China is doing some great work on building out infrastructure and studies of the moon. They're the only country that's brought back any moon rocks in decades.

Space Race 3.0 is on, and we'll see how different approaches to the research and manned missions will move forward.

The US is currently building out an extremely upfront cost heavy project, but with a lot of long term benefits.

China is building a more straightforward moon project, but with higher ongoing costs, as much of the infrastructure is disposable (more like Apollo).

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[–] mipadaitu 2 points 6 months ago

I'm not sure it would have been possible. The amount of computing power to land a rocket like that is insane.

In order to land in other ways, the rocket has to be really small (parachutes) or have too much weight consumed by an airframe (space shuttle).

It probably wouldn't have been possible to get to the moon with the restrictions those designs would have imposed.