6 ms·

Is there an actual commercial reason for landing on the moon? What was this lander going to do? It seems like a lot of missions from various companies and co

Is there an actual commercial reason for landing on the moon? What was this lander going to do? It seems like a lot of missions from various companies and countries are trying to get to the moon and they're all crashing. Is it just a rite of passage for a space program? What is the point of this

swader999 3y ago
Mine cheese.
snacktaster 3y ago
Yeah I'm curious too. It seems like if there was actually some commercial benefit to this then USA would be dropping rovers on the moon every week. But it's mostly lost interest now.
- dylan604 3y ago
  If you're a private company looking to build a mining base station, tourist hotel, or any other thing a private company might want to do, then it's best to get the kinks worked out by practicing with an unmanned lander a few times first
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > mining base station What would you be mining on the moon and what for?
    - dylan604 3y ago
      If I told you that, I'd break my NDA and lose my job. If you're so curious, go fund your own start up ;-) I have no idea. One movie suggested H3. Others think mining water ice would be an idea. Others think you can use the regolith to 3D print stuff. I'm not the private company launching lunar landers, but I was just making up hypotheticals on why someone might want to practice landing things on the moon.
    - FredPret 3y ago
      Rmemeber that whatever you mine up there is valuable because of the position further out of our gravity well, not just because of mineral content
      - krisoft 3y ago
        Okay, but that asks the same question: What do you want to use the stuff for? Imagine that I told you that I have a new venture to mine slate in the arctic. And when asked I would tell you that it is very expensive to transport slate from the already existing mines to the arctic, which makes the arctic mined slate that much more valuable. You would immediately see that this is true, as long as there is someone who wants slate in the arctic, and very much not true if there is nobody there who needs pretty roofs or blackboards. Somehow with space this is less obvious?
        FredPret 3y ago
        You can't build anything useful or fun with slate in the arctic. But you can set up low/zero g manufacturing on/near the moon, military installations, incredible observatories, and unique tourist facilities. You can also set up space habs / moon bases for people to live in in the far future which would spread our bets as a species in a way that living in the arctic doesn't.
    - throwaway743 3y ago
      Helium-3 for fusion.
- relativ575 3y ago
  Can not be further from the truth: https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services This mission itself is in preparation for future missions contracted by NASA
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    I think Artemis is largely going in the wrong direction. It's not really unfair to say the main reason it exists is to give the SLS a reason to exist. The grand ambition of Artemis is to recreate the Apollo landing (with some identity politics injected), and create a mini-ISS around the Moon. Even if you took us 10 years in the future and this was achieved (which one can very safely say it will not be), it would not be particularly relevant. The reason I say it's the wrong direction is not only the lack of ambition, but cost! Artemis is planned to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just absurd given our trajectory with space. This (back to the topic of this thread) company sent their rover to the moon on a $67 million SpaceX launch. Add the cost of their rover and operations, and it's likely this entire project, of landing a rover on the moon, cost less than $0.1 billion. The future of space belongs to whoever can get these costs down as much as possible. Because the goals are big - like industrializing the Moon. Water is enough to make rocket fuel, simple raw resources can be exploited to develop things in a near 0-g environment, and so on. At NASA level costs these sort of concepts would bankrupt the entire country. So it's going to be whichever entity/nation can operate most cost-effectively that will decide the future of space. And, for better or for worse, I know who I'd expect to win that game.
uni_rule 3y ago
Acquire neat rocks to flex on lesser nations with
- walrus01 3y ago
  Bonus points if you attach some to plaques and give them away to various nations which then lose some of them.
  - belter 3y ago
    "Stolen and missing Moon rocks" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks
    - walrus01 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_sample_displays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_sample_displays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_lunar_sample_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_lunar_sample_display Assuming it wasn't lost or stolen since 1970, I wonder what the Taliban is doing with its moon rock.
    - belter 3y ago
      The Wikipedia article is missing another case. A rock taken by Apollo 17 from Taurus-Littrow was gifted by Richard Nixon to Portugal in 1973. It was in exhibition at the Lisbon Planetarium but got stolen 11 July 1985. https://www.jn.pt/nacional/portugal-teve-uma-rocha-lunar-mas-foi-roubada-11110956.html https://www.jn.pt/nacional/portugal-teve-uma-rocha-lunar-mas... So next time some suspicious character in Lisbon, proposes to sell you a piece of the Moon...it might be real.
WillPostForFood 3y ago
It was carrying two rovers, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and the second from the UAE. This is the equiv of SpaceX launching a NASA satellite.
pseudostem 3y ago
Not my opinion - I saw a compelling video of some prof on reddit a few years ago. His argument went something like this: name the richest businessman from the time of Columbus/ Amerigo. Or a very powerful politician/ socialite? Progress is a derivative of us pursuing the unknown. That is why we do what we do. Disclaimer: I've lost a lot of the language behind the original argument, but as a sceptic it did make a lot of sense to me at that time. And hopefully the meaning behind the original message has not been lost due to my bad phrasing.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Then again many still remember “Queen Isabella of Spain”. It’s hard to predict what will be famous and remembered centuries from now - Musk could be entirely successful at all he wants and does and be remembered no more than by those obsessed with early earth history.
- perihelions 3y ago
  - "name the richest businessman from the time of Columbus/ Amerigo" The copper monopolist. His name is easy to remember, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Fugger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Fugger (Some crossover: the bio says he was a major investor in some of those spice-route-seeking expeditions, possibly including Magellan's).
throwaway743 3y ago
Helium-3
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
somenameforme 3y ago
The big reason not much happened in space in the past was cost. The Space Shuttle ended up costing around $60,000/kg to send stuff to space. SpaceX brought that down to $2,600/kg with the Falcon 9. And if Starship lives up to its potential, you're looking at $10/kg. You literally cannot overstate the impact of that change. Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. And for big players, the cost of travel itself will approach 0% of total costs. So basically the future of space is going to be decided by who can most effectively leverage this new frontier that's suddenly becoming completely accessible. In a way there are some analogs with the internet. We're in that critical early phase where really good ideas, like selling books online, should still sound pretty stupid to most people. One thing that's very different though is that the change is not even remotely linear. We're going from room-sized glorified calculators to high powered laptops, practically overnight.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  > Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. We're already at a point where - at least using companies in the UK - it costs about the same to launch a cubesat as it does to buy a poverty-spec cloth-seats-no-aircon Ford Focus. It's mad that I could launch a 10cm 1kg cubesat - think in terms of a bag of sugar - for so little money, and all I need to do is ring a guy a couple of hour's drive south in Glasgow and wave a credit card to do it.
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    It's already cheaper to fly between UK cities via Barcelona than to take the train; in ten years time it'll be cheaper to go from London to Edinburgh via the L2 Lagrange point.
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      That's more a factor of the price of train tickets. It costs £40 per person to travel from Glasgow to Dundee even booking in advance, making it slightly more expensive for one journey for one person than the cheapest car I've ever bought - and roughly the same price as a tank of LPG in my old Range Rover.

