I think we have been to the moon, but I'm not certain.
Well, at least there's hope for you. You should really doubt it about as much as atomic bombs being developed and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or like, a molecule of water having two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom. That's how silly this is. As someone eloquently put, the web has opened the sum total of man's stupidity to everyone and the net result was that a whole bunch of stupid people learned a whole lot more stupid shit when it should be the complete opposite.
Exactly, get the hell away from sherdog and be human.
Sage advice. This place is a breeding ground for anti-intellectualism and a strong percentage of the posts by
people Untermenschen in the science-related threads in particular are invariably horrid beyond belief and that's before even taking into consideration the constant, utterly invalid conflation of politics and science. You'll lose any faith you ever had in humanity spending time here on a daily basis.
Today's rocket would be way better. If we said lets go back to the moon, I can't see us taking more than a few years to get a new rocket/craft that can get us there.
Aside from
@Phr3121,
@Rebound59 and a precious few others, I don't think it's properly appreciated how absurd the Saturn V (1967-73) actually was* or what it takes to send humans beyond low earth orbit, particularly if it's with the intention of having them not only land on another astronomical body but returned to Earth in one piece which will invariably be the case sans far off colonization futurism, and it's quite convenient the moon's gravity is only 1/6 of Earth's where the latter is concerned. People seem to think it should be as simple as flinging an 800 kg robotic space probe into the solar system or something - although that gets wildly complicated thereafter in terms of navigation - when it is immeasurably difficult, not to mention outrageously costly with very high risk factors for loss of life.
* The thing had a payload capacity of 140,000 kg (308,647 lbs) to LEO and damn near 50,000 kg for Trans-Lunar Injection to the moon. It launched an entire fucking space station - Skylab 1 - into orbit in one go and the ISS could've theoretically been assembled in three launches with it as opposed to the several dozen it actually took on lesser launch vehicles. It utterly blows the panels off anything else that's ever been engineered by human beings, balls-to-the-wall jaw droppingly powerful. Each Apollo mission had a launch mass of 45,000-48,000 kg.
NASA hasn't gone back to the moon or pushed for Mars mission because the budget isn't there.
True, indeed.
As a percentage of the budget is dire.
This would be smart if we hadn't already gone all in on the SLS.
Yeah, it's unfortunately something of a pork barrel.
The same way we project our economic and military strength across the planet, we should be working on doing that in space.
Maintaining superiority in either of those facets won't even be possible without doing the same for science and technology on the whole, not to mention that they're also the anchor of modern civilization. The PRC is coming with supremely focused, ruthless ambition while the USA continues to dumb down and eat its own face. What the fuck is America going to do about it? China has already pulled ahead in quantum computing/cryptography and will likely be close to even in biomedical research and innovation over the next decade. They actually care about it.
In my limited opinion, I just feel it's not the right time the money could be spent better on getting a more efficient propulsion system for example.
Something along those lines is actually in the works, but this post has gone long enough.