[Spktyr]

We can’t go back to the moon at current because of all the industry and knowledge that was destroyed and no longer exists. You can’t just wave your wand and have parts appear from nowhere; just like you can’t just think happy thoughts and build a brand new 1969 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special - the suppliers don’t exist any more, the tooling doesn’t exist, the line to build it doesn’t exist any more.

The technology base has to be rebuilt/redeveloped in order to build something like a 69 Cadillac today. Same thing with the Saturn V. And since you have to go to such expense and trouble, you might as well just start over and build something new that is advised by the developments and advances between the old design and now. Which, actually, is what’s going on now.

But yes, at this time, we do not have the ability to build a craft to take men to the moon. New moon craft are *being designed* and developed, but nothing we can put into production today.

[null and void]

What, exactly, did we have when Kennedy said "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."?

It was a few captured V-2s and a handful of Redstones, and very little else.

We made it with years to spare.

Magnatron and my point is that we don't lack the technical capability, but the will, and we have the bonus of hyper-abundant bureaucratic "help".

Sell your can't someplace else, we're all stocked up here."

[hanamizu]

We can’t go back to the moon at current because of all the industry and knowledge that was destroyed and no longer exists.

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Kennedy made the landing (and retrieving!) of a man on the moon in his 1961 inaugural address. We got there in 1969. That’s less than 10 years and while we did have an aerospace industry, they were pretty much starting from scratch. There weren’t moon-rocket factories, lines, parts suppliers in 1961 and yet we somehow made it happen. We can’t seem to make it happen now. There was a ‘can-do’ attitude in the nation that seems to have been lost.

And slide rules. They used slide rules for the math.