I’m not saying it didn’t happen. of course it happened. I’m just saying that it’s pathetic that we couldn’t do it today even if we had a reason to do it. NASA has said that it has lost/destroyed the technology. That’s a fact.
I don’t think government should behave like that. That’s all.
I don’t believe this is true. I’ve heard something similar long, long ago, and my recollection is that it refers to tooling for the Saturn V rockets. We don’t need those anymore.
I know I’ve read that NASA lost the plans for the Saturn V, but our technology today is so much better, so much more efficient, that we really don’t need
50+ year old tech.
Not quite. All of the hardware is sitting in museums, and we understand how it works, so the technology is not "lost".
The tooling was lost, some of the blueprints were lost, all of the factories (which belonged to private companies, remember) were repurposed to build new things, etc. Once Uncle Sam stops signing the checks, people, their buildings, and their machines move on to new things.
One thing to remember is that manufacturing has changed dramatically since that time. All of the engines for the Saturn V, for example, were basically built by hand by skilled craftsmen. (You can even see on some parts where a man running a drill press made a mistake and started drilling a hole in the wrong place!)
Nobody builds stuff like that anymore. Drafting isn't done on drafting tables, calculating isn't done on slide rules, etc. Computers changed everything.
I’m just saying that it’s pathetic that we couldn’t do it today even if we had a reason to do it.
Well, unless the federal government changes their minds again, the current plan is to go back in a few years. But it's still the case that going to the moon won't pay for itself, so I doubt the effort can be sustained.
We could do it. We just couldn’t do it with THAT technology. Largely because it’s just too old and crappy and we just can’t replicate it anymore. There was a balancing act of bad technologies helping each other work in spite of how cruddy they were. And of course it was all built from machines with the same balance of crappiness going on.
It would be like trying to make a brand new as it was Model T. We just don’t have the stuff to make machines that bad but still working anymore.