26 ms·
If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?
- neonate 9y agohttp://archive.is/g1NEH http://archive.is/g1NEH
- draugadrotten 9y agohttps://archive.is/PO1WZ/image https://archive.is/PO1WZ/image
- ogdoad 9y agoBecause putting a man on the moon would be putting a man on the moon!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- coliveira 9y agoWe can't because the USA prefers to create more bombs and other war machines rather than invest in science.
- gandhium 9y agoAre you suggesting that US is scientifically losing to most countries?
- gozur88 9y agoWe would never have done it the first time if not for military competition with the USSR.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoDoesn't mean we have to keep competing militarily if we could go to space instead. (Though there is potential for another military race there too - the first country to put a deorbiting system on a near-Earth rock wins.)
- mikejb 9y agoMilitary competition is always necessary. You need to be able to defend yourself, and for that, you cannot fall too far behind. I agree with you when we get to the offensive use of weapons. Though the US is only one of a number of players in that field.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoYeah, I have no illusion that military one-upping is going away any time soon. My point was only that while it's true it was military competition that opened access to space, we don't have to forever justify space exploration by military applications. Private industry around space, and NewSpace in particular, is a good step towards that. Military competitions is what gave us microwave tech. Doesn't mean that if world peace suddenly happened, we would stop producing microwave ovens.
- mikejb 9y agoIt's a mixture of both: Military competition is what drives a ton of research with an immense budget behind it. The problem I have with some nations (the US is not the only offender here) is that they deploy the poisoned fruit of that research.
- coliveira 9y agoThe USA already has bombs, no science is being used to produce more of the same.
- gozur88 9y agoWe had bombs before the space race, too. That doesn't mean it wasn't, in essence, a military competition.
- njharman 9y agoChina manages to do both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog... https://www.google.com/search?q=china+weapons+development https://www.google.com/search?q=china+weapons+development
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoLooks like commenters here did not read the subtitle: Outside study blames NASA’s bureaucracy and contracting practices for delaying lunar missions
- anilgulecha 9y agoWell, the article does also say: > NASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself.
- TylerE 9y agoTHere is little POINT in putting a man on the moon after you've done it. We have plenty of moon rock to run experiments on. Any micro/low gravity experiment can be run cheaper in LEO. There aren't any valuable resources there to exploit. It's a bit like asking why we don't build a habitat on the bottom of the Marians Trench - we COULD, but why WOUDL we?
- abecedarius 9y agoLunar resources could have great value just by their location. The energy cost to lift them into space is much lower than from Earth. Doing anything ambitious in space would require a lot of material, which has limited our ambitions since the 1970s. (Asteroids might serve better, though: a wider variety of stuff, comparable in energy cost but farther away.) I wish the damn article would link to this new report, or at least give me the keywords to search for.
- gozur88 9y ago>Doing anything ambitious in space would require a lot of material, which has limited our ambitions since the 1970s. We go to the moon because materials are cheap because... we want to build what?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoAn industry in space. To send larger probes around the Sol system. To build larger orbital laboratories, LEO or otherwise. To build all supporting infrastructure for that. To manufacture things that benefit from microgravity conditions (like optical fibers, see [0]) to be used both on Earth and elsewhere. To enable large-scale Mars missions, including eventual habitation. To eventually access more raw resources than we've ever imagined. -- [0] - http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/ http://madeinspace.us/mis-fiber/
- phillc73 9y agoIf the benefit of manufacturing optical fibre cables in a low gravity environment was so great, would it be more economically viable to build a 'low gravity' factory on earth?
- alexnewman 9y agoNASA can’t put a man on the moon, but Elon soon will make putting two lambos into lunar transfer orbit with the falcon heavy
- PakG1 9y agoYou sure it's not Tesla Roadsters?
