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Call me cynical but I think this whole recent moon effort is just busy work so we don't have to work on actually pushing the bounds of human exploration by goin
by causi 3y ago
Call me cynical but I think this whole recent moon effort is just busy work so we don't have to work on actually pushing the bounds of human exploration by going for Mars. Way more politically palatable to distribute a few tens of billions of dollars to various constituencies to redo things we've already done than to risk failure trying to do something new.
- XorNot 3y agoIt's worth noting that SpaceX's major development change is to "hardware rich" and test often. That's something you can do launching rockets. It's something you can do in orbit. And for deep space the moon is close enough (and by many measures, harder then Mars to land on) to safely yet effectively test practical systems of the type you'd want to go to Mars (consider: Mars' atmosphere is incredibly thin, so it's more Moonlike then Earth like).
- causi 3y agoOh the launch systems and landing systems are fine. I'm referring to plans on building a permanent moon base.