The moon mission and ICBMs have almost nothing to do with each other, unlike the first satellite, which was a clear demonstration of the capability to deliver intercontinental payloads and was launched on the rocket literally designed to be able to deliver nuclear payloads to the continental US.
The moon mission had only one goal: to save the face after the US has lost all meaningful milestones to the Soviet Union and to "win" the space race by moving the goalpost. I am quite confident, that if the Soviets has managed to land on the Moon first, the goalpost would've been landing on Mars.
With rapidly dropping launch costs there's valid industrial applications in orbit and quite a few startups working on building things in LEO and bringing them back down. Microgravity is incredibly valuable in manufacturing, the Brits worked that out in the 1700's with shot towers. Same with ultra low temps and vacuum conditions.
It's really weird the spin on this. Space X rockets (and others) blow up all the time, it's part of the R&D process. So not sure why this is being reported so negatively (well, actually, I do, of course...)
> Space X rockets (and others) blow up all the time
SpaceX has done ~227 successful Falcon missions in a row. Those rockets do NOT "blow up all the time". Further, the success rate of the Falcon 9 is 247/249. Meaning, 99.20%. For the block 5 variant it is 192/192 or 100% success rate.
SpaceX is also developing some rockets. You seem to be comparing rockets which are under development and where SpaceX often gives a low probability of success with missions that are supposed to work. The development rockets are NOT in production, they are NOT used to bring cargo in space. It's really apples vs oranges.
> So not sure why this is being reported so negatively (well, actually, I do, of course...)
Instead of giving some stupid hint just say what you wanted to say. Up to now what you said doesn't make sense to me, so no why not explain the rest as well.
I think it's because Luna-24 nearly 5 decades ago was a success, and reported Soviet success rates of their probe programs were 100% (despite the actual number being lower), alongside some cheekiness due to Russian timeline being chosen to land just before the Indian mission.
I don't think that such a failure of a 50 year old technology with a previous "100%" success rate is that weird for people to have such a take about. I think it is weird that you suggest SpaceX rockets are blowing up all the time, when a much more direct and accurate comparison would be the Japanese/Israeli lander failure.
Do we consider Japan/Israel serious contenders to NASA/ESA in space here? Probably not in the same way as India and China.
It wasn't a rocket that blew up. The launch was successful. Something failed on the Luna 25 spacecraft itself when it was moving to a pre-landing orbit, and it crashed into the Moon.
That kind of thing just doesn't happen to NASA and ESA very much.
It might be true but I doubt a sanctioned nation will be able to continue a largely unproductive enterprise at this scale. They have definitely been punching above their weight so far though, unfortunately it will probably fizzle out soon
Have you noticed who Russia shares it's borders with? Go read about which chips the devastatingly effective Lancet 3 drone contains (hint: made in 2022 & 2023).
Plus, it's been widely reported that Russian military industrial output is way up with factories working 3 shifts, etc. We are not talking about illiterate Afghanis.
Yes, they absolutely were, but their golden era is long past. The Soyuz is a workhouse but it's also basically a 1960s design, and Russia isn't even trying to build reusable rockets.
I don't dislike Russia. I dislike what the Russian government is doing to the world, and the peril that it creates for us all. I dislike the stubborn nationalistic gullibility among some Russians that is aiding this. And I dislike the cynical destruction of hope and opportunity for young Russians. They, and all of us, deserve better.
You basically proved my point: maybe you don't "dislike" them, but you are looking at their space program through an emotional lens of how you "feel" about them, not based on their actual technical merit.
It's an easy trap to fall into, but a dangerous one. We've also seen it manifested in the war prognosticating ("they're a bunch of drunks who will run out of missiles soon!"). Well, apparently there are some sober ones.
The language of nasa is starting to ramp up. When they fire Boeing and rent SpaceX rockets we’ll know things are getting serious.
I also think this is a great example of cognitive dissonance we tech people display, “oh we’re going to the moon in the name of freedom to stop the Chinese claiming all the resources for themselves. That’s good. I like space travel.”
Reality is, we’re off to do the same thing we’ve always done, fight over control of resources. There’s hope in knowing that throughout its history, there’s one thing the US has done competently.
I sometimes like to remind myself that there are lots of things we do competently here in the U.S. Our medical system, for example, converts a public problem into private profit in a way that is unrivaled in the developed world.
