Plenty of people wanted to. Congress was more interested in lining pockets, and they decide what NASA gets to do. Plus Star Wars, Shuttle, ISS, etc. All stupidly expensive and with far superior perceived benefits.
You still haven't supplied a good answer as to why they would keep sending people. How many times can you land people for a few days to poke at rocks and collect samples before the cost outweighs the benefits? Seriously, what exactly were they supposed to be doing there?
But it's not just the US Congress. It's every other space agency on Earth. And it's every Tony Stark billionaire "adventurer" on Earth.
The Moon has been sitting there just 30 Earth diameters away from Earth for 50 years. Yet we are supposed to believe that nobody even attempted to land anything there from 1976 (last supposedly successful USSR Luna mission) to 2013 (first supposedly successful Chinese mission). That's 37 years!
Further, we have been asked to believe that from March 1966 until December 1972, the 6 of the USA's 7 unmanned Surveyor landers and 7 of the USA's manned Apollo missions went off without a hitch, even though the nobody from the USA has been able to successfully land anything on the Moon since and even though it is now 10 years after China's successful Chang'e 3 mission reignited the space race.
All supposed Moon lander missions --
Lander Missions
1/1962 Ranger 3 FAILED
4/1962 Ranger 4 FAILED
1/1962 Ranger 5 FAILED
1/1963 Luna E-6 #2 FAILED at launch
2/1963 Luna E-6 #3 FAILED at launch
4/1963 Luna 4 #3 FAILED
1/1964 Ranger 6 FAILED
3/1964 Luna E-6 #6 FAILED at launch
4/1964 Luna E-6 #7 FAILED at launch
3/1965 Kosmos 60 FAILED at launch
4/1965 Luna E-6 #8 FAILED
5/1965 Luna E-6 #10 FAILED
6/1965 Luna E-6 #7 FAILED
10/1965 Luna E-6 #11 FAILED
12/1965 Luna E-6 #12 FAILED
1/1966 Luna E-6 #13 Successful
5/1966 Surveyor 1 Successful9/1966 Surveyor 2 FAILED
12/1966 Luna 13 Successful
4/1967 Surveyor 3 Successful
7/1967 Surveyor 4 Successful
9/1967 Surveyor 5 Successful
11/1967 Surveyor 6 Successful
1/1968 Surveyor 7 Successful
12/1968 Apollo 8 (Manned Orbiter) Successful2/1969 Luna E-8 FAILED at launch
6/1969 Luna E-8-5 FAILED at launch
7/1969 Luna 15 FAILED
7/1969 Apollo 11 (Manned Lander) Successful9/1969 Kosmos 300 FAILED at launch
10/1969 Kosmos 305 FAILED at launch
11/1969 Apollo 12 (Manned Lander) Successful2/1970 Luna E-8-5 #405 FAILED at launch
4/1970 Apollo 13 Failed landing
9/1970 Luna 16 Successful
10/1970 Luna 17 Successful1/1971 Apollo 14 (Manned Lander) Successful
7/1971 Apollo 15 (Manned Lander) Successful9/1971 Luna 18 FAILED
2/1972 Luna 20 Successful
4/1972 Apollo 16 (Manned Lander) Successful
12/1972 Apollo 17 (Manned Lander) Successful
8/1973 Luna 21 Successful10/1975 Luna 23 tipped over on landing
10/1975 Luna E-8-5M No.412 FAILED
8/1976 Luna 24 SuccessfulNo even attempted landing missions until 2013 (37 years later!)12/2013 Chang'e 3 (China) Successful
12/2018 Chang'e 4 (China) Successful2/2019 Beresheet First Israeli and first privately funded lunar lander mission CRASHED
11/2020 Chang'e 5 (China) Successful11/2022 OMOTENASHI (Japan) FAILED
12/2022 Hakuto-R Mission 1 (Japan) FAILED
7/2023 Chandrayaan-3 (India) Successful8/2023 Luna 25 (Russia) FAILED
9/2023 SLIM (Japan) Successful1/2024 Peregrine Mission One (USA) FAILED
2/2024 IM-1 (USA) supposed launched today, and aiming for a 2/22 arrival
You have to admit that this is bit strange technological timeline. While it is not impossible to write off, it is quite reasonable to wonder whether all of the supposedly successful landing missions on the 1960s and 1970s occurred exactly as reported.
The part that I find strangest is all of the supposed technical hurdles that Artemis is supposed still facing.
