You should read more about failures than happened during Apollo program. Apollo 1, Apollo 13 being most famous, but even during Apollo 11 multiple things failed.
I, too, was 6 years old and have good memories of it. They made a Big Deal of it in school, leading up to the launch, and we were reading books like "You Will Go To The Moon" by Mae and Ira Freeman, and seeing films and hearing stores about it.
Most of the film people have seen from Apollo 11 is the rocket itself (and most of the most famous Saturn V footage isn't even Apollo 11) and the lunar landing. I'd bet a significant number of people don't even know who Michael Collins is.
Most of the film people have seen from Apollo 13 is a movie where Gene's got a bunch of snappy quotes and has a starring role in the middle of the action in mission control.
I suppose it's an example of how much failures are far more visible than successes :) Going to the moon was "routine" by the time 13 launched because as far as the public could tell, it was all going smoothly. Seemed easy. A solved problem. That's even a theme in the Apollo 13 movie!
I'm just old enough to remember the massive optimism associated with the Apollo program (I was a space-obsessed nerd kid). The mid to late 70s though were depressing by comparison, without the rapid cadence of the moonshots.
people in the age range 20–70 in 01970 would be in the age range 74–124 today. different people, who identify with those people, in several different countries, would like to do what those people did. it behooves them to study what those people did and how they did it, not because they can't do anything better, but because it's easy to do worse, and both of these criticisms make a good case that artemis is doing much worse. the ussr at the same time did so much worse that they never landed humans on the moon at all. similarly with contemporary france, the uk, the prc, etc.
you cannot get to the moon and back on a saturn v because there aren't any saturn v rockets in operable condition, and there never will be again. it belongs to history now, like children's chemistry sets that could make rocket fuel, being able to order rocket fuel ingredients without getting a visit from a police agency, drugs being legal by default instead of illegal, new classes of antibiotics being brought to market, and being able to go out in public without your movements being permanently archived for spy agencies to data-mine later on
artemis is on track to follow in the footsteps not of apollo but of the soviet n1/l3 program, which was canceled after losing the race decisively to apollo. it's chang'e that's following in the footsteps of apollo. we'll see if spacex can change that, but i'm not that optimistic
That's half the truth. The rest of the truth is: We went to the Moon out of sheer terror.
In fact, the Moon trip itself was a side effect. The space race took the form of a race to the moon because "the race to the Moon" was a much more joyful marketing slogan than "the race to design and build the next generation of ICBMs that will enable cities and towns like yours to be destroyed with even greater precision."
Remember that the Moon race was conceived in the early 1960s. ICBMs were a brand new technology. Everybody knew that we had to build more of them, keep improving them, stay ahead in them -- they'd seen the H-bomb tests. People who had lived through the 1940s -- Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Nanking, Bataan, Dresden, Nagasaki -- naturally found it difficult to have faith in human decency and restraint; they all thought World War III was inevitable, and probably imminent. This was several years before the Cuban missile crisis and a decade before the ABM treaty.
But it was hard to stay cheerful when talking about the world's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals, so the space race was portrayed as a game to get astronauts and/or cosmonauts to the moon, and everyone had a lot of fun playing along. Enormous quantities of money were poured into rocket research, the military on both sides of the Cold War got their high-tech missiles and spy satellites and electronics, and in the end we got to watch some truly amazing pictures of people walking on the moon and feel proud. Smiles all around. A big win for everyone.
But the Moon itself was a secondary goal. A Macguffin. The Soviets didn't even bother to go, and their effort seems to me to have been rather halfhearted. By 1969 they had long since achieved the important goal anyway: Better rockets. The USA followed through but quickly got bored with the actual "moon" part. The Apollo 13 movie talked all about that: Mere months after the first moon missions, the remaining ones attracted scant public interest.
So I find the space race fascinating, and I understand the nostalgia for it, and I'm glad some good came out of the cold war, but I don't want to live through anything like it if I don't have to.
Ironically, you wonder had the first mission failed. If the space fever of the 60s would have stayed far longer or not.
In other words, did the public just took it for granted that how difficult of feat it was and lost interest after a few successful (Apollo 13 the exception) moon landings?
The Apollo program had failures with humans. People died. Failures happened, and many smaller failures happened even during the successful launch to the moon.
So after the moon landings public interest started fading quickly for space programs. NASA didn't have enough funds to both continue Apollo programs and develop the Space Shuttle so they wound down Apollo early to best use the budget they had. When a large program like that ends production is shut down, people leave companies and the unique skill sets required to build those products disappears.
So yeah truly we just haven't had a compelling enough interest to devote the necessary funds to go back. Also the Moon doesn't offer super unique research opportunities.
Also there is some incredibly interesting reading on the Russian Moon program. Your belief that they didn't want to go says that largely the effort to cover up their failed moon program was mostly a success towards the average person. The Russian spent a ton of money on their N1 rocket which failed on launch 4 times and then was cancelled and they ordered everything be destroyed.
I don't buy it. Apollo almost failed many times by administrative churn and lack of public support. Apollo was successful because of passionate engineers working on the problem not by public support
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