- Puerto Rico
- U.S. Virgin Islands
- Guam
- Northern Mariana Islands
- American Samoa
- Baker Island
- Howland Island
- Jarvis Island
- Johnston Atoll
- Kingman Reef
- Midway Atoll
- Palmyra Atoll
- Wake Island
However, we also lost a bunch of territories between 1948 and 1982, particularly the Philippines and the Panama Canal. Can you imagine how much richer we'd be if we had developed the Philippines into a manufacturing hub right before China became one?
Imagine how much of a hypocrite we'd be if we taxed the Philippines without representation, or how different politics would be if 113M Filippinos voted in American elections...
What resources, exactly? The moon is a shit place to go for basically anything. We’d be much better off trying for near earth asteroids.
And no, a lunar base is not a good launching spot to get to other places in the solar system. You’re much better off with large orbital bases for that so you don’t have to waste reaction mass getting to and from the surface of a heavy body without atmosphere.
Access to this water will mark the first Space based military confrontation between Earth nations.
"How much water is on the Moon?": "...Based on remote observations by radar instruments aboard Chandrayaan-1 and LRO, the lunar poles have over 600 billion kilograms of water ice. That’s enough to fill at least 240,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools..." - https://www.planetary.org/articles/water-on-the-moon-guide
The ISS isn’t in a stable orbit and needs constant though low levels of thrust to maintain its position. You could actually have a more stable orbit over the moon, but getting to it would a lot more deltaV for seemingly zero benefit.
Right-because as far as I know the orbit of the iss is unstable because it’s so low that there’s a very small amount of atmosphere there, enough to eventually slow it down. No atmosphere on the moon.
The moons gravity is sufficiently low that you can build a space elevator out of already existing materials[1]
That's a big deal, because it vastly simplifies orbital infrastructure, which in turn makes it realistic to think of returning materials to Earth or sending them to resupply ships further out.
Tell me: if a space elevator on the Moon is theoretically possible, using materials which already exist, then why do you conclude it definitely can't happen?
Because on Earth there's a real problem: you need carbon nanotubes to do it. And not just, the ones we have, but perfectly formed, seriously long carbon nanotubes (depending on weaving techniques you can get up to 80% UTS, I can't remember if this is enough).
We don't have these. We may never have these. It may be energetically impossible to build and maintain these.
But the moon space elevator doesn't have that problem. A number of existing materials in use today meet the necessary strength/weight requirements for lunar gravity. You can just go and buy them. If you went to the moon with them, you could drop a very long tether from orbit down to the surface and it would work.
The main reason we don't have a space elevator on the moon is the feasibility of moving materials to the moon to build it. But that's a limitation which applies to...all things Moon related. Moving thousands of tons to build a Lunar base or research station has exactly the same problems. It is theoretically possible but logistically infeasible at the moment, but not insurmountable.
That's different - in an important way - from requiring materials which don't currently exist in sufficient quantities, or purity, using manufacturing techniques which don't exist and may never exist.
I fail to understand how going to Mars is sensible. It is a dead planet. It had water and even possibly life before Earth. It is a lesson for which where Earth is headed by our actions. I don't understand how accelerating climate change and the Earth towards a dead planet to get to a dead planet makes any sense.
I'd appreciate not being called a liar, whether you think I am wrong or not. (Edit: Parent comment has since been edited.)
Developing, testing, and sending the massive rockets required for human travels to Mars, not to mention the other supporting systems development required over sending only unmanned systems, has "about 0%" affect on climate change? The environmental and ecosystem damage that rockets do is alone incredibly disruptive.
I simply see little reason, aside from ego, to send humans to Mars.
Being wrong is not lying. (Edit: Again parent comment was edited.) However, I am not wrong with currently presented facts, of which you are free to bring yourself and haven't as of yet.
> Indeed, according to the NOAA report, a single passenger aboard a rocket is responsible for 100 times more climate-changing pollution than a passenger aboard an airplane.
> The researchers found that this level of activity would increase annual temperatures in the stratosphere by 0.5 – 2° Celsius or approximately 1-4°Farenheit, which would change global circulation patterns by slowing the subtropical jet streams as much as 3.5%, and weakening the stratospheric overturning circulation.
Agreed. "Q: What is the difference between a million and a billion. A: About a billion" (don't remember the source). Space travel carbon costs are as close to 0% as makes no difference. There are about 8,000 commercial planes in the air right now.
The parent commenter edited their comments several times, so the argument there now is different than it was.
My original comment above does not say that rockets should be the top focus on reducing climate change. It says they are a contributor to climate change, which they are. I don't see why we're wanting to send humans to Mars and doing so will thus needlessly increase the impact of rockets on the environment.