- mikejb 9y agoThe (single) Tesla Roadster is going on a transfer orbit to Mars. (Actually, the Tesla is 'just' going into a heliocentric orbit with it's apogee around the Mars orbit. That is sufficient to prove that it can get to Mars because it's just a matter of timing, which is relatively trivial, but it doesn't crash into another Planet and upsets planetary protection officers - yes, that's a job)
- alexnewman 9y agoWhat evidence leads you to believe that nasa is currently run as efficiently or as innovative as during say the first half of Apollo. Everything I’ve heard from people who worked there is that it’s generally become more and more of nightmare
- mruniverse 9y agoYou ask for evidence, then follow up with "I heard from people..."?
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoPeople telling you things is evidence.
- alexnewman 9y agoActually,that's a good point! People telling me things isn't exactly evidence. I wonder what pure evidence would look like?
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoNo, it is exactly evidence. But, as you seem to be aware, each kind or instance of evidence should be weighed differently, i.e. stronger evidence should sway your beliefs more strongly. People telling you things may not be particularly strong evidence, but you should still probably update your beliefs at least a little.
- alexnewman 9y agoAhh, I am glad you asked. I actually have been lucky enough to work at two small spacecraft companies. I am not an aerospace engineer but I talk to people who are and interact with tons of x-nasa people. Also, my weirdo comments aren't my own. Checkout the omega tau series, especially http://omegataupodcast.net/218-a-life-in-apollo/ http://omegataupodcast.net/218-a-life-in-apollo/
- Pica_soO 9y agoBecause capitalism, as religion while in its optimization frenzy- cripples the ability's of mankind? Reaching the moon already was only done to compete with a faction outside the reference system. Without commies to race and lean against, the western system decayed to just another nice decorated, well managed cotton plantation. There is no price on the far future events, such as bollide strikes. If there where, suddenly the moon would have holiday resorts.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoNicely put. Though this is not caused by the religious aspects of modern capitalism, but by its core mechanism of work - people are forced to work on what earns them and protects their short-term profit (poor people to eat, rich people to not become poor people). There seem to be only few people on the planet with simultaneously enough wealth and focused will to tell the market where to go, as opposed to being directed by the market - I'm thinking about people like Gates and Musk. Fortunately, one of them is hell-bent on getting to Mars; without that forcing function, we'd probably be talking about scrapping ISS by now. (I don't feel like you can blame situation in NASA purely on capitalism though, at least not directly. They don't play the capitalism game. But they are controlled by politicians, and politicians play the capitalism game.)
- drdeca 9y agoPoliticians play the politics game. This game involves people acting with self interest, and relates in some ways to access to/control of resources. This is the case regardless of economic system. "Capitalism is moloch, yes, but government is also moloch. Anarchy is also moloch."
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThat's why I wrote "indirectly". Politicians play the politics game, but the particulars of that game is in big way determined by the economic system of a country. In the US, politicians try to game the election process, and that involves allocating resources in a way that ensures their electability. The end result is things like turning NASA's space efforts into a giant jobs program. Politicians under a (hypothetical) different economic system would face different pressures, maybe even aligned with pursuing longer-term projects.
- partycoder 9y agoBecause the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods, a period of time where America had virtually infinite money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Opposition_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Oppositio...
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Because the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods We are still under the Bretton Woods system, more or less. Almost 2/3rds of foreign currency reserves held by central banks are held in U.S. dollars [1]. If anything, real interest rates are lower today than they were in the 1960s. [1] http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/03/31/pr17108-IMF-Releases-Data-on-the-Currency-Composition-of-Foreign-Exchange-Reserves http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/03/31/pr17108-IMF-R...
- partycoder 9y agoYes but the US does not allow audits on their gold reserves. They could print as many dollar bills they wanted until the Nixon shock. That ended, and as a consequence the economy is not doing as well right now. If not but because of exclusive deals (e.g: oil) it would be very hard to justify the dollar current value.
- jl6 9y agoYou can’t put a man on the moon but your grandparents could.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago"Back when I was your age, I had to go to work 400 000 km. In near 0K cold for 3 days. Upwell! Both ways!"
- nkrisc 9y agoIf you were in direct sunlight for those 3 days to the moon I'd be more concerned about being hot than cold.
