why were missions to moon stopped?

Because Stanley Kubrick died of course.

Originally posted by eriktheawful

Originally posted by sparky31

Originally posted by Tiger5
Sorry but I cannot find the programme to post a link.

However to reply to your OP manned space flight is too expensive and did not make economic sense when information can be gathered in a cheaper fashion using unmanned flights. Sorry but that is the Dollars and cents reasoning.

Manned space flight was necessary at the time of the Cold war to show american supremacy as was the space race.

yeah but they are spending how many more billions on mars at this moment when surely its cheaper to send humans back to the moon?i bet there is alot more surprises to be found on the moon than we think

come on what they believed about moons round other planets have all been rewritten in last few years so why not go back and study our own?

edit on 2013 by sparky31 because: (no reason given)

The total cost of the Apollo Moon Program was $23.9 billion, accounting for inflation in today's dollars that comes to a total of $170 billion

Each Apollo mission cost about $18 billion each in today's dollars.

Source

Total cost of the Mars Science Laboratory was $2.5 billion.

You do the math. Unmanned missions costs a LOT less. Less equipment, no need for food, water or air. No heavy shielding from solar radiation needed. No massive amounts of fuel to get there as quick as possible, since the longer humans are in space, the more danger they are in. Instead, you can use a minimum amount of fuel and gravity assists from other planets and take your time getting there at a much lower cost.

I would love to see a manned mission to Mars, or even back to the moon. But as other's have posted: money controls everything.

i,m sorry but that doesn,t wash with me.....since we last sent a human to the moon you have said cost way more money than is been spent else where......come on even private space companys are talking about getting people to mars by 2020......if private space companys are talking about that then don,t tell me nasa couldn,t send a man back to the moon.

don,t get me wrong i don,t see it happening but if they are even discussing it then don,t say getting back to moon is going to cost beyond stuff they are funding at the moment.

reply to post by sparky31


You need to understand several things:

Politics of the time. Public mood and opinion at the time.

Prior to the moon landings, our government sold to the American people that it was very important to get to the moon before the USSR. It was a mater of national pride. No expense spared. And politicians at the time had the support of the public on it.

By the time we got there, many things had changed. Vietnam was a mess, the year before, 1968, showed huge movements and changes in civil rights. Public opinion on space exploration was changing. We got there, and got their first. So, we were done. No need to be spending so much money on landing people on a ball of rock 1/4 of a million miles away.
People here felt we had more important things to be spending that money on, right here on Earth, and not "wasting" it on space exploration.

By 1972, the public was not interested in moon landings anymore. I know, I was there. Very young, but still there. People just were not amazed anymore and they felt it was a huge waste of money.

There are plenty of people that are like that now. Search the Space Exploration forum. You'll find plenty of people posting here on ATS how 2.5 billion dollars on Curiosity was a HUGE waste of money and that we should be spending it right here on Earth (never mind that 2.5 billion is a literal drop in the bucket compared to over 800 billion spent each year on our military).

It cost us 18 billion to do a single Apollo mission. That's NASA's budget for a entire year right now. They have other priorities, and because it's tax payer's money, they would need to justify spending their entire yearly budget on ONE single mission.

Yes there are other countries planning on sending humans to the moon again. I think that's wonderful and I cheer them on. I wish it was the US, my country, but I'm just happy that someone is going back.

Yes their are private companies planning on sending humans to Mars. Note that: PRIVATELY OWNED COMPANIES......not a government agency that is using tax payer dollars. They can do what they want, and not really care how voters feel, because voters and tax payers do not put them into office.

You don't have to take my word for it. Do some actual research. Go back and look at posts right here on ATS, and see how many people post about "wasting" money to go into space (manned or unmanned).
Then do some research on public opinion on it back in 1970-72. You'll see that the majority of public opinion was "stop wasting money going to the moon. We've been there. We 'won' the space race already. Start spending money here on Earth."

Because, with time to actually look up, sooner or later someone would have figured out that the stars were not visible.

reply to post by sparky31


Simple same reason missions to mars was cancelled no money.

reply to post by haven123
[more
We went to the moon and found something someone didn't want us to see. The missions stopped because we were warned to stay away. The moon is someone elses playground. That's my theory, based on pure speculation, and the fact that no other nation has tried to land there. Crazy? perhaps. But that's the way I see it.

