This is both a bunk excuse and an excuse with some amount of merit. The minds who created it are either gone or far out of the workforce, the factories that manufactured the technology are likely all gone and what remains is probably in China.
So it could go either way. If you no longer have the capability to manufacture or operate that technology, it may as well be lost.
I think the more interesting questions are: How did film survive the radiation of the belt, even through the weak parts, and how come we can't go back with newer, better, faster and more hardened technologies?
The ongoing excuse is that "there is no need or benefit to doing so and it is expensive" while we piss away trillions of dollars on nothing that helps us. Whereas, seeing physical materials and how they've changed in 60 years could hold answers when compared against the samples we supposedly have.
It's like Columbus figuring out how to get to the Americas, and then a few decades later, nobody kept any of the knowledge of ship building and navigation. It would be just like that, but a thousand times worse.
Except it's not like that at all. Space is infinitely more complex than oceanic travel and navigation, with a vast difference in the number of variables that can go wrong.
Ship building for oceanic navigation had many centuries of practice and refinement, whereas we (supposedly) only had one single manned mission to the moon and that was all.
It's disingenuous to call them anywhere in the realm of the same situation, and it's also wrong from a physics standpoint too.
The problem remains why didn't we ever innovate and iterate on it until SpaceX entered the scene and instead left the technology to "disappear".
Something doesn't add up somewhere in the equation, but it's not necessarily that it is a "forgotten" technology on its face. It clearly goes deeper than that.
I know, that's why I said it's a thousand times worse. The point of my comparison was that if some society had figured out how to get to some far away land, they would value that knowledge and technology, so there's definitely some fuckery afoot when they say we lost the tech to go to the moon.
This is both a bunk excuse and an excuse with some amount of merit. The minds who created it are either gone or far out of the workforce, the factories that manufactured the technology are likely all gone and what remains is probably in China.
So it could go either way. If you no longer have the capability to manufacture or operate that technology, it may as well be lost.
I think the more interesting questions are: How did film survive the radiation of the belt, even through the weak parts, and how come we can't go back with newer, better, faster and more hardened technologies?
The ongoing excuse is that "there is no need or benefit to doing so and it is expensive" while we piss away trillions of dollars on nothing that helps us. Whereas, seeing physical materials and how they've changed in 60 years could hold answers when compared against the samples we supposedly have.
It's like Columbus figuring out how to get to the Americas, and then a few decades later, nobody kept any of the knowledge of ship building and navigation. It would be just like that, but a thousand times worse.
Except it's not like that at all. Space is infinitely more complex than oceanic travel and navigation, with a vast difference in the number of variables that can go wrong.
Ship building for oceanic navigation had many centuries of practice and refinement, whereas we (supposedly) only had one single manned mission to the moon and that was all.
It's disingenuous to call them anywhere in the realm of the same situation, and it's also wrong from a physics standpoint too.
The problem remains why didn't we ever innovate and iterate on it until SpaceX entered the scene and instead left the technology to "disappear".
Something doesn't add up somewhere in the equation, but it's not necessarily that it is a "forgotten" technology on its face. It clearly goes deeper than that.
I know, that's why I said it's a thousand times worse. The point of my comparison was that if some society had figured out how to get to some far away land, they would value that knowledge and technology, so there's definitely some fuckery afoot when they say we lost the tech to go to the moon.