Maybe the fact that astronauts safety is the number 1 priority is holding back any new exploration mission to the moon or beyond, maybe such concern wasn’t as strong back then, that’s why it was possible for the NASA to get validation from USA government.
to be honest I am 50/50 about the Apollo mission, I don’t put much belief into it, but I don’t blame others who believe in it and I can be the one who is wrong.
This is but a variation of the Van Allen Belt conspiracy, which states that space travel is all but impossible because a wall of concentrated radiation will cook an astronaut like a poached egg if anyone attempts to traverse it.
James Van Allen himself debunked that theory. In short: yes, it’s potentially deadly, and any space flight that extends so many miles beyond the Earth does have to take exposure into consideration, but no, it’s far from being an insurmountable problem.
It would take nearly a full week of exposure inside the strongest portion of the Van Allen Belt to administer a lethal dose of radiation to an occupant of a space craft. Hardly the instant guaranteed death at the moment of contact some make it out to be. Apollo 11 was only exposed to this strongest portion for about 15 minutes, in total for a little over 2 hours.
You can’t believe Van Allen’s problem, but ignore his solution.
Is there anything useful to humans up there? All that effort just to drive a flag pole through the ground seems kind of pointless.
We go because it’s there. We do it because we can.
Once we get quantum communication figured out (which would theoretically allow a signal from Earth to be received instantly on Mars), this could be combined with robotics, motion tracking, and VR to essentially send ‘avatars’ to do experiments and exploration. NASA workers could get the impression they are there in person even though they’re in a room somewhere in Houston.
At the least, this could allow for the possibility of having ready-to-go infrastructure on the Moon and Mars for the first travelers.
Quantum entanglement won’t allow us to move data across vast distances at faster than light speeds, unfortunately. It does allow us to exploit certain phenomena to do other weird things I won’t even pretend to understand, but it’s still limited by good old fashioned classical physics in that regard.
The short answer is that we are not safe on Earth. Species become extinct all the time. If we keep all our eggs on Earth we too will become extinct, sooner or later. The only way to increase our chances of survival is to branch out from earth. (Granted, it makes space exploration important, but not high priority)
For me, there are other reasons to go out there, but they are more subjective.
I’d rather we go extinct.
Well, the universe will be extinct sooner or later too. It is just a matter of time. We are not living in an infinite time and an infinite space.
As far as the lunar landing goes, I do not question lunar landing myself but this is the only thing I am not sure about. Why can’t NASA build the exact same ship with the exact same rocket with the exact same training etc and send humans back to the Moon? I am sure that every step was recorded in high detail.
You could use that line of thought to justify just about anything.
I mean, hell, the universe won’t be able to sustain life as we know it in a few hundred billion years anyway, so why not do this eightball of coke, then hit up the all you can eat pancake buffet at IHOP? We’re all doomed anyway, SO PASS THE MAPLE SYRUP OH MY GOD MY HEART!
And to get back on topic…
NASA did record every single thing they did to the nth degree. We have ready access to their old blueprints, schematics, notes, and all other kinds of good stuff. Though I do remember reading that there’s a ton of data backed up on a type of magnetic tape we don’t have the means to easily play back these days.
From what I gather, we know all the broad details of the Apollo program, though some of the tiny tweaks and details, such as why they’d deviate from the blueprints for certain things, deciding to continually build this or that in what seems to be a counterintuitive manner on the fly is currently lost to us.
It’s not information we desperately need, but it’d still be nice to know the entire scope of their methods and reasoning.
You confuse nihilism with acceptance of our mortality.
Because I like to put things in perspective 
In any case, will delaying the human extinction on earth couple hundred million years make a difference in the scheme of things? Universe does not care about us as far as we can tell.
I was merely responding this grandiose purpose of surviving human species in other planes claim. There is so much we could do here to take care of that before exploring other planets . Sometimes technological ability seems to blind us a bit. Meanwhile I naturally support any form of exploration.
The thing is, we don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow, let alone 10 years, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now. To me, it’s hard to take an absolutist stance on things when we don’t know where we’ll be, nor our ultimate limitations.
The human race could be living it’s final days, blissfully unaware of our impending doom lying in wait 30 years from now, or it could be in its barest infancy, taking it’s first steps on a 20 billion year journey across the cosmos. Maybe our ultimate destiny is infinite. We don’t know. Thing is, none of these potential fates directly effect what we’re doing today, right at this very moment. Entertain philosophical discussions rather than fret upon them.
We could live forever, or die tomorrow. Who knows what the future will bring, so we might as well talk about going to Mars, huh?
If they did that, then I would hope they upgrade the computer at least, as even a cheap Android tablet would be far more powerful.
That doesn’t diminish the incredible accomplishment of actually being able to do things like the moon landing using the technology they had in the computing field (ie. not a lot of spare bits and flops to give breathing room for the programmers).
Sure, it makes sense. However reconstructing the exact working replica should not be too hard with the current technology, unless they have something else in mind with the proposed lunar landing.
Reverse engineering 50 year old tech when you have the originals sitting right front of you is incredibly easy to do. It’s already been done. I think SpaceX looked back to the Apollo modules when designing the Dragon capsule.
The issue is why the Apollo engineers did certain things. They made numerous tweaks upon the original designs based upon mission experience, and no one seemed to bothering to explain the reasoning behind these change. If we knew why, it’d give us a better foundation to work from, possibly saving us from having to make those same mistakes again ourselves.
Course a lot of these tweaks were done to save space, lower weight, or just from having to deal with the general bulkiness of the tech available at the time. For example, they probably had to deal 40+ pounds worth of big ass computer components that would probably flake out if the ambient moisture in the cabin were slightly higher than usual, while your average smartphone weighs a quarter of a pound, is waterproof, and has about 1,000,000 times more computational oomph, all powered by a little battery that would seem like science fiction to an electrical engineer in the 60’s. Their concerns were a lot different than ours.
…though it’d still be nice to know why.
The moon landing is a hoax because we are taking too long to go back, therefore the technology didn’t already exist…
That statement shows a lack of knowledge on the subject. We haven’t gone back for many reasons. Inflation, budget cuts, public opinion, hindsight. And probably most importantly, NASA isn’t just a bunch of space nerds that really want to go back because golly gee, it’d just be super swell! It’s a scientific as well as a political endeavour. The wait is on better and cheaper technology, new scientific instrumentation, sustainability, forethought that can pave the way to Mars and beyond, economic and political climate.
Did we go to the Moon in 69? Yes. Could we go back right now if we really wanted to. Absolutely. Should we just go, spontaneously, because " hurry up and real life Star Trek"? No, so just sit there patiently while the adults do grown-up things, young fella.
That’s exactly who NASA is. If they had even half the budget as, say, the military, they’d have done all kinds of crazy crap by now.
Literally the only reason why we don’t have vacation the floating resorts of Venus is because congress are a bunch of tightwads who are too afraid to stand up to the lizard people masters after discovering their pyramids on the moon.
…which is also the reason why we haven’t been back to the moon yet, FYI.
No. That’s exactly what many people that work at NASA is. That’s not what -NASA- is. The word to underline in your quote is “just”.
The political aspect you brought up, I already covered above.
The basic problem is that manned space travel is complicated, expensive, and dangerous. That was true 50 years ago, it’s still true today. All the “modern technology” we have has mainly progressed in processing large amounts of information (computers) while our ability to control the deployment of large amounts of power (e.g. atomic power), which is what you need to escape Earth’s gravity, has not improved as much.
I wrote an essay on this issue a little while back.