Yes, there are worse things than rockets, but the impact is definitely not zero, and more and more rockets are going off, so the impact will only increase. The rockets required for human flight are much, much larger than those for unmanned missions. Further, the negative affect of rockets on the local environment, that is local to the launch sites, is very underrated. As noted in the linked article from the NOAA, the impact of rockets needs more study, and the impact is different than airplanes and is estimated to increase the temperature of the stratosphere by degrees, and not a fraction of degrees. This has downstream effects that are not good and is again different than airplanes.
Lastly, yes, planes are bad, too, and we should absolutely reconsider plane fuel and flight use.
> I fail to understand how going to Mars is sensible.
It isn't. It's a relic of intuitions born in our ancestral environment when exploration tended to be profitable. But that's because our ancestral explorations all took place in the relatively benign environment of earth.
It's barely realistic to do a sample return mission to Mars. Sending humans there is a pipe dream.
Maybe a cold answer, but if we could establish a self-sustaining Mars colony, then we can probably find ways to cope with ecological collapse on earth as well.
It's just, what could possibly work on Mars - domes and such - might not be the solution we want on Earth. But again with the current level of climate concern, we might very well land under a dome as a best case scenario.
"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars."
While that quote is intentionally more poetry than science (it's from Babylon 5) it reflects a kernel of the truth. Right now, we have all of our eggs in one basket. We must act with great care toward that basket, surely. But we should also strive as a species to see that there is more than one basket. Mars is the first baby step toward the stars, and we should go to the stars.
That is overly sentimental and romantic and doesn't match reality. The effort to sustain life on Mars is more than we know, and it is much, much, much, much more effort to sustain life on Mars (even if we knew how to do it) than it is to address our problems here on Earth. And say we go to Mars, which we can basically simulate here on Earth anyway. How does that get us closer "to the stars"?
If we can't survive here on Earth, literally the most perfect habitat for us, then what in the world is the point of "going to the stars", whatever that means in the first place? What are we going to do there? Destroy whatever secondary Earth we find? What physics is there to say that we can even get to another solar system before we destroy the habitability of the Earth?
We can "go to the stars" without sending man out first. I still see no current reason to send humans to Mars other than to waste resources.
> Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out.
Yea, and that's a minimum of 400-500 million years out, and it's going to get a lot hotter before it goes cold. And umpteen million other things on Earth, such as the geological structure, will have drastically changed by then. You shouldn't act like humanity actually has the ability to effectively worry about such a date when we can't even do most stuff today with any longer than a year or two horizon. The likelihood of disaster, such as asteroid or meteor impact or a Venus-type situation or other ecosystem collapse scenarios, before the Sun exhausts itself is basically 99.<however many 9s you want>%. Going to Mars doesn't give us anymore data on how to escape the Sun's evolution.
And I highly question any claim that humanity even has the ability to be an interstellar species, which is a separate question from capability.
I'm perfectly fine with vaporizing when our Sun decides to go supernova on us.
Who are we? Just a species which won evolutionary lottery in one way or another and dominate a planet with what we do best.
Exploring what's out there is exciting, yes, but if we're going to ruin everywhere like our pale blue dot, I think it's for greater good that we go extinct on this marble.
Going to Moon has been a publicity stunt (to prove that the US can do it faster than the Soviets, ergo the democracy-capitalism system is better than totalitarian communism), and so will be the travel to Mars. There are no tangible benfits to be drawn from either of them - it's all about propaganda.
I wonder how much synergy there is in developing a Moon vs Mars mission. I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap. If the plan is to launch Mars missions from the Moon, then the overlap is obvious.
The only advantage to the moon is less DeltaV and travel time required.
The moon is actually a much harder place to have a long term base than Mars. With the moon you either get cooked for ~2 weeks and then freeze for ~2 weeks or you set down at the poles and constantly freeze. The Apollo missions where timed to get out before things got hot. The Mars atmosphere is thin, but provides ready access to nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon plus tiny trace amounts of hydrogen and even some noble gasses. The Moon is just shy of vacuum and would be very difficult to extract significant quantities of anything useful.
So going to the moon first means solving all sorts of problems than don’t help a Mars mission.
I'm not certain I agree with you about the only advantages: the moon also has the advantage of being much closer for emergency supply and rescue missions.
The optimal place for a Moon base is likely one of the permanently lit parts near the poles, which are thought to stay at a fairly constant -50 C or so.
For comparison, the average surface temperature on Mars is -60 C.
