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Four decades ago humanity went as far from home as they have ever gone. Two men, Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men recorded history to set foot on an alien planet. That this alien world was our own Moon, should not diminish the achievement, as it took an immense amount of energy, scientific advancement and sheer willpower to make Apollo 11 and its five successor missions land successfully on the Moon and return safely. (I do not count Apollo 13 in this list as they never managed to land on the Moon. That said, the heroics of that mission, which managed to return home safely despite massive electronic and mechanical failure, should never be downplayed.)
And yet, in the intervening 40 years since the Moon landings, it would seem that denial that these momentous events ever took place have taken root in our collective imaginations even more than the actual events themselves. Were I to have received a dollar for every time I saw the claim in the last week that the whole Moon landings were a hoax, I could afford to pay for the rest of my college without loans. There are any number of reasons given justifying these asinine assertions, from the fact that the Soviets began the space race in a better position than the Americans and yet failed to send a man to the Moon, (A simple search of the Soviet N-1 rocket design would be more than sufficient to explain that) to the arguments that the whole thing was just window-dressing for increased military spending during the Cold War. Yet the most pernicious argument I have yet seen deals in bare facts: The Moon landings must have been fake because in the nearly 40 years since Apollo 17 we have never gone back to the Moon, and no one else has gone. Hence, as we are unable to go to the Moon now, and no one has been able to go in the intervening years, we must have never gone in the first place, and the whole Moon landings were obviously a hoax.
Such observations beggar commentary. To begin with, they base their observations from a position of such absolute myopia as to make any attempt to argue against these claims an exercise in futility. The assumption inherent here is that the current state of things is the only way that things have ever been, and that there has been no change over time that brought us to this state. Hence, as we currently have no functional Saturn-V rockets, we must never have had any and therefore, could not have gone to the Moon using them.
As to the other sub arguments, Might I offer the following evidence to the contrary? To begin with there is the cost of the Apollo program. In 1969 the Apollo program cost between 20-25.4 Billion Dollars, that would roughly equal 135 Billion Dollars in today’s money. This was not a small investment for our nation, and would be a crippling investment for many other nations, even those with ambitions for space flight. Furthermore, a space program is far more dangerous and difficult than one may well imagine. In 2003 the Brazilian space program suffered a massive accident that destroyed their rocket complex as well as killing numerous experienced engineers, crew and scientists. Hence it is far from surprising that other nations have attempted a Moon landing, not because of any inherent sense of American superiority, but because the costs and risks have been prohibitively high.
If the costs alone do not explain why we have not returned to the Moon, perhaps the lack of payoff will. While Armstrong and his successors discovered scientifically invaluable data while on the Moon, they found no exploitable natural resources. No oil, no gold, no uranium, nothing exploitable for profit. Even if they had, the possibility of a cost-effective extraction of these resources from the Moon is highly unlikely, considering the cost of getting material there to do the extraction, and then removing it. Hence the Moon, while fascinating and tantalizing, is not terribly profitable, and has therefore been largely ignored by capital. There is nothing to make a buck on there, so there is no pressing reason to go back. This is not a random phenomena. There are numerous islands in our own oceans which have received scant visitation since the first explorers discovered them for precisely these same reasons. Consider the example of Rockall, a volcanic spire lying in the Atlantic roughly between Britain, Ireland and Iceland. It’s existence has been known for centuries, but until the discovery of oil on the seafloor surrounding it, there was little, if any interest in the island, save as a navigational hazard to be avoided. Why? Because it was desolate, small and far away. The Moon may not be small, but it is both desolate and far away. Until technology progresses to such a degree as to make the distance less onerous and expensive, or until the Moon is discovered to contain an exploitable source of a resource in high demand here on Earth, it will likely remain as Rockall did for centuries, a distant spot on a map to inspire our imaginations, and to remind us that Men once walked there.
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