Among the supporters of the lunar conspiracy hypothesis, one can very often find the argument that the level of technology 50 years ago was much lower than it is now, and since no one flies to the moon now, it was impossible to send a person to the moon with him. With the same success we can say that since now no one builds coal-powered steam locomotives and does not build a railway in Antarctica, then 100 years ago mankind did not have the technology for this.
Was technology really so primitive in 1969? Yes and no at the same time. A modern smartphone is many times superior in computing power to all NASA computers in 1969, taken together, electronic devices take up hundreds of times less space on the ship than analog ones and allow much more accurate and easier control of the ship, so engineers had to be sophisticated and wait for weeks for the results of computer calculations. all of them were carried out long before the flight itself.
Technique of 1969 can really be called primitive, but only from our modern level of technology. But in 1969 it was the pinnacle of engineering, many things that are commonplace for us now, then were developed specifically for the space program and existed in single copies. The 50s-70s were full of discoveries and new technologies in all spheres of science. In the 61st year, the first manned flight into space was made, which shows, on the whole, a sufficient level of rocketry to create a heavy rocket by the 69th year, capable of delivering a man to the moon. In 60, the bathyscaphe “Trieste” sank to the bottom of the Mariana Trench for the first time, having withstood a pressure drop of 1100 atmospheres, compared with this, the pressure drop in space in 1 atmosphere seems insignificant.
Since the mid-60s, the USSR has regularly sent automatic research stations of the Luna series to the moon. Luna 15 was supposed to deliver lunar soil to Earth, it was launched almost simultaneously with Apollo 11, but crashed while landing on the Moon just at the time when the first astronauts were there, and already in the 70th year Luna 16 was able to deliver soil from the Moon to Earth, which shows the possibility of creating a system for returning a ship from the Moon at that time. Just a couple of years later, the first stations were sent to Mars, and Voyagers were launched to the outer planets, which required significantly greater accuracy in course calculations, more advanced communication technologies and powerful launch vehicles.
In the mid-50s, the first nuclear-powered submarines were created, and by the mid-60s they had already entered mass production. Such boats were able to withstand autonomous navigation for several months, which shows that by 1969 there were technologies capable of supporting human life on a spacecraft for several months, and all flights lasted less than two weeks. This period is rich in the creation of many other technologies, which can be enumerated endlessly.
From all this, we can conclude that, although they were inferior to modern ones, they were quite sufficient to send a person to the moon. The Apollo program required the use of advanced technologies at that time, colossal financial costs, enormous hours of work for engineers and workers, and was also associated with a huge risk to the lives of astronauts, but was quite feasible. The refusal to fly to the moon for 50 years is due to the same reason that in the future they refused to use the supersonic passenger aircraft Concorde (by the way, the first flight was also made in 1969), it was economically unprofitable. Now humanity is again aiming at the moon, since it became possible to make flights much cheaper, not billions of dollars, and several hundred million and there is a potential for the economic development of our satellite, the extraction of helium-3 and, possibly, valuable metals, at a low cost of flights, this can become profitable.
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