US had a man walk on the moon in 1969, but now we can't even land a tiny box on the moon 55 years later?

In the 60ies the NASA was run by German Rocket scientists, now Elon Musk gets all the subsidies.

LR surely helped you see the light.

A few things to consider: Back in the Apollo Era 5% of the entire US budget was put into the space program. Nowadays it’s a fraction of a %. The number of moon missions back then were only a relatively small number and they weren’t all smooth sailing. In fact there were tons of mishaps, near misses and a number of fatalities. See link

en.m.wikipedia.org

List of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents

This article lists verifiable spaceflight-related accidents and incidents resulting in human fatality or near-fatality during flight or training for crewed space missions, and testing, assembly, preparation or flight of crewe...

Open link

Nowadays there a space missions taking off every other day. It’s very, very rare that something goes wrong or a mission fails. But people like to cherry pick the failures and overlook all the successes.

The only way to spread the knowledge is to fund private industry projects nationwide. You can't have Los Angeles do it all like the 1960s Apollo 11 program. It's not smart for national security.

NASA lost its drive and focus decades ago. That spirit and dedication was lost along the way.

The Transcontinental Railroad was built in about 10 years starting around 1863. California has been building a railroad since 2015 and is looking at finishing the originally planned project in 30 years to never. Even the smallest segment isn't projected to open until around 2030 or later. The Great Projects that were completed in the past: Hoover Dam, Empire State Building, Erie Canal, Interstate Highways, the automobile industry, electric grid, etc. The United States can't even build everyday consumer products anymore.

People these days place more priority on having feel-good meetings, Powerpoint presentations, and endless human relations navel gazing. Not to mention social media cryfests.

Always seemed odd to me that marathoners in the Shorter/Rodgers era would be able to hang with, or beat, American male marathoners of today.

The same thing is seen today in sports where every play is celebrated by posturing, dancing, look at me stuff. Even if the team is getting blown out and has a crappy record.

"It's all about me", entitlement, putting the wrong people in the wrong jobs to satisfy quotas, bad leaders, ..the list goes on and on.

Whatever it was that made America a powerhouse of civilization is finished, and it's not coming back.

The approximate cost of the Apollo program in today's dollars was $260 Billion. In addition, we had also spent another $25 Billion on the manned Mercury/Gemini programs and about $5 Billion on the Ranger/Surveyor unmanned lander programs. Of the 9 total Ranger landers (designed solely to photograph and crash into the Moon), the first 6 completely failed to achieve their goals. Of the 7 Surveyor landers, 2 failed completely. Numerous other landers from other countries also failed. The Apollo program also had two major failures, one on the ground during testing that killed all three astronauts in the capsule, and Apollo 13 (if you want to know what happened, watch the movie). If you add the sheer volume of failures related to space shuttles, rocket tests, and interplanetary orbiters/landers, governments of the Earth have spent billions of dollars on missions that have provided almost zero ROI.

This $108M failure is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. It is actually a miracle more of our missions haven't failed - space is extremely dangerous, there are numerous variables that we have to basically cross our fingers won't cause mission failure, and humans involved in any activity make mistakes since that's one of the risks of being a human. To achieve the results we gained from the Apollo landings, we used technology from 60+ years ago, most of which no longer exists at a functional level at any space agency. We have had to start over from scratch, and so in a sense, we are starting back at Square One with landing human beings on the Moon. Be prepared for more failures like thjs one, but hopefully, the successes will make these all worth it.

I don’t understand: you think an iPhone can fly to the moon?

Yup, here’s a quote from the article: “The $108m (£85m) paid to Astrobotic, a space logistics start-up, was a fraction of the cost of launching one of NASA's own missions.”

The failure seems unrelated to software bugs or alleged Silicon Valley a*holery, but because of mechanical issues, which in turn is almost certainly because of the cost cutting in the private sector. Software bugs are still possible but NASA had some of the most defensive coding standards and protocols out there precisely because there is no turning back, so those practices presumably will be inherited by the private sector and we will likely also benefit from significant software testing and formal verification advances since then.

We’ve had very expensive government-led programs; other governments like India have soft-landed on the moon for under $100M; but no one has tried to do it in the private sector ever, leave alone in the $100M ballpark, so this is just new territory.

Apollo 1, X-15, Apollo 13, Challenger, Columbia. Things go wrong all the time. And that's just the manned missions, where no expense is spared to ensure safety. Space has always been dangerous as hell.

Also, NASA's budget in the 1960s was significantly higher adjusted for inflation than it is today. It also had essentially one mission, whereas today NASA's smaller budget is being pulled in a million different directions.

There probably is something to the institutional culture having changed. Accounts of NASA in the 60s make it sound like some cultural combination of a a silicon valley startup and a nation fighting an existential war. That's not really sustainable long-term. It can maybe work when you're chasing some crazy goal with a defined endpoint, but no institution stays like that.

There were five Space Shuttles that were launched into space (one other was just a test vehicle that wasn't designed for actual space travel). 2 of those vehicles were destroyed by a combination of human error and unanticipated damage caused by weather and launch flotsam. The means 40% of the shuttle program was destroyed, costing the US billions of dollars. But overall - the shuttle program was enormously successful, and failure and the loss of the lives on those shuttles was just a part of that success (one can hope that those deaths were instrumental in establishing controls that will save countless others in future space missions, although I have my doubts).

You should look into it some more with those Ivy League investigative and reporting skills and get back to us.

It should obvious by now that NASA lied. Gus Grissom was right all along, that's why he was murdered. It was no accident.

We never landed on the moon and we never will. Elon Musk is wasting his time & billions of cash.

Nothing gets through the firmament.

This ^

In the 1960s we poured a huge amount of resources into the space program to catch up to the Russians and then beat them by landing men on the moon. Hundreds of thousands of engineers at various aerospace companies worked on the Apollo program for NASA and were committed to achieving Kennedy's goal by the end of the decade. After it was done, NASA focused on other things, like the STS Orbiter (shuttle), and planetary exploration with probes .

We had a very successful Mars lander and have had a helicopter flying around on the red planet the past couple years. How about that? Why look at one failed private lunar lander and then think previous things were fake .

Processing power has literally nothing to do with any of this.

Of course you are.

I stopped reading there. This is another variation of "I'm not a conspiracy theorist but..." which is always followed by a conspiracy theory.

Refrigerators built in the 1960's and 1970's are tanks and still running today, but appliances built today are crap. Maybe there was a better focus on quality and precision back in the day.

Rojo: “As we made a ton of real good cars as they’re real good but sometimes people crash those cars as conspiracy? As my iPhone is smarter than a car and it NEVER crashes. AND as people ride bikes even though their are cars. As conspiracy?”

Because complex launch systems frequently fail their first flight in some way.

I would note that Spacex' Falcon 9 is by far the most reliable launch vehicle on the planet, and is at the same time the cheapest way to put a payload into earth orbit. 2,234 satellites were launched by the US in 2023 - 1,937 were launched by Spacex.