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Published in:
Prologue: The Conspiracy of the Faked Moon Landings Read chapter Read first chapter

2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

16. Technology, Money, and the Return to the Moon

Author : Thomas Eversberg

Published in: The Moon Hoax?

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The Moon remains an object of great attraction to mankind. It has a noticeable effect on our lives (sleep, tides), and many people feel an emotional connection to it. Who doesn’t like to gaze up at the Moon at night? After all the discussion about the authenticity of the Moon landings, I am constantly asked whether or not I think humans will ever visit our satellite again. With the extraordinary success of the lunar missions, many people ask why the Americans stopped making trips to the Moon and why the Soviets gave up going there altogether. After all, it is the first stop on the way to the planets, the ever-present goals of all would-be space explorers. And since I myself am helping to shape the German space program, I get asked whether or not we will head back to the Moon in the foreseeable future. In light of the rapid pace of technology development, this question is not easy to answer. Who would have predicted the impact of the internet 30 years ago? Nevertheless, there are indications that allow us to speculate on the future of spaceflight. An unbiased evaluation of the necessary technologies, as well as realistic considerations of the expected efforts and costs, can be an effective way to inform this discussion.

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previous chapter What Can We Learn?
Footnotes
1
On 21 October 2011, a Russian Soyuz rocket was launched from the equatorial European launch site in Kourou, French Guiana for the first time in order to achieve a higher carrying capacity and thus reduce the costs of transporting two navigation satellites. In times of the Moon landing, allowing a launch by the “enemy” on your own soil was completely unthinkable.
 
2
The Space Shuttle requires solid propellant rockets for the launch. They are considered to be a high-risk system because once they are ignited they cannot be turned off. During the planning phase of the Shuttle, the military warned NASA that, in their experience, they should expect two catastrophic failures per every one hundred launches. This number ended up being quite accurate.
 
3
In April 1971 the companies North American Rockwell and General Dynamics presented a calculation for their Shuttle design with a reusable glider plus orbiter (!), which was based on 450 flights until 1988. The total price for development plus operation should not exceed ten billion US dollars.
 
4
To justify the necessity of new flights to the Moon with new fuel sources, such as helium-3, is speculative and unsuitable for analysis. There are extensive investigations by competent scientists who prove the opposite (e.g. the report Factor Four by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins to the Club of Rome) and the claims of a significant increase in energy demand (we are talking about long periods here) are certainly dubious. But I am not getting into the debate of energy savings here. A nice joke about fusion technology is the so-called “fusion constant”. Its value: about 40 years. According to the engineers, this is how long it will take to finally develop a functioning fusion reactor. This figure has been constant since the 1950s.
 
5
Obviously, the industrial nations are living well above their means and are now forming financial “safety nets” for entire national economies. The public debt of the USA, for example, clearly exceeds the costs of a Mars mission and one should no longer speak of “astronomical” but of “economic” sums.
 
Metadata
Title
Technology, Money, and the Return to the Moon
Author
Thomas Eversberg
Copyright Year
2019
Book
The Moon Hoax?

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05459-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-05460-1

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05460-1_16

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