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You're really missing the point of going to the moon really, really hard.
by ericd 14y ago
You're really missing the point of going to the moon really, really hard.
- arethuza 14y agoWhich was to get to the Moon before the Soviets?
- simonh 14y agoCan it be a coincidence that the moon rock-poor USSR collapsed while the moon rock-rich USA is now the world's only real superpower? OK, so maybe I'm pushing this a bit...
- cema 14y agoUSSR was not moon rock-poor, it had a reasonable amount of moon rock extracted by automatic space craft (more precisely, space craft not inhabited by humans). The point of reaching the Moon is different, it's to spark the imagination and inspire. And one of the reasons the USSR collapsed is, btw, the ideas it was based on were not inspiring any longer (an understatement!)
- simonh 14y agoUSA: 382 kg USSR: 0.32 kg Recovered from meteorites: 48 kg But that's from Wikipedia, so you can add a few grains of salt to those figures. One of the main reasons the moon missions were cut short is because the public lost interest, just as they did with the Space Shuttle. The inspiration argument only gets you so far, and we've been that far already.
- ericd 14y agoThe original point was competing with the Soviets and generating national pride, sure. The point now would be to get practice with the harder problems of survival in space, as a trial run for the marathon that is going to Mars. Every time we as a nation do something that seems audacious, we raise the morale of the nation and energize the populace to work harder on pretty much everything else. We could certainly use a shot of national pride to the arm after the events of the past decade...