Why the heck doesn't NASA put a rover on the moon, as they did with mars

Question

It takes 3 days to get to the moon, while it takes almost a year to get to mars. Plus since the moon is soooooooo much closer to us than mars, it would be much easier to send commands to the rover, and recieve information from the rover, they wouldn't have to wait forever to send commands and recieve information as they do when they deal with the mars rover since the signal takes time to travel from mars to earth, i know theres probably not much more we can discover on the moon, but considering how simple a project it would be compared to putting a rover on mars, which they already succesfully did twice, i don't see the reason why it hasn't been done, it will be a lot more simple, cheaper, and faster than deploying the mars rover, and we could use it to send video footage of the moon back to earth, takes pictures, and perhaps dig to see whats the moon is composed of underneath its soil, it would just be able to recieve live footage of the moon and recieve new beaitful pictures everyday from the moon. Instead of billions upon trillions being spent on a war that no one wants, why not spend 200-400 million on a moon rover, the bigger picture is the fact that i think humans should master traveling back and forth from our own moon, and even experiment with living in self contained environments on the moon, because they execute missions to mars which will last over a year, NASA should take things 1 step at a time and leave no stone unturned

Answer 1

Well, I agree it would be simpler, easier, and faster to get there, but the one question I don't see answered is:  

Why?  

Answer 2

Why send a rover to the moon to do what humans already have during the Apollo missions? We studied the terrain and brought back soil and rock samples from the moon already to study even more. The main reason the rover was sent to Mars is to study the Martian terrain up close and in more detail than the previous rover mission; in specific, to search for traces of water and to study the soil composition in hopes to answer many unanswered questions surrounding the red planet's past, present, and future. More specifically, whether or not it once sustained life, does sustain life currently, or may be able to sustain life in the future. Sure it would have been much less time and money consuming overall to go to the moon, but we've already done that. I'm sure there are still many things undiscovered on the moon but the same can be said about our own planet earth. We already know exactly what the moon is made out of and that there is no life there and that it can't exist there due to the lack of atmostphere. Mars is now the next step.

Answer 3

why in the h**l would we need to?

we sent rovers to mars becuase we can't send people to study... the robots act as archeologic scientists in our abscense...

apparently we can and have sent people to the moon... so what would be the point? the rover isn't exactly the best explorer/study.... it has great limitations that humans wouldn't face.... but most notably, the inability to think for themselves and problem solve in the fashion humans do...

so you spend millions to develope a moon rover, then millions to send it to the moon then millions to pay those who are in charge of controlling it's actions... when you could just spend a few million to train a human and a few more million to send them in space.....  

Answer 4

Because Congress wouldn't approve it. Going to Mars to look for life is 'sexier' (as in more interesting). The average man on the street (aka, 'voters') see the moon as dead and dull. Been there, done that. So if the voters think the moon is dull, Congress won't spend any $$$ to put a rover there.

Besides, you can get more work done on lunar studies now with orbiting satellites. The moon landings were able to drill much deeper than a rover could dig, and we have a pretty good knowledge (we think) of what the moon is composed of. Orbital platforms can scan much more ground, and much faster.

BTW, we've put three rovers on Mars, not two.  

Answer 5

The mission profile you outline would still cost at least $100 million.  As you say, what would it achieve?  We have thousands of high-resolution 70mm color and black-and-white photographs from the Apollo project.  We have a program of increasingly resolved orbital surveys.  We even have actual samples of the lunar surface available for study, including core samples to several centimeters deep.

NASA has experience soft-landing unmanned landers (Surveyor) on the Moon, but no experience with soft-landing rovers there.  The cost-benefit tradeoff simply doesn't work out according to space policy makers.  We have experience soft-landing human crews there (Apollo), and will resurrect that ability in the coming decade.

As for what we can better spend our money upon than war, that's a huge topic.