Mars vs. Moon debates are getting ridiculous these days. Why not both?
Thanks to NewSpace, getting out there is only going to become cheaper; we can, as civilization, afford both. Let ESA and NASA and China race to the Moon. SpaceX wants to go to Mars. If either succeeds in the next decade, we all win. The knowledge and experience gained is reusable for either, it goes into the same pool. And if we keep fighting over which destination is better, we won't get to any.
Because it costs too much right now. SpaceX is providing NASA with rockets, I'm not sure they'll have a sustainable business model to get to Mars. I hope they do find a way but until costs come way down it's going to be tough.
> The Trump administration is also looking to trim the budget of NASA’s earth science directorate
> The nearly $1.8 billion budget for that part of NASA would be about 6.5 percent lower than what was enacted for fiscal year 2017
Donald seems to be stuck in the Cold War. I've not heard of one good reason for him wanting to send Americans back to the Moon other than "prestige." There are much more valuable scientific targets than the Moon that we could be targeting, and it's very upsetting that he seems to be using NASA to enhance his own image (e.g. deep cuts in areas where NASA needs budget increases..)
I feel in many ways that this is how NASA works. One leader says “My predecessor has no vision for a positive future. We must go beyond low Earth orbit and explore the solar system. I’m announcing renewed funding for programs that will send humans to Mars in 25 years. I’m introducing a bill that adds $2B to the NASA budget.”
And then the subsequent leader says “My predecessor loved spending money even while the people suffered. We cannot be spending billions on space exploration while people need jobs. I have let NASA know they’re going to have to tighten their belts and get to work with less so the people can have jobs. I’m introducing a bull that cuts $2B off the budget.”
Meanwhile, both leaders expand the military budget by $40B.
That’s under our control. They’re unimpeachable because we support an air of respect for them. We could do the same for those less privileged, but other agendas get in the way.
The fact that counties around Northern Virginia are the wealthiest counties in the whole country (and 3rd wealthiest one is in Maryland, also close to DC) supports that statement:
There’s a good point to be made about manned missions to the moon. There are so many things we don’t know about the moon. See, for example, ESA’s “moon village” plans. The General Director gave a talk at 33c3 that—among other things—makes the case for prolonged human presence on the moon for scientific purposes: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8406-the_moon_and_european_space...
Not just anyone, the Director General! There was another talk by someone from ESA (I don’t remember his name) on the feasibility of a moon elevator (lunar surface to Lagrange point 1 iirc), which would be possible with current materials if we could just figure out how to get them there...
I was in the audience for both and it was absolutely amazing!
1) It is closer and more feasible to practice landing and returning from a planet than Mars
2) The ISS is going to de-orbit in the 2020s, so for low-gravity and habitat research, we can spend billions on another LEO station (which private industry is already tackling) or we can do something a bit more daring: set up shop on another rock.
I think NASA should be allowed, broadly, to choose its own missions and goals, and stick with it for longer than one administration. Their work takes more than 3 year election cycles.
Only because we are going to allow it. We could, you know, keep it in orbit and continue to use it.
> I think NASA should be allowed, broadly, to choose its own missions and goals, and stick with it for longer than one administration. Their work takes more than 3 year election cycles.
I could not agree with this more. Having every administration fuck up their agenda every 4-8 years is not productive.
> Only because we are going to allow it. We could, you know, keep it in orbit and continue to use it.
I'm not sure if it's safe to operate much longer than the 2020's without some major work and the running costs are astronomical. I'd love to see the ISS live longer but with limited resources going to the moon instead seems like a solid plan. At least on the Moon we might be able to get some practice in at harvesting resources off world. That's really going to be the economic key to kicking off a non war related space race.
The British-style civil service structure is much more suitable for long-term government investments like NASA, NIH, etc. They are too important and too complicated to be left to politicians.
How does accountability to the public work with career civil servants? I'm not saying it's not possible, but I think for every country like Finland where civil servants hold themselves accountable you can find 2-5 countries where they are inefficient, or worse, corrupt. Would the USA be more like Finland or more like the other countries?
Nobody's built any useful (for power generation) fusion reactor yet, much less one running He3.
There isn't actually much He3 on the moon, just more than here on Earth. It's doubtful that mining on the moon would be cheaper than just making it here.
I guess that feels a little like England setting up a base in Greenland as a supply depot to stop at before crossing the Atlantic to the new world. There’s way more stuff at their home base so it’s hard to see how adding a far off stop in a desolate place will help.
Pretty much everything on your list is not possible with our current technology. More importantly, it's feasible to develop this technology on Earth.
The problem with going to the moon (or anywhere else in the solar system) is that the only thing we can do right now is science experiments. And there's a lot more impactful science that can be done for far cheaper than sending people outside of our gravity well. If you want to do anything else, then you have to develop a lot of technology to get to the point. But the space bugs want to see humans go to space, and they generally don't want to see effort being expended on the research to let humans do anything useful because it's not space research.
If you define it as "building infrastructure on the Moon to do so," no, it is not available with current technology. Where are you going to get your acids for refining, for example, if you can't scavenge from old piles of organic goop?
