Somewhere on the Moon, someone wrote the letters TDC on the ground. It was a love note. “It took me a while to get down on my knees and scribble Tracy’s initials with one finger,” Gene Cernan, commander of NASA’s Apollo 17 mission, said in his memoir. These are the initials of his daughter, and it was the last thing the last man did to walk on the moon. Cernan once remarked that he hoped someone in the future would find those initials and wonder, “Who was here?”
The initials, which probably survive to this day, were written in December 1972. More than 50 years later, no one has set foot on our satellite.. And this was something that haunted Cernan until his death in 2017. “Neil – Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon and died in 2012 – and I don’t intend to see the next young Americans walk on the moon. “. And God help us if they are not Americans,” Cernan told Congress in 2011, trying to push for the resumption of manned flights to the Moon.
A return plan is already in place. NASA is preparing to send a new crew to the Moon in 2025. The mission is called Artemis III and will take four astronauts to the south pole of the Moon. Among them are the first woman and the first black person. But why did it take so long?
More than science, politics. “We would be on the moon right now if it weren’t for the political risk,” Jim Bridenstine, NASA chief under President Donald Trump, said in 2019. “Honestly, we would be on Mars by now,” he said at the time. CBS.
Making the case for investing in a return to the Moon
A mission to the Moon involves a multi-million dollar investment. And to pay such a sum, you need a good justification that will please politicians. Apollo, the first manned mission to the Moon, owes much to the Cold War. The program mobilized more than 400 thousand people and required expected investments in plus 257 billion dollars — adjusted for inflation after five decades.
“Everything we do really has to be about getting to the moon before the Russians do,” former US President John F. Kennedy told then-NASA chief James Webb in a heated debate they had at the White House. November 21, 1962. According to minutes of the meeting, Webb was concerned about the risks of the mission. The technology needed to even think about landing on the moon didn’t even exist.. He also feared that rushing the lunar mission would affect the long-term viability of NASA as an organization, which by then had only been founded four years ago.
The moon landing should “be, along with defense, the top priority of the US government. Otherwise, we shouldn’t spend so much money because I’m not that interested in space,” the president insisted. By 1962, the Russians had already launched Vostok, the first spacecraft with a man on board, into orbit. Rushing towards this NASA funds reached a maximum of 4% of the entire federal government budget. in 1965, according to Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham during testimony before Congress in 2015.
The Americans finally achieved this in 1969. But arriving first was very costly for NASA. “The impact of Apollo on the space program as a whole was negative,” says John M. Logsdon, a political scientist and veteran space policy scholar at George Washington University. John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. NASA, Logsdon says in a book published in 2010, entered a “four-decade identity crisis” because the journey to the moon turned it into what Webb feared: “a single-program agency.”
The start of a new race back to the moon
Once this great milestone was achieved, political interest faded. After Apollo 17 returned to Earth in 1972, Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were planned, but all three missions were canceled due to lack of funding. NASA budget since the 1970s it has varied from 0.4% to 1% of all government spending.according to the report Planetary Society.
Bridenstine, a former NASA executive, said there were other attempts to return to the moon between 1990 and the early 2000s: “In each case, the program took too long. “It took too long and too much money.” The space agency would spend nearly $20 billion in projects that were ultimately canceledaccording to a report presented to Congress in 2012. In an interview CBS In 2019, he explained that to address “political risk” this time, it had to be done quickly. For this reason, he assured, they offered plan to return to the lunar surface in less than five years.
And there is nothing better to speed up plans than another competition between powers. China became the second country in the world to plant its flag on the moon in 2020, thanks to an unmanned spacecraft that also collected samples of lunar rocks. From then on things moved quickly. A year later, it launched the first module of its Tiangong space station into orbit. Since then, the Asian giant has made five manned flights to its station.
China has already announced this year that He hopes to set foot on the moon before 2030. They want to reach the moon’s south pole, where it is believed there may be frozen water. Scientists explained that this could be a source of hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used, for example, to produce rocket fuel and power travel to Mars. Over all these years presence iron, silicon and magnesium and other minerals of lunar soil.
Current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson admitted that he is in a new career. “We want China to not come and say the water belongs to them,” The official stated this in an interview in May of this year.
Artemis’ financial problems
NASA’s 2021 report states that the program Returning to the Moon will cost approximately $93 billion. This is an impressive investment, but much less than what Apollo required. “These 50 years of technological advancement have been a game changer,” says Jack Burns, professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.
But this does not mean that money has ceased to be a problem. An audit by NASA’s Office of Inspector General found that development of the SLS rocket had exceeded its planned timeframe and investment. This rocket has already been tested and will be used on the Artemis manned voyage. Working on a rocket They have accumulated more than six years of arrears and have already cost about $6 billion more than planned.– the message says.
However, the project has the support of US legislators. The Senate and House Appropriations Committees last July proposed that NASA receive about 25 billion dollars in funding through fiscal year 2024. Congress has called for budget increases for the Artemis program and its transport components, the SLS rocket and the Orion crew capsule.
If everything goes according to plan, humanity will return to the moon This will be in December 2025. Artemis “represents the thousands of people who work tirelessly to take us to the stars. “This is your crew, this is our crew, this is humanity’s crew,” NASA said as it introduced the four people who will travel to the satellite for the first time in 50 years.
Among all the things Cernan said about his trip to the moon, he talked about silence. He especially remembered the moment the lunar spacecraft stopped. “This is where you experience the most peaceful moment a person can ever experience in their life,” Cernan said in 2007. “No vibration. No noise. The earth stops talking. Your partner seems to be hypnotized. “He can’t say anything.”
There is video of Cernan and teammate Harrison H. Schmitt’s final walk on the Moon. They can be seen having fun singing a version Fountain in the park, song by Ed Haley. “One day in December I walked on the moon…” Before flying back to Earth, saying goodbye, Cernan said: “We are leaving the same as we came, and, God willing, we will return with peace and hope for all humanity.“
Source: Hiper Textual