The longest lit places we know of are lit ~94% of the year but then experience even longer periods of deep freeze. They also don’t get much sunlight, and having a base there would create a long shadow. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S00191035100013...
Multi month moon bases could be an intermediary before going to the moon, but those spots still get really cold.
The Moon is very near and it's still possible to have near real time communication with it.
Going to the Moon helps learning about and solving many problems that will help on Mars for much cheaper and without incurring months and months of space travel.
Show me people living on the Moon permanently then we can discuss trying that on Mars. Otherwise it is indeed just for the show like the Moon landings.
A society can do multiple things at a time, and it's a more efficient use of resources to do so. Progress made in an activity versus resources put into it is generally logarithmic or even asymptotic when investing extreme amounts of resources, so if you have a huge amount of resources to spend (like a country does), you can get more done in total if you spread them out a bit instead of focusing on one thing at a time. Sticking another billion dollars into fixing housing would have a negligible difference. Finding solutions to something like that requires experimentation, data gathering, and deliberation, which all take time. Putting people on the moon will not affect the passage of time for those of us on Earth. (And it hardly affects the passage of time for anyone on a rocket, as well.)
Yes, you can totally mow your lawn while your house is burning, and it's easier to mow your lawn than put out a house fire. Therefore, let's mow the lawn instead of putting out the house fire.
> Sticking another billion dollars into fixing housing would have a negligible difference.
US federal budget currently allocates around 1 trillion dollars for various welfare programs. NASA's entire budget is 32 billion. Please explain how gutting all space-related activities to boost federal social services by a mere 3% is going to contribute meaningfully to solving your list of major issues.
Also bear in mind that this is federal social services. Once we tally state and municipal level social service programs, the amount of resources dedicated to space-related activities is a rounding error.
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.
It'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).
US may need to solve homeless crowds living in all major cities downtowns first, then to fix it's broken education program and after 2 decades to start thinking how to do its first moon landing
Your question has been answered, see below. And perhaps you would be glad to hear that the "narcissistic exploration of space" has actually lead to greater care and concern for the planet than we had before we started the endeavor.
>However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.
>Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment.
>Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our Earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our Earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation. It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.
> great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment.
This take is strikingly similar to the movie "Don't Look Up":
> And when these treasures from heaven [asteroid fragments] are claimed, poverty as we know it, social injustice, lose of biodiversity, all these multitudes of problems will become relics of the past and humanity will stride through the pillars of Boaz and Jachin, naked into the glory of a golden age
which... is a satire.
We need to stop (over) polluting the environment, not to find better ways to clean the environment.
Finding better ways to clean the environment will only lead humanity to pollute more. Ernst Stuhlinger obviously never took a stroll nearby a chemical plant.
I am sure that the associate director of science at NASA never visited a chemical plant. /s
We pollute the environment by just living. After you eat a meal and digest it, you take a crap. After you drink some water you take a piss. That is pollution, but it is low level.
You get 100 people all taking craps and pissing in one area, that causes huge problems for the local area. Also breeds disease.
Your solution in this case would be what? Because you say not to find a way to clean, just stop over polluting.
What you and the writer's of "Don't Look Up" don't seem to get is that, by pressing humanity into space and solving challenging problems we get new tools to deal with existing problems. Not that "All the problems will cease to exist once we do the thing."
You get a new tool, how you use that tool is up to you and those around you.
In 1920, someone developed a pesticide that was great for killing louse, fumigating ships and warehouses. This was great and saved many people.
Then in 1942, someone decided to use it to systematically murder a race of people.
This does not mean that we should never make or use pesticides again, it means that we need to bring people closer together and get them to stop trying to kill each other over slight differences.
> I am sure that the associate director of science at NASA never visited a chemical plant. /s
You haven't read the text attentively. "Visiting a chemical plant" is different from "taking a stroll nearby" it, that is, seeing the effects of it in the environment.
> We pollute the environment by just living. After you eat a meal and digest it, you take a crap. After you drink some water you take a piss. That is pollution, but it is low level.
This is radically disconnected to what's being done to the environment now, which is not just a matter of overpopulation. Currently, as a popoluation, we are:
- wasting massive amount of resources (to observe two simple examples, just go to a restaurant, or notice huge cars in tiny towns)
- producing unmanageable amounts of waste in general (especially as consequence of the previous point)
- most importantly, producing unmanageable types of pollutants (read HN more attentively, and you'll find recent talks of microplastics)
Cleaning up after polluting is at best considerably more expensive, at worst, impossible to perform, than not polluting in the first place.
