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“ a commercially viable constellation of lunar satellites”???? “ Commercial bodies could use innovative technologies developed for the Moon to create new servi
by valuearb 5y ago
“ a commercially viable constellation of lunar satellites”????
“ Commercial bodies could use innovative technologies developed for the Moon to create new services and products on Earth, which would create new jobs and boost prosperity.”
You know what the engineers working on this project could have been doing instead? Work on projects that directly benefit earth even more. Instead of this pork barrel project without a direct use.
The biggest factor by far in making lunar exploration and development cheaper is mastering in-orbit refueling. That enables hundreds of tons of cargo to be cheaply delivered to the lunar surface.
That means easily building lunar satellite constellations when needed. It also means we won’t need the bloody sores of the Gateway to Nowhere and SLS bleeding exploration programs dry.
- edgyquant 5y agoI will never understand this attitude. Large nation states are able to work on more than one thing and expanding capabilities on and around the moon will directly benefit the Earth one day.
- mturmon 5y agoYes. Facilitating communications is just a general good thing. The improvised relay system we have around Mars has been important to fast relay of data from the rovers. It has also allowed us to more closely observe EDL sequences so that if something goes wrong, we will learn what it was so we can fix it.
- IshKebab 5y agoThat's not guaranteed by any measure. Projects can just be a complete waste of time.
- wolverine876 5y agoI don't understand the parent response: I'm sure you know that money, time, and talent are all constrained, and everyone, from a child with an allowance to the CEO of Google to the President of the U.S. has to choose priorities. All of economics is about allocating those resources. Even within NASA, they have to choose some project and reject many more.
- edgyquant 5y agoYes, but NASA doesn’t exactly have a huge budget compared to the overall Federal budget.
- wolverine876 5y agoI don't understand: The comment says "but", yet then seems to support my point in the GP: If NASA has a smaller budget, then their choices are even limited by available resources.
- barbazoo 5y agoIt's a zero sum game though. Every dollar spent on some far away possibility somewhere in space is a dollar less spent on issues that exist here and now and need crazy amounts of money to solve.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoYou can always makes the argument that money can be better spent elsewhere. It’s just not a compelling argument.
- Shadonototro 5y agodifferent teams for different tasks you know, there are more than 1 people on earth