I am not altogether convinced by the argument missions stopped because of not enough money. I fancy that whatever the minitary want there is always money found for it. I suspect money gets syphoned to a number of projects that few of the politicians have a hand in, because people who work for government agencies are more permanent in their jobs than politicians who have to be 'inconveniently' elected, so things could be undisclosed.

I was given a book called Who Built the Moon by a relative who had his feet firmly set on the ground but, as a architect was fascinated by that book. It makes interesting reading and raises serious questions.

Also I checked through some of the earlier threads and one mentioned that before the flood ancient civilisations had observed that there were two moons at one time and no moon whatsoever at another and Venus was the light in the sky - Lucifer/light etc We also have the Tiamat story which tells of a colllision etc.

I found it most intriguing that a weapon was fired at the moon sometime ago. I think it was for some scientific experiment but that's hardly feasable. A weapon suggests some form of destruction so what were they destroying?

There's lots of theories eg the Nazi's went to the moon, aliens use it.

I suspect that an ancient civilisation capable of sophisticated technology that created the worldwide cyclopean buildings that we can't build today, could well have forseen our planets aptitude for total reshake and possibly went to the moon to escape the turmoil. I know one thing for sure our scholars who try to convince us that round stones were used to bash these huge blocks into shape, sometimes using 'sophisticated' wooden stands to support their swinging stones, is an insult to everyone's intelligence. I know they can roll blocks along but the fitting and planning to make these buildings virtually earthquake proof is well beyond what our scholars claim our ancestors were capable of, despite the evidence in fron t of their own eyes. Some of our Scholars are from the Church who have a vested interest in the status quo would try to quosh this theory, but no other explanation comes to mind except aliens and even then why are they not visiting regularly today and have consuls on Earth?

We don't seem to want to 'use' the moon and it seems to have been a decision that was easily kept to until the rise of other states that now have the money and technology to go there.

Watch Iron Sky, it explains everything.

I never get the claim the USA won the space race.

Yeah they put a man on the moon. That put them ahead.

But surely thats just a goal post. The space race is still going?

The space race wont be "over" till the first instersteller travel.

Is it cheaper to send a manned mission from a base on the Moon to Mars then to send a manned mission to Mars from Earth?

If we went to the Moon and built a base there and used that as a jump-off spot for manned, or unmanned, missions to the rest of the solar system, would we save on fuel costs?

delete.

reply to post by Knives4eyes


This is a very brain-dead argument, if Luna is so uninteresting why do they want to get up there now...

You have water, helium3, lower gravity for launches to further destinations, if you intend in mining asteroids lunar orbit is the safest location to do it. You can pretty much automate and use remote presence to do much of everything, you can also start using it for optical and radio astrology.

Then there is the defense against dangerous asteroids, and simply maintaining the higher ground above other nations (killing satellites and attacking the ground from the moon would be of great advantage).

In fact the simple evidence that we do not have 24/7 remote presence on the Moon building and exploring is enough extremely strange. Today we could have self replicating robots working over there, even using remote presence as to avoid issues with AI limitations.

Neal Degrasse Tyson addresses this in one of his lectures.

The reason we havent gone back, or gone anywhere else is that to get funding for human exploration you have to have either a greed or a fear motive. Once that goes away the people holding the purse strings put a stop to it.

The fear was that communism (as embodied by the Soviet Union) was winning as an ideology. In particular the Soviet space successes of the sputnik era. The moon missions were a response to that fear. Having 'won' the race to the moon the fear was gone and therefore the activity ceased.

If there was something valuable on the moon the greed motive could have kicked in but there isn't so it didn't.

Unless either a new fear or greed motive appears there wont be any human expansion into the solar system or anywhere else. The people with the ideals don't have the power to get it done.

Enjoy pictures from robots, its all you are going to get until an asteroid appears unseen and wipes us out.

Originally posted by SpaceSaviour
Is it cheaper to send a manned mission from a base on the Moon to Mars then to send a manned mission to Mars from Earth?

If we went to the Moon and built a base there and used that as a jump-off spot for manned, or unmanned, missions to the rest of the solar system, would we save on fuel costs?

In principle, yes - you could save on fuel costs. Also, you could save on the cost of lifting material to orbit if you mine the Moon for aluminum, titanium, etc. However, the money spent on setting-up the infrastructure (mines, factories, fuel processing plants, etc.) on the Moon completely overwhelms any cost savings for Mars mission fuel.