swader999 3y ago

Mine cheese.

snacktaster 3y ago

Yeah I'm curious too. It seems like if there was actually some commercial benefit to this then USA would be dropping rovers on the moon every week. But it's mostly lost interest now.

dylan604 3y ago
If you're a private company looking to build a mining base station, tourist hotel, or any other thing a private company might want to do, then it's best to get the kinks worked out by practicing with an unmanned lander a few times first
- krisoft 3y ago
  > mining base station What would you be mining on the moon and what for?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    If I told you that, I'd break my NDA and lose my job. If you're so curious, go fund your own start up ;-) I have no idea. One movie suggested H3. Others think mining water ice would be an idea. Others think you can use the regolith to 3D print stuff. I'm not the private company launching lunar landers, but I was just making up hypotheticals on why someone might want to practice landing things on the moon.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Rmemeber that whatever you mine up there is valuable because of the position further out of our gravity well, not just because of mineral content
    - krisoft 3y ago
      Okay, but that asks the same question: What do you want to use the stuff for? Imagine that I told you that I have a new venture to mine slate in the arctic. And when asked I would tell you that it is very expensive to transport slate from the already existing mines to the arctic, which makes the arctic mined slate that much more valuable. You would immediately see that this is true, as long as there is someone who wants slate in the arctic, and very much not true if there is nobody there who needs pretty roofs or blackboards. Somehow with space this is less obvious?
      - FredPret 3y ago
        You can't build anything useful or fun with slate in the arctic. But you can set up low/zero g manufacturing on/near the moon, military installations, incredible observatories, and unique tourist facilities. You can also set up space habs / moon bases for people to live in in the far future which would spread our bets as a species in a way that living in the arctic doesn't.
  - throwaway743 3y ago
    Helium-3 for fusion.
relativ575 3y ago
Can not be further from the truth: https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services This mission itself is in preparation for future missions contracted by NASA
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I think Artemis is largely going in the wrong direction. It's not really unfair to say the main reason it exists is to give the SLS a reason to exist. The grand ambition of Artemis is to recreate the Apollo landing (with some identity politics injected), and create a mini-ISS around the Moon. Even if you took us 10 years in the future and this was achieved (which one can very safely say it will not be), it would not be particularly relevant. The reason I say it's the wrong direction is not only the lack of ambition, but cost! Artemis is planned to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is just absurd given our trajectory with space. This (back to the topic of this thread) company sent their rover to the moon on a $67 million SpaceX launch. Add the cost of their rover and operations, and it's likely this entire project, of landing a rover on the moon, cost less than $0.1 billion. The future of space belongs to whoever can get these costs down as much as possible. Because the goals are big - like industrializing the Moon. Water is enough to make rocket fuel, simple raw resources can be exploited to develop things in a near 0-g environment, and so on. At NASA level costs these sort of concepts would bankrupt the entire country. So it's going to be whichever entity/nation can operate most cost-effectively that will decide the future of space. And, for better or for worse, I know who I'd expect to win that game.