From 2007When Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind” onto the surface of the moon in 1969, his booted foot sank into a layer of fine gray dust, leaving an imprint that would become the subject of one of the most famous photographs in history. Scientists called the dust lunar regolith, from the Greek rhegos for “blanket” and lithos for“stone.” Back then scientists regarded the regolith as simply part of the landscape, little more than the backdrop for the planting of the American flag.
No more. Lunar scientists have learned a lot about the moon since then. They’ve found that one of the biggest challenges to lunar settlement—as vexing as new rocketry or radiation—is how to live with regolith that covers virtually the entire lunar surface from a depth of7 feet to perhaps 100 feet or more. It includes everything from huge boulders to particles only a few nanometers in diameter, but most of it is a puree created by uncountable high-speed micrometeorites that have been crashing into the moon unimpeded by atmosphere for more than 3billion years. A handful of regolith consists of bits of stone,minerals, particles of glass created by the heat from the tiny impacts,and accretions of glass, minerals, and stone welded together.
Eons of melting, cooling, and agglomerating have transformed the glass particles in the regolith into a jagged-edged, abrasive powder that clings to anything it touches and packs together so densely that it becomes extremely hard to work on at any depth below four inches.
For those who would explore the moon—whether to train for exploring Mars, to mine resources, or to install high-precision observatories—regolith is a potentially crippling liability, an all-pervasive, pernicious threat to machinery and human tissue. After just three days of moonwalks, regolith threatened to grind the joints of the Apollo astronauts’ space suits to a halt, the same way rust crippled Dorothy’s Tin Man. Special sample cases built to hold the Apollo moon rocks lost their vacuum seals because of rims corrupted by dust. For a permanent lunar base, such mechanical failures could spell disaster.
Regolith can play havoc with hydraulics, freeze on-off switches, and turn ball bearings into Grape Nuts. When moon dust is disturbed, small particles float about, land, and glue themselves to everything.Regolith does not brush off easily, and breathing it can cause pulmonary fibrosis, the lunar equivalent of black lung. There is nothing like it on Earth. “Here you have geological processes that tend to sort and separate,” says geologist Douglas Rickman of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “On the moon you have meteorite impacts that mix everything together.”
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NASA’s current plans call for a series of “precursor” robotic lunar missions to test technologies and gather information. These will begin next year, long before NASA’s new Orion spaceship is ready to loft its four-astronaut crew moonward. By the time that happens, perhaps around 2018, planners hope to have resolved some key unknowns: whether there are ice deposits at one of the lunar poles, whether a space suit can be made that can survive multiple journeys across the dust-ridden landscape, and whether the human body can survive dust, lengthy stays in reduced gravity, and prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation.
The first trips will be Apollo-like sorties, brief visits to test techniques and equipment and to begin building the outpost. Eventually the base will include living quarters, a launchpad, a storage facility for fuel and supplies, and a power plant. By 2024, NASA experts expect to have enough infrastructure to support a permanent human presence with four astronauts rotating every six months, the same length of a stay as on the International Space Station.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/moondust-radi ... n-the-moonThey were called the “dusty dozen” for good reason. The 12 Apollo astronauts who walked on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972 kicked up so much moondust that the powdery sediment got lodged in every nook and cranny of their space suits. Caked in the stuff, the astronauts inadvertently tracked the toxic dust into their spacecraft and even back down to Earth upon landing.
These NASA astronauts complained of a “lunar hay fever” that irritated their eyes, lungs, and nostrils. A doctor who helped the Apollo 11 crew members emerge from their dust-scattered space module following its ocean splashdown experienced allergic reactions of his own. “Dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon,” Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, said during a postflight debriefing. “I think we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems, except dust.”
Billowing clouds of dust particles—jagged and abrasive for want of weathering and atmospheric reactions—are hardly the only health hazards posed by a lunar mission, though. Galactic cosmic rays would bombard lunar inhabitants with a steady stream of high-energy radiation. The level of gravity on the moon—about 17 percent that of Earth’s—could wreak havoc on bones, muscles, and other organs. And then there are the psychological aspects of what one NASA astronaut described as the “vast loneliness” of the moon.
As humanity prepares to return to the moon and eventually colonize it, scientists are now actively probing these risks and beginning to devise medical countermeasures. Yet solid evidence on the health consequences of lunar living is extremely limited.
“Except for the Apollo experience, we really have no data,” says Laurence Young, a space medicine scientist in MIT’s department of aeronautics and astronautics—and those Apollo missions were never designed with biomedical research goals in mind.In contrast, the International Space Station (ISS) was established as a giant floating laboratory from the get-go, and nearly two decades of experiments from the continuously inhabited station do offer some clues about what it might be like for people to live on the moon for extended durations. But a zero-gravity space station orbiting within the protective halo of the Earth’s magnetic field is hardly analogous to the moon’s surface, with its partial gravity and harsher radiation.
