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I still think the Voyagers 1 and 2 are bigger feats. Moon landings were cool as an indirect way to develop ballistic missile technology in such a vast scale th

I still think the Voyagers 1 and 2 are bigger feats. Moon landings were cool as an indirect way to develop ballistic missile technology in such a vast scale that nowadays the world's peace relies on this kind of deterrence - Good. And they gave as huge tech advancements as added benefits. Moon landings in 2020s are vanity projects for billionaires with very diminished added benefits. The apollo program was staggering. The N-th moon landing will be 'meh'

adventured 7y ago
You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine and instead focusing on the public propaganda value of the nth landing (the "meh" part). The most important part of a technological adoption process is making a thing routine. That's where most of the value is in fact derived. That is true of all technology that is made far less inexpensive and far more routine. We're deriving drastically more value out of space now than we did with Apollo and we're spending a lot less money to do it. That will accelerate. Billionaires perfecting regularly landing on the moon would have a massive benefit of taking a hard-to-accomplish space task and turning it into a common task. It's the exact opposite of being an implied low value vanity project. The ability to then use the moon for manufacturing, storage, basing and experimentation has very large benefits to working on Mars and more broadly in space generally.
- dwighttk 7y ago
  >You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine which is?
  - Paradigma11 7y ago
    Build an industrial moon base with a mass driver. Build a few thousand kinetic impactors in space. Decommision your nuclear weapons which cost 5*10^10$/year. Profit.
- buboard 7y ago
  there is value to space travel for exploration, but space travel is currently promoted for tourist purposes. There is nothing wrong with that, but companies won't offer anything beyond that because going on a 6 month space trip to mars is torture rather than tourism.

adventured 7y ago

You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine and instead focusing on the public propaganda value of the nth landing (the "meh" part). The most important part of a technological adoption process is making a thing routine. That's where most of the value is in fact derived. That is true of all technology that is made far less inexpensive and far more routine. We're deriving drastically more value out of space now than we did with Apollo and we're spending a lot less money to do it. That will accelerate. Billionaires perfecting regularly landing on the moon would have a massive benefit of taking a hard-to-accomplish space task and turning it into a common task. It's the exact opposite of being an implied low value vanity project. The ability to then use the moon for manufacturing, storage, basing and experimentation has very large benefits to working on Mars and more broadly in space generally.

dwighttk 7y ago
>You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine which is?
- Paradigma11 7y ago
  Build an industrial moon base with a mass driver. Build a few thousand kinetic impactors in space. Decommision your nuclear weapons which cost 5*10^10$/year. Profit.
buboard 7y ago
there is value to space travel for exploration, but space travel is currently promoted for tourist purposes. There is nothing wrong with that, but companies won't offer anything beyond that because going on a 6 month space trip to mars is torture rather than tourism.