- rurban 9y agoThe germans could. When the anglo-british bureaucracy took over the german Huntsville engineering management and forced them to Houston/California and switch to solid rockets it started failing. This was the inside view. The new type of management was called "destructive organizational culture". https://www.jstor.org/stable/25611289 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25611289 [of course the new management blamed it on the germans]
- mcguire 9y ago"The only people who have been above low Earth orbit were born in the 1930s and put there by Nazis."
- T-A 9y agoEdit: nope, looks like it's this one: "Stepping Stones: Economic Analysis of Space Transportation Supplied From NEO Resources" https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_final_report.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_fin... --- I think the report in question is "NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Conquering the Challenges of In-Space Manufacturing": https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011108 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011108 These may also be interesting: "NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Overview and Update", https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011109 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011109 "Additive Manufacturing for Human Space Exploration", https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011644 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011644
- maccam94 9y agoI really want to see asteroid mining prioritized, as well as a space station capable of permanent human habitation (either partial or full gravity). A space station is also preferable to another planet for our next big space endeavor IMO because it is easier to get materials to and from it (no extra gravity well to deal with). Also, I feel like a lot of people think "ah, everything has to be done differently because space is a zero-G environment", but I bet it would be easier to adapt a lot of traditional technologies, engineering processes, and biological elements in a rotating station. Once we have the ability to do fabrication and construction in space, everything becomes much cheaper. Lastly, if researchers need to experiment in zero-G, we could construct zero-G modules adjacent to the center of the ring for experimentation. The primary blocker for a rotating station as far as I know has been the mass requirement. If you have a structure above a certain rotational speed with a radius that is too small, the occupants are likely to become nauseous. From the research I've seen, the minimum size for a viable rotating station would be about 600 tons[1]. Moving that amount of mass into orbit would have been extremely expensive, but Falcon Heavy could launch it for under $1.5B, and the BFR for even less. [1]: http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/GlobusRotationPaper.pdf http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/GlobusRotationPaper.pdf (page 22)
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
- Animats 9y agoBecause, half a century later, it's not any cheaper to do it than it was then.
- maccam94 9y agoIt's recently gotten way cheaper. Cost per kilogram delivered to LEO: Saturn V (used for the Moon landing mission): $8,250 Falcon 9: $2,700 (price for an expendable launch) BFR (hypothetical, in development rocket): $500
- Klathmon 9y agoDoes that scale to a full lunar mission though? Just because it's cheaper to take the bus downtown doesn't say anything about the cost of airfare to another continent.
- valuearb 9y agoDepends on your design. The Saturn V was big enough to launch the entire lunar stack of vehicles in one shot. Anything less than that requires in orbit assembly. IIRC: Saturn V could put 100k pounds in lunar injection. The first SLS will be around 50k, the Falcon Heavy around 40k. Layer versions of the SLS, should we choose to spend more tens of billions developing them, will eventually have Saturn V capabilities. The BFR (as planned) will be the largest capacity rocket ever made. Putting 300k+ in low earth orbit. It’s designed to be refueled in orbit, so essentially it’s lunar/mars injection orbit payload caisvity is 300k+. It’s also designed to be fully reusable, unlike the Falcon series that only reuses main boosters. So it’s claimed to be far cheaper than them, and they are already the most affordable rockets ever made. The SLS is designed to be crushed and melted like a beer can after every launch, which is why it will cost $2B+ per launch.
- sytelus 9y agoIn inflation adjusted dollars? I would have still thought its 10X cheaper now because of all the learnings plus much lower cost computing and other engineering enhancements. Back in 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program reported to Congress was $25.4 billion. By far the most expensive parts of the mission were the Apollo spacecraft (the Command Modules, the Lunar Modules) and the monstrous Saturn V launch vehicles. A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today’s money, a few billion dollars. In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars (or around $200 billion in today’s money). Compare these costs to modern day space travel, where companies like SpaceX charge just $133 million to launch a spacecraft to the International Space Station. The Falcon Heavy, which will be comparable to the Saturn IV, will be in the same price region. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-landing-45-years-looking-back-at-mankinds-giant-leap https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon-la...
