3 ms·

Days to the moon at an extreme cost with little to no benefit vs hours for the satellite if something goes wrong. Again we don't even have the technology to ma

Days to the moon at an extreme cost with little to no benefit vs hours for the satellite if something goes wrong. Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable. Two weeks a month on the dark side of the moon. "I don't see that at all. Unmanned satellites would make sense, but the surface (or possibly an aerostat for some planemos) is always going to be a much more human-friendly environment in terms of gravity and radiation shielding." You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it. This is circular reasoning. Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then. The knowledge we have obtained on earth will help us when we put stations in orbit around the planets we want to explore. The more solid we can make those stations the better for everything else. Which is why the moon makes sense as a next step. It's challenging but doable. No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds.

lmm 9y ago
> Days to the moon at an extreme cost with little to no benefit vs hours for the satellite if something goes wrong. Days versus hours - exactly. A step up in risk, to be sure, but not a huge one - realistically there aren't so many problems that won't kill you in the hours it would take to get home from the ISS but will kill you in the days it would take you to get home from the moon. > Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable. Space stations aren't profitable either. It's not about profit, it's about humanity spreading through the cosmos. > You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it. So how does a manned space station help with that? We already have satellites orbiting Mars and acting as communications relays. > Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then. "Knowledge of space stations will be valuable because we will build space stations because that will let us reuse our knowledge of space stations" is textbook circular reasoning. > No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds. So how do we get to there from here? I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first. Suppose the goal is Mars, or one of the Jovian moons, or Titan. How would an ISS 2.0 put us any closer to getting there than we are now? What is it that we can't do now that we would want to test out with an ISS 2.0? We're going to need surface habitats on these places, and building a surface habitat on the moon would let us test out the technologies and engineering that needs, in a place that's - relatively speaking - much quicker to get to and from, so safer and easier to iterate on. While a space station tells us some things that are relevant to building surface habitats, most of the things it tells us are only relevant to space stations. I simply don't see the need for long-term-manned space stations, and medium-term-manned space stations we can do already.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  It's not just a step up it's a factor up. Space stations are less expensive than moon bases so why do a moonbase? It teaches us nothing much more compared to a space station and cost a fraction. They help by being a habitable space station which can be docked with. It might even be a place to escape and wait for rescue if something goes bad on the planet a much cheaper way to rescue than having everything based on the planet. "I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first." It's not about corporate profit-and-loss it's a matter of making it unnecessarily expensive. There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon without any point that isn't mostly already solved by the ISS.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > Space stations are less expensive than moon bases so why do a moonbase? It teaches us nothing much more compared to a space station and cost a fraction. We need to learn how to build habitats off-Earth, out-of-atmosphere with all that entails (e.g. handling fine sharp-edged dust), and outside the van allen belts. And these things need to be closed systems that can be inhabited for decades at a minimum. At the same time, they'll be under nonzero gravity, and they will have access to bulk matter. That's a very different set of engineering challenges from a space station. > There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon But the cost-reduction techniques would be very different for planemo-surface bases than for space stations. E.g. a popular proposal for cheaper space stations is using inflatable modules to save having to ship up building materials, and that's a good idea for space stations. But on a surface under gravity, inflatables might not be structurally rigid enough, and building structures from the local soil might be a better option.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      Might, maybe etc lots of unknowns where each mistake is costly and can threaten to bring down the project. We have no idea so actually establishing a base on the moon isn't yet cheap enough that we can do it for the hell of it and we don't learn enough we aren't already learning with the space station. Let's solve getting people and material cheap into space, lets solve better AI, lets have some optimal automated building processes on earth then we can talk about moving people and material up on a base on the moon just for the fun of it.

lmm 9y ago

> Days to the moon at an extreme cost with little to no benefit vs hours for the satellite if something goes wrong. Days versus hours - exactly. A step up in risk, to be sure, but not a huge one - realistically there aren't so many problems that won't kill you in the hours it would take to get home from the ISS but will kill you in the days it would take you to get home from the moon. > Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable. Space stations aren't profitable either. It's not about profit, it's about humanity spreading through the cosmos. > You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it. So how does a manned space station help with that? We already have satellites orbiting Mars and acting as communications relays. > Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then. "Knowledge of space stations will be valuable because we will build space stations because that will let us reuse our knowledge of space stations" is textbook circular reasoning. > No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds. So how do we get to there from here? I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first. Suppose the goal is Mars, or one of the Jovian moons, or Titan. How would an ISS 2.0 put us any closer to getting there than we are now? What is it that we can't do now that we would want to test out with an ISS 2.0? We're going to need surface habitats on these places, and building a surface habitat on the moon would let us test out the technologies and engineering that needs, in a place that's - relatively speaking - much quicker to get to and from, so safer and easier to iterate on. While a space station tells us some things that are relevant to building surface habitats, most of the things it tells us are only relevant to space stations. I simply don't see the need for long-term-manned space stations, and medium-term-manned space stations we can do already.

ThomPete 9y ago
It's not just a step up it's a factor up. Space stations are less expensive than moon bases so why do a moonbase? It teaches us nothing much more compared to a space station and cost a fraction. They help by being a habitable space station which can be docked with. It might even be a place to escape and wait for rescue if something goes bad on the planet a much cheaper way to rescue than having everything based on the planet. "I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first." It's not about corporate profit-and-loss it's a matter of making it unnecessarily expensive. There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon without any point that isn't mostly already solved by the ISS.
- lmm 9y ago
  > Space stations are less expensive than moon bases so why do a moonbase? It teaches us nothing much more compared to a space station and cost a fraction. We need to learn how to build habitats off-Earth, out-of-atmosphere with all that entails (e.g. handling fine sharp-edged dust), and outside the van allen belts. And these things need to be closed systems that can be inhabited for decades at a minimum. At the same time, they'll be under nonzero gravity, and they will have access to bulk matter. That's a very different set of engineering challenges from a space station. > There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon But the cost-reduction techniques would be very different for planemo-surface bases than for space stations. E.g. a popular proposal for cheaper space stations is using inflatable modules to save having to ship up building materials, and that's a good idea for space stations. But on a surface under gravity, inflatables might not be structurally rigid enough, and building structures from the local soil might be a better option.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Might, maybe etc lots of unknowns where each mistake is costly and can threaten to bring down the project. We have no idea so actually establishing a base on the moon isn't yet cheap enough that we can do it for the hell of it and we don't learn enough we aren't already learning with the space station. Let's solve getting people and material cheap into space, lets solve better AI, lets have some optimal automated building processes on earth then we can talk about moving people and material up on a base on the moon just for the fun of it.