And keep in mind that I'm talking about regulating (that is, at least reducing) pollution, not abolishing it (that is, going Amish).
My proposition here is not that space exploration is zero-sum but rather that space travel is wildly inefficient for solving problems here on earth. The trouble with your suggestion (and, prior, mine) is that we don't really know what could have been done with the same resources had there been a moonshot to, say, solving the climate crisis.
As a huge lover of space travel, I have shared that very letter from Ernst Stuhlinger. What it really only proves is that if you throw enough money at something, you will get some returns. The rest of the arugment is borderline religious in nature; that through some mysterious process if we just get into space we'll suddenly realize oh, we should fix that planet, simply because we can see ourselves as one small planet.
Peak space travel was arguably right when this letter was written. If it were at all true, we would not in the position we're in now. Instead, the opposite has happened, and it's not because we're not travelling in space - it's because we continue to ignore the problems we alone are causing.
Running away from those problems into space will not somehow, magically, solve them.
Maybe learning to live with scarce resources and recycling everything could be useful technologies to develop for both space and Earth.
Should we also stop making entertainment and games until we fix this little planet of ours? Don't do anything else that isn't "fix the earth" related? If not, why is space singled out as the one thing we're not allowed to do?
It's funny to me how as Hacker News commentors, we tend to approach coding in a mostly pragmatic, efficient way. As engineers. Yet when it comes to space, we fall for the romance. I love that idea, but the problem is that it's not realistic.
There is very little that happens in space with regards to scarce resources that could not also be solved here on earth, for cheaper.
I am not suggesting humanity should be banned from space. But to borrow a line from another great scifi show - what has humanity done to earn our place in the stars? How have we treated what we have already been given? What have we done with this? Is there any - and I ask, any, - indication here on this planet that says we will treat what we find out there with any more or less respect than how we treat this planet?
This isn't about fixing earth. It's about fixing ourselves. The problem isn't the earth. And if the problem is us, then our problems go with us wherever we go. We have to fix the way we treat the universe around us first.
It's funny to me that you talk about pragmatism and efficiency, but you ultimately make a moral and emotive argument that we should fix ourselves before we go anywhere else.
My question to you is simply why do we need to fix ourselves first? Seems illogical and unlikely.
Fundamentally, space doesn't care if we treat it with respect or not.
I realize that it can seem superficially that I am making an emotive or moral argument but that isn't it at all. Ethics aside, we have to acknowledge that the way we interoperate with our environment is fundamental to our survival of the species, which is in turn what makes it therefore ethical and moral. We aren't going to find ourselves out there, any more or less than Europeans did when they crossed the ocean to find what was to them the New World.
If we don't fix how we interoperate as a species with our lived environment, we will die. There is no magic solution in space. We either fix ourselves - we change how we interoperate with the environment - or we die. Going into space solves nothing.
That may be so, but people who want to go to space aren't doing it to stop us damaging the environment, any more than people who built the Large Hadron Collider or filmed all the Marvel super hero films are.
They are doing it because it's possible and they want to do it. You don't single them out as unproductive in your quest to fix the planet. Why?
106 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadOnce that was proved, and the technology to deliver long range nuclear weapons implemented, the motivation to push this stuff at all costs dropped.
Put another way: back then it was science in the service of warfare with an effectively unlimited budget. Now it's mostly just the science.
The moon mission had only one goal: to save the face after the US has lost all meaningful milestones to the Soviet Union and to "win" the space race by moving the goalpost. I am quite confident, that if the Soviets has managed to land on the Moon first, the goalpost would've been landing on Mars.
With rapidly dropping launch costs there's valid industrial applications in orbit and quite a few startups working on building things in LEO and bringing them back down. Microgravity is incredibly valuable in manufacturing, the Brits worked that out in the 1700's with shot towers. Same with ultra low temps and vacuum conditions.
No way that is true.
The "spin" is coming from you.
> Space X rockets (and others) blow up all the time
SpaceX has done ~227 successful Falcon missions in a row. Those rockets do NOT "blow up all the time". Further, the success rate of the Falcon 9 is 247/249. Meaning, 99.20%. For the block 5 variant it is 192/192 or 100% success rate.
SpaceX is also developing some rockets. You seem to be comparing rockets which are under development and where SpaceX often gives a low probability of success with missions that are supposed to work. The development rockets are NOT in production, they are NOT used to bring cargo in space. It's really apples vs oranges.
> So not sure why this is being reported so negatively (well, actually, I do, of course...)