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y agoThis seems to happen to a lot of things. In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc. Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram lines in the early 20th century, but there was even a tram line that went all the way to a nearby town of population around 15K, 22 km away. If anyone proposed a tram line like that today, I think they would be dismissed as being kidding for proposing such extravagant spending. This, in a context where Spain is a much richer country than it was back then. I often wonder what went wrong.
- jpatokal 9y agoClassic trams and modern light rail are different beasts. Trams were popular worldwide back in the days where automobiles were far too expensive for most people and buses hadn't taken off yet, and since they were the only practical means of transport for medium distances, even small cities had massive ridership. They also ran right on the road, sharing space with cars, which was OK because there were a lot less cars and cars were not meaningful competition. These days cars are affordable, and light rail has to be better than cars to be competitive, and do so well enough to entice a significant portion of the population out of their cars to be affordable. In practice this means dedicated right of way, which is far more expensive to purchase and fit out as a rail line than just laying some rails on an existing street. And of course modern safety, environmental and just plain bureaucratic regulations also inflate the prices of public works considerably compared to the good/bad old days, particularly in the US.
- nunobrito 9y agoThis will go on until one day a large enough government admits that moon landings back in the 60s/70s were filmed, instead of real. The large majority of people here are based in facts instead of religion and dogmas. As a fact-based society, we should be able to look from a distance and re-evaluate the facts with a colder perspective. From what I observe, every year we are either 5 year away from settling on the moon (or Mars), every year there are nn reasons why it didn't happen (loop and repeat since the last 50 years). Very few doubt the fact that selfies of astronauts smiling directly at the sun are possible (without injury). Very few wonder why the first landing was a success, right on the first try even as other agencies (SpaceX) iteratively fail on the first runs. Very few ask why the the original recordings don't exist any longer, only botched TV recordings. The effect of radiation outside the earth shield is simply too strong. We have always sent animals during any space milestone before humans. Look up what happened to them, if you can find the records. I'm an engineer. If possible, would like to see humans on the moon during my lifetime. Instead, we are taught that the sun orbits around the earth and burn apostates on the public square. We can do better. Happy 2018! :-)
- ourmandave 9y agoYou forgot the /s
- aurizon 9y agoThey need driverless, conductorless subways/trams in enclosed tubular right of way with passengers entering from one side and exiting from the other, via offset doors. Think of the days when you had elevators with operators who were paid for pushing the floor number for you - (a carry-over from the cable-pull hole in the wall days when operators were needed.) These trams were killed by the wages of the operators, in much the same way that modern subways are ruined costwise by the wages of the drivers and conductors who each have hourly wage costs of $50 or more = large ticket costs and avoidance to car use. In effect opportunists grabbed all the $$ In the moon race, NASA is so burdened by legacy wages and other costs AND the fact that Congressional opportunists grab the money that NASA was prevented from that course.
- johnminter 9y agoThe author answers the question in the first sentence. It is not that we can't, the problem is that it is not cost effective to do so. Or, as the cliche goes, "It's all about the Benjamins". The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?
- stupidcar 9y agoYour analogy makes no sense. America isn't a person, doesn't have a limited working life, and isn't going to "retire". The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether. In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.
- pjc50 9y ago> wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether .. but not, as you pointed out, the biggest expense of all in the military. The way back to the moon is the same reason as America went to the moon in the first place: competition and colonialism. As soon as China or India look like they might go back to the moon, the space race will resume.
- ThomPete 9y agoThe question is why would we put a man on the moon? I grew up with Moonbase Alpha (although I am not expecting to be thrown into space by a major explosion) and want this as much as anyone else but is there any reason (mining, strategic, know benefits to research) which justifies the price?
- ams6110 9y agoThat really explains why it happened the first time. Price was not a concern. We were on almost a war footing to get it done. The whole reason that NASA stopped innovating after about 1972 was that the costs were unsustainable.
- ThomPete 9y agoYeah that's what I am thinking too. I would love that we are the point where we need a base on the moon, but I don't know what would justify it other than tourism and we aren't that rich and it isn't that easy and safe just yet.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI'd say the costs were projected to be unsustainable. There apparently was this whole episode with the Congress realizing that Wernher von Braun & crew are aiming for Mars, and deciding to cut the party short before it gets out of control[0]. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#Loss_of_political_support_and_cancellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#Loss_of_political_suppor...
