DBWI someone tries to go to the Moon

I got this idea while watching a sci-fi movie. There are lots of stories and movies about people building rockets and using them to get to the Moon. What if some government put its resources behind the idea and actually tried to do this?

Its surprising this hasn't been tried. Presumably in democracies, interest groups fighting for resources would keep the government from committing to such an endeavor, but it would seem to be exactly the sort of prestige project dictatorships like to do.
 

Delta Force

Banned
I got this idea while watching a sci-fi movie. There are lots of stories and movies about people building rockets and using them to get to the Moon. What if some government put its resources behind the idea and actually tried to do this?

Its surprising this hasn't been tried. Presumably in democracies, interest groups fighting for resources would keep the government from committing to such an endeavor, but it would seem to be exactly the sort of prestige project dictatorships like to do.

That would require a rocket with a payload almost time times larger than the Titan and Proton rockets that are already used to launch the unmanned lunar sample return missions and all the Earth orbit missions and payloads.
 
The Cold War could go completely crazy, I suppose. Imagine what a boondoggle a moon-base would be! Though there is an argument for a telescope on the dark side, but it could be automated, like the Copernicus Orbital Telescope.

The real question is whether the runner up tries to send a manned mission, or if they return their focus to unmanned missions.
 

Archibald

Banned
With chemical propulsion ? no way. Even with nuclear-chemical (a nuclear reactor heating liquid hydrogen) it would be marginal - believe me, the space branch of the Atomic Energy Commission did the math in 1961 when JFK daydreamed about man-on-the-Moon. He quickly gave up when his advisor Jerome Wiesner briefly told him about the cold numbers of spaceflight.
What's the point of going there if no permanent base thereafter ? was Wiesner last straw argument to JFK.
Fortunately 50 years later nuclear fusion is at the corner, and if applied to spaceflight, it could get us across the solar system. :p

(OOC: during the post-sputnik panic and before the creation of NASA space matters were very nearly given to the AEC)
 
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Why go through all that effort? Just film it on a studio set and shoot a rocket off, then broadcast the whole thing "live". :rolleyes:

Well, there is already that 1969 mockumentary "One Small Step", which is basically a highly professional, albeit commercially not very successful hard sci-fi movie. The cinematic techniques and aesthetics in that movie were really impressive for the time, which led many to believe that what was seen wasn't just a movie, but actual footage of a secret moon landing.

As crazy as it sounds -and I don't want to be kicked for posting silly conspiracy theories!-, but there are quite a lot of people today who seriously believe we went to the moon!
 
well, without actually going to the moon, space agencies around the world have poured a lot of money and effort into developing 'remote' stuff... probes, sensors, space based cameras. Would working on 'getting men to the moon and (presumably) back slow that down some? After all, NASA and similar agencies generally aren't all that big a part of any nations' budget...
 
With chemical propulsion ? no way. Even with nuclear-chemical (a nuclear reactor heating liquid hydrogen) it would be marginal - believe me, the space branch of the Atomic Energy Commission did the math in 1961 when JFK daydreamed about man-on-the-Moon. He quickly gave up when his advisor Jerome Wiesner briefly told him about the cold numbers of spaceflight.
What's the point of going there if no permanent base thereafter ? was Wiesner last straw argument to JFK.
Fortunately 50 years later nuclear fusion is at the corner, and if applied to spaceflight, it could get us across the solar system. :p

(OOC: during the post-sputnik panic and before the creation of NASA space matters were very nearly given to the AEC)

Well to be fair, Werner von Braun didn't exactly help matters. His proposed LEO rocket and accompanying spaceplane would have weighed something on the order of 5,000 tons and to top it off, he wanted to use hypergolics as fuel, would have been an environmental nightmare, never mind the risk they would have posed to the crew should something have gone wrong.
 
FWIW, the British Interplanetary Society developed a practicable design for a Moon mission in ~1938 using solid-fuel rockets. Yes, it had a seriously 'steam punk' look about it, but the math was sound...

There's even a chance it would have worked given that, in OTL, NASA re-invented many of their ideas......
 
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