Instead of giving some stupid hint just say what you wanted to say. Up to now what you said doesn't make sense to me, so no why not explain the rest as well.
I think it's because Luna-24 nearly 5 decades ago was a success, and reported Soviet success rates of their probe programs were 100% (despite the actual number being lower), alongside some cheekiness due to Russian timeline being chosen to land just before the Indian mission.
I don't think that such a failure of a 50 year old technology with a previous "100%" success rate is that weird for people to have such a take about. I think it is weird that you suggest SpaceX rockets are blowing up all the time, when a much more direct and accurate comparison would be the Japanese/Israeli lander failure.
Do we consider Japan/Israel serious contenders to NASA/ESA in space here? Probably not in the same way as India and China.
That kind of thing just doesn't happen to NASA and ESA very much.
Around 1,800 space launches (including USSR) vs 1,500 USA. And they seem to be increasing the frequency of launches.
And sure, there’s plenty to criticize about Russian politics but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a space contender.
Heck, replace Russia with India. India has a ton of basic problems but that is not stopping them from competing.
I mean I'm not sure if this is true.
They until recently sold around 100 RD-180 rockets to the US - none of which experienced issues. Not to mention putting US astronauts into space.
Russia is one of the few nations that actually have the history, engineering talent, finances and the raw resources to compete.
Plus, it's been widely reported that Russian military industrial output is way up with factories working 3 shifts, etc. We are not talking about illiterate Afghanis.
Angara and Soyuz-5 are designed to be reusable to some extent.
If you want to say something is obsolete, you need to be more specific. I'm sure a lot of "1960s design[s]" are state of the art.
It's an easy trap to fall into, but a dangerous one. We've also seen it manifested in the war prognosticating ("they're a bunch of drunks who will run out of missiles soon!"). Well, apparently there are some sober ones.
So is patronising people on the internet, it seems.
I'm going to leave it there.
I also think this is a great example of cognitive dissonance we tech people display, “oh we’re going to the moon in the name of freedom to stop the Chinese claiming all the resources for themselves. That’s good. I like space travel.”
Reality is, we’re off to do the same thing we’ve always done, fight over control of resources. There’s hope in knowing that throughout its history, there’s one thing the US has done competently.
And no, a lunar base is not a good launching spot to get to other places in the solar system. You’re much better off with large orbital bases for that so you don’t have to waste reaction mass getting to and from the surface of a heavy body without atmosphere.
"How much water is on the Moon?": "...Based on remote observations by radar instruments aboard Chandrayaan-1 and LRO, the lunar poles have over 600 billion kilograms of water ice. That’s enough to fill at least 240,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools..." - https://www.planetary.org/articles/water-on-the-moon-guide
Once we have developed technologies and experience on the Moon then moving on to Mars becomes more sensible and easier.
That's a big deal, because it vastly simplifies orbital infrastructure, which in turn makes it realistic to think of returning materials to Earth or sending them to resupply ships further out.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_space_elevator
Want to buy some magic beans? They are theoretically possible...
It doesn't mean all science fiction becomes reality.
Because on Earth there's a real problem: you need carbon nanotubes to do it. And not just, the ones we have, but perfectly formed, seriously long carbon nanotubes (depending on weaving techniques you can get up to 80% UTS, I can't remember if this is enough).
We don't have these. We may never have these. It may be energetically impossible to build and maintain these.
But the moon space elevator doesn't have that problem. A number of existing materials in use today meet the necessary strength/weight requirements for lunar gravity. You can just go and buy them. If you went to the moon with them, you could drop a very long tether from orbit down to the surface and it would work.
The main reason we don't have a space elevator on the moon is the feasibility of moving materials to the moon to build it. But that's a limitation which applies to...all things Moon related. Moving thousands of tons to build a Lunar base or research station has exactly the same problems. It is theoretically possible but logistically infeasible at the moment, but not insurmountable.
That's different - in an important way - from requiring materials which don't currently exist in sufficient quantities, or purity, using manufacturing techniques which don't exist and may never exist.
Let probes and automated systems do it.
Developing, testing, and sending the massive rockets required for human travels to Mars, not to mention the other supporting systems development required over sending only unmanned systems, has "about 0%" affect on climate change? The environmental and ecosystem damage that rockets do is alone incredibly disruptive.
I simply see little reason, aside from ego, to send humans to Mars.
If you want to fix climate change there are much better targets.
First Google result: https://time.com/6273065/space-travel-climate-impact/ and https://research.noaa.gov/2022/06/21/projected-increase-in-s...
