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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

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

> 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.