uni_rule 3y ago

Acquire neat rocks to flex on lesser nations with

walrus01 3y ago
Bonus points if you attach some to plaques and give them away to various nations which then lose some of them.
- belter 3y ago
  "Stolen and missing Moon rocks" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks
  - walrus01 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_sample_displays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_sample_displays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_lunar_sample_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_lunar_sample_display Assuming it wasn't lost or stolen since 1970, I wonder what the Taliban is doing with its moon rock.
  - belter 3y ago
    The Wikipedia article is missing another case. A rock taken by Apollo 17 from Taurus-Littrow was gifted by Richard Nixon to Portugal in 1973. It was in exhibition at the Lisbon Planetarium but got stolen 11 July 1985. https://www.jn.pt/nacional/portugal-teve-uma-rocha-lunar-mas-foi-roubada-11110956.html https://www.jn.pt/nacional/portugal-teve-uma-rocha-lunar-mas... So next time some suspicious character in Lisbon, proposes to sell you a piece of the Moon...it might be real.

WillPostForFood 3y ago

It was carrying two rovers, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and the second from the UAE. This is the equiv of SpaceX launching a NASA satellite.

pseudostem 3y ago

Not my opinion - I saw a compelling video of some prof on reddit a few years ago. His argument went something like this: name the richest businessman from the time of Columbus/ Amerigo. Or a very powerful politician/ socialite? Progress is a derivative of us pursuing the unknown. That is why we do what we do. Disclaimer: I've lost a lot of the language behind the original argument, but as a sceptic it did make a lot of sense to me at that time. And hopefully the meaning behind the original message has not been lost due to my bad phrasing.

bombcar 3y ago
Then again many still remember “Queen Isabella of Spain”. It’s hard to predict what will be famous and remembered centuries from now - Musk could be entirely successful at all he wants and does and be remembered no more than by those obsessed with early earth history.
perihelions 3y ago
- "name the richest businessman from the time of Columbus/ Amerigo" The copper monopolist. His name is easy to remember, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Fugger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Fugger (Some crossover: the bio says he was a major investor in some of those spice-route-seeking expeditions, possibly including Magellan's).

throwaway743 3y ago

Helium-3

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

somenameforme 3y ago

The big reason not much happened in space in the past was cost. The Space Shuttle ended up costing around $60,000/kg to send stuff to space. SpaceX brought that down to $2,600/kg with the Falcon 9. And if Starship lives up to its potential, you're looking at $10/kg. You literally cannot overstate the impact of that change. Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. And for big players, the cost of travel itself will approach 0% of total costs. So basically the future of space is going to be decided by who can most effectively leverage this new frontier that's suddenly becoming completely accessible. In a way there are some analogs with the internet. We're in that critical early phase where really good ideas, like selling books online, should still sound pretty stupid to most people. One thing that's very different though is that the change is not even remotely linear. We're going from room-sized glorified calculators to high powered laptops, practically overnight.

Gordonjcp 3y ago
> Space flights costs will start to become completely viable for small companies or even individuals. We're already at a point where - at least using companies in the UK - it costs about the same to launch a cubesat as it does to buy a poverty-spec cloth-seats-no-aircon Ford Focus. It's mad that I could launch a 10cm 1kg cubesat - think in terms of a bag of sugar - for so little money, and all I need to do is ring a guy a couple of hour's drive south in Glasgow and wave a credit card to do it.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  It's already cheaper to fly between UK cities via Barcelona than to take the train; in ten years time it'll be cheaper to go from London to Edinburgh via the L2 Lagrange point.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    That's more a factor of the price of train tickets. It costs £40 per person to travel from Glasgow to Dundee even booking in advance, making it slightly more expensive for one journey for one person than the cheapest car I've ever bought - and roughly the same price as a tank of LPG in my old Range Rover.