After the Soviet unmanned probe Luna 9 landed on the moon for the first time in history in 1966, mankind achieved the feat of Neil Armstrong aboard the U.S. Apollo 11 landing on the moon for the first time in 1969. But why is the moon landing still an event that the whole world is paying attention to, almost 60 years later? The answer is ‘money’.
With the U.S. company Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus attempting to land on the moon for the first time as a private company at 7:30 a.m. on the 23rd (Korean time), humanity’s space exploration has achieved optimal ‘cost-effectiveness’ with the advancement of science and technology. There is an analysis that the pursuit is actually making the moon landing more difficult.
According to CNN, the United States and the Soviet Union poured enormous amounts of capital into the space development war in the 1960s. It is said that at the time of the peak of America’s ‘Apollo Project’, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) budget accounted for more than 4% of the total expenditures of the US government.
In comparison, NASA’s budget share for the ‘Artemis Project’ today is only 0.4%. If you do a simple calculation, it has been reduced by 1/10. Greg Autry, a professor at Arizona State University and a space policy expert, said, “The amount of money invested in the Apollo project is close to trillions of dollars in current value, so it is impossible to compare it to today.”
One of the main reasons is that while other science and technology have advanced tremendously since the Cold War, research related to space development has stagnated somewhat. For example, the computer mounted on Apollo 11 is not even close to the level of smartphones carried by ordinary people today. As a result, it is difficult to recycle the aerospace technology of the time, so a completely new level of technology must be applied again. It is inevitable that a huge amount of capital will be needed.
Another factor is that no matter how advanced technology is, space exploration is still a highly difficult science. Accurately planning a route to the moon, 400,000 km away, is like “hitting a golf ball in New York and putting it into a hole in Los Angeles” (Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University). In addition, there is a delay of about 3 seconds in communication with the Earth, making real-time precise control still close to impossible.
As a result, in addition to the United States and Russia, only five countries, including China, India, and Japan, have succeeded in landing on the moon so far. More than half of lunar exploration attempts so far have ended in failure. The least successful landings in China (2014), India (last year), and Japan (last month) were all unmanned landings.
In the United States, there is a recent trend of drastically lowering costs by ‘outsourcing’ the design of probes to the private sector instead of the government directly engaging in space exploration. If Intuitive Machines succeeds, it will be the first time an American probe has landed on the moon in 52 years since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.