- nnq 9y ago> is there any reason [...] which justifies the price THIS kind of thinking is our problem imho - we are living in rich times and we should start behaving as such! We have more of everything than we need. Yeah, there are children starving or dying of preventable diseases somewhere in the world, but guess what, even if we'd be 10x richer there will still be. Or we'll whip out a world war or some runaway next gen bioweapons instead to ramp up the killing that way. That's who we (Homo Sapiens) fking are! A space race would be a pretty awesome way to encourage competition and progress on a scale similar to that encouraged by the last "world" war. But no, instead we'll go for the "mass-surveillance-technology supremacy race" or "best AIs for trading race" or the "let's pretend energy is scarce and price-war on in while talking about solving climate-change race"... GROWTH and EXPANSION are our only reasons of being and our own authentic good motivations as human beings, and infecting as much of the cosmos as possible with ourselves, aka "space technology" development should be our core drive as a species!!!
- jasonmaydie 9y agoI think the real question is why we want to put a man on the moon. Imagine you climbed mount Everest with no climbing equipment and then 30 years later someone asked you why you haven't done it again.
- mezuzi 9y agoIf you can read a wsj article, why can't you read it?
- indubitable 9y agoThe article answers itself: "NASA’s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors." That quote is speaking largely of the SLS. It's supposed to essentially be the Space Shuttle 2.0, but it's often just referred to as the Senate Launch System for good reason. We've spending billions of dollars on that program and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. This [1] is the Wiki entry from 2011 detailing the program's promises, which have been constantly 'reimagined.' In reality it's mostly a giant pork project. Ultimately it's being driven by congressmen who only care about getting their kickbacks and it's being developed by ULA, an anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed, who only care about profit. And the companies themselves are also falling apart. This [2] is Lockheed Martin's CEO. One of the largest aerospace companies in the world is headed by a person who has absolutely no background whatsoever in aerospace or related technologies. Until 2015, this [3] was the head of Boeing - same story. Perhaps not coincidentally, since Boeing put an aerospace engineer in charge - they have sharply changed their direction and competitive outlook. We have an increasingly corrupt government contracting work to companies who are driven only by money. Musk's success and the government's success in the 60s have something very simple in common. They were not driven by greed or short term self interest, but big picture ideology and aspirations. And it seems the whole notion of aspirations, beyond earning lots of money, is something that is somehow fading in society. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Launch_System&oldid=457761065 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Launch_Syst... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marillyn_Hewson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marillyn_Hewson [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nnq 9y agoWhy don't more people realize that infecting as much of the cosmos with ourselves should be one of the MAIN GOALS of Humanity?! Ergo, space exploration technology should be a priority, even at massive costs, and even when those cost are measured in human lives and human pain and suffering. This, plus "defeating aging", plus "achieving superhuman general-purpose intelligence" (either by augmenting/improving human I or by developing AIs). Almost nothing else matters besides these. What fucked up global leadership did we end up with that they seem to have completely forgot this?
- kazagistar 9y agoYou might wanna justify those claims? Having a bunch of oppressed miserable humans rules by tyrannical AIs or whatever seems quite a bit worse then living happily on our single planet.
- megaman22 9y agoBetter to have the seeds of humanity spread across many baskets, rather than in a single one that is perpetually endangered by an unlucky intersection with a rock. Who knows if we'll ever be able to actually get outside our local system, but we're never going to figure out how to do it if we can't even setup shop in the cosmic equivalent of our front yard.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoDespite your obvious irony, you're actually right - those should be primary goals of humanity. Beyond all this talk about life being a journey and not the destination, people sometimes forget that at some point, you're supposed to stop taking in the view and start doing something useful.
