“NASA received 4 percent of the federal budget in 1965,” Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham told Congress in 2015. For the past 40 years, however, the rate has remained below 1 percent, and in the last few 15 years it fell to 0.4%».
A 2005 NASA report estimated that returning to the Moon would cost about $104 billion ($162 billion today adjusted for inflation). The Apollo program cost about $142 billion today.
Referring to missions to Mars and a return to the moon, Cunningham said, “NASA’s budget is too small for that.”
The problem of presidents
President Biden will be in office – or not – when NASA sends astronauts to the moon in 2025 or later. And here’s the other big problem: party politics.
“Why should we believe what any president predicts for two terms of government? Hadfield said. “It’s just talk.
The process of designing, engineering and testing a space shuttle takes longer than a two-term president. And future presidents and lawmakers often reject their predecessor’s plans for space exploration.
In 2004, for example, the Bush administration tasked NASA with developing a way to replace the retired space shuttle and return to the moon. The agency spent $9 billion on the program over five years.
However, after President Barack Obama took office and the Government Accountability Office released a report about NASA’s failure to estimate program costs, Obama ended the program.
Trump didn’t scrap Obama’s SLS, he just changed it: He wanted to see Artemis astronauts return to the moon in 2024.
Such frequent changes in NASA’s costly priorities have resulted in an estimated $20 billion in losses and years of wasted time.
Biden seems to be a rare exception: he left Trump’s Artemis project and the space force.
Challenges beyond politics
The political tug-of-war over NASA’s budget isn’t the only reason humans haven’t returned to the moon. The moon is also a 4.5 billion year old death trap for humans and the complexity of the task should not be underestimated.
Its surface is filled with craters and boulders that threaten a safe landing. Before the first moon landing, the United States spent billions of dollars developing, launching and transporting satellites to the moon to map its surface and help scout potential landing sites for Apollo.
Even more worrying are meteorites. The Moon is covered in a thin layer of lunar dust, several centimeters deep in some areas. It is very abrasive and sticky, rapidly contaminating space suits, vehicles and systems.
There is also a problem with sunlight. For 14 days, the Moon’s surface is a hot hell exposed directly to the harsh rays of the sun; the moon has no protective atmosphere. The next 14 days are spent in complete darkness, and the surface of the Moon is one of the coldest places in the universe.
NASA is developing an energy system that could supply astronauts with electricity during week-long lunar nights, something that would be useful elsewhere, including on Mars.
We’ll be back
Another problem the astronauts say is NASA’s aging workforce. Most kids these days want to be YouTube stars, not astronauts.
“You need young people for missions like this,” Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt recently told Business Insider. The average age of the Apollo 13 mission controllers was 26 years old, today those who work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center are around 60 years old.
Especially when people in their teens and 20s are working, Schweickart said. “When Elon Musk’s team gets something done, the whole company yells and yells and jumps up and down.”
According to astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, Musk is a typical member of the “generation of space-mad billionaires.”