Researchers therefore have to settle for approximations of lunar conditions. They study proxy dust instead of the real thing, because moondust collected by Apollo astronauts remains scarce. (And even those precious Apollo samples became less reactive after coming into contact with the Earth’s moist, oxygen-rich air.) The researchers simulate galactic radiation by using particle accelerators to create the kinds of energetic heavy ions found in deep space. And they have a variety of tricks to fudge one-sixth gravity: They take parabolic flights that induce short bursts of moonlike conditions; use harnesses and other body-weight support systems to mimic the biomechanics expected in reduced gravity environments; and place subjects in tilted beds for weeks on end to model the effects of lunar gravity on heart function.
The imitations are never perfect, but they are informative. Last year, an interdisciplinary team from Stony Brook University, in New York, exposed human lung cells and mouse brain cells to dust samples that resemble the regolith found in the lunar highlands and on the moon’s volcanic plains. Compared with less-reactive particulate materials, the toxic dust caused more genetic mutations and cell death, raising the specter of moondust triggering neurodegeneration and cancer in future lunar explorers. “The DNA is being damaged, so there is a risk of those types of things happening,” says Rachel Caston, a molecular biologist who led the research. (She’s now at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.)
But will the same damage happen inside the human body? And if so, would ensuring the safety of future moon settlers require the equivalent of a mudroom, an expensive and logistically challenging piece of equipment to haul over to our celestial neighbor? And just how clean would that mudroom have to be to keep astronauts safe?
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2024/02 ... nd-lander/“We’re glad to get to this point, it’s been a while getting here,” said NASA’s CLPS program manager Chris Culbert. “We’ve got our fingers crossed. We hope that they’re successful, but we know it’s very, very hard to land on the moon.”
...
It’s the second of what is still scheduled to be five CLPS launches in 2024. The first in January saw Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lander launched on the first ever flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. While it made it to space and flew nearly half a million miles, a propellant leak took any chance of a soft moon landing off the board and the company eventually steered it back to Earth to burn up on reentry.
Efforts by Russia and a private Japanese company ispace also both met with failure in 2023.
...
“Understanding how when you land, you’re blasting the surface with a rocket engine, right? So understanding where that dust goes and what it does is important,” Culbert said pointing out that nobody knows, for instance, just how close you might be able to have human habitation nearby. “Are you sandblasting them? … Those are important pieces of things to know about future missions.”
Why landing on the moon is proving more difficult today than 50 years agoIt is more than half a century since Nasa landed astronauts on the moon and brought them all home safely. Shouldn’t landing on the lunar surface today be, if not quite trivial, then at least straightforward? Hasn’t the rocket science of the mid-20th century become the basic knowledge of the 21st?
Peregrine isn’t the only recent failure. While China and India have both placed robotic landers on the moon, Russia’s Luna 25 crash-landed last year, nearly 60 years after the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 nailed the first gentle touchdown. Landers built by private companies have a 100% failure record on the moon: the Israeli Beresheet lander crashed in 2019, while a Japanese lander built by ispace crashed last year. Peregrine makes it three out of three losses.
https://apnews.com/article/nasa-moon-la ... ec2e00f090Astronauts will have to wait until next year before flying to the moon and at least two years before landing on it, under the latest round of delays announced by NASA on Tuesday.
The space agency had planned to send four astronauts around the moon late this year, but pushed the flight to September 2025. The first human moon landing in more than 50 years also got bumped, from 2025 to September 2026. NASA cited safety concerns with its own spacecraft, as well as development issues with the moonsuits and landers coming from private industry.
“Safety is our top priority,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The delays will “give Artemis teams more time to work through the challenges.” ...
The Government Accountability Office warned in November that NASA was likely looking at 2027 for its first astronaut moon landing, citing Elon Musk’s Starship as one of the many technical challenges. Another potential hurdle: the development of moonwalking suits by Houston’s Axiom Space.“We need them all to be ready and all to be successful in order for that very complicated mission to come together,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s deputy associate administrator. He added that even with the delay, a 2026 moon landing represents “a very aggressive schedule.”