- paulus_magnus2 9y agoEconomy. If Moon was made of gold it wouldn't be worth going there for it [1]. Perhaps reusable spacecraft can change that. For strategic / military reasons (money no objective) we can achieve much more than if profit is the only motivation. [1. need a better source?] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22059/if-the-moon-were-solid-gold-how-far-away-would-it-have-to-be-to-not-be-economic https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22059/if-the-moon-... Edit: Elon Musk: With New SpaceX Tech, Rocket Costs Will Drop By A Factor of 100 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/908254079092002816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ffuturism.com%2Felon-musk-with-new-spacex-tech-rocket-costs-will-drop-by-a-factor-of-100%2F https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/908254079092002816?ref_s... Also analysis / spaculatoin for BFR. Keep in mind we're only talking about sending stuff to Mars, not retrieving it. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3343/1 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3343/1 Edit 2 federal court set the value of the moon rocks at $50,800 per gram based on how much it cost the U.S. government to retrieve the samples between 1969 and 1972. https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting-apollo17.html https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting-apollo17.ht...
- DennisP 9y agoNot only is that based on expendable rockets, but as your link says, the game changes if you use a mass driver to launch your payloads back to Earth. And of course, as Andy Weir has been saying, tourism could be a major economic driver once reusable rockets get cheap enough.
- Robotbeat 9y agoBut we ARE talking about retrieving stuff from Mars: the BFS must be returned to Earth to be reused. It's also capable of bringing people back from Mars, and that's supposed to be included in the $200k/person ticket price. Assuming at least 200kg of human plus consumables per person for the trip back, that implies that anything worth at least $1000/kg would be worth sending back. So I think Musk is actually wrong when he says that he can BOTH send people to Mars super cheap with return tickets AND that there could not possibly be something of enough value on Mars to return to Earth even if you had cocaine ($100,000/kg?) prepackaged on the surface (gold is $35,000/kg or something). ...not that I expect a vibrant Mars export economy or anything. Musk's basic point about not expecting Mars to fully and profitably pay for itself with physical exports is correct.
- mohi13 9y agoHave been wondering the same for quite sometime. None of the mentioned reasons seems convincing enough.
- Exuma 9y agoSo how much would it cost to send someone to the moon again?
- Robotbeat 9y agoSimply put, we need a lander. If we had a lander, we could use existing rockets to get to Mars via Earth orbit rendezvous (see Gemini, also ISS is regularly refueled and boosted by visiting vehicles). But we spent all of our exploration money on an expensive rocket (and a capsule that is much heavier than it needs to be...).
- kraig911 9y agoMaybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now. I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and economy and I'm sure it does. But work a soup kitchen for a day and you'd realize we have economies of wealth built on the back of despair and hopelessness. Our society needs to change to be a space faring one. Maybe I'm stupid and a traveling to space would initiate the change we need. I just can't see how.
- Endy 9y agoWell, could it be possible to send currently homeless people to colonize the Moon?
- ChristianBundy 9y agoRethink this comment.
- StavrosK 9y ago(edited) Would these homeless people be sent to the moon mandatorily or voluntarily? If voluntarily, why only send homeless people? Why not send everyone who wanted to go?
- stcredzero 9y agoIn The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Moon was a penal colony. In that book, a form of harsh natural selection took place, and everyone who wasn't smart enough to survive in the demanding technical environment (and smart enough to foresee the disasters caused by those who weren't smart enough) quickly died gruesome deaths, leaving a population which was quite intelligent and valued learning.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mcguire 9y agoNot a WSJ subscriber, so I can only see the first two paragraphs... "NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency." As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result. On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success. An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off. (Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.") "Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..." But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.
- bigfcjjyfcg 9y agoI heard similar things from my ex-NASA roommate when I worked at SpaceX, do you think NASA can correct the problems you've outlined?
- mcguire 9y agoI don't know. There's a lot of institutional inertia and forces opposing any change (and change itself is just churn). The science side of things has a much better track record, but the interplanetary stuff is done by JPL, which isn't really NASA, and most of the rest is mostly a-political (modulo the Earth sensing stuff, which I'm continually surprised isn't cancelled for global warming reasons). Then there's private enterprise, which seems to be doing better. But I'm not entirely comfortable with the "Guilded-Age" model of development. So, I dunno. Edit: when I wrote, "Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out...", that should be "pointed out to me".
