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Is there much practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still? Modern robots are cheaper and can perform science more effectively than any human
by picture 2y ago
Is there much practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still? Modern robots are cheaper and can perform science more effectively than any human
- striking 2y agoBragging rights (ostensibly "practical" in a geopolitical, soft power projection sense)
- picture 2y agoDidn't we get to brag about it already? The value of continuing to have the capability seems to be outweighed by the costs of maintaining the facilities and equipment
- hammock 2y ago[flagged]
- jlund-molfese 2y agoI don’t think that’s true https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/feb/16/instagram-posts/no-google-didnt-confirm-that-the-1969-us-moon-land/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/feb/16/instagram-...
- hollerith 2y agoCan you provide a link? I have been unable to find any report of Putin's expressing such a disbelief. I did find a report that "a former chief of Russian space agency Roscosmos has voiced doubt over the authenticity of the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing", but of course that is not the same thing: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/russia-s-former-space-chief-doubts-us-landing-on-moon/2892170 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/russia-s-former-space-chief-...
- protomolecule 2y agoHere is Putin expressing belief: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40588895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40588895
- protomolecule 2y agoHere is Putin saying that Americans had landed on the Moon and it's impossible to fake a such thing. [0] Now please remember where you learned that 'fact' and at the very least stop trusting that source. At best, review all that you learned from them and discover more fakes. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wIK7ruiAdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wIK7ruiAdE
- zardo 2y agoYou don't get much bragging rights for being first to plant a flag on the Moon once China has a continuously manned outpost there.
- mrmuagi 2y agoIt looks like the RTT is 6 minutes (more or less depending on orbit) for packets send to mars, but despite that it does seem like the easier option yeah.
- shkkmo 2y agoNot really accurate at all. The lowest the RTT gets is six minutes but that is a brief period every couple of years. The longest RTT is 45 minutes. Even 6 minutes makes any kind of tele-operation infeasible and require system to function autonomously. This restricts the kinds of science that are currently possible.
- Phrodo_00 2y ago> can perform science more effectively than any human I wouldn't go that far, but we already had humans on the moon so we can get away with robots doing the science now. I still think sending astronauts to mars would speed up research, for example.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoI think a long term view is it’s the basis for building heavy industry in space as it has a lot of natural resources that can be exploited industrially and escape orbit velocities are much less from the moon than earth surface. This eventually leads to a general space infrastructure. If you believe the end of humanity is on earth then this probably isn’t convincing. Folks like myself believe we are inexorably driven to spread life as a function of what life is and we have no meaningful choice but to keep going. But as long as some subset of humanity believes in this humanity will keep investing in it. Not everyone has to be aligned and we can have many priorities at once, not the least of which is robotic science which I only see as mutually exclusive as long as there’s not plentiful private investment, which there is at the moment. I don’t see robotic exploration as suffering in the build out of extremely low cost launch capability and a general space infrastructure including moon infrastructure. I see it benefiting enormously as the costs and risks drop significantly.
- sho_hn 2y agoIf we ever get to heavy industrialization of lunar resources, how are we going to deal with the CO2 footprint of rockets?
- p1mrx 2y agoIn theory it's possible to make a carbon-neutral methane rocket based on atmospheric CO2, though that depends on how completely the methane can be burned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gas
- throwawaymaths 2y agoA spacex falcon 9 contains ~as much fuel as a 747. Note: fuel, not fuel + oxidizer Edit: falcon 9, not starship
- MarkusQ 2y agoSource? I get Starship 34,000,000 kg + 12,000,000 kg vs 747 ~200,000 liters ≅ 150,000 kg, or about 1/300 th of what Starship holds.
- pretendscholar 2y agoDistributing human populations to ensure survival. With current tech the lunar colony couldn't be self-sustaining but the ideal is that humans would be able to propagate and sustain themselves outside of Earth so that a single event couldn't end human civilization. Also creating a jobs program that will produce the technology necessary for a lunar colony will improve materials science, medical understanding, logistics.
- hosh 2y agoWe could also learn to live within the means of our ecology.
- sho_hn 2y agoThis sounds like the harder problem.
- tialaramex 2y agoNo, it's merely incredibly difficult. Sustainable living off Earth is far beyond that. Humans definitely can't leave. Humans are even less well suited to interstellar travel than they are to living at the bottom of the ocean, something they also don't do and have no idea how they could ever do. So, with tremendous effort humans could visit one of their neighbouring planets. All of these planets are terrible. Mars is by far more hostile to life than anywhere humans have even visited, let alone had a permanent settlement. But we could do it. To what end? Live here, or die here, those are your options and you should get used to it.
- tonynator 2y ago>To what end? To have the species survive if anything ends all life on Earth - apparently not a priority for you but it is for those that enjoy humanity existing. Also to explore and learn more about the universe we live in. Do you truly not see value in that? Have you never left the city/state/country you were born in?
- colechristensen 2y agoYes, humans living on other celestial bodies is a goal in itself, expanding us beyond Earth and a few people in LEO. Cities on the moon and Mars are a reasonable and achievable goal. There are resources which can much more easily be exploited with real people on premise, some people will want to live in different environments, there are opportunities for sport, entertainment, tourism, and plenty of industries which will be much more effective with skilled labor on site instead of meticulously planned missions which often fail and if they don't spend a whole bunch of effort overcomming the basics of operating.
- twothreeone 2y agoI would imagine (a) keep watch over the lunar atomics and (b) fend off PLA officers stationed there permanently after Chang'e-42.
