Why can't humans put a man on the moon again?

In 2004, President George W. Bush declared that we would return to the moon by 2020. NASA gave a shock response that left the world's jaw dropping. I'm sorry, the technical knowledge from the first six landings was lost by mistake, so we have to start all over again. It's really not a joke. NASA ran the story itself, and big names like the New York Times and CNN ran the story. NASA went on to explain that we had lost telemetry tapes, hardware technology, documentation tools, video film, moon landing data, and this and that, blah blah blah.

Is this NASA database or my garage? The mail is all over the place, and there's no one to take care of it? In that case, our garage is better managed than his. It's a little messy at best. At least I know where to look for things in the clutter. Six moon landings that's an unprecedented feat, and you lost all your data. Does that sound like a feat to you? Anyway, NASA's central idea was, do you want to go back to the moon? We could use the money to redevelop it. To so unreasonable answer, Bush temper is also very good, agreed, no problem, give money to people.

Time flies to 2018, the US President George W. Bush, Obama changed to Trump, have not sent a living man back to the moon, what is the situation? After all, the Apollo Moon landing program started in 1961 and put astronauts on the moon in 1969 in just eight years, and the iPhone took only seven years to go from Generation one to generation six. NASA has experienced 14 years from 2004 to 2018, which is more than double the time of the Apollo program. You haven't caught up to the starting line of 1969. There's probably a story behind it.

So the skeptics and conspiracy theorists, having consumed a bottle of Red Bull, reinvented the idea that the six moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were faked, only to be neutralized by NASA's bone-spinning hands. Because the main bug in the theory is that the moon mission involved hundreds of thousands of people and cost $25 billion, or more than $150 billion in today's money.

At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union were at war with each other, and the Soviet KGB was so pervasive that if something so big was faked, even the slightest hint of it, the Soviet Union would already have ridiculed American imperialism. But all those years of Soviet silence proved nothing.

But why is it that NASA scientists can't remember anything, like they're suffering from collective amnesia? The more I think about it, the more I can't figure it out, so we have to look for clues from a piece of history. At the time of the Apollo mission, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was at its height, and the two superpowers were engaged in a space race. The Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in space until the Apollo program.

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, orbiting the Earth once. Not to be outdone, the United States sent an astronaut into space a month later. But the astronaut, named Shepard, spent only a short time in space before returning to Earth, losing the first round to the Soviet Union.

In July 1961, NASA sent another astronaut on a shorter flight of 15 minutes before heading home. In November, American astronaut Glenn succeeded in orbiting the Earth, equaling Gagarin's record. After more than half a year of hard work, although it equalized the record of the Soviet Union, NASA still felt uneasy and fell behind the Soviet Union by more than half a year. In the last six months, the Soviets have come up with some amazing plans.

What makes NASA even more worried is that they do not yet have real manned rocket technology. The previous three manned experiments, although successful, were carried out with rockets that were not specially developed for manned rockets, but with launch vehicles using Redstone surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. Engineers hurriedly replaced the missile's warhead with a space capsule that could accommodate astronauts, made the simplest modifications possible, and sent the rocket skyward.

What do you want? The effect is to boost the confidence and morale of Americans. Radishes don't wash mud, potatoes don't peel, risk assessment is bullshit, the human body is an experiment, that was the situation. The Apollo program was born at this time, with the goal of landing a man on the moon. This is a bombshell for the Soviets in low Earth orbit.

In the first round, the astronauts were in low Earth orbit (Leo) within 400 kilometers of the Earth's surface. The Moon, at 380,000 kilometers, is hundreds of times farther than Leo, which is a qualitative leap. And best of all, NASA accomplished this transformation in just eight years, landing on the moon and blowing the Soviets out of the water.

The question then is, why should there be any doubt that America's sudden leap into space was done on its own? Let's get back to reality and look at two of the technical challenges that currently baffle NASA scientists. The first headache for NASA was how to protect against radiation. The space suit is the most important thing for human travel in space. Although it is a piece of clothing, it is actually a one-man spacecraft.

It has two important components, an anthropomorphic pressure vessel and a portable life support system that looks like a backpack. With these two parts of the suit, in the extreme environment of space for the astronauts to simulate a close to the Earth environment. It can keep the astronauts breathing at all times, maintain the balance of pressure and temperature around the body, and protect the astronauts from the harsh environment of space.

In addition, the suit must be at least 2.5 millimeters thick and light enough that the astronauts cannot feel its presence. The earliest known spacesuit was the SK-1 worn by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The United States and the Soviet Union later introduced a series of new spacesuits, including these designed for the Apollo program. The suits worn by contemporary Chinese astronauts were designed with Russian help, Chinese versions of the Russian Sokol and Orlan models. Here's the thing. Until the Apollo moon landings, scientists hadn't really thought about space radiation.

All the spacesuits before the Apollo moon landings were designed for low Earth orbit, and indeed after the Apollo moon landings. Because after that, the farthest astronauts can go is to the International Space Station, which is more than 400 kilometers above the ground, although the atmosphere is calculated, but not into the real sense of space.

600 kilometers above the Earth's surface is a region called the Van Allen Radiation Belts. It was discovered in 1958 by the scientist Van Allen, so it was named after him. The belt's main role is to trap energetic particles from the solar wind and other cosmic rays, protecting the atmosphere. This region is filled with high-energy electrons and protons, and the rays from these particles can cause dangerous radiation damage to the human body.

