Going Back To The Moon We should have been back on the moon by now. It is incredible we are so far behind schedule. It all started when the Apollo program was cancelled. The excuse was the people of the United States were no longer interested in going back to the moon. This was just more bunk being served to us. It seems to me something was being hidden and my guess was there was a secret program which involved the moon and possibly the building of a base there. When we announced we were going to go back to the moon, the plans for the Saturn V rocket were said to have been destroyed. Wasn’t this convenient for the legacy companies like Boeing? This meant it would be far more expensive to develop a new moon rocket than make more Saturn V rockets. The engines are the same used to power the shuttle. So much for advanced engines. The engines still use hydrogen and oxygen. The SLS uses some of the same components as the shuttle, but many of them have been redesigned. To me this means the SLS rocket is just revised old technology. The Saturn V produced 7.7 million pounds of thrust; this rocket produces 8.8 million pounds of thrust. What will we gain by going back to the moon? To start with every spaceflight advances our space technology and we learn more. When planes first took to the air the improvements came pretty quickly. We went from slowly flying a stick frame covered with canvas to flying to the moon in 66 years. One can’t even accurately guess the progress we will make in that time in space travel. If one is to compare this progress made in the first 66 years to the next space flight and from that date looked ahead 66 years, we might have attained faster than light speed, even though it was said to be impossible. In the early days, even before launching rockets into space and also at the beginning of that time, we had all these plans appearing in the magazines of the times. Popular Mechanics was one of those magazines and I couldn’t wait for it to come out to see what was new and it showed some great ideas for space travel. Most of it of course was impractical, especially at the time. I remember one idea, which seemed to me to be really crazy and it was an idea on how to propel a ship at faster speeds. The idea was to detonate small nuclear charges behind the ship to have the energy wave push the ship along. All ideas were not that ridiculous and another talked about a method we are using today for some probes and it is the solar sail which catches the solar wind from the sun and pushes a probe at a good speed. The problem is the solar wind weakens the further away from the sun the ship is, so there is a limit on its range. Another advantage to going to the moon might be resources. The United States depends on others for certain resources and this could end if we could figure out how to dig for them on the moon and return them to earth inexpensively. Since the moon has far less gravity than the earth. Launching vehicles back to the earth would take far less power so many think some sort of railgun could be created to shoot ships toward the earth which then could either glide through the atmosphere and land or carry a small amount of fuel and land SpaceX style which is butt first. Scientists might love to have labs on the moon. We have found out there are a lot of dangerous experiments being conducted on the earth and sometimes bad things escape the laboratories. If the laboratories were on the moon and something escaped it would go onto an airless body and probably die. Even if it didn’t die, it wouldn’t infect the population on earth. Since the moon is already a step off of the earth, if we produced propellent there and launched from there, our ships would have much more fuel. This is because launches from earth use up most of the fuel since our gravity is much stronger. In the future however, this might not even make a difference as the way we power our spacecraft advances. We can compare this to sailing ships which depended on the wind before the first steam ships were invented which needed no wind at all to travel. The closeness of the moon gives us a great advantage in certain circumstances. People and supplies can get there quickly. Today the trip is about 3 days, but as time goes by, it will get much shorter. Light from the moon reaches us in 1.3 seconds. The average distance to the moon is 238,855 miles. NASA actually used the sun for a sling shot for a rocket and got it up to 300,000 miles per hour. This was the probe named the Solar Probe. At that speed the moon could be reached in less than an hour. Of course, it would take longer because you would have to allow for slowing down and landing. I am not a believer on trying to put a colony on the moon unless the entire moon could be terraformed and given an earthlike atmosphere.
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