Which includes a huge disadvantage of potentially taking more than 6 days to evacuate astronauts from the moon’s surface in an emergency, depending on exactly where the craft happen to be orbiting when the emergency occurs. For Apollo missions it was a matter of hours, not days.
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That seems insane.
If I were to summarize the most important lessons from the history of crewed spaceflight they would be:
- Minimize potential points of failure
- Have a backup plan if something fails anyway
Nothing about this plan looks like it was designed with that philosophy in mind.
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There are 2 answers to the question why go to the moon.
Both answers are “China”.
The first time we went to the moon was for propaganda against the USSR.
China had been rushing into space lately and I think some people would think it will make the US look bad if China reaches the moon and we cannot get out of low earth orbit.
Conveniently, making the effort throw a lot of money at a lot of states and businesses so it is a source of pork barrel spending.
So answer number one China and politics as usual.
Answer number 2 is also China. From 1405 to 1433 Zheng He took huge treasure fleets that went down through and around Southeast Asia, to India and Africa. He made repeated trips. After the last trip there was a new emperor who had the opinion that China was the center of civilization and the world and there was no reason to look outside, travel or explore. The new emperor burned the fleets. In the following centuries, Europeans did travel and explore and dominated the world and humiliated China. A major tool was the navies Europe developed to explore which were carrying cannons that could bombard Chinese cities.
The Earth will be destroyed in 5 billion years when the sun dies. Even if we developed slow self-sustaining generation ships that travel at the speed of the Voyager probes they could reach other solar systems and possibly spread life where there was none before. If we all go back to nature and live off nuts and berries for the rest of existence, all traces of earth life, human culture and existence will be wiped out.
We will be like the Chinese treasure fleets. Daring to explore once and then turning our backs on the outside universe. Possibly to our detriment.
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Humanity will not exist in any recognizable form in 5 billion years. We will either be extinct or will have evolved into forms so unimaginable to contemporary humans that planning for such a future is a fool’s errand.
Learning more about our universe and our place in it is a perfectly valid reason to study other planetary bodies. And we have learned much more about those planetary bodies from robotic space probes than we ever learned from crewed missions.
Colonizing space, on the other hand. is so far beyond our current capabilities that it would be silly to dedicate any significant resources toward that goal at this time. Especially when there are so many more pressing issues relating to humanity’s survival that beg resources right now.
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Move fast and break things!
Don’t worry, SpaceX is involved.
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I thought we needed world war three and a eugenics war.
Star Trek is cool, but the price tag may be too high.
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Whether humanity is involved or not, is not a question for me.
It is possible that life develops everywhere, all the time. Life could have developed on Mars first since it is a smaller planet and would have cooled faster than Earth. A meteor impact might have blown debris carrying life out into space and seeded the early earth. People are looking for life on Venus and Mercury and under the ice of Europa. There could be life everywhere.
It was once thought that maybe our solar system was a fluke and there were not many planets around other stars. We now can see planets almost everywhere we look.
If there are planets everywhere and life everywhere then in the last few million years some intelligent life should have developed and spread throughout the galaxy by now, but it hasn’t.
Maybe life does not develop easily. On earth life tries to spread wherever it can. On the bottom of the ocean, in rocks miles underground, in Antarctica there is life. It spreads spores and seeds and walks, flies, swims and crawls to every corner it can reach. Maybe humanity is the latest method life has developed to spread. It cannot make it through the vacuum of space or escape the gravity of Earth, but here we are to maybe carry life to new places. We might not be here in a billion years but maybe some piece of moss descended from life on earth might end up growing on the other side of the galaxy because humanity reached out at this time in our history.
Or maybe their is life under every rock and in every puddle on every planet in the universe and the reason we can find no evidence is they are all sitting on their butts watching TV and saying “Why try?” “Who cares?”
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If we want to maximize the odds of life from our planet spreading throughout the universe, the best thing we can do at this exact point in history is to act in such a way that protects and cherishes life on Earth until humanity gets its shit together enough to put together a viable plan to colonize space.
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This is invariably the rationale ultimately given to pursue the fantasy of space settlement, but I’ve never understood why it’s necessarily a bad thing. “Humanity” as we understand it will one day become extinct. So what? Everything is ephemeral.
Interesting that we spend our time arguing about how to explore the solar system, and compare costs etc.
Here’s my 2 cents: Maybe we could all spend 10% less on military hardware and things that go boom. That would leave astonishing amounts of resources for space exploration, and we could probably solve a fair chunk of earth issues as well.
It really shouldn’t be ‘explore this way or that way’, it should be ‘stop killing people and spend that money and effort on cool things that make life better.’ Arguing the first just gives the hawks a free pass.
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Some of you question this stuff. You justify your questions because of the cost; the mission design being flawed; the lack of compelling reason. And hey, you’re probably right to question all those things. Those are good questions to ask that make this all seem questionable.
But for me? I just love the idea of being on the moon and doing science up there and building towards some better future when humanity stretches for the other planets, and then the stars. I love that shit. It’s inspiring in ways all our military industrial complex research in how to build a better targeting missile to more effectively kill people are not.
Yeah, but I’m sure all the reasons not to do it outweigh my being star struck and thinking it’s better to spend our money this way then to build another billion dollar fighter jet. I’m a bit of a push over when it comes to science research and our space programs. Just a big old tech softie here who thinks The Right Stuff is a near perfect film.
Me? I always end up seeing stars.
“We knew the Moon from our earliest days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built cities and set out to subdue the Earth.” - Carl Sagan
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NASA was going to kill those astronauts. NASA (mis) management doesn’t know what is going on and the managers don’t listen to those who know…
Actually, NASA returned five times after Apollo 11. Up to and including Apollo 17. So, yep, they returned. 
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Which is why I said
Hmmmmmmm. Okayayyyy. I seeeeee.
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Of course they’ve postponed the launches, Congress hasn’t managed to cancel the funding yet. You know there’s a whole slew of mostly right-wing congresscritters who are once again foaming at the mouth at such obvious “government waste” and arguing that NASAs budget should, like the pay to various government officials they don’t like, be cut to zero, particularly if those eggheads don’t stop wasting their budget on things like climate change studies.
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I fail to see the correlation with this as a sole reason for the delays. can you elaborate, please?
There’s so much pork tied to Artemis from defense-facing contractors and certain southern senators that I don’t think this is generally a factor for the overall agency budget. Some science-oriented programs may receive budget cuts due to political pressure, but I don’t see Artemis being one of them, at least for the time being. There’s too much money to be made from it.
Of course if we aren’t mindful about how we explore the solar system we will be killing people in the process (albeit a much smaller number of people than we do through warfare).
If I couldn’t already tell from your handle, I would ask if you are German. Or Klingon, maybe. Yikes. Heavy stuff. Logical, but ouch.