By way of analogy: It is uses less fuel to launch rocket into Earth orbit from sites closer to the equator. This is because the most important thing in making orbit is horizontal velocity (altitude is only important for getting above our atmosphere - without air-drag, we could orbit only 7 miles up (high enough to clear the tallest mountains) if we could accelerate to a horizontal velocity of ~18,000 mph). Closer to the equator, the Earth's spin gives more of a sideways boost to a rocket - i.e. the rocket is already moving several hundred miles-per-hour to the east before it even leaves the pad.

Therefore, England (which lies above 50° north latitude) saved on fuel cost by colonizing North America and using it as a base for sending men to the Moon (some other stuff happened along the way, but it's all incidental to the overall narrative).

reply to post by sparky31


Why? Because of television ratings and lack of interest, that's why. There were several more apollo missions planned but scrapped because people just didn't give a crap anymore.

Mainly because they didn't have the foresight to see how important the moon is. It's got basically no atmosphere, a telescope built on the moon would have much better range than one on earth, or even in earth orbit. A permanent base on the moon would create a launching pad, one of the most expensive parts of space travel is.... getting into space. Once we've established a presence on the moon, we could potentially build our ships there and launch missions from there.

some will say it's because we never went. We did. We can prove it. some will say because it's too dangerous. It's actually safer now than during apollo as we know what to expect, we've even discovered another layer to the van allen belts.

It's about money, in the end. The money just wasn't there because the interest wasn't there.

And lastly. Manned moon missions were amazing, but a complete and collosal waste, you get much more done with probes and drones and rovers, and for the price of Apollo landing man on the moon, we could have sent rovers to several planets and moons, and made actual discoveries, we'd be years ahead of where we are now.

reply to post by Saint Exupery

In principle, yes - you could save on fuel costs. Also, you could save on the cost of lifting material to orbit if you mine the Moon for aluminum, titanium, etc. However, the money spent on setting-up the infrastructure (mines, factories, fuel processing plants, etc.) on the Moon completely overwhelms any cost savings for Mars mission fuel.

In the short term, not in the long term. Besides, the mining would be privatized so the corporations who secured the mining rights would be footing the bill for that, not NASA or the tax payers.

And why even consider fuel processing plants? We could easily use ion-propulsion drives, and since they'd be constructed already off the earth, no dirty fuel is required to get them moving. As well, since space offers no drag or resistance, a little push goes a long way, a long long way.

We won't be sending men to mars, I don't care what NASA says they are planning, it's not happening in our lifetime, it doesn't make sense in any regards other than maybe sparking the interest of the new generation, who probably wouldn't pry themselves away from facebook long enough to even care. We'll send unmanned drones, like we have been, they are cheaper and get things done better.

Loss of public support, and hence, loss of funding.

The public stopped caring about the Moon missions. They were bored of them after about the 4th one. This was the 1970s, and the public cared more about funding social programs to help people in need on Earth, rather than "wasting" (in the general public's opinion) money on going to the moon.

Ive only read a few comments so for give me if someone else has said this but to those who say there isn't any point going back to the moon are completely wrong. firstly, we haven't studied every portion of the moon, we havent even looked at half of the moon so to say there isn't anything worth looking at is wrong, secondly there are rare elements within the moon rocks that would be worth so much money back here that any manned space flight to and from would be able to pay for itself once they have sold on the minerals which is why America went there and planted flags which is what was done in the old days.

so while some might think its a waste that the planet is baron they might be right about the baron part but there are many things worth going back for and also we still dont have answers to many questions about the moon, why does it ring like a bell inside when it shouldn't be hollow, why are the moon rocks much older than the rocks on the planet earth, these questions could bring about many new answers to our understanding of our solar system.

And joke dont forget the Monolith up there. gotta check that out.

Don't know why they stopped either as there is a somewhat abundant source of Helium-3 on the moons surface.

"Helium-3 is a light, non-radioactive isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron. It is rare on Earth, and it is sought for use in nuclear fusion research. The abundance of helium-3 is thought to be greater on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years),[1] though still low in quantity (28 ppm of lunar regolith is helium-4 and from one ppb to 50 ppb is helium-3),[2][3] and the solar system's gas giants (left over from the original solar nebula)."

Helium-3

reply to post by sparky31

Because they werent stopped. They never started.