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Ask HN: Why has nobody gone to the Moon since 1972?
- harryf 11y agoIt's expensive and the potential for scientific discovery is too low?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mohsinr 11y agoBecause we are planning to go to Mars now.
- tdicola 11y agoThe intense cold war of the 50's and 60's ended and the cost couldn't be justified. Make no mistake, if there wasn't the constant fear that our enemy would use space to drop nukes on our head we never would have made it to space & the moon as fast as we did.
- mbfg 11y agoAgreed NASA's funding is directly tied to the concern over war, especially with super powers. You can assume that NASA's budget will dwindle into the future, unless this fear re-emerges.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoBecause there's nothing up there you can make enough money on to justify the expense. Not yet anyway.
- lazyjones 11y ago> Because there's nothing up there you can make enough money on to justify the expense. How do we know? Did anyone ever attempt to dig even a few meters below the surface?
- lololomg 11y agoNothing you could possibly find on the moon would be worth the cost of retrieving it from there. Even if there was bars of pure gold just lying on the moon it would be more expensive than just mining it on earth.
- Vendan 11y agoWell, gold isn't a very valuable thing, aside from it's use as a basis of currency and "look at this gold, isn't it pretty, I'm so rich!". But there are other things that are more valuable. On thing is He-3, which would make an ideal fusion fuel. Another is pretty much any raw material, and the industrial base to use it. I'd much rather have industrial machinery churning out tons of pollution on the moon then on the earth.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoEven assuming 10 ppb of He-3 in the lunar regolith, you'd need to process 150 tons of the stuff to get one gram of fuel. http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/wcsar9311-2.pdf http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/wcsar9311-2.pdf Mind you, if we eventually automate extraction industries the economics for a lot of things change. > I'd much rather have industrial machinery churning out tons of pollution on the moon then on the earth. Would you pay twenty times as much for your computer in order to make that happen? And would most people do likewise? It's the answer to that sort of question that determines whether something gets done.
- transfire 11y agoThere is plenty to gain from it. But it is a long term prospect. Unfortunately today, everyone is after the quick profit (You know like building bombs.) Some examples: * A telescope on the moon could be larger due to the reduced gravity, and have a better view without the atmosphere. * Helium-3 mining, not to mention plenty of other resources that are starting to become somewhat scarce and hard to reach on Earth. * Since the gravity is a 6th of Earth's, launching space exploration vehicles from the Moon would be much easier and thus cheaper. * Colonizing the Moon would be first step in getting all man's eggs out of one basket, so to speak. * If man can setup a sustainable ecosystem on the Moon, then he can do so almost anywhere. It really is a great testbed for expanding into the cosmos. * The Lunar Olympics will be awesome!
- joelrunyon 11y agoThe telescope concept would be very cool to see done.
- mitchtbaum 11y agoOh, definitely! Look at how much more visible the stars were for the astronauts as they did their moonwalks! Imagine how much better we could see everything with a less cluttered view again! https://google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=moonwalk+site:nasa.gov https://google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=moonwalk+site:nasa.gov
- ikt 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_of_Apollo_Moon_photographs#Absence_of_stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_of_Apollo_Moon_pho...
- goykasi 11y agoThese all seem like very sensible wins -- especially #6. I think #5 is the most interesting, but my immediate first question, as a total layman for space travel/survival, is how do we keep breathing up there? It seems like solving the O2 to Moon transport is a reasonable problem to tackle -- assuming we get people and gear up there -- albeit a lot of effort. How about the next outpost? And then the next? Do we continue bunny hopping O2 transports from Moon to Mars to Earth2... etc until there is a continuous supply of breathable air out from Earth? Or do we have a way to generate as we go further? Are we at mercy of Earth's O2 supply? That seems like the biggest problem for leaving this planet.
- eps 11y agoOh, common [1] There are several satellites on the Moon's orbit right now, including US and Chinese ones. Japan had an orbiter, and so did (and will have) India. PS. Indian Chandrayaan was stuffed to the brim with HD imaging equipment, and yet the only orbit photos of Apollo landing sites are from NASA ... Say all you want, but that's remarkably odd. Who would've passed a chance to grab an image of one of very few monumentally important Moon sites if they were fully equipped to do that and were in immediate vicinity of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_the_Moon#Timeline_of_Moon_exploration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_the_Moon#Timeli...
- lololomg 11y agoThere is no money in it
- Shivetya 11y agoNo one to race against is likely the primary reason. After all it is pretty simple to get to and has been extensively studied. From an exploitation stand point the moon doesn't offer anything at a cost comparable to what can be done on Earth, yet. So until the technology exist that makes the planets more accessible I doubt there is a true need to have a base there. Science could benefit by simply being out of atmosphere but money is sucked up in military and social budgets.
- Lanari 11y agoA lot of records didn't got broken for a long time, humanity back then was like a kid just discovered a toy, we were surprised by what can technology do and we tried to do it just because it's cool and not because it's practical. Anything that didn't solve people's problems isn't worth taxpayers' money.
