Why didn't NASA return to the moon?

 The landing of 12 men on the moon remains one of the greatest achievements of NASA, if not the greatest.

The astronauts collected rocks, took photographs, conducted experiments, planted flags, and then returned home. But these sojourns as part of the Apollo program did not result in a permanent human presence on the Moon.

Fifty years after the last crewed lunar landing - Apollo 17 in December 1972 - there are many reasons to bring humans back to the giant, dusty Earth satellite and stay there.

NASA has promised that we will soon see U.S. astronauts on the moon again - perhaps in 2025 at the earliest, as part of a program called Artemis that will also see the first women walk on the lunar surface.

Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who led the agency during the Trump administration, said it was not scientific or technological hurdles that kept the U.S. from doing it sooner.

"If it were not for the political risk, we'd be on the moon by now," Bridenstine said in a 2018 phone call with reporters. "We'd probably be on Mars by now."

So why have not astronauts been to the moon in 50 years?

"It was the political risks that prevented it," Bridenstine said. "The program has taken too long and cost too much money."

Researchers and entrepreneurs have long pushed for the establishment of a manned base on the moon - a lunar station.

"A permanent human research station on the moon is the next logical step. It is only three days away. We can afford to make a mistake and not kill everyone,"  

Chris Hadfield, a former astronaut, told Business Insider. "And we still have a whole bunch of things to invent and test to learn from before we can go further out there

A lunar base could become a fuel depot for space missions, lead to the development of unprecedented space telescopes, facilitate life on Mars, and solve long-standing scientific mysteries about Earth and the formation of the moon. There could even be a thriving off-Earth economy, perhaps one built on space tourism.

However, many astronauts and other experts believe that the biggest obstacles to making new crewed lunar missions a reality are mundane and somewhat depressing.

It's really expensive to go to the moon - but not that expensive

Saturn V rocket at dawn in 1967

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A time-honored hurdle for any space program, especially missions involving humans, is the high cost.

NASA's 2022 budget is $24 billion, and the Biden administration is asking Congress to increase that budget to nearly $26 billion for 2023.

These amounts may sound like a windfall until you consider that the total will be divided among all of the agency's departments and ambitious projects: the James Webb Space Telescope, the massive rocket project called the Space Launch System (SLS), and far-flung missions to the sun, Jupiter, Mars, the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, and the edge of the solar system. (By contrast, the U.S. military will have a budget of about $858 billion in 2023.)

In addition, NASA's budget is small compared to its past.

" NASA 's share of the federal budget peaked at 4% in 1965," said Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham at a 2015 hearing before Congress. "In the last 40 years, it has remained below 1%, and in the last 15 years, it has moved toward 0.4% of the federal budget."

A 2005 report from NASA estimated that returning to the moon would cost about $104 billion over 13 years ($162 billion today, with inflation). The Apollo program cost about $142 billion in today's dollars.

"Manned exploration is the most expensive space project and, consequently, the most difficult to support politically,"

 Cunningham said during his testimony.

He added, according to Scientific American, "If the country, here Congress, does not decide to put more money into it, what we are doing here is just talk."

Referring to Mars missions and a return to the moon, Cunningham said, "The NASA budget is way too low to do all the things we have been talking about."

The problem with presidential

Trump astronaut

Former U.S. President Donald Trump wanted to send astronauts to the moon again in 2024. Reuters/Carlos Barria

President Biden may - or may not - be in office when NASA next lands astronauts on the moon, in 2025 or later.

And therein lies another big problem: partisan whiplash.

"Why should you believe a president when he predicts something that's going to happen two administrations in the future?" Said, Hadfield. "That's just talking."

The process of designing, building, and testing a spacecraft that could take people to another world easily lasts two presidential terms. But new presidents and lawmakers often scrap the previous administration's priorities for space exploration.

"I would like to see the next president support a budget that allows us to accomplish the mission we are asked to do, whatever that mission may be," said Scott Kelly, an astronaut who spent a year in the room, wrote in a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" thread in January 2016, before President Trump took office.

But presidents and Congress don't often seem to care about staying the course.

In 2004, the Bush administration tasked NASA with finding a way to replace the retiring space shuttle and also return to the moon. The agency developed the Constellation program, which would land astronauts on the moon in a rocket called Ares and a spacecraft called Orion. NASA spent $9 billion over five years to design, build and test the hardware for this human spaceflight program.

But after President Barack Obama took office - and the release of a Government Accountability Office report ( NASA) on the inability to estimate Constellation's costs - Obama pushed to cancel the program and authorize the SLS rocket instead.

Trump hasn't eliminated SLS. But he has changed Obama's goal of getting astronauts to an asteroid and shifted priorities to lunar and Mars missions. Trump wanted Artemis to land astronauts on the moon again in 2024.

Such frequent changes to NASA's expensive priorities have led to cancelation after cancelation, a loss of some $20 billion, and years of wasted time and momentum.

Biden appears to be a rare exception to this trend: he hasn't questioned Trump's Artemis priority for NASA and has also left the Space Force intact.

Buzz Aldrin told Congress in 2015 that he believed the will to return to the Moon had to come from Capitol Hill.

"American leadership inspires the world by consistently doing what no other nation is capable of doing. We proved that for a short time 45 years ago. I don't think we've done it since," Aldrin wrote in a statement. "I believe it begins with a bipartisan commitment by Congress and the administration to sustained leadership."

The real driving force behind the government's commitment to return to the moon is the will of the American people, who elect politicians and help determine their policy priorities. But public interest in lunar exploration has always been lukewarm.

Even at the height of the Apollo program, after Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface, only 53% of Americans thought the program was worth the cost. For most of that time, approval of Apollo in the U.S. was less than 50%.

Should NASA return to the moon?

Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Most Americans think NASA should make returning to the moon a priority. More than 57% of nationwide respondents to a December 2018 INSIDER poll said returning to the moon is an important goal for NASA, but only about 38% said living, breathing humans need to return. (Others who want the U.S. to land on the moon say robots could do the lunar exploration)

Support for crewed exploration of Mars is stronger: 63% of respondents to a 2018 Pew Research Center poll said it should be a priority for NASA. 91% of respondents think it's important to scan the skies for killer asteroids.

The challenges beyond policy lunar base made 3d pressure

Many space enthusiasts have long hoped to establish a base on the Moon, but the harsh environment of the lunar surface wouldn't be an ideal place for humans to thrive. NASA

The political tug-of-war over the NASA mission and budget isn't the only reason no humans have yet returned to the moon. The Moon is also a 4.5 billion-year-old death trap for humans and shouldn't be underestimated lightly.

Its surface is littered with craters and boulders that threaten safe landings. In the run-up to the first lunar landing in 1969, the U.S. government spent billions of dollars to develop, launch, and deliver satellites to the moon to map its surface and help mission planners find possible Apollo landing sites.

Of greater concern, however, is what eons of meteorite impacts have left behind: Regolith, also called lunar dust.

Madhu Thangavelu, an aeronautical engineer at the College of Southern California, wrote in 2014 that the moon is covered with "a fine, talc-like upper layer of lunar dust, several centimeters deep in some regions, which is electrostatically charged by interaction with the solar wind and is very abrasive and sticky

Peggy Whitson, an astronaut who lived a total of 665 days in space, told Business Insider that the Apollo missions "had a lot of problems with dust"

"If we're going to spend long periods and build permanent habitats, we need to figure out how to deal with it," Whitson said.