Flights on Earth are cancelled or delayed under more known conditions.
You're thinking about airline flights, where safety is priority number 1. In that context, any hint of danger is unacceptable. Airlines will ground flights for any reason or no reason. At the same time, military aircraft have equipment that allow them to do instrument approaches to the middle of the desert, no airport required, and bush pilots routinely land planes on virgin land in the middle of nowhere with just a compass and a map for navigation equipment, just to go camping.
They already knew the moon had no atmosphere, so the only two unknowns were gravity and ground conditions. The lack of accidents could just be due to the small number of trips. Reckless drivers can get away with it for years before fate finally catches up to them.
Quite. There were also two manned flybys before the Apollo 11 mission, with Apollo 10 testing every condition but the actual landing. Even gravity and ground conditions weren't unknown by then, since the Soviet Luna missions had already obtained the relevant data. Namely, that the Moon is literally hard as rock all over, making for a far more suitable landing surface than most terrestrial environments.
You're thinking about airline flights, where safety is priority number 1. In that context, any hint of danger is unacceptable. Airlines will ground flights for any reason or no reason. At the same time, military aircraft have equipment that allow them to do instrument approaches to the middle of the desert, no airport required, and bush pilots routinely land planes on virgin land in the middle of nowhere with just a compass and a map for navigation equipment, just to go camping.
They already knew the moon had no atmosphere, so the only two unknowns were gravity and ground conditions. The lack of accidents could just be due to the small number of trips. Reckless drivers can get away with it for years before fate finally catches up to them.
Quite. There were also two manned flybys before the Apollo 11 mission, with Apollo 10 testing every condition but the actual landing. Even gravity and ground conditions weren't unknown by then, since the Soviet Luna missions had already obtained the relevant data. Namely, that the Moon is literally hard as rock all over, making for a far more suitable landing surface than most terrestrial environments.