> Indeed, according to the NOAA report, a single passenger aboard a rocket is responsible for 100 times more climate-changing pollution than a passenger aboard an airplane.
> The researchers found that this level of activity would increase annual temperatures in the stratosphere by 0.5 – 2° Celsius or approximately 1-4°Farenheit, which would change global circulation patterns by slowing the subtropical jet streams as much as 3.5%, and weakening the stratospheric overturning circulation.
My original comment above does not say that rockets should be the top focus on reducing climate change. It says they are a contributor to climate change, which they are. I don't see why we're wanting to send humans to Mars and doing so will thus needlessly increase the impact of rockets on the environment.
Yes, there are worse things than rockets, but the impact is definitely not zero, and more and more rockets are going off, so the impact will only increase. The rockets required for human flight are much, much larger than those for unmanned missions. Further, the negative affect of rockets on the local environment, that is local to the launch sites, is very underrated. As noted in the linked article from the NOAA, the impact of rockets needs more study, and the impact is different than airplanes and is estimated to increase the temperature of the stratosphere by degrees, and not a fraction of degrees. This has downstream effects that are not good and is again different than airplanes.
Lastly, yes, planes are bad, too, and we should absolutely reconsider plane fuel and flight use.
It isn't. It's a relic of intuitions born in our ancestral environment when exploration tended to be profitable. But that's because our ancestral explorations all took place in the relatively benign environment of earth.
It's barely realistic to do a sample return mission to Mars. Sending humans there is a pipe dream.
While that quote is intentionally more poetry than science (it's from Babylon 5) it reflects a kernel of the truth. Right now, we have all of our eggs in one basket. We must act with great care toward that basket, surely. But we should also strive as a species to see that there is more than one basket. Mars is the first baby step toward the stars, and we should go to the stars.
If we can't survive here on Earth, literally the most perfect habitat for us, then what in the world is the point of "going to the stars", whatever that means in the first place? What are we going to do there? Destroy whatever secondary Earth we find? What physics is there to say that we can even get to another solar system before we destroy the habitability of the Earth?
We can "go to the stars" without sending man out first. I still see no current reason to send humans to Mars other than to waste resources.
> Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out.
Yea, and that's a minimum of 400-500 million years out, and it's going to get a lot hotter before it goes cold. And umpteen million other things on Earth, such as the geological structure, will have drastically changed by then. You shouldn't act like humanity actually has the ability to effectively worry about such a date when we can't even do most stuff today with any longer than a year or two horizon. The likelihood of disaster, such as asteroid or meteor impact or a Venus-type situation or other ecosystem collapse scenarios, before the Sun exhausts itself is basically 99.<however many 9s you want>%. Going to Mars doesn't give us anymore data on how to escape the Sun's evolution.
And I highly question any claim that humanity even has the ability to be an interstellar species, which is a separate question from capability.
Who are we? Just a species which won evolutionary lottery in one way or another and dominate a planet with what we do best.
Exploring what's out there is exciting, yes, but if we're going to ruin everywhere like our pale blue dot, I think it's for greater good that we go extinct on this marble.
The moon is actually a much harder place to have a long term base than Mars. With the moon you either get cooked for ~2 weeks and then freeze for ~2 weeks or you set down at the poles and constantly freeze. The Apollo missions where timed to get out before things got hot. The Mars atmosphere is thin, but provides ready access to nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon plus tiny trace amounts of hydrogen and even some noble gasses. The Moon is just shy of vacuum and would be very difficult to extract significant quantities of anything useful.
So going to the moon first means solving all sorts of problems than don’t help a Mars mission.
But adding to the negatives list there's the razor-like moon dust: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-coating-tec...
For comparison, the average surface temperature on Mars is -60 C.
The longest lit places we know of are lit ~94% of the year but then experience even longer periods of deep freeze. They also don’t get much sunlight, and having a base there would create a long shadow. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S00191035100013...
Multi month moon bases could be an intermediary before going to the moon, but those spots still get really cold.
Going to the Moon helps learning about and solving many problems that will help on Mars for much cheaper and without incurring months and months of space travel.
Show me people living on the Moon permanently then we can discuss trying that on Mars. Otherwise it is indeed just for the show like the Moon landings.
> Sticking another billion dollars into fixing housing would have a negligible difference.
It would if we ... built houses.
Also bear in mind that this is federal social services. Once we tally state and municipal level social service programs, the amount of resources dedicated to space-related activities is a rounding error.
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).
But if we can’t fix the home we have, what reason is there that humanity expand into space? How do we know we won’t f that up too?
