[chud]

Yeah, Musk may be our only hope of getting back to the Moon, much less Mars.
I don't see NASA being able to do it anymore, and Boeing doesn't look ready after stranding those two astronauts in space and all of their other problems.

I remember seeing a brief clip a couple of years ago with some engineer from NASA who said something like we don't know how anymore, and I took it to mean that they must have lost a lot of institutional knowledge at NASA in the years after Apollo 17 when they cancelled the program, and then the Germans engineers, especially Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus, passed away. Those guys were the heart of the program and probably took a lot of that knowledge to their graves.

Today we would basically be starting over. Technology has gotten better, but in many ways we are dumber.

NASA even lost a lot of the old footage of Moon walks that our astronauts did back then. They think that the tapes must have been erased and reused.
Government efficiency at its finest...

[Angelino97]

they must have lost a lot of institutional knowledge at NASA in the years after Apollo 17

NASA has been focused on more important things.

[Secret Agent Man]

Some of the original plans/prints for the saturn 5 don’t exist anymore.

[PIF]

NASA even lost a lot of the old footage of Moon walks that our astronauts did back then. They think that the tapes must have been erased and reused.

—
Most were deliberately thrown out to make room for more recent stuff.