[continued from previous message]   
      
   skill, and yes, some luck. They achieved the impossible. And that brings me   
   to part three, where we're going to explore the biggest question of all. If   
   we did it once, why haven't we done it again? What   
      
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    does that   
   tell us about space exploration, about human ambition, about our future? And   
   what would it take to not just go back to the moon, but to go beyond to Mars,   
   to the outer solar system, to the stars? So, we've arrived at this profound   
   question. We went to the moon. We proved it was possible. We achieved one of   
   the greatest technological feats in human history. And then we stopped. We   
   haven't been back in over 50 years. Why? You see, this is what really bothers   
   me as a physicist. It's not just that we haven't   
      
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    gone back. It's   
   that we seem to have lost the capability. We've regressed. We took this   
   giant leap forward and then we took several steps back. And that tells us   
   something important about human civilization, about progress, about our future   
   in space. Let me give you the official explanation first. Money. After Apollo   
   11, public interest waned. The Vietnam War was draining resources. The economy   
   was struggling. NASA's budget was cut drastically. By the mid 1,970 seconds,   
   the Apollo program was   
      
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    cancelled. We'd planned missions through   
   Apollo 20, but we stopped at Apollo 17. And you know what? That explanation   
   makes sense. The moon landings were expensive. The entire Apollo program   
   cost over $25 billion in 1,962 seconds money. That's over $280 billion in   
   today's dollars when you account for inflation. That's an enormous amount   
   of money. More than the Manhattan project, more than the Panama Canal, one   
   of the most expensive projects in human history. And what did we get for   
   it?   
      
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    Scientific knowledge, certainly. Technological advances,   
   yes. National prestige absolutely, but no practical benefit, no lunar colonies,   
   no helium 3 mining, no strategic advantage, just rocks and data and bragging   
   rights. So when the political will evaporated, when the public lost interest,   
   when the budget pressures mounted, the program ended. It makes perfect sense   
   from an economic and political perspective. But here's what troubles me. We   
   didn't just stop going to the moon. We lost the   
      
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    capability to   
   go. The Saturn 5 production lines were shut down. The tooling was destroyed or   
   lost. The engineers retired. The institutional knowledge disappeared. Within   
   a decade of the last moon landing, we could no longer replicate what we'   
   done. Think about that. We achieved something extraordinary and then we   
   deliberately dismantled our ability to do it again. It's like climbing   
   Mount Everest and then burning all your climbing equipment. Why would   
   you do that? The answer is that we didn't think we'd need   
      
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    it   
   again. We thought the moon was conquered. Done. Mission accomplished. Time   
   to move on to other things. The space shuttle, the space station, maybe   
   Mars someday. But we were wrong. Because now, 50 years later, we want to   
   go back to the moon. And we're having to start almost from scratch. We're   
   designing new rockets, new spacecraft, new systems. We can't just pull   
   the old Saturn 5 blueprints off the shelf and build new ones. We have to   
   reinvent everything. And that's incredibly frustrating   
      
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    because   
   it means we wasted 50 years. We could have been building on Apollo, advancing   
   our capabilities, establishing a permanent presence on the moon. Instead,   
   we abandoned it and fell backwards. Now, some people say we didn't really   
   go to the moon in the first place, that it was all faked to win the Cold   
   War propaganda battle against the Soviets. And in part one and part two,   
   we looked at why that theory doesn't hold up. The evidence is overwhelming   
   that we really went. But here's an interesting question. Even if   
      
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    we really went, even if the landings were genuine, could they still   
   have been partly propaganda? Could the real reason we went and the real   
   reason we stopped be political rather than scientific? And the answer is   
   yes. Absolutely. The moon race was fundamentally political. Kennedy didn't   
   say we're going to the moon for science. He said we're going to the moon   
   to beat the Soviets, to demonstrate American superiority, to win the space   
   race. And once we won, once the Soviets gave up trying to match   
      
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    us, the motivation evaporated. we'd achieve the political goal. Why keep   
   spending billions of dollars? This is the reality of space exploration. It's   
   not driven by scientific curiosity alone. Is driven by politics, by economics,   
   by national prestige. And when those drivers disappear, the programs end. Now,   
   let me talk about what's happened in the 50 years since Apollo. We built the   
   space shuttle. It flew 135 missions over 30 years. It was reusable, which was   
   supposed to make Space Access cheaper, but it didn't.   
      
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    Each shuttle   
   flight costs about half a billion dollars, more expensive than an Apollo   
   mission when you account for all the refurbishment and support costs. And   
   the shuttle couldn't go to the moon. It could only reach low Earth orbit a   
   few hundred miles up. The moon is 240,000 mi away. The shuttle had maybe 1%   
   of the capability needed to reach the moon. So we traded the ability to go   
   to the moon for the ability to go to low Earth orbit repeatedly. Was that   
   a good trade? Depends on your goals. If you want to   
      
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    build a   
   space station, yes. If you want to explore deep space, no. Then we built the   
   International Space Station. An incredible achievement. A permanently crude   
   outpost in space. But again, it's in low Earth orbit, not the moon, not Mars,   
   just 250 mi up, barely scratching the edge of space. And we've learned a lot   
   from the ISS, about long duration space flight, about living in microgravity,   
   about international cooperation. All valuable, but we haven't expanded beyond   
   low Earth orbit.   
      
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    We've been circling the Earth for 50 years while   
   the moon sits there untouched a quarter million miles away. Now things are   
   changing. NASA's Aremis program plans to return humans to the moon. Maybe   
   in 2026, maybe later. It keeps getting delayed and it's expensive. Really   
   expensive. The space launch system rocket that will carry astronauts to the   
   moon costs over $2 billion per launch. Two billion for a single launch. Compare   
   that to Apollo. The Saturn 5 cost about 185 million per launch in 1,960   
      
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    seconds. That's about 1.3 billion in today's money. So, the new   
   rocket is actually more expensive than the old one, even accounting for   
   inflation. Why? Because we're not just recreating Apollo. We're trying to   
   build something better, something more capable, something safer, and all of   
   that costs money. But here's what really gets me. Private companies are doing   
   it cheaper. SpaceX is developing the Starship rocket. When it's operational,   
   it should cost maybe 100 million per launch. maybe less.   
      
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    That's 20   
   times cheaper than NASA's space launch system. How is that possible? How can a   
   private company do it so much cheaper than NASA? Well, several reasons. SpaceX   
   is reusing rockets. They land the boosters and fly them again. NASA isn't doing   
   that with SLS. SpaceX is using modern manufacturing techniques, 3D printing,   
   computer control machining, vertical integration, and SpaceX has a different   
   culture. They move fast. They fail. They learn. They iterate. NASA can't   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)