The last Apollo mission landed on the Moon in 1972, and if all goes according to plan, NASA will be sending astronauts back there near the end of the next decade. Why has it taken us over 50 years to go back to the Moon?
. The CM would hold the crew of four, the SM would provide propulsion for the entire spacecraft, and the ALM would allow two of the three astronauts to land on the Moon and then return to lunar orbit.
The plan was relatively straightforward. The Saturn V would launch from Earth, the first stage would boost the rocket to orbital velocity and then be discarded, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. At this point, the second stage would ignite, bring the rocket and spacecraft to an altitude of 185 km , and then be discarded in Earth orbit.
The CSM would then break orbit and insert the spacecraft into a transearth injection, taking them all the way back home. Once they reached Earth, the CM and SM would separate, and the CM would land in the ocean and the crew would be retrieved. Mission accomplished.All of this hardware and an intense amount of training and technical expertise was necessary in order to send astronauts to the Moon.
Also, both the launch vehicles and the spacecraft that allowed astronauts to get the Moon, land on it, conduct surface operations, and then return home, were entirely expendable. Once the three stages of the Saturn V rockets were spent, they either fell into the ocean or became space junk in orbit. In short, the Apollo Program was not efficient, not by a long shot. But of course, it was not meant to be. For NASA, the entire purpose of the program was to get to the Moon as quickly as possible, not to mention beating the Russians to it. Speed was of the essence, not a slow and gradual build-up that would eventually lead to the lunar surface.
If this is starting to sound familiar, it's probably because it closely resembles what Arthur C. Clarke envisioned in Stanley Kubrick's. Released in 1968, roughly a year before the Moon Landing took place, this vision of the future was based on Clarke's extensive knowledge of physics and space exploration. It, therefore, made sense from a scientific standpoint.
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