Boeing, Lockheed etc. were still engineering oriented companies full of projects and management opportunities for innovative and risk-taking people. Starting with the Reagan era, they are now emptied out rent seekers full of car salesmen who look up to Jack Welch as a role model.
To be fair, Boeing, Lockheed etc won't be the decisive players putting humans back on the moon from the US. It'll be smaller and scrappier players more akin to startups.
The USA of the 1960s was very different from the one that exists today.
I'm a drop on the ocean only, but my case is the one I have: PhD in Computer Science, highly specialized and have lived and worked around the world , but there's not enough that attracts me to living in the US.
Its health system issues, the animosity against minorities and immigrants and the lack of reasonable immigration paths for professionals make it unsexy.
And as I said I'm literally nobody. How would the US attract real post Ww2 talent?
> lack of reasonable immigration paths for professionals
getting a visa is the hardest part, but doable if you’re a bit lucky. Once you have the visa, getting permanent residency after a few years and ultimately citizenship is relatively straightforward, IF you’re not from one of a few countries with large numbers of immigrants to the U.S.: mainly Mexico, the Philippines, China and India.
It seems from your profile that you’re Mexican so yeah, getting permanent status in the U.S. would take a really long time even if you got a visa.
This is one of the biggest competitive disadvantages of the U.S. currently: making it unreasonably hard for skilled people to immigrate, compared to places like Canada or Europe. But I think it’s an exaggeration to say there’s no reasonable path.
The US was not a bastion of technical capability or well educated people in the 1950s. To say that the "skill doesn't exist anymore" suggests a misunderstanding of "where it comes from" in the first place.
You can do the same thing for Apollo as you can for the Shuttle. The process of reading through these histories, from front to back, is incredibly enlightening, and shows just how with determination alone you can build something like this from scratch.
That being said.. it really also helps if there's a dual purpose use for the military.
The effect that war had on the technological progress, including learning the skills of how to manage a not-so-simple idea like going to the moon into reality was incredible, and a direct spinoff from the bureaucracy created during the war.
Nowadays, that specific motivator is squarely with the Chinese.
If I look at the current score board in the last decades, US has invaded more counties than China (have they found those WMDs yet?), yet somehow we're (us non Americans in the west) are supposed to fear China, because reasons?
Honestly, my biggest enemy right now is my own EU government who has done the biggest damage to our country and because of them there's a shortage of doctors, teachers, etc, high inflation, stagnating wages, high taxes, unaffordable housing, etc. We have done that ourselves, not China. Whatever bad things China is doing in their own back yard is much less damaging to us than all those things I've just mentioned yet somehow we're expected to fear China.
Aren't these foreign boogie men convenient finger pointing to our corrupt and incompetent leadership: "Hey, don't look at us for your plummeting standard of living, look at Covid, Russia, China, immigrants with beards, The Loch Ness Monster, etc". Give me a break.
Just like all the other undemocratic dictatorships the west is "friends" with and turn a blind eye to their anti human rights actions?
They admit their own failings by showing us who they are "allergic" to. So yes, China may be a "bad guy", but they're painted as a boogeyman for a reason.
While it is true that it is globally not very active in military terms I am pretty sure that this is going to change when more and more economic partners are realizing that there is no more money coming from China and it is cheaper to just default on their debt and nationalize Chinese interests.
FWiW :
The Republic of China (ROC), or simply China, was a sovereign state based in mainland China from 1912 until its government's retreat in 1949 to Taiwan, where it is now based.
The nine-dash line, also referred to as the eleven-dash line by Taiwan, is a set of line segments on various maps that accompanied the claims of the People's Republic of China (PRC, "mainland China") and the Republic of China (ROC, "Taiwan") in the South China Sea.
A 1946 map showing a U-shaped eleven-dash line was first published by the Republic of China government on 1 December 1947.
The issue is that "Western" sea faring nations self selected themselves as arbitrators of global borders, including those of regions with governance dating back 4,000 years.
On 12 July 2016, an arbitral tribunal organized under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) concluded that China had not exercised exclusive and continuous control over the [ dashed zones ]
Over 20 governments have called for the ruling to be respected.
It was rejected by eight governments, including China (PRC) and Taiwan (ROC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_(1912%E2%80%...
China and Taiwan have always claimed the regions within the nine dashed line.
Similar to the Chinese claims that the British never brought democracy to HongKong while China threatened invasion if any such thing had happened.
Populist words are cheap. I'll start blaming China for warmongering when they actually put boots on the ground. Meanwhile how many dorne strikes has the US made in the middle east without any consequences?
No, China is waging a war against the entire world in the smartest way imaginable, and most of us don't even realize it: They have their financial tendrils in all of our economies, down to the core elements and throughout the peripheries. Nearly everything has at least some degree of Chinese monies and thus influence now.
It's really only a matter of time until Pax Americana comes crashing down because we are all far too busy complaining about our navels. Be prepared, because Pax Sino isn't going to be kind to most of us.
IDK man, being drone striked from above by the USAF seems far worse to me than whatever China could be doing to me, but I'll bite.
>They have their financial tendrils in all of our economies, down to the core elements and throughout the peripheries. Nearly everything has at least some degree of Chinese monies and thus influence now.
More influence that the world reserve currency which last time I cheeked is the USD and only the US has the printer for it?
Expert welders can be trained in years. We could easily buy an Apollo-era generation of aerospace welders if we wanted them.
At least until SpaceX starts to feel a bit too comfortable... o_O
IMO, the opposite is true.
1. SpaceX needs money to fund their Mars dreams. And the HLS contract is a couple billion dollars that they can grab.
2. Getting to the moon with NASA will dramatically help SpaceX because NASA will be working with them to crew rate the lander for everything except taking off from and landing on Earth.
3. Developing HLS Starship will let SpaceX begin to offer private Lunar missions.
4. Mars is really tough. It's far away, it's only feasible to travel there once every 2 years, it's very difficult to land, and it'll be super hard to get in-situ resource utilization - basically harvesting resources from Mars to generate enough propellant that a return trip to Earth is possible.
I'm sure SpaceX will probably send some rockets to Mars. But the first few sets will be figuring out hwo to land and maybe set up ISRU. And in the meantime, the Moon is a great venue for SpaceX to train systems and earn a bit of money.
The Chinese are currently in their Apollo phase in which every engineer dedicates their life to the mission.
But I like to think we will.
I think those two things combined means your logic is off by at least 3 orders of magnitude.
Starship has fewer engines than Super Heavy, it likely won't be landing at full throttle either, and lunar lander Starship could have landing legs as well. The lower gravity on the Moon means that you can carry more hardware with you. Maneuvering in 0.16 g is nowhere near as fuel intensive as in 1 g.
SLS is the thing that launches Orion, which is the capsule with humans inside. SLS isn't capable enough to get that capsule into lunar orbit. Orion also isn't landing by itself though, it just transfers the astronauts to a landing vehicle (SpaceX Starship, currently...), which lands and then starts again.
The thing brought up in that video is that the rendezvous point should probably be in lunar orbit, but isn't.
No, Starship may carry people to the moon, but getting them off the moon isn't possible. The lunar Starship won't return to LEO.
The closest thing you could do is send another Starship and do the same NRHO docking that SLS+Orion is already doing and then instead of aerobraking, do a deceleration burn to get an LEO capture. That is the only way without Orion. For better or worse, Orion in NRHO is indispensable.