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Back to the moon, then to Mars!
tunicate515
Member Posts: 30 Arc User
Great news everyone! Official statement from NASA:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/new-space-policy-directive-calls-for-human-expansion-across-solar-system
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/new-space-policy-directive-calls-for-human-expansion-across-solar-system
Post edited by tunicate515#4416 on
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Besides, go back to the Moon for what? It has no resources worth exploiting, unless fusion power becomes a reality (last I checked, it's still twenty years away, just like it has been for the past fifty years). It's inconvenient to live on. And any industrial processes could be carried on just as well in space habitats, with the added advantage that in space you can select what effective gravity your processes will occur under (just use a centrifuge to imitate anything from zero to, say, four gees!), while on the lunar surface you can't get any lower than 1/6g.
Asteroid mining shows far more promise than anything on the Moon. And frankly, the only reason to go to Mars is because we can. It's no more useful than Luna, and suffers from a 1/3g gravity well to boot.
Thankfully that is ONE thing the Tangerine in Chief is doing right. We need to get back out into space.
Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.
-Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
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Yeah, well, that monkey-minded rubbish got us to the moon in the first place so we could fling poo at the Russians.
Put those two things together, you'd have better odds of getting struck by lightning than this actually happening.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
besides that the only real benefit to go there and setup is to show humanity can reach the moon and put down roots there and that is a powerful thing, like when a person is proud to be a member of a nation and see the flag unfurl and the national anthem play, this would be a similar thing but on a global scale, that humanity can do this.
we don't know for certain the moon a worthless rock in space and i think that it's a bit presumptious to suggest tiny moon rocks and small core samples for decades ago are what we have for proof which is next to nothing without an actual survey of the planet beyond a few meters of the surface and one tiny area. Luna is made up of the same stuff our planet is made up of so it's not out the realm of possibility that luna contains a lot of natural resources that have yet to be found and tapped just yet.
the only way to know for certain beyond this discussion of what we think we know is when we can go out there and actually prove it.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Lunar Optical Interferometers is not a good enough reason to establish a permanent base on the Moon? There is also the Tourism and Industrial aspects of the Moon as good enough reason to establish a permanent presence on the Moon. We wouldn't have had the Bhopal disaster in 1984 that exposed 500,000 people to dangerous gases if the pesticide plant was built on the Moon.
Hey, no argument from me, I'm just making the observation of which one of the two brags about it as the cornerstone of their entire platform (the other one at least tries to look like they don't most of the time). Hell, the space shuttle was a clusterfrak of earmarks to begin with. It had a bunch of stuff baked into its design, like needing to get taken completely apart and put back together after every flight, that had no engineering purpose but plenty of political purpose.
BTW, Columbia happened under Dubya, with a Republican Congress.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
No successor has been built because Congresscritters, irrespective of political affiliation, care more about getting contracts for their home areas than helping a government department - any government department - succeed. That's how they get elected in the first place, and failure to deliver means they don't get re-elected. And every time NASA came up with a design, Congress would fiddle with it to spread the work out, until eventually the design would either be obsolete or dangerous (or, in the case of Ares, both; static tests showed that the crew capsule would have been subject to so much vibration it would likely have killed said crew).
Fortunately, private enterprise has no such restrictions, which is why both SpaceX and United Launch Alliance are currently delivering satellites to orbit (and SpaceX is also running supplies to the ISS), and they will soon be joined by Blue Origin and (likely) Virgin Galactic (VG was conceived as low-orbit space tourism, but it would astonish me to learn that Richard Branson has no plans for cargo deliveries to space as well).
Ok, we can take it as given then that huge contracts/subsidies will be funneled to Boeing, Lockheed, etc. However, as long as they are getting umpty billion dollars per year, we may as well have them building space hardware as opposed to more overpriced warplanes that would only be fully utilized in a World War Three-scale war. The F-22 or B-2 programs each cost more to develop in inflation-adjusted dollars than the Space Shuttle did. Let's build a 2020s update of the X-20 or something (e.g. a man-rated derivative of the X-37B).
As for the argument that going to the Moon is useless due to having already gone there during the Apollo Program, what would you say if, after six landings of two men each, none longer than four days or traveling more than eight kilometers from the landing point, that European nations had decided that America was useless and not worth further examination? The Moon may lack breathable air, but the same could be said of literally all locations currently known in the whole universe outside of Earth.