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One thing I've always wondered: let's say we NEEDED to go to the moon right away, even if it meant taking a few safety shortcuts. Like, aliens landed there and demanded a face-to-face meeting before they destroy our planet and we don't know how long they'll wait for us (could be minutes, could be centuries, but who wants to find out?)... What's the fastest we could, in theory, get there?
At the moment, we just cannot.
We don't even have space suits that can operate on the moon. The stuff they use on the ISS is made to be used in a total vacuum only, not walking around in the dust and on sharp rocks. There are new suits in development, but nothing final as far as I know. I'm not sure if any are close to being finished, let alone tested and certified.
There's also no vehicle that can land on the moon with crew right now. Nasa is relying on SpaceX to get their Starship program to the point they can do it. People are divided on this, but anyone with technical knowledge I heard about this say the SpaceX program is very challenging and probably not feasible. Especially with the super optimistic timelines they've been throwing around.
In theory you could put a Crew Dragon with a big trunk of supplies on a Falcon Heavy, which has the delta-V to go to the moon. But obviously that's pretty risky, once you go you're committed. When working in LEO you almost always have some kind of disaster recover scenario available where you abort and get back to earth asap. If you are underway to the moon, there is no turning back. The Crew Dragon has very limited mobility. But I think a trans-lunar injection and orbit around the moon would be possible, with a free return trajectory. So if going around the moon is good enough, that would be possible.
Still it would probably take 9-12 months to put such a mission together and it would be very risky indeed. And like I said, landing on the moon is a total no-go right now.
We should ask Scott Manley to do a video about this, I would love to hear his thoughts on this.
We went from first flight to landing on the moon in less than 70 years, and are worlds ahead of where we were then. I totally get that we wouldn't be able to leave tomorrow, but in the "could be minutes, could be centuries" scenario it's hard to imagine the answer being more than 70 years starting now, and that's what I'm curious about
Well it all depends on what you want to do. I interpreted your question as we need to go there asap, what can we do? And then the answer is we can do an crewed orbit in about a year time.
If we just want to do it with a good chance of survival, building all the shit we need, but still get there soon, the answer would be different. If we just want to go fast, we would probably use all our heavy lift vehicles to build a moon vehicle in LEO. Then put a big ass engine on that and a bunch of fuel and launch the whole thing to the moon. That's something we could do within 5-7 years if we would put our minds and money to it. I feel the suits we currently have in development could be ready within that time as well. The lander would be a problem however, we don't have any of those in development right now. Blue Origin has their Blue Lander, but that's been on the drawing board for so long now. They did get extra funding to get it ready for 2030, but haven't shown their progress publicly, so who knows how far they are. On the other hand, if we want to take some risks for this special mission I'm sure we can get something together in 5-7 years if humanity unites and puts their weight/money/faith behind it.
However if we keep going like we've been going since Apollo was cancelled, we are never going to get there at all. The politics are complicated and the private sector has been hit or miss. Plus with the Musk factor, we don't know what's going to happen. I have zero faith in anything we have going right now.
For sure. And Elon would just shit talk the aliens, pass along misinformation about them on Xitter, and we'd get zapped after finding it it was possible when we first learned of them.
Since we had a lander during the Apollo program, why don't we have access to a lander now?
Because when the Apollo project was ongoing, they only built what they needed to build. Everything was a prototype basically and there were usually different versions of everything going around. Afterwards a lot of the stuff was re-used for later programs, often modified or taken apart for parts. As the budget shrank they needed to be creative. Take a look at the work CuriousMarc and his team is doing with repairing and restoring old Apollo Moon hardware, along with documentation and preservation.
Why can't we simply build the Apollo lander today. Well a couple of reasons.
First of all, like I said it were prototypes, so you'd have to figure out what design to use. All of the documents back then were on paper and not all of it is digitized by a long shot. The amount of documents they produced back then was crazy. And a lot of it was lost over time unfortunately. Puzzling all of that together would be quite some task. Most folk from back then are since dead or at the very least retired. And I for one sometimes forget entire projects I worked on, so good luck getting small details out of those people.
Our idea of what is acceptable, a good idea and safe has changed since the Apollo times. A lot of the design back then included components that were very dangerous and toxic. Not only to be used, but also to manufacture, which we wouldn't find acceptable these days. And things we've later learned were a bad thing to do. So the design would need to be modified to be safer, which would probably cascade into an entire new design.
We've lost so much of the support infrastructure the program relied on. It's hard to understate how much this matters. This is a big thing when people say the moon program was fake. It wasn't just one rocket, one lander, one crew, it was millions upon millions of pieces of infrastructure supporting the whole thing. From jigs to electronics, test equipment, custom tools, handling facilities etc. All with their own backstory, design requirements, documentation etc. A lot of this has been lost, especially when it was outsourced at the time. You'd have to reverse engineer and re-create a lot of that.
Time has moved on and so has technology. Whilst the Apollo program had some cutting edge stuff back then, these days it's ridiculously outdated. It would be very hard to manufacture any of those components today. We're talking about the first generation of integrated circuits, on very expensive ceramics. Using crazy analogue electronics, only understood by the best gurus at the time. Even mechanical computers were used, a lost artform last used in the 80s. You could start redesigning stuff to modern equivalents, but again that would probably snowball into just designing a whole new thing.
Recreating something from that long ago is simply not possible I'm afraid. And even if we could, it would probably make for a pretty shitty lander compared to modern standards.
Just a civilian guess, but 2 or 3 Delta V or Falcon Heavy to put 1 payload into LEO with a command module and lander, then 1 booster with fuel. Short of using prototype lander, fabrication would take months at best. Then a Starship or SLS to get a crew, food, and water into orbit.
It depends, do you need to return your representative, or can we leave him on the moon? Latter is easier. Maybe he can hitchhike back with the aliens.
If it's a one-way mission, it could be done with a Falcon heavy and a slapped-together lander sourced from NASA. Maybe even an old Gemini capsule or something from the Smithsonian.
Or you could send up a Falcon heavy with fuel payload, rendezvous with the ISS, pick up a 'naut, and steal a Soyuz, although I'm not sure if they can be configured to land on the moon
Responding because I am also curious about this.