NASA has only one Artemis moonshot under its belt so far. In a test flight of its new moon rocket in 2022, the space agency sent an empty Orion capsule into lunar orbit and returned it to Earth. To engineers’ surprise, some charred material came off the capsule’s heat shield during reentry. Later, testing of another capsule uncovered a design flaw in the life-support electronics, and separate battery issues popped up.
https://www.space.com/nasa-moon-landing ... cerns.htmlOver the past 20 years, researchers have developed a consistent picture of the physics of rocket exhaust blowing lunar soil, "but significant gaps exist," Metzger said. "No currently available modeling method can fully predict the effects. However, the basics are understood well enough to begin designing countermeasures."
Metzger and other team members at UCF's Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science (CLASS) say landing pads are needed for missions that repeatedly visit a lunar outpost.
For lunar landings, CLASS research has shown that the sandblasting that will occur at a lunar outpost is unacceptable, as it will excessively degrade optics, solar cells, thermal control surfaces and moving joints on mechanisms. Impacts of blowing rocks could also break hardware.
Florida Space Institute rsearchers are investigating methods to mitigate the effects of these blasts, such as sintering lunar regolith. They're also looking at robotics for bulldozing and building berms, as well as considering the use of gravel or pavers. And they're organizing a series of robotics competitions for landing pad construction technologies in conjunction with machine learning firms to further advance the necessary robotics capabilities.
"NASA takes the potential ejecta issues associated with rocket engine plume surface interaction very seriously," said Robert Mueller, senior technologist and principal investigator in the Exploration Systems and Development Office at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
One fundamental challenge, says Jan Wörner, a former director general of the European Space Agency (Esa), is weight. “You are always close to failure because you have to be light or the spacecraft will not fly. You cannot have a big safety margin.”
Added to that, almost every spacecraft is a prototype. Apart from rare cases, such as the Galileo communications satellites, spacecraft are bespoke machines. They are not mass produced with the same tried and tested systems and designs. And once they are deployed in space, they are on their own. “If you have trouble with your car, you can have it repaired, but in space there’s no opportunity,” says Wörner. “Space is a different dimension.”
The moon itself presents its own problems. There is gravity – one-sixth as strong as on Earth – but no atmosphere. Unlike Mars, where spacecraft can fly to their destination and brake with parachutes, moon landings depend entirely on engines. If you have a single engine, as smaller probes tend to, it must be steerable, because there is no other way to control the descent.
To complicate matters, the engine must have a throttle, allowing the thrust to be dialled up and down. “Usually you ignite them and they provide a steady state thrust,” says Nico Dettmann, Esa’s lunar exploration group leader. “To change the thrust during operations adds a lot more complexity.”
And yet, with the first lunar landings back in the 60s, it can be hard to grasp why the moon remains such a tough destination.
Moon mission records provide a clue: soon after the Apollo programme, lunar landers fell out of favour. When China’s Chang’e 3 spacecraft touched down in 2013, it chalked up the first soft landing on the moon since the Soviet’s Luna 24 in 1976.
“There were decades when people were not developing landers,” says Dettmann. “The technology is not that common that you can easily learn from others.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/us-spac ... -1.7115921U.S. aims to end 52-year moon absence
The launch came a month after the lunar lander of another private firm, Pittsburgh's Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on Jan. 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut flight.
The failure of Astrobotic's Peregrine lander, which was also flying NASA payloads to the moon, marked the third time a private company had been unable to achieve a "soft landing" on the lunar surface, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.
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If successful, the flight would represent the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo crewed moon mission in 1972, and the first by a private company.
The feat also would mark the first journey to the lunar surface under NASA's Artemis moon program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth's natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.
NASA announced last month that it was delaying its target date for a first crewed Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China has said it was aiming for 2030.
Small landers such as Nova-C are expected to get there first, carrying instruments to closely survey the lunar landscape, its resources and potential hazards. Odysseus will focus on space weather interactions with the moon's surface, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies and navigation.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa- ... ust-cloud/To establish a long-term human presence on and around the Moon for the benefit of humanity, NASA must address the challenges lunar dust presents to these complex missions. This is where the Artemis Generation of problem solvers may be able to help.
For the challenge, NASA is asking undergraduate and graduate students from accredited colleges and universities in the United States to help tackle the challenges of plumes and lunar dust by seeking innovative, systems-level solutions to minimize and manage the impacts on future lunar exploration systems. Potential solutions might include development of dust shields, creating flight instrumentation dedicated to managing plume surface interactions, finding ways to see through the dust cloud during landing, or tracking dust during ascent and descent.
We Still Don't Know How to Deal With Moon DustIf we’re going back to the moon, we’re going to need to learn how to deal with the dust.
by BenDhyan » Wed Feb 14, 2024 8:29 pm 