>The repeated application of such fire-refining processes was capable of producing copper that was 99.25% pure.
Copper and iron can be refined reasonably enough using heat. Maybe it's possible to "pitch" metallic ore into very close and highly a eccentric orbit around the sun to help melt it down before "catching" it on the other side.
Seems like asteroid mining would be pretty straight forward on the surface of the moon. The lack of erosion is capable of showing us exactly where they are.
Like I said it might take a hundred years before we can be totally self sufficient on the moon, but I think it's possible long term.
The moon’s inclination is 5 degrees to the ecliptic, you’d have to try really hard to find a worse place to put solar panels.
Self-sufficiency would require manufacturing complex organical compounds and is total science fiction stuff, and will likely remain that way for a looong time.
Well for one Greenland is outside the massive gravity well of England. So you can save a lot of fuel only shipping things back to Greenland between missions.
Greenland is also a nice parallel for an entirely different reason. The land is at the extreme margin of habitability, definitely for the Vikings who settled there. And when the traders of the North Sea stopped visiting Greenland, the colony disappeared within a few generations. (Most historians now believe that the loss of trade is what killed Norse Greenland, not the Little Ice Age)
Unless you can make propellant on the moon, that’s going to be less economical than going directly. There’s nothing to be gained by going down another (albeit not very deep) gravity well. The base camp analogy doesn’t really apply.
Hm, hydrolox could indeed be possible. Didn’t think of that.
But you’d still need a very large number of missions to make construction and maintenance of the moon base cheaper than just directly going where you want to go. It’s probably going to be a while before a moon base makes sense for economical reasons.
Also, the moon does not have a dark side. It has a far side that never faces the earth, but the sun shines there just like it does on the other side.
Why can't it make sense on economic grounds? I would imagine that once there was a moonbase there would be a number of rather wealthy people who would like to visit.
After all if Blue Planet can cause interest in luxury $4m submarines[0] I don't see why the moon would be an exception.
Who knows, seeing Earth from outside might even trigger some activity to keep it viable for us!
You can't hope to maintain a Moon settlement off the back of ultra-rich peoples' vacation fads. For one, the whole scheme would collapse once the super-rich get bored.
A moon base needs better and more stable funding, and for that it needs a reason. Science will not be enough, but the demands of a cislunar economy (propellant, off-world settlements for workets) just might.
> you’d still need a very large number of missions to make construction and maintenance of the moon base cheaper than just directly going where you want to go.
We can't forever just launch point-to-point missions from Earth's surface. The Moon meshes up well with industrial space activities around Earth, which we'll need anyway, and which'll create plenty of demand around itself for missions and resources.
> It has a far side that never faces the earth, but the sun shines there just like it does on the other side.
Sure, but a) lack of atmosphere while still having stable ground underneath helps, plus b) lack of RF noise from Earth would really help radiotelescopes, which was what I was thinking about when writing my previous comment.
>The Moon meshes up well with industrial space activities around Earth, which we'll need anyway, and which'll create plenty of demand around itself for missions and resources.
This is essentially my argument. Short term it doesn't offer many advantages but without it, it makes the really big and cool industrial space projects more difficult.
Some lunar base advocates push the "exploration base camp" narrative. But I find it disengenuius. It's too far away in terms of energy cost, and too close in terms of travel time.
> I've not heard of one good reason for him wanting to send Americans back to the Moon other than "prestige."
Not even for the inspiration? I mean look at how everyone reacted to SpaceX's recent launching of a Tesla into space. Everyone thought it was super cool and inspiring - and it was. Now imagine how much cooler it would be to send people to the moon again in the modern age. Yeah it happened before but that was a long, long time ago, and may as well have never happened for probably 3/4 of the people in America.
It'd be hard for additional climate research to do anything (politically) that the existing climate research hasn't done already. Although, I understand how there might be some element of "Hah! Got'em!" among some groups.
Overall, I see this as a move towards globally inspiring national pride projects and away from the more subtle and less-expensive "only PhDs understand how this is really important," tasks. It really fits the personality and promises of the current president.
The fundamental issue is that it's relatively hard for us to reasonably account for future costs against present costs. I also think it's interesting that in more social equitable countries (like the Scandis) the public and politicians tend to take climate change more seriously. Is Maslow's hierarchy actually coming into play?
Another explanation might be that some countries have much stronger governments than others. In the US, the "man with a plan," pattern almost never plays out successfully.
This is just embarrassing, especially for the United States as a whole. The Trump administration should be ashamed for cutting important research and nominating a climate change denier as the head honcho.
Although building a moon base would be cool. It could increase our reach for manned missions. Sort of a first/last pit stop before a long journey.
Thanks to NewSpace, getting out there is only going to become cheaper; we can, as civilization, afford both. Let ESA and NASA and China race to the Moon. SpaceX wants to go to Mars. If either succeeds in the next decade, we all win. The knowledge and experience gained is reusable for either, it goes into the same pool. And if we keep fighting over which destination is better, we won't get to any.