• Question: why do you think scientists haven't revisited the moon

    Asked by anon-186892 to Stewart, Miriam, Laura, Kathryn, David on 14 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 14 Nov 2018:

      I don’t know exactly, but I imagine this is one of those things where there are a few different competing reasons. One of them is probably that it’s very expensive to get people to the moon, when we can collect data and samples using a robot (and with less risk). I know that one of the reasons people went to the moon was due to politics — in simple terms both the USSR and the USA were trying to demonstrate how powerful they were by racing to be the first to send someone to the moon. Nowadays (at the moment) we don’t have that kind of political tension, so there’s not so much reason to visit the moon.

      We could quite possibly be sending tourists there in our lifetimes though — which raises all sorts of other questions!

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 14 Nov 2018:

      The Chinese space agency has a space mission on the moon right now – it’s called Chang’e:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3
      after the Chinese goddess of the moon. It has a small robotic rover moving around the moon and making measurements.

      In general a lot of space missions are now easier, safer and cheaper to do with robots. NASA has a plan to take people back to the moon and eventually to Mars, but it’s very expensive. At the peak of the Apollo programme, NASA’s budget was over 4% of the entire US government budget:

      and it’s now about 0.5%. It’s not necessarily much cheaper to send people back to the moon since you want to guarantee you can bring them home safely.

      I really hope we push forward with human space exploration in my lifetime – I’m very excited to see progress from the International Space Station and companies like SpaceX.

    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 14 Nov 2018:

      We have sent other little rovers and satellites to the moon but we probably won’t send any more humans unless we decided to colonise it in the future. In 1960’s Russia and the US were competing to be the first to send a crew to the moon so there was a lot of public interest and extra funding going into it. Once the US got there and became the first people on the moon the interest and money went away. There isn’t much we can do up there at the moment, they collected rock and soil samples when they went up in 1969 so there isn’t any scientific reason to go there now. In the future we might want to try and colonise mars (very far in the future, probably a hundred years or more) so we might start by colonising the moon, in which case we would start sending humans again.

Comments