> Yet, despite these technological leaps, we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone of landing a human on the moon since those historic missions.
It's been over 60 years, more than 3 generations, since the first moon landing. Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why?
When columbus 'discovered' the americas, it set off dozens or hundreds of ships to explore the americas in the next few decades. When the US navy carried out the first transatlantic flight, it set off dozens of cross-atlantic and cross-oceanic flights within the next decade or two. When the US developed nukes, the soviets, brits, french, chinese, etc developed nukes within a decade or two. When the soviets launched a satellite into space, the US did so within a few weeks. There is this pattern with all major discoveries and technologies.
Why is the moon landing so unique? All major nations have tech today that far exceeds what the US had in the 1960s. In orders of magnitude terms, it is beyond comprehension. In purely computational terms, the 1960s US is computational closer to the first human 300,000 years ago than they are to us today. And yet the 1960s US was able to do something that we aren't able to do today. Not only that, why hasn't any other nation ( russia, japan, germany, china, etc ) done so. The prestige of being the 2nd to land on the moon should be a draw. No? Has there been any great achievement in recent memory that parallels the moon landing. Where something monumental happens and nobody else tries to match it?
There was money to be made and multi-month voyages were already normalized. If the moon was made out of some easily extractable and essential mineral and the economics worked out, Standard Oil, Wall Street, and the rest would have been setting up launch pads immediately.
It might make more sense when you don't simply view it as demonstration of scientific achievement. Demonstrating dominance in the field of rapidly delivering large payloads, at the press of a button, to anywhere on the surface of the earth (even the damn moon!) likely played/still plays an outsized role in game-theoretic political/military calculations aiming to deter existential threats.
> The prestige of being the 2nd to land on the moon should be a draw. No? Has there been any great achievement in recent memory that parallels the moon landing. Where something monumental happens and nobody else tries to match it?
Other countries have been to the moon -- Russia and China even landed vehicles and brought them back[1]. What they did not do is send people. Only the wealthiest countries in the world can afford to do space exploration, and they have better things to spend that money on than sending astronauts on sightseeing tours.
> Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why?
"Technology" is not a uniform thing. Computers are many, many orders of magnitude better than they were in the 1960s. Rockets have not improved nearly as much. It currently costs thousands of dollars per kilogram to get a payload to low earth orbit. If you want to send a ~70 kg human with hundreds of kg of support equipment into space, they had better have something to do that's worth at least a million dollars. That's way too expensive for almost any kind of human work, which is why the target market for commercial human spaceflight is "bored rich people" rather than "people with something useful to do".
For a longer answer on why human space travel (and especially colonization) probably isn't going to happen the way we'd like, see Charles Stross's essay "The High Frontier, Redux".[2]
It would be more meaningful to say that it has no resources that are accessible or valuable to us at our current level of development. At some point the deuterium deposits may be valuable for nuclear fusion and the ability to produce and launch fuel from the lunar surface may be a big deal, those things just weren't valuable while orbital refueling was effectively 'banned' by Congress until Shelby finally retired.
Now that such an absurd restriction has been lifted and we have at least 2 large refuelable vehicles under development, perhaps in a few decades we will see some value to having some industry on the Moon.
Promises of material wealth and resources created an economic and political incentive
>transatlantic
Extremely cheap - and having been demonstrated as possible encouraged many fame seekers or flight enthusiasts to recreate the feat
>Nukes
Obvious reasons - not to lose geopolitical leverage
>satellites
Both in development at the same time. Also there is a real technological benefit in the ability to launch controlled orbital antennas which was obvious even to lowly radio engineers
The obvious answer as to why no one ever did it the second time is that it was never done the first time and that space is, in fact, fake. For the sake of argument (assuming space is real) it would probably be too costly for any other nation for no material/tangible benefit. USSR surely could have done it, but the risk of losing the crew and experiencing bad PR probably outweighed the potential benefit of being the first loser. Even a perfect series of missions wouldn’t have helped them with the very serious problems they were dealing with on the ground. They knew they could get their precious space rocks cheaply and with less risk just by waiting a while. China (more specifically the CCP), on the other hand, could very seriously use a moon landing right about now.
It's been over 60 years, more than 3 generations, since the first moon landing. Technology has advanced so much since then that one has to wonder why?
When columbus 'discovered' the americas, it set off dozens or hundreds of ships to explore the americas in the next few decades. When the US navy carried out the first transatlantic flight, it set off dozens of cross-atlantic and cross-oceanic flights within the next decade or two. When the US developed nukes, the soviets, brits, french, chinese, etc developed nukes within a decade or two. When the soviets launched a satellite into space, the US did so within a few weeks. There is this pattern with all major discoveries and technologies.
Why is the moon landing so unique? All major nations have tech today that far exceeds what the US had in the 1960s. In orders of magnitude terms, it is beyond comprehension. In purely computational terms, the 1960s US is computational closer to the first human 300,000 years ago than they are to us today. And yet the 1960s US was able to do something that we aren't able to do today. Not only that, why hasn't any other nation ( russia, japan, germany, china, etc ) done so. The prestige of being the 2nd to land on the moon should be a draw. No? Has there been any great achievement in recent memory that parallels the moon landing. Where something monumental happens and nobody else tries to match it?