chemical rocket.

If you want people to watch something on television, you could film several seasons of several popular shows for less than a single launch.

The only reason that it happened in the 60s and 70s was because it was a proxy for national defense.

There’s nothing there.

I beg to differ.

(also in answer to pjd’s posting above…)

Maybe, but it’s the last one for MILES.

Short answer: Large numbers of people lack imagination.

The average man on the street is both too stupid and too unimaginative to conceive of any circumstance where going back to the moon would be desirable. Thus, the degree of support is simply too small under normal circumstances.

Once we got there before the Russians, the incentive ended.

“The driving reason was Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. Without that, it wouldn’t have happened.” – Roger D. Launius, senior curator of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

It’s the same answer as to why there are no flying cars. They don’t make sense. They appeal to people in the abstract, but the practical details make them unsuitable for everyday use.

Just a meme that went viral a few years back.

Thanks.

Notably absent from this post is an imaginative reason why it would be good to go back to the moon.

“Because it’s there” has been enough reason for people to tackle any number of dangerous and expensive exploits.

Going to the moon is a bit more expensive and maybe* dangerous than climbing Everest, so requires either a bit more motivation, or for the costs and dangers to become more reasonable.

We will go back to the moon when we have the technology and industrial capacity to make it a more trivial task that more meets the benefits, those of curiosity and sense of exploration, of doing so. OTOH, should we discover unobtanium on the moon, then that may increase the benefits of doing so enough to spend a bit more on the effort.

*enough people have attempted to climb Everest to have a reasonable baseline of the danger. We never lost anyone on a moon mission, so you could say it has a good safety rating, but I don’t know that the sample size is large enough to determine that.

ETA: a question, or a ponder, anyway. If the Soviet Union had beaten us to the moon, would we have continued to try to get there ourselves?

For propaganda reasons, we would have had to go. And not only go, but do something big and gaudy that would trump their landing.