In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech outlining his administration's plan to land Americans on the moon. He said that they chose to go to the moon because it is difficult.
NASA was able to meet Kennedy's challenge and send a dozen astronauts to the surface on six missions between 1969 and 1972 at a cost of about $250 billion in today's dollars.
NASA is getting ready to send humans to the moon for the second time. The Artemis I, the first test flight of the hardware that will be used to send astronauts later, is scheduled to lift off on Monday.
Many people are wondering why they should return.
Scientists learned a lot from the rock samples brought back by Apollo astronauts.
David Kring is a lunar scientist at the Center for lunar Science & Exploration in Houston, Texas.
The Apollo landings took place at the moon's equator. NASA has more ambitious goals.
There are 13 possible landing sites, each in the south pole region, where water ice has been confirmed deep inside craters. Artemis II will be a lunar flyby in four years. The first crewed landing is Artemis III.
The sites are some of the best places to look for lunar geology and understand lunar ice.
The lunar south pole region is extraordinary, says Kring.
The moon is the best place to understand the origin of the solar system. The moon is not subject to weathering and erosion because it has never had an atmosphere or flowing water.
The level of detail on the moon's surface revealed by probes is so extraordinary that we want the astronauts to collect rocks.
Craig Hardgrove is an associate professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. He acknowledges that rovers and landers are limited by their scientific instruments, but still considers himself a huge fan of robotic exploration. They don't have the same amount of time to capture as much data on the landscape and geologic context as an astronauts have.
The principal investigator of the LunaH-Map mission says humans are able to collect a large number of samples quicker than robots. The probe is designed to locate polar ice deposits.
With astronauts selecting the best samples, laboratories and universities can look at them with a wider range of sophisticated tools. I think we have a better chance of answering more questions if we bring them back to Earth.
It's an enormous challenge to keep astronauts safe from radiation exposure when they're 200 times farther away from Earth than the moon.
He says that the launch windows to get to Mars are once a year. We would be thinking about keeping our astronauts on the surface of Mars for a while. If we were to test out all these technologies on the moon, I think we would be doing a service and everyone a service.
Apollo was focused on defeating the Soviet Union. There was no plan for a long-term presence there.
Clive Neal is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Notre Dame. A gradual shift toward a permanent human presence on the moon is something he'd like to see.
It may not be as far off as previously thought, given that the vehicle that will land Artemis astronauts on the moon will be provided by a commercial venture.
"We need to build an infrastructure that will allow us to transition to commercial operations on the moon in the future," Neal says. We can come up with a way to do these things sustainable that can be applied to more distant destinations.
Dozens of new technologies created to go into space and to the moon have brought substantial benefits to people on Earth.
Similar innovations could be created by Artemis.
According to a study commissioned by NASA, commercial products that emerge from the space agency's research return between $100 million and $1 billion annually to the US economy. The Apollo program gave birth to many of those "spinoffs".
The Apollo Guidance Computer was a technological wonder. Digital fly-by-wire technology is used in passenger jets and military planes.
The miniaturization of electronics happened during Apollo. Don't forget about mobile phones." It might not have happened without Apollo.
Today's flame-retardant fabrics are used to protect firefighters from high temperatures and are lighter than their predecessors.
A "super insulation" developed for NASA in the 1960's can now be found hidden inside the walls and roofs of buildings, in winter gear, and in cases for electronic devices, according to NASA.
The Apollo moonshot inspired a lot of new engineers and scientists. According to a survey of 800 researchers, the Moon landings deserve credit for motivating a large fraction of today's scientists.
With Artemis, we're going to get nearly live video from the surface of the moon and people are going to start thinking about the moon as a real place.
He says it can be inspiring for people like him, but also for people who aren't thinking about careers in space exploration or engineering.
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