- Tempest1981 9y agoSlight tangent but related: Andy Weir's new book Artemis has some good scientific details about living on the moon. Some future cost estimates on getting there: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/27/world/blog-what-economy-artemis-can-tell-us-about-life-earth https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/27/world/blog-what-econo...
- m3kw9 9y agoMaybe because doin anything else that is slightly more complicated than a few experiments is gonna cost exponentially more and the budgets won’t get approved.
- foxyv 9y agoThis is the one hope I have, with huge amounts of wealth concentrating in a few people's hands we may see pie in the sky stuff like Moon colonies and space tourism start up.
- GlenTheMachine 9y agoThere are a lot of answers here about how expensive Apollo was, and about how those expenses haven't really gone away. Those answers are basically right: putting humans on the moon was, and would still be, enormously expensive. But there's another factor at play which I haven't seen any mention of, which is that our risk tolerance as a culture has dropped considerably since then. We went from Mercury, to Gemini, to Apollo, in an INSANELY short period of time. We went from having never launched anybody into space, to Apollo 11, in ten years; we went from never having launched a Saturn V to putting three humans on top of one in thirteen months. We lost three astronauts due to multiple design flaws in the Command Capsule, then redesigned the capsule and launched it with astronauts in it in eighteen months. None of that could happen now. And the reason can only partly be blamed on NASA losing its mojo. In truth, the entire spaceflight community has developed far a more comprehensive, reliable safety culture. But that culture is by necessity much slower than it was then. Nobody in the industry could move as quickly as NASA did in the mid 1960s. NASA of today can't - but neither can SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or Sierra Nevada, or anyone else I know of. Even if we wanted to, we would have to re-educate our engineers. Engineers are taught how to do program management starting as undergraduates. We have an entire generation of aerospace engineers who have been taught to move at deliberate, conservative speed, to make sure nobody gets killed. The human inertia inherent in our current engineering culture just wouldn't allow us to go back to the speed of the 1960's. A slower, more comprehensive safety culture costs even more money, but more importantly it requires financial support from Congress and the White House over a much longer period of time in order for a mission to make it from proposal to launch - support which is extremely hard to sustain across administrations. And (personal opinion here) society as a whole is supportive of - indeed, has demanded and driven - these changes. We would not tolerate the US government spending 2% to 3% of the entire federal budget on a manned spaceflight program, and then losing an entire crew in a pre-launch accident, and then returning to launch in 18 months.
- goldensnit 9y agoI thought helium-3 was a viable and necessary resource to put people on the moon. Is it not?
- steve0210 9y agoIn order to efficiently place people into space we would need a robotics based economy. Robots would need to build the rockets and fly the rockets. Humans would design the rockets and tell them where to go. Mission control would be replaced with one flight director observing an AI which monitors everything.
- zamalek 9y agoAn additional reason is that expertise died out with the end of funding. We had exactly one generation that tackled this problem - there has been no opportunity for them to hand down their experience. We're not starting from scratch, but we're certainly worse-off than we were at the end of the space race - scientists and engineers will have to learn from books and papers, rather than having an expert around to guide them.
- ElijahLynn 9y agoAre most of the comments here based on the headline alone? This is a paywall and I am not seeing many comments discussing the article itself, just the headline (question).
- PatchMonkey 9y agoWaitWaitWait... Nasa had its peak funding during those Moon landing years. We've let that equipment dryrot, switched to new versions, run those into the ground, slashed the budget repeatedly (and again over NASA's climate change research), privatized everything possible, let the best engineers retire, underpaid and underutilized their replacements until they left... And somehow we have the gaul to wonder "why is going to the moon not working?" Its almost like we're asking for something for nothing. Scientists and Engineers need to eat too. We need to buy new hardware. Train new people. If we wait too long, Musk will buy Cape Canaveral. We've already let Houston get turned into a museum rather than a launch pad. I dont care how much you're gonna blame bureaucracy for this - this is poor leadership at the helm of our nation to gaslight folks this way.