- usrusr 11y agoBecause few places on earth are worse than living in a bunker on the moon.
- grandalf 11y agoAll it takes is one rogue actor in space and suddenly all satellites need to be armored. Even a moderately powered ground-based laser could take out billions of dollars in satellites. The moon offers a useful strategic location because part of it is always facing away from Earth, making it difficult to attack from Earth-based lasers.
- yc1010 11y agoI was just reading this today, first part deals with this subject > http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-coloni... I asked the same question of an old engineer at Kennedy Space center who was talking about the Saturn rockets to a (small) group of people (most just wanted take photos and cared little for history). He was quite blunt in his response, "We were doing great but then someone higher up decided that we won the manhood measuring contest and its better to spend public funds on bombing some poor souls in paddy fields half a world away..."
- cft 11y agoHypothetical question: say gold or platinum was found on the surface of the moon (no mining required). Would it be profitable to go there with the current technology?
- informatimago 11y agoNo: it's easier to crash the gold market, by selling paper right here on Earth. And see how well it works! Gold should be 10 or 20 times more expensive than it is thanks to the virtual gold running in the virtual markets.
- veddox 11y agoSeveral reasons, some of which are: 1) "Been there, done that - why go back?" 2) The Soviets aren't trying to get there anymore, so the Americans don't see the point of trying. 3) We couldn't even if we wanted to (Apollo equipment is long-since obsolete and unusable, a successor program to return to the moon was scrapped by Obama in 2010). 4) Nobody is keen on spending the billions it would require. I find it sad that we don't even have the ability to go to the moon anymore, but there you go, I guess that's the way it works when we let our money-saving drive control our curiosity.
- informatimago 11y ago4) Banksters are keener of keeping the billions for themselves and to wage wars all over the planets and to any kind of concept, than to put them to work in the society to some exhilarating project. Remembers, the millions spent on space exploration are not thrown out of the planet window to literally space! They are spent right here, given to people and making them work. Instead of having PhD working at McDonalds, (and having less qualified people on unemployment or homeless), you would have PhD working to explore space, and less qualified people working up the jobs PhD don't resign themselves to do. But there are two more probable reasons: 5) Aliens said: NO. 6) You don't really believe those billions of dollars were wasted on the F-35 program do you? (And all those other waste military development programs, of which we will never know anything about given the ACCOUNTING files have been destroyed in the 911 attack on the Pentagon and WTC-fucking-7). No, all this money has been used in secret space travel and weapon development programs, and they already have interstellar space ships and people going out there.
- c0nducktr 11y agoIt's not at all hard for me to believe billions of dollars were spent on the F-35 program. Certainly less hard to believe than us already having interstellar spaceships.
- davidgerard 11y agoThe Space Race was funded out of the military budget, not the science budget. "We can put a man on the moon" is a phrase meaning "we can put a nuke in your capital." Once that point was established, NASA went down to science funding levels.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- williamle8300 11y agoIf you like hilarious, sardonic, but also sincere writing, you should read, "Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?" by Dave Eggers. He founded McSweeny's. It's a fictional story read as a dialogue (Socratic method). It's not stuffy post-modern fiction. Very readable. http://www.amazon.com/Your-Fathers-Where-Prophets-Forever/dp/030794753X http://www.amazon.com/Your-Fathers-Where-Prophets-Forever/dp...
- Gravityloss 11y agoShort: Too much people were needed. Long: The Apollo program was built to land a man on the moon as quickly as possible, with a high budget and immature technology. It was very well designed for its requirements. However it is not the right way to sustain humans in space long term. It cost far too much, in fixed costs and per launch. Longer: If you look at old films on how piston powered airlines worked, the amount of staff needed was much larger than the amount of passengers and the trips were short. Hence by definition only few could afford long trips. It's just mathematics. Everybody can't be a lord with servants. Only with modern jetliners the amount of work needed per seat mile dropped drastically, and travel became possible for the masses. Something similar has to happen for space launch. We can't have a significant portion of the population working in rocket factories / refurbishment shops / launch control, so it must be developed and streamlined a lot. In practice this means reusable rockets with high flight rates and low maintenance. Further out, we need to extract resources from space to drastically drop the needed amount to launch from Earth's deep gravity well. The whole Apollo architecture was a result of immature technology, short time table and large budgets. NASA should not try to repeat it, as the budget and the political drive are not there, and it didn't result in anything long lasting the last time either. Instead, focus should be on lowering cost of more modest missions at first. The Space Shuttle attempted this, but it was too ambitious and inflexible. After they built the mammoth, all the money went into feeding it, and there was no money for developing new things. "“NASA is an organization that is dominated by fixed costs. In business terms everything is in the overhead,” he said. The committee found, with some effort, that the fixed cost of NASA’s human spaceflight program is $6–7 billion a year. “The bottom line is that they can’t afford to keep the doors open with they money they’ve got, let alone do anything with it.”" -Jeff Greason, more at: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1483/1 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1483/1
- mproud 11y agoLack of political motivation.