Originally published at: NASA won't be sending humans to moon again until at least 2026 - Boing Boing
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Why though? There’s nothing there.
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There are, apparently, raw materials that can be used in exploring further afield.
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what a curious statement:
“We are returning to the Moon in a way we never have before, and the safety of our astronauts is NASA’s top priority as we prepare for future Artemis missions,”
what new way is this? no more chemical rockets(es)? only after a loop around venus? (will it involve whalers?) and to mention safety in that sentence implies that it wasn’t “top priority” previously? ah well, ‘A.I.’ make for dubious press releases. (“just so long as they leave e.musk up there”)
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Good, that gives me two years to come up with my own Moon Programme. Hold my Tang.
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I’m largely in support of space exploration and scientific research but if the moon were a place that we still had a whole lot of profound, burning scientific questions about then we’d be sending a lot more robotic probes there, like we have been on Mars. There’s honestly not a lot of need to send humans, especially since robotic missions are continually getting cheaper and more capable. The funding for the Artemis program could have covered the cost for a lot of robotic exploration. A NASA audit says that it will have cost about $100B by 2025. A robotic sample return mission for Mars rocks would cost about 10% of that.
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But why send people? Is there anything gained from using a person directly when a robot is less than 2 light seconds away?
ETA: Looks like I owe @Otherbrother a coke
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I think he meant “more absurdly convoluted, needlessly complex, and pointless than any manned mission we’ve tried before.”
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Exploiting further afield.
FTFY.
Look now, Idiocracy is becoming more of a documentary day by day. I’d like to keep Iron Sky in the science fiction / fantasy section, not as a historical drama.
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I mean, it’s technically true that they have never returned to the moon before (with a manned mission after the Apollo programme ended). So it is in a way they’ve never done it before
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I know that previous eras would sometimes commit to, and complete, projects that took decades or even centuries to complete. I don’t really know what it would take to do something like that today, but I really would like to see a long-term effort towards developing the kinds of technologies, like asteroid mining and then space-based solar power, that would enable either living off-world or greatly improving resource availability down here on Earth. It’s not a high priority, it’s not the solution to any urgent problem, but it’d be really useful to know we could do those things if we needed to.
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well, you know, there is this one guy…
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If we are going to break the bounds of planet Earth, ya gotta start somewhere. You want Star Trek, this is how you get Star Trek.
Yes we can learn a lot from probes, but there is something to be said about how versatile a human is for exploring, collecting, and using various tools on the surface as well.
I am excited to learn more about the geology. Do some digging.
And if we are talking about future permanent/semi-permanent habitation, we need to start going back.
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Did you forget my first sentence?
“If we are going to break the bounds of planet Earth, ya gotta start somewhere”
If you can’t make a go on the Moon, where resupply is relatively easy, you will never reach the stars.
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reaching the stars? Im not very confident that this goal will ever be possible, quite the opposite, actually. and again, what would be the purpose? we need to spread among the stars because why? I think we have a certain amount of time as a species on this planet and thats mostly it. we can still make the best of it and fucking grow up without destroying earth aka the world we need to live and stop pretending that human space exploration will somehow magically turn into star trek and and that humanity will become a “multi-planetary”-species. sorry the rant, but I think we really should check our priorities in this matter.
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Aw man. You sound overly pessimistic. Which, given the shit going on, is understandable.
It won’t be magical, it will be something that takes a long ass time and a lot of blood sweat and tears. It also doesn’t mean we can just ignore a bunch of other issues on Earth. We can do multiple things at once.
Purpose is what you make it. There is no preset fate or destiny. There are many things people do on Earth right now that other people think are a huge waste of time and have no purpose. I think the vapid lives a lot of people lead, especially internet influencers and streamers, has no purpose. I am sure they think my dead end job and time I spend making a fanzine has no purpose. There are people who are completely uncurious about the world who think my jack-of-all-trades knowledge about 10,001 little things has no purpose. What you or I agree on having purpose is going to be different, and that is OK.
The world is huge, the people many, and all of us have different drives on what we believe is important.
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It is a very different mission. Whether or not that’s a good thing is still an open question.
The Apollo missions were very simple. Send a rocket up into orbit, give it a boost to leave orbit, settle into low orbit around the moon and drop down. Then do the same thing in reverse:
The Artemis missions, on the other hand, are way more complicated. It involves this crazy “Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit.” This is partly because their new Orion rockets can’t actually change speed enough to get into the low lunar orbit that Apollo did, so they keep this much faster velocity that sends the zooming around the moon at crazy speeds.
But the other thing is that getting the Orion spacecraft to the moon requires a crazy amount of fuel. NASA is going to have to launch 15 rockets into space just to put the fuel up there that will use to refuel the main rocket while in orbit around the Earth.
Here is an interesting (although kind of weird, honestly) talk that the Smarter Every Day guy actually gave to NASA about this, trying to get them to really make sense of their own decision making:
That said, the theory behind this increased complexity is that it creates this ongoing route from Earth to other places (moon, Mars, etc.) and that all this other crap is putting the pieces in place to make this continuously possible in the future.
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artemis III as a lunar landing is not only nasas sls and orion, but spacex and “starship”. and that will most likely needing up to 20 (yes, thats official) launches for refuelling. and I dont see that happening. ever.
(edited after checking whole mission, apologies)
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