Our current home needs our collective imagination and creativity more than the moon, or space.
Once we solve this problem we can move on, but until we do, space exploration is narcissistic manifest destiny escapism at a species wide level.
https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
>However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.
>Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment.
>Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our Earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our Earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation. It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.
This take is strikingly similar to the movie "Don't Look Up":
> And when these treasures from heaven [asteroid fragments] are claimed, poverty as we know it, social injustice, lose of biodiversity, all these multitudes of problems will become relics of the past and humanity will stride through the pillars of Boaz and Jachin, naked into the glory of a golden age
which... is a satire.
We need to stop (over) polluting the environment, not to find better ways to clean the environment.
Finding better ways to clean the environment will only lead humanity to pollute more. Ernst Stuhlinger obviously never took a stroll nearby a chemical plant.
We pollute the environment by just living. After you eat a meal and digest it, you take a crap. After you drink some water you take a piss. That is pollution, but it is low level.
You get 100 people all taking craps and pissing in one area, that causes huge problems for the local area. Also breeds disease.
Your solution in this case would be what? Because you say not to find a way to clean, just stop over polluting.
What you and the writer's of "Don't Look Up" don't seem to get is that, by pressing humanity into space and solving challenging problems we get new tools to deal with existing problems. Not that "All the problems will cease to exist once we do the thing."
You get a new tool, how you use that tool is up to you and those around you.
In 1920, someone developed a pesticide that was great for killing louse, fumigating ships and warehouses. This was great and saved many people. Then in 1942, someone decided to use it to systematically murder a race of people.
This does not mean that we should never make or use pesticides again, it means that we need to bring people closer together and get them to stop trying to kill each other over slight differences.
You haven't read the text attentively. "Visiting a chemical plant" is different from "taking a stroll nearby" it, that is, seeing the effects of it in the environment.
> We pollute the environment by just living. After you eat a meal and digest it, you take a crap. After you drink some water you take a piss. That is pollution, but it is low level.
This is radically disconnected to what's being done to the environment now, which is not just a matter of overpopulation. Currently, as a popoluation, we are:
- wasting massive amount of resources (to observe two simple examples, just go to a restaurant, or notice huge cars in tiny towns)
- producing unmanageable amounts of waste in general (especially as consequence of the previous point)
- most importantly, producing unmanageable types of pollutants (read HN more attentively, and you'll find recent talks of microplastics)
Cleaning up after polluting is at best considerably more expensive, at worst, impossible to perform, than not polluting in the first place.
And keep in mind that I'm talking about regulating (that is, at least reducing) pollution, not abolishing it (that is, going Amish).
As a huge lover of space travel, I have shared that very letter from Ernst Stuhlinger. What it really only proves is that if you throw enough money at something, you will get some returns. The rest of the arugment is borderline religious in nature; that through some mysterious process if we just get into space we'll suddenly realize oh, we should fix that planet, simply because we can see ourselves as one small planet.
Peak space travel was arguably right when this letter was written. If it were at all true, we would not in the position we're in now. Instead, the opposite has happened, and it's not because we're not travelling in space - it's because we continue to ignore the problems we alone are causing.
Running away from those problems into space will not somehow, magically, solve them.
Should we also stop making entertainment and games until we fix this little planet of ours? Don't do anything else that isn't "fix the earth" related? If not, why is space singled out as the one thing we're not allowed to do?
There is very little that happens in space with regards to scarce resources that could not also be solved here on earth, for cheaper.
I am not suggesting humanity should be banned from space. But to borrow a line from another great scifi show - what has humanity done to earn our place in the stars? How have we treated what we have already been given? What have we done with this? Is there any - and I ask, any, - indication here on this planet that says we will treat what we find out there with any more or less respect than how we treat this planet?
This isn't about fixing earth. It's about fixing ourselves. The problem isn't the earth. And if the problem is us, then our problems go with us wherever we go. We have to fix the way we treat the universe around us first.
My question to you is simply why do we need to fix ourselves first? Seems illogical and unlikely.
Fundamentally, space doesn't care if we treat it with respect or not.
If we don't fix how we interoperate as a species with our lived environment, we will die. There is no magic solution in space. We either fix ourselves - we change how we interoperate with the environment - or we die. Going into space solves nothing.
They are doing it because it's possible and they want to do it. You don't single them out as unproductive in your quest to fix the planet. Why?
So we can grow to become the aliens from Independence Day.
In reality, the JWST serves as much practical purpose as crewed space exploitation. Maybe even less.