Sorry that I can't answer your question in detail. I was listening to a podcast (maybe NPR or maybe some other interviews), the reason Apollo style program isn't used anymore is because it's not sustainable. I didn't understand the technical detail to give you a good answer.

Not having multiple options is not what made Appollo unsustainable.

And it wasn't actually unsustainable, it just wasn't sustainable while at the same time building shuttle.

Apollo was feasible because there was a very real risk of the entire USA being destroyed and every voter knew it. It was a race to technological and military superiority against the USSR and the Apollo program was a big part of that. That existential fear and risk doesn't exist today, there is no appetite for that level of commitment in the general population. AOC herself could kill a program proposal like Apollo with a single tweet about proposed bathroom door labels.

> AOC herself could kill a program proposal like Apollo with a single tweet about proposed bathroom door labels.

Hacker News becoming more like reddit every day with trash comments like this.

Hacker News was never anything more than a subreddit for elitist silicon valley VCs and FAANG programmers with 35 hours of free time per week.

The lunar mission did not yield any kind of advanced military capabilities, though. We had cooperative space missions with the Soviets as early as 1975, when the Apollo program was still ongoing. See Apollo–Soyuz:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz

I can’t believe this is the first time I learn about this. How interesting!