- Teever 2y agoWhy does someone always do this in a thread about space stuff? Without fail there's always some negative Nelly who already knows the answer to their downer question. We get it. You don't care about space shit, most people don't. But why go derail a thread about a space accomplishment with negativity? Is there much practical reason for that?
- cratermoon 2y ago"can perform science more effectively than any human" is very disputable. If they are so much better, why does anyone get up off their couch and do field research? Just let the robots do it. Besides, it's human nature to explore, in person. As George Mallory said, "Because it's there."
- eichin 2y agoFor off planet research: because ( https://xkcd.com/695/ https://xkcd.com/695/ aside ) we don't care if the robots "die". Human space exploration has an enormous amount of overhead to keeping the humans alive at all; even the sensors humans bring with them are compromised by having to be operable in a spacesuit. Not saying that there isn't value to sending humans into space - it's just that that value isn't in gathering data for science, other than on the astronaut-subjects themselves.
- mytailorisrich 2y agoIt makes more sense to have a permanent human presence on the Moon than to aim for Mars. The Moon is both very near and very easy to communicate with so it is the perfect first place to learn about building a "colony" before moving on to Mars.
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoEstablishing a permanent presence on the moon would be a stepping stone to further exploration of other planets. (Mars in particular.) Since its only a 3-4 day trip, with transfer windows every month (and non-optimal ones essentially constantly). resupply missions and rotating astronauts/personnel are going to be much easier. Much less of a gravity well to deal with. The plan would be for in situ resource extraction and manufacturing. With enough of a human presence, projects like local construction of spacecraft become feasible. And something like a mass driver would be much more feasible on the moon. A big enough one and you're even considering interstellar probes ... It would require a consistent, sustained effort. But not astronomical in US budget terms. Maybe $20-$30 billion/year (about of 3-4% the defense budget)
- Zigurd 2y agoAnything beyond Earth orbit requires either multi-stage expendable rockets, which isn't economical for supporting a moon base, or in-orbit refueling that has better economics than expendable rockets, which depends on cheap rapid reusability. If you can't land, refuel, and fly without refurbishing the launch system, rocket engines, etc. you can't ship fuel to orbit cheaply enough to justify in-orbit refueling. Starship is a vastly better attempt at more of these goals than STS. But if it misses cost, or payload, or reliability goals it won't solve this problem. It is even possible that it will take too many attempts in which a ship and 39 engines are expended to even get close.
- philwelch 2y agoOr we can get the fuel from the moon. The moon has water ice, which means it has hydrogen and oxygen, which you can use as rocket propellant.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> practical reason that requires sending people to the moon still? The big one that robots can’t do is studying human biology in space. How do we fare long term on a foreign body? What does trauma medicine look like? How do we accommodate the diseases and disabilities that frequent our non-astronaut grade population? Is gestation, birth and development possible in low gravity? Et cetera. Then Moon provides the easiest place to do this at scale by virtu of being the closest place to Earth with in situ resources.
- lupusreal 2y agoNot much point sending robots to go look at Moon rocks if there's no pretext of sending people there. I mean, you could make some PhDs out of it I'm sure, but would that be worth the public expense? I don't think so.
- somenameforme 2y agoThis is a common misconception. Modern robots are very limited in their capabilities, out of necessity. Mars is a great example. Perseverance has the most capable drill of any rover, and it can drill up to 2.4 inches deep. [1] And these drills are used extremely sparingly because they tend to break rapidly, like any sort of moving part. Perseverance's top theoretic speed is around 0.07mph, and it's a speed demon compared to prior rovers. [2] Same reasons - the more you move the more things break, and the nearest repair shop is pretty far away. The first humans on Mars will almost certainly learn vastly more in a week than we've learned in 60+ years of probes and rovers! Beyond this though (and also the survival aspect as others have hit on), I'd simply mention the inspirational aspect. Many who lived through the Moon landings (as well as those who did not) see this as humanity's greatest achievement. And I think this sort of stuff helps to create a better future for a people. When asked what they want to be when they grow up, the most popular choice for American children today is a vlogger/YouTuber, the least popular is astronaut [3]. In China, the answers are completely reversed. Who's going to have the better generational outcome in 30 years? But of course this isn't just for children. So many people just seem completely devoid of hope and optimism for the future. And that's completely understandable the way things have been going for many decades now. But show literally anybody this video of the Falcon Heavy landing [4] and the first question you will always get is, "Is that real?" People just can't even believe what we're achieving, and I think doing even more of this, on a much larger scale, and making it all the more visible would really improve so many lives, and likely the entire country itself. Just read the comments to that video, to see how it impacts people, and those are friggin YouTube comments! [1] - https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-journey-to-mars/ https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/qa-perseverance-rovers-... [2] - https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-self-driving-on-mars https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-self-driving-on-mar... [3] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-much-rather-be-youtubers-than-astronauts/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/american-kids-would-... [4] - https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1704 https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1704
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wolfendin 2y agoRobots aren’t performing science, they’re doing one half of one step of the scientific method: collecting data in an experiment. It’s humans doing all the rest.
- troyvit 2y agoPenal colonies of course!
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoHumans won't survive long-term without colonizing other planets and/or star systems. There are existential threats already in motion besides climate change; Earth won't have any surface liquid water in about a billion years. While there is several times more water underground than on the surface, that may also not be locked away well enough for when the Sun becomes a red giant 4 billion years later.
- adastra22 2y agoAll of the science returns of the robotic missions to mars in the past three decades could have been done by a geologist in a space suit with a rock hammer in 15 minutes, and probably done better. Robots really, really suck. Also many people see the whole point to be expanding people out into the cosmos, not the science.