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There are several over lapped reasons, and they add up to only being able to afford a rover every couple of years, so they get sent to mars where more science can be done. The launcher size/cost is s …

Not fully. By design the landing was early moon local morning both for optimal lighting for the landing and for reasonable temperatures. In practice the sub zero shadow temperature was more of a probl …

Short answer - sure! More practically, getting things to space is mostly limited by mass, not 'shape'. So carrying a machine+raw material will generally be worse than just flying a finished product. T …

Due to the tidal locking a landed object on the near side of the moon sees the Earth stay almost stationary in the sky. This means that slow but reliable antenna pointing methods such as scanning slow …

In general terms any particles placed on an orbit by a single impluse will pass through the point that impulse was applied again one orbit later. So for dust kicked up from the moon surface it will ar …

The energy, material and safety costs of rocket flight on the moon probably mean most bulk cargo will travel by some form of surface transport. For those cases where use of a rocket is justified some …

There are various proposals to build infrastructure at Earth/Sun L1 point, such as discussed in this question. From LEO the Delta V cost to L1 is about 3.5 kms or about kg of propellant in LEO for eve …

Early Soviet Lunar probes such as Luna 9 did use airbags. I do not have a reference, but suspect the design process was as per Mark Adler's answer where the state of the art could get a controlled cra …

The question here is not so much about pressure fed engines as about thrust. If you need to land 240 tonnes of space craft on the moon you need to overcome at least the force of lunar gravity on that …

In addition to Mark Foskey's answer relating to the implausible strength required for this there are a number of other complications. A traditional space elevator is placed in a circular orbit, the mo …

Decelerating from 1700 meters a second at even quite high accelerations like 10G (98 meters a second) involves a fair bit of distance, nearly 15 km per Uhoh in comments. For the first segment of decel …

A lot more of this has to do with the physical nature of the cable than the signal protocol, in that you get the best cable you can and then adjust your signalling method to move as much data as physi …

In addition to the points in Hobbes answer about increased power consumption is the question of where that power is coming from. If using a solar array you need to use batteries to store power through …