Why did NASA astronaut Don Pettit say that we don’t have the technology to go to the moon, that we destroyed it? What was he intimating?

 So here’s Don Pettit: astronaut, chemical engineer PhD, renowned space photographer, and the first man to invent a thing in space and win a patent for it (the Zero Gravity Coffee Cup!). Dr. Pettit has logged more than 370 days in space and over 13 spacewalk hours. Like most astronauts, he’s a truly exceptional human being, and currently at 69 years old, the oldest serving astronaut at NASA.

His actual quote:

I'd go to the moon in a nanosecond. The problem is, we don't have the technology to do that anymore. We used to, but we destroyed that technology and it is a painful process to build it back again.

So, maybe you need an engineer’s explanation… I volunteer (I’m also a photographer, but tragically, not an astronaut). What Don is referring to isn’t our simple lack of an Saturn V rocket, but rather, the loss of the system that delivers the parts to make additional rockets. NASA rockets are built by a hugely complex coordinated effort of hundreds if not thousands of private companies contracted by NASA to build the various components. But that’s really not the core of what he’s saying here, I believe.

President Richard Nixon cancelled the last several Apollo missions in September of 1970, thus ending the production of new Saturn V super-heavy lift vehicles and other critical components. NASA still flew Apollo 16 and Apollo 17, both missions in 1972, but NASA had planned to fly though Apollo 20. So, lacking any orders for new Saturn V rockets from NASA and any likely possibility of such orders, all of those contractors who built the parts for Saturn V rockets started dismantling their production lines and repurposing them for something else. The same thing they do for any other contract project. It’s not as if NASA had a full soup to nuts Saturn V production line (they did final assembly) and sent Neil, Buzz, and all the boys down with sledgehammers to “Hulk Smash” the remnants of the Apollo program.

I’m not pretending to speak for Dr. Pettit, but I have a pretty good idea that he was expressing his frustration in NASA’s directions, which were my frustrations as well, as a kid who grew up watching manned rockets take off and fly farther every time, only for all that to end before I could get involved. Astronauts fly to space, and so of course, as an astronaut, he was heartbroken by the end of travel to the Moon and beyond. Quite a few scientists, NASA and otherwise, love their probes and robots and don’t see so much value in manned travel, and so today we have Mars, a planet entirely occupied by robots. Had NASA been funded and, of course, permitted by the political winds to keep sending people up, we’d likely have humans there today.

What he’s absolutely not suggesting is that you’d want Saturn V today, but rather, if the Apollo program had not been cancelled, if we had kept flying manned missions, the Saturn V would naturally have been replaced by improved rockets, and those replaced by the next generation. If you’ve seen the television show For All Mankind, that’s kind of the idea. The technology would have evolved faster and more cleanly than waiting 35 years to restart, and even at that by fits and sputters: Constellation, Asteroid Redirect Mission, Orion, and finally SLS and Artemis.

But the Artemis I mission has flown around the Moon, and while it was unmanned, the SLS super-heavy lift vehicle did propel the Orion spacecraft that’s designed for humans to travel to the Moon and back. Artemis II is planned for sometime in or after September of 2025, with a crew: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen.

The old is always “destroyed” to make way for the new. Ford lacks the technology to build a Model-T today. Intel lacks the technology to build an 8088 today. McDonnell-Douglas lacks the technology to build a DC-3 today. Those were single products, sure, but also product lines that were in continuous development and improvement. And still continues today.

There was a Kickstarter project called Reflex launched in 2017, with the goal of creating a new fully manual, modular 35mm camera system. They last posted in 2021, discussing problems, then the apparent impossibility, of obtaining a mechanical focal plane shutter mechanism. That technology had been destroyed, and while they could manage other parts of the camera system, that was apparently beyond the capabilities of a small group like this. Pentax is supposedly working on a more modest compact film camera for release this year… maybe they’ll have better luck. But even existing camera companies didn’t simply have that technology lying around… I suspect they’ll adapt modern parts.

The old stuff makes way for the new. That’s true of ideas, too, particularly those silly ideas of pre-scientific people that expired about 2,500 years ago, like “Flat Earth,” in the light of improved human knowledge.