Now if a satellite is going to be launched into this area, it has to be protected against radiation, otherwise it won't work. The Van Allen belts extend about 60, 000 kilometers above the Earth's surface, and then the spacecraft will fly out of the protective zone of the Earth's magnetosphere and face even greater challenges, bombarded by cosmic rays and solar winds.

The subsequent trip to the moon would last more than eight days, exposing astronauts to dangerous doses of radiation all the while, not to mention strolling around the lunar surface after landing. Without the protection of the atmosphere and magnetosphere, it would be 100% spacesuits against cosmic rays. There were six successful moon landings in the Apollo program, and the astronauts came back alive and well, with no one ever showing symptoms of radiation sickness. So it's safe to say that NASA's spacesuits are well designed and can withstand radiation. Everyone was amazed that within just a few years, NASA scientists had figured out how to survive the radiation.

But by 2015, NASA scientists had lost all their technical data and couldn't come up with a single anti-radiation idea. When things come to the point of disgrace, Lhasa publicly offered a reward for ideas. That's it, how to overcome deep space radiation beyond the magnetic field.

You don't have to do anything, just provide a guess of radiation resistance, an expert assessment, and you get $30,000. Finally, in June 2022, NASA announced that it had found two companies with ideas for a new generation of spacesuits. Here it should be noted that these two companies are only out of the concept of radiation resistance, as to say when can actually produce it? NASA, too, is coy, saying the contract runs until 2034.

And it's not just spacesuits that have to be radiation-proof, but spaceships as well, to protect the astronauts. NASA is offering a $175,000 reward to solve the problem. A 2022 study at the University of Wisconsin has received a portion of the grant and is now working on a working copy. So people can't help but ask, who gave us the idea for the moon landing that has been done before? China also has the Chang 'e lunar exploration project and plans to put a man on the moon by 2030, so how to solve the problem of radiation resistance of spacesuits? The answer is there is no answer, it's not solved, it's just that no one tells you. Perhaps China's space experts are waiting for NASA to solve the problem first.

The second problem the moon had to overcome was transporting the load. In the early 1960s, space technology was definitely in its infancy, and while some rockets could travel long distances, the guidance systems were very primitive. Rockets at that time typically carried no more than two tons, and there was no way to send people to the moon and bring them back safely, because you had to have enough fuel, you didn't have to have people, you just had to have a one-way fuel. Sending a probe to Mars, for example, is a long way away, but because it doesn't need people, it has less equipment, it's light, it doesn't need to go back, it can do whatever it wants. It's different when you have astronauts, you have to get back safely, you have a lot of instruments, you have to more than double the fuel. But NASA was a big deal when it developed the Saturn V three-stage rocket.

The Saturn 5

The Saturn V is 102 meters tall, the equivalent of a 36-story building, and has more than six million parts, all of which need to be designed and built with the highest precision and subjected to rigorous quality testing. Those who watched Saturn V launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, marveled that it looked less like a vehicle than a monument. The thrust generated by Saturn V can lift up to 130 tons of cargo into low Earth orbit. Other rockets can carry only two tons. Saturn V can increase the load capacity by 65 times.

Even now, 50 years later, Saturn V is a dead ringer for its peers. To reach low Earth orbit, for example, the Long March 5B can carry around 25 tons of cargo, Elon Musk's Space X Falcon Heavy can lift up to 57 tons, and Russia's Angara A5 can handle 24 tons, so the Saturn V is still the king of the load.

Isn't it strange that NASA, which mastered this key technology in the 1960s, is going to have to start all over again in 2022? What might be the answer behind this? A book by Thomas Tompkins, a former senior engineer at McDonnell Douglas, reveals that in the 1960s, aliens intentionally passed technology to humans and selected a group of scientists to do something about it. One of those selected was Tompkins, who had worked on the moon project himself and had not yet designed a launch console. In addition, Tompkins' book notes that in 1954, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower struck a deal with the Greys at Holloman Air Force Base, allowing the aliens to take humans on board their ships for genetic research in exchange for access to alien technology.

Of course, this is just Thomas Kins, and it can be read as fiction, but it offers another way of thinking. Let's imagine a scenario here to see why NASA was able to accomplish the impossible and is now so forgetful. Back in 1961, this was IBM's first practical mainframe computer, the 7090, which would fill an office and execute about 100,000 instructions per second. Today, a chip with more than four cores can easily outperform it by 100,000 times. Can you imagine? The Apollo moon program was developed under such conditions. And now, 50 years later, we can't catch up.

The United States and the Soviet Union were the countries with the most advanced technology during the Cold War. The key technologies for lunar exploration, spacesuits, rockets, and lunar rovers, were impossible for the United States to get help from anyone else. So the simplest and most crude explanation is that the United States had a strong foreign aid back then, and the equipment was all finished products, either with instructions or with consultants on the side, and there was very little to digest and understand by themselves.

And that's the kind of help the United States couldn't have gotten from any other country on Earth. So why is NASA losing these technologies now? Maybe for some reason, NASA's cooperation with SETI ended. It's also possible that NASA wasn't allowed to copy the technical documentation because of contractual confidentiality or something. So after 1972, NASA was not able to go to the moon again, and it hasn't been until now.

But NASA was not in a position to tell everyone that the moon landing technology was not its own, which would have been humiliating, so it said it had lost the data because of a mistake. Can current technology solve all the problems of going to the moon? An optimistic estimate is that it is possible to use the knowledge we have accumulated over the last 50 or 60 years to understand the foreign aid technology of 50 or 60 years ago